RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31108, 11 July 1966, Page 22

RANDOM REMINDER

SUCCESS STORY

The black pins in the psychological map of Christchurch and suburbs are the ladies who play in the C grade in the various golf clubs. These are the great unwashed, the beginners who are fighting tooth and claw for the responsibility and respectability of earning a handicap for the first time. There are many of them, earnest little souls who study Palmer and Player instead of getting on with the scrubbing. Years ago, the summit of a woman’s ambition was marriage, her most precious possession the lines which told the world the union was official. It seems now that these delicate sentiments have been lost in the great gulf of golf which has swallowed up so many fine men and wrecked so many happy homes. The C graders have just that one, burning ambition, to qualify

for their handicaps, to hold their heads in the air—an attitude too many assume too soon, and thus stay in the hoi-polloi of the C’s. Now and then, someone escapes from this awful mesh: and what an occasion it is for her. That evening, she has to tell a dozen people on the telephone just how she threeputted only five greens and how, at the dramatic last hole, she was nearly 100 yards from the green but gave her 3-wood everything and made the apron. Waiting for the great day is worse than having someone in the house sitting School Cert “I’ll just never get it” comes the plaintive cry. But on that great occasion when the final two-inch putt is put into the hole with a trembling blade, the world is wonderful. C grade ladies who win promotion usually mark the occasion by buy-

ing their friends a nice cup of tea, or even something stronger, at the club-house. But there should bo some sort of ceremony. Perhaps the heroine should be carried shoulder high around the club-house, and then seated on a dais: after a fanfare, or roll of drums, her handicap (an embossed, gilt-edged card) could be brought to her on a silver salver by the two newest C graders, or novices. Acceptance of the card would require a 20minute speech recalling some of the highlights of the round, with pertinent and useful pieces of advice thrown id. It would save a large number of telephone calls.

Yes, it’s wonderful to have such a ray of sunshine in the house. Now, of course, its a matter of waiting for tho golfing equivalent of th« first day at secondary school.