Bread-&-Butter Putts

The 22nd annual P.G.A. championship tournament, held last week at the Pomonok Country Club, almost within a trylon's length of the New York World's Fair, will long be remembered for: 1) the noisiest squabble in the history of the Professional Golfers Association; 2) the most exciting final waged between two bread-&-butter putters.

Cause of the squabble was Densmore Shute, two-time (1936-37) winner of the tournament and one of the best match players in the world, who was refused permission to tee up his ball on opening day because his P.G.A. dues ($35) were 48 hours late in reaching the Association's secretary. Whereupon 50 of his colleagues --mostly box-office headliners--refused to play, held up the tournament for two hours while officials and players wrangled.

In many golf tournaments an unknown from nowhere steals the show. In last week's performance, however, the headliners hogged the spotlight from beginning to end. When the field of 120 (including Shute) narrowed down to two, the survivors of the six-day elimination matches were Byron Nelson and Henry Picard, the two top-ranking pros in the U. S. (on the basis of their scores in the circuit of P.G.A. tournaments this year).

Nelson, a 27-year-old Texan, was trying to add the P.G.A. (match play) championship to the National Open (medal play) championship he won last month and thus become the only professional golfer besides Gene Sarazen to win the two major U. S. titles in one year. Picard, 31-year-old New Englander, had never won a major U. S. tournament although he has long been considered one of the game's best shotmakers.

What ensued was a pull-devil-pull-baker-final whose drama was enlivened by balls bouncing off spectators' legs, jumping stymies, hitting flagpoles and miraculously falling into cups. On the 36th green, the match was still all even. On the first extra hole, the titans, each of whom had played the 36 holes in 10 under par, plopped their balls onto the green in 2. Picard was seven feet away from the cup. He tapped his ball gently, watched it sink out of sight. Nelson was five feet away from the cup. He tapped his ball gently, but it did not sink out of sight. By a quarter-of-an-inch margin, Henry Picard earned $1,100 and became the leading money-winning pro of the year (with $8,177).

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