EIGHT MILES OF GOLF

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 142, 3 July 1937, Page 17

EIGHT MILES OF GOLF

FERR1ER AND HATTERSLEY N.S. WALES CHAMPIONSHIP FUTT OF TWO FEET WINS Eight miles of golf Jim Ferrler and Harry Hattersley played for the New South Wales amateur championship on June 12, and Ferrier won in the end by a putt of two feet, and Hattersley missed squaring by two inches. That was the "curtain" to the golf drama at Rose Bay which 3000 followers thought it worth trudging, running, scrambling and craning to see. Foliowing a golf championship is almost as strenuous as playing one, or caddying for the players. The players walk and the caddies have to, carrying 301b. bags of clubs. But unless you were fleet of foot or prepared to battle-in when you got to the green, you couldn't follow the last hole and hope to see the finale. Cathedral Quiet f; Around that last green arena the stroke-by-stroke fans arrived gasping and breathless and broke the bamboo rods that held them back. Yet they settled down, as still as a cathedral congregation, so that you could hear the raindrops hit the bald head of the man in front Who had taken his hat off so that you could see the game. There was Jim Ferrier in Ms yellow sweater and his little navy beret topping off a figure that was big, boyish, and just 22 — until he bent to putt, and his lips came into a thin line that made him older. He was 1 up, which to non-golfers means he had won one more hole than Hattersley out of 35. There was Hattersley, steady as most of the crowd wanted him to be, preplring to beat the hoodoo that this green seemed to have on him when he missed his putt on it in the first round, Then green was wefc and slow, yet he putted short again — and Ferrier was N.S.W. amateur champion, 1937. Caddies Knew "I'm ashamed of myself," Hattersley said afterwards. "Bad luck," Tom McKay, last year's champion, said to him. "No, bad putt," he replied. He had no need to be ashamed, his caddie, Tom Moore, said; and so did Ferrier's caddie, Freddie Cousins. "I've, never seen a better match," said the latter— and caddies know. Young Cousins, small, 16. and fairhaired, carried 19 clubs, weighing 301b, or more, in a bag nearly as big as himself, for those eight miles of

golf. He felt that Ferrier would win. Hattersley's caddie thought Hattersley played up to form. It was magnifieient golf. When Ferrier was sinking 20ft. putts, a glazed-eyed man said: "If he sinks this one l'm going home. I can't stand it. I want to give my clubs away and take up croquet." A short girl in a sweater said, at the back of the crowd: "This is the first golf championship I've seen, and I haven't seen any of it yet." Umbrella Bounce And there were other funny things of sport drama not in Ihe script — I-Iattcrsley b.ouncing a ball off the coloured umbrella of a spectator too close to the fairway — his ball liitting a man and losing Hattersley 20ft. of run — the amazing accuracy of their play, so that they did not kill anyone along the narrow laneway of watchers — Macquarie-street doctors and municipal councillors sprinting like two-year-olds to get a view of a drive or a putt — Ferrier with his head bowed when he missed a "sitter" — Ferrier putting right on to the lip of the tin, and Hattersley's ball slewing round the hole and not going in — Ferrier getting out of a bunlcer on to the green 100 yards away with more ease than you would get a "bull" in a shooting gallery — the fellows who called out "Way for the caddies" as a rusc to got to the front of the green crowds — ihe rain that wet you outgide, and the long, long beer at the "37th, hole."