YOUNG AFRICAN'S SUCCESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 124, 27 May 1937, Page 25

YOUNG AFRICAN'S SUCCESS

; Bobby Locke's defeat of .Trautner, one of the American competitors in the British amateur championship, at. Sandwich, is heartening, especially when it is learned that five out of the six Americans .were beaten in ; the opening rounds.' Arthur D'Arcy Locke, known as "Bobbie," is a twenty-yeat-old golfer from the Rast Rand, residing at Brakpan, a member of the State Mines and. Germiston Clubs. In 1935 he was amateur and open champion of South Africa, and. Natal amateur, and open champion. It was of him Padgham said he could imagine nobody else winning the British Open. This was after the youth had' wiped" Padgham's eye badly when Padgham toured South Africa. Locke's best work is done near and on the greens, but this only means that it is superlative, because-the. rest of his game must also/be faultless. ■Courses round Blakpan must have improved within the last thirty,-years. !The old Germisfon course that then ran' down, by the- Simmer Pan- was a hard and rocky piece of ground, full of .occasional spring hare holes, where it was possibl.e'-to drop another ball, with* out penalty fif it could not, be found, as there'wais not much grass for it to hide, in-. Th,pse were the days when) the Haskell ball was just beginning to supersede the, old "gutty"., in South Africa, and-the "greens" were made of either- clay or Kimberley "blue ground," even-sized grit in which sparkling chips of near-precious pebbles-^showed. After each'pair* had i gone over the -green,'.a native, starting at the centre, walked, concentrically outwaords wiping out the*; footmarks. :These "greens" were trje^but-'very. slow. ■■■ . ', ■".-. ■'«&#,;■ ■"■;'/■■•.:■;..;