Answer at Oakland Hills

At the North Shore Golf Club near Chicago, Golfer Ralph Guldahl leaned over a 4-ft. putt and sighted it. Sinking it meant a tie for the U. S. Open Championship. Golfer Guldahl missed. That was in 1933.

Last week at the Oakland Hills Country Club in Birmingham, Mich., Golfer Guldahl had another short putt on the 18th green of his last round in the Open. This time he sank it. This time it meant not only winning the championship but doing it by two strokes, 281 to Sam Snead's 283, and breaking by a stroke the record Open score set by Tony Manero last year.

Between Golfer Guldah's two little putts lay two stories. One was the story of what was in many ways the most dramatic U. S. Open Golf Championship ever played. The other was the story of one of the most extraordinary golfers in the game's history.

At Oakland Hills last week, the Open Championship, No. 1 event of golf--72 holes of medal play for the best amateurs and professionals in the U. S. sifted through nation-wide sectional qualifying tests--started out as anticipated. Most publicized U. S. golfer since Bobby Jones, long-driving young Sam Snead of White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., playing in his first Open, lived up to all advance notices with a 69 (three under par) for his first round. Made after a shaky start in which he was two over par on the first four holes, he shared the lead with P. G. A. Champion Denny Shute.

While Snead was living up to the expectations of the gallery, his confreres were reassuring experienced observers who know that golf's uncertainties make such performances by favorites wildly improbable. On the very first hole, Al Watrous, home pro at Oakland Hills, took two strokes to get out of a trap which, in innumerable unimportant rounds, he had invariably avoided. Bert McDowell, an able amateur from Baton Rouge, knocked three balls into the lake on the 16th hole, took three putts for an n, posted a 91, high score for the first day. Young Frank Strafaci of Brooklyn, 1935 Public Links champion, hit the flag on the third and missed a hole-in-one by a hair.

The Open Championship always produces at least one heroic round. Last week it was provided on the second day of play by Jimmy Thomson whose gargantuan drives have made him for the past two years the most spectacular professional in the land. Golfer Thomson arrived at the 17th green needing a par and a birdie for a 64, by two strokes the lowest Open score on record. He then missed a 2-ft. putt by inches, missed another on the 18th, took a 66. Meantime the defending champion, Tony Manero was floundering around nine strokes behind the leaders, Gene Sarazen was restoring himself momentarily to a contending position with a 69 after a first round 78 and, as anticipated, Guldahl, Snead, Big Ed Dudley and British-born Harry Cooper, who has twice turned out to be runner-up in the Open after posting a score apparently good enough to win, were fighting with Thomson for the lead.

Sensation of the third round was supplied by game, bowlegged little Bobby Cruickshank, who punched his long irons and putts so straight that he sank five birdies for a sizzling 67, second lowest score of the entire tournament. This brought him up from 15th place to fourth, and within close striking distance once more of the title that had just eluded him in 1923, 1932 and 1934.

Oakland Hills was the scene of a U. S.

Open in 1924, when wispy little Cyril Walker beat Bobby Jones by three strokes with 297. The course was harder that year than last week because the greens had been winterkilled. Designed by Golf Architect Donald Ross, who came to the U. S. from Scotland in 1899 and has since, on 350 links all over the U. S., reproduced as effectively as the land allowed the sweeping dunes of his native sea coast, Oakland Hills is notable for its raised, table-like greens. This feature tends to handicap players like Sarazen, who hit low-flying iron shots, favors bigger, stronger players like Snead, Dudley and Guldahl who can use clubs with more loft to drop the ball on the table from on high.

Last week, the course had achieved its effect by the time the last round started. Gene Sarazen had offered to bet $500 that no one would break 288 (even fours and par). Snead had predicted that he would beat 292 and finish at least second.

After receiving a prize as "best-dressed" golfer at the tournament, Snead started out early the last afternoon needing a 71 for 283. When he got it and walked into the locker room he was congratulated as the new champion. Then word came in that, though Dudley, Cooper and Thomson had passed out of the picture, and Cruickshank was safely behind at 285, curly-haired Guldahl was burning up the first nine.

Starting out with the same score as Snead, Guldahl had just missed birdies on the first four holes, holed a 50-footer for a birdie on the fifth. He took a weak bogey on the sixth and parred the seventh. This left him needing to shoot one under par for eleven holes to tie Snead. Guldahl met the situation with a screaming eagle 3 on the 491-yd. eighth, a birdie 2 on the short ninth, to be out in 33 and three shots under Snead to that point.

Not only at Chicago in 1933 but again in last year's Masters' tournament at Augusta, Guldahl had enjoyed a comparable situation and contrived to lose. Needing only to come home in par to win by two strokes he now made it look as though he would lose again when he pushed his drive into the rough on the tenth, took a bogey 5, and three-putted the next green. But this time, with the gallery waiting for Guldahl's game to crack wide open, it did the opposite. So calm that he appeared preoccupied, he got birdies on the next two holes, played the remaining five in par despite ricocheting off a spectator into a trap at the 15th, combed his hair for the cameramen while strolling across the packed home green to sink his last putt for the title.

Invented by Scotch shepherds, golf in the U.S. has been inherited by many Italian day laborers' sons, who caddied on the courses their fathers tended. Guldahl is the first ex-caddie of Norwegian descent to develop top-flight golfing talent. Reared in Texas, Guldahl's talents in the past have sometimes seemed misplaced. After his tragic putt in 1933 which, if it had gone into the cup, would have made him a national celebrity, he speedily lost prestige. In 1935 he failed even to make a living out of golf, took to selling automobiles and working as a carpenter's assistant in Hollywood to support the young wife and son, Buddy, who now travel with him to all tournaments. A year ago he borrowed enough money from his employer to enter the Western Open. He won it with a record-breaking last round of 64. According to the standards of professional golf, he has been financially successful ever since. Last winter his average score in the circuit of winter tournaments was 71.63, an alltime record. His failure to climax this by winning the Masters' at Augusta, No. 2 open tournament of the U.S., came when his ball failed by inches to carry a stream. Byron Nelson, following him, gained three strokes at that hole and three at the next, where Guldahl again went into the water. But the way Guldahl played at Augusta convinced Sportswriter O. B. Keeler that his defeat was not due to lack of either courage or technique. Adding one more to its string of lucky or prescient articles (TIME, May 24), the Saturday Evening Post last week carried a biography of Golfer Guldahl written two months ago by Sportswriter Keeler, which, if bookmakers at Oakland Hills had been sophisticated journalists, might well have caused them to shorten their Guldahl odds of 10-to-1. The article ended as follows:

" 'It doesn't seem so tough, these days,' says Ralph Guldahl.

"Conceivably, that may be the answer at Oakland Hills."

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