Maytime at Tam

On a gently rolling plain in suburban Chicago one day last week, a pudgy, grey-haired man wearing a lurid $20 sport shirt stepped from a big black Cadillac, rent the air with a grandiose sweep of his cane and exclaimed: "This was nothing more than a bankrupt cow pasture 17 years ago." For ebullient Promoter George S. May, 63, the 134-acre pasture has grown spectacularly solvent and lushly green. It is now known as Tam O'Shanter, the nouveau Ritz among country clubs, whose 6,915-yd. golf course has a telephone on every tee.

On Tam O'Shanter's verdant fairways last week. Promoter May was running off golf's biggest money event, the $75,000 "World" Championship, first played in 1943 with a mere prestige pennant as its prize. Among the 119 starters were 22 topnotch foreign golfers whose traveling expenses were footed by Promoter May. Six big signboards showed the leaders' scores, relayed hole by hole via phone and walkie-talkie. On the championship's final day, with hamburgers going for 60(f, some 10,000 fans, who had each paid a record $6 for admission, trailed golf's top stars. Perennial Tam favorite: this year's All-America Winner Lloyd Mangrum, Tam's pro (and May's pet golfer ever since Mangrum won $300 from him by shooting a birdie on a 100-to-1 bet). Other leading players: Amateur Frank Stranahan, Pros Julius Boros, Lew Worsham.

Sallying forth from Tam O'Shanter's modernistic, Muzak-wired clubhouse (228 employees, a rash of bars, a swimming pool), Promoter May made occasional rounds of the course with a happy, proprietary air. Far too lavish to make a profit, the tournament's whopping deficit is being underwritten by May's firm of efficiency experts (680 staffers, $8,000,000 yearly sales), which will efficiently charge it off to promotion and publicity. Onetime Bible Salesman May got into golf because so many of his business prospects were found on tees. His fortunes have not always been up to par: called before the Kefauver Committee three years ago. he refused to say whether he had allowed a crime syndicate to operate slot machines at Tam. But everyone agrees that May stages the liveliest golf shindigs in the business.

The windup of last week's World tournament couldn't have been more spectacular if May himself had written the script. Onetime (1947) U.S. Open Champion Lew Worsham. needing a birdie on the final 410-yd., par4 hole to tie Virginia's Chandler Harper, smashed out a 270-yd. drive. He then calmly took a wedge, plopped the ball onto the green and into the hole for an eagle 2. Jubilantly aghast, Worsham murmured: "The luckiest shot I ever had." Lucky or not, it was worth $25,000 to Lew Worsham, whose 72-hole score was 278 v. Harper's 279.

Naturally, the last word was George May's. "Next year the jackpot in the World meet is going to be boosted again," he declared. "The figure will be staggering."

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