Winter's Last Licks

With week-by-week regularity, a baby-faced golfer and a sawed-off miler have made the other boys feel like giving up and going home. Last week, they took one last lick at winter pickings:

P: At Atlanta, Byron Nelson putted with mechanical magic up to 45 feet, chopped 13 strokes off par for a 72-hole total of 263, never drew a deep breath as he won the last (and his fourth straight) tourney of the winter circuit. The victory upped his 1945 earnings to $17,857, gave him an eight-to-six edge in tournaments won over capable but collapsible Sammy Snead.

P: At Rhode Island's Camp Endicott, Jim ("Iron Mike") Rafferty ended a perfect, ten-race season (including three wins over Sweden's Gunder Hagg) by winning the three-quarter-mile special. He watched bespectacled Haakon Lidman jack up Sweden's sagging track reputation by lowering the 15.8 world record for the 110-meter high hurdles by 1.4 seconds.

But the world's swiftest sprint swimmer lost in the National A.A.U. Indoor championships. In the 100-yd. freestyle, record-smashing Columbia Midshipman Alan Ford (TIME, Feb. 26) tried hard to shake off lean-jawed Specialist 2/C Wally Ris, onetime mechanical engineering student at the University of Illinois. He got no farther than a half-stroke ahead in three laps. Then they both flubbed the all-important last turn, squared away even for the final spurt. Whispered 21-year-old Wally to himself: "Beat him . . . beat him." He did--by a touch, and in New York A.C. pool-record time (51.3 seconds).

Loose-shouldered Ensign Adolf Kiefer, who began breaking world backstroke records ten years ago, helped Wally Ris build up a top-heavy 46-point team total for the Bainbridge (Md.) Naval Training Center. With strokes to spare, Kiefer copped his pet 150-yd. backstroke event and the 300-yd. individual medley. Cracked 26-year-old Adolf Kiefer to himself when he banged his funny bone against the side of the pool on the last leg of the backstroke: "What am I doing in here anyway? I'm too old for this sort of thing."

With the Navy reassigning its star athletes overseas (and most star swimmers are in the Navy) it looked like the last big meet of the war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.