Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 January 1919 — IS SCORING EASIER ON STRANGE COURSE? [ARTICLE]

IS SCORING EASIER ON STRANGE COURSE?

Good Player Should Be Able to Shoot Good Golf Anywhere. ■ • Professional Claims That It Is on His Own Course That He Makes Poor Showing—-Chick Evans Was One Exception.“A good golfer should be able to shoot good golf anywhere,” says Jack Hoag in Chicago Evening Post. “It is fairly easy for am intelligent man to study his home course until he can go around it in respectable figures. He has his own w&tf of playing each individual hole and he can score around 80 most of the time, but the real add test of a player’s game is to try him on a course that he is not familiar with. The finished player will face any situation and come through with the stroke called for, and it is the golfer who studies the game until fie has the most importantstrokes at his command who makes the real showing in our tournaments.” What will those say to this who assert that it is often easier to play a course for the first time than it is later when one comes to know it? Didn’t Gil Nichols, the professional (wasn’t it Gil?), who explained not long ago that a professional so generally makes a poor showing in a championship held on his own course because he knows the blamed links too well ? Anyway, Isn’t it a fact that Chick Evans bobbed up at the Garden City Golf club with a 32 for the in. holes in the qualifying round of the 1913 amateur championship, qprding six 3s oil the nine thus: 3584 33 5 3 3 —32? That string of 3s on the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth was one of the greatest achievements in medal scoring in the United States. True, that great score of 39-32—71 was made in the second elimination round, his first being 77.

Then, too, he had played over the course several times before in practice, so that the links could not be called absolutely strange as in th(P .case of Vardon and Ray, the British professionals, who in their 1913 American tour, would hasten from the train to a course and often smash the local record to smithereens, <• Some day, perhaps, some goli psychologist Tike Marshal Whitlatch, formerly the Dyker Meadow champion, will take up the question and determine just how much influence the strangeness of a course exerts on a player, eithei' for good or ill.