Golf Marathoners

Last spring when U. S. golf fans read about two Australians--a plumber and a bookmaker--challenging one another to a -L-20 golf match along the roads from Sydney to Melbourne (600 miles), 4,000,000 eyebrows were raised at such antipodean antics. Two months ago, however, a Chicago stockbroker named James Smith Ferebee played 144 holes of golf in one day to win the other half of a Virginia plantation he owned with his partner Fred Tuerk, a fellow-broker. U.S. golf addicts had to admit that there were strange golfers in the U.S. too.

What Broker Ferebee started was a nationwide golf-marathon craze--173 holes, 196 holes, 231 holes, 235 holes, posted almost daily by husky young caddies, schoolboys and even a Chicago housewife out to prove that 144 holes from dawn to dusk was nothing extraordinary. When a Northwestern University freshman played 301 holes, putt-putting around on a scooter bike, J. Smith Ferebee, nettled by such theft of his thunder, announced that he was embarking on a golf marathon to end all golf marathons: 600 holes in four days--a minimum of 72 holes in each of eight different cities (two a day) from coast to coast.

Last week Broker Ferebee made good his boast (and incidentally won from Broker Tuerk $9,000 earmarked for paying off the mortgage on the plantation). On the home green of Long Island's Salisbury Country Club at 10:30 one evening, under the eerie glare of magnesium flares, Golfer Ferebee completed his two-a-day transcontinental jaunt. For four days, while the majority of U. S. golfers stuck to their radios and stockbrokers stuck to their tickers, Broker Ferebee had stuck to his golf ball--in Los Angeles and Phoenix, Kansas City and St. Louis, Milwaukee and Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. He had traveled 3,000 miles by plane, had tramped 155 miles on foot, had taken 2,860 strokes on 600 holes, had worn out two dozen pair of gloves, had not lost a ball. His lowest score was 77, his highest 99.

Unlike famed Pheidippides, the Greek runner who fell dead as he took the last step of the first marathon in 490 B.C. (22 miles from Marathon to Athens), 31-year-old Golfer Ferebee, after dog-trotting almost 40 miles a day for four days, topped off his super-marathon by stopping at New York's World's Fair Grounds and playing his 601st hole on the stroke of midnight for publicity before continuing to Manhattan and a hotel bed at last.

While Ferebee's entourage--his head caddie, 18-year-old Art Cashetta (who carried clubs for 300 of the 600 holes), his personal physician, Dr. Charles B. Alexander (who fed him orange juice and water), his financial backer, rich Air Conditioner Reuben Trane (who had 3,000 autographed golf balls handed out en route advertising his business), his good-natured better, fat Fred Tuerk--all made merry on Broadway, Super Marathoner Ferebee went to bed, put a sign on his door: "Don't open until Christmas."

Meanwhile, at New York's Fenway Golf Club, U. S. golfers who play for pay trudged around in the nearest to a golf marathon they had ever experienced: the 108-hole Westchester Open Tournament. For its prize money of $13,500 and additional prizes of $8,500 for the best approaches and drives each day, some 300 of the country's top-ranking professionals matched strokes for six rounds instead of the customary four. A test of endurance as well as skill, the best golfer at 108 as well as 72 turned out to be Sam Snead of West Virginia, sensational big-time sophomore, who posted scores of 73, 72, 73, 72, 71, 69.

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