Auckland Golf Has a Promising Season Ahead

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 642, 19 April 1929, Page 7

Auckland Golf Has a Promising Season Ahead

New Courses, Club-houses and More Players—l,ooo Acres of Land is Used for Courses Within Easy Reach of City—Clubs Manage Annual Rake-Off of Nearly £20,000 —Municipal Links are Wanted —Sloan Morpeth Clinched Auckland Championship at the Age of 14 Years —He Did Not Celebrate the Occasion —Auckland Claims Finest Stylist in the Dominion —Bobby Jones, Master Golfer of the Age, is a Busy Man Now.

r JpHIS season should be one heavily scored in the history of Auckland golf. It follows a period when there have been more changes than in several seasons in the past. New golf courses, new club-houses, more members, the acquisition of the leading golfer in the Dominion, the bringing into force of the new scratch score system, the conversion of Glendowie into a proprietary country club —all these have wrought great changes in the present and future prospects, and these things should be of inestimable value to golf in Auckland. Time too! For far too long has Auckland lagged behind the South, and gone down year after year to superior players—very often superior because they took the game more seriously, and had better facilities for learning the finer points. Few people realise just how much money and Tand is involved in the playing of the game in Auckland. Within easy reach of the city there are ten golf courses, which means that somewhere about 1,000 acres of more or less valuable land is under use. About half of this is used for no other purpose. There are. at an estimate, 2,500 members of these clubs, and what they pay for their golf ranges from £2 to £3 each up to £ll 11s annually—plus extras in the way of levies for the New Zealand Golf Association, etc. As an instance the Maungakiekie Golf Club, which is the largest in New Zealand, and the twentieth in the world so far as membership goes, had 524 members at March 1, and its income last year was £6,622. The Auckland club, with its links at Middlemore, was not very far behind this income, so that the two of them managed between them to collect well over £IO,OOO. These are, of course, the two principal clubs, but Akarana and Glendowie between them represent an income of some thousands of pounds. The rest bunched together add another thousand or two, so that among them all the golf clubs in and around the city, within twelve miles, take an annual rake-off of well up toward £20,000. The annual expenditure out of income by no means represents the total expenditure. In the way of capital expenditure Titirangi, Middlemore and Akarana, during the past couple of years, have used up a sum of money that on a conservative estimate must reach well up toward £IO,OOO, and when the Glendowie Club has completed its conversion, and starts out to build a new clubhouse and remodel its links to a certain extent, a few more thousands will disappear into the pool.

Titirangi, of course, has spent its thousands in entirely remodelling its course, and bunkering and watering it. This was the largest work ever undertaken in bringing a course up-to-date in Auckland, and a huge amount of soil was shifted. However, this work was barely under way before Middlemore started in to catch up some lost ground, and in remodelling the greens to two of the holes in the middle of the course the club is shifting as much earth as was shifted on the whole of Titirangi, which, of course, proves nothing but that Middlemore had the more difficult ground to deal with. In addition, Middlemore spent a thousand or two in effecting badly wanted and very extensive alterations to its clubhouse.

Auckland has become a keen golfing community. To see the number of people “with bags of clubs, imposing in varying degrees, who chase buses on the mornings of the days of rest, apart from those who are more fortunately situated in the matter of transport, is a proof of that. The wonder to the outsider is that long before this there has not been sopie definite move in the direction of a municipal links. In this connection the present city administration certainly can lay no claim to any such motto as “The People Who Get Things Done.”

rules and regulations; that though golf is a labour, it is after all but a pastime, and that though its outlay may exceed that necessary in other forms of sport, no other form of sport can exceed the pleasure, thrill, good-fellowship and necessity for sportsmanship in golf. It is to he hoped that Auckland golfers, within the next year, will complete the work so well begun by—(1) Seriously overhauling their handicapping systems now that the scratch score has given a proper basis for adopting something better than the present haphazard system, and (2) That the inter-club matches, which have meant so much in the development of the game in the South, will be so arranged and revised in Auckland as to make them a means

And of the future? It has been most noticeable that during recent years the game in Auckland has increased in the display of the golf spirit: more especially a realisation that though golf is a game, it has its

of encouraging the members to seek ambitiously for a better standing in the local ranks. Teams of twenty at a time, the picking of which has sometimes been open to question, will never achieve this objective. The illustrations on this page depict the most prominent golfers in Auckland at the moment, with a late illustration of the world champion, the famous Bobby Jones. Sloan Morpeth is, of course, the leading figure, and his history is a remarkable one. A born golfer, whose propensities for playing football were strongly repressed by his father when Sloan was a lad, he first won , the Auckland championship when he was about 14 years of age—and was bitterly disappointed that after his success he was sent home to bed while his elder brother enjoyed the popu-

| larity that had fallen on the name of Morpeth. For many years his name I was unknown in the game while he was attending to duties that kept him : away from the links. He staged an extraordinary come-back in 1927. when he won the amateur title at Hamilton, and this year, while his supremacy will be challenged when he defends the Open title at Wanganui, his chances of being in the team to be sent to Melbourne to endeavour to regain the Kirk-Windeyer Cup are not likely to cause any serious doubt. H. B. Lusk, whose name has been prominent in Auckland and Dominion golf for many years, is an ex-amateur champion, and many times holder of the provincial title. Among the veterans and strong upholders of the game, he ranks with W. S. Ralph. R. O. Gardner and several others.

Moss, the Middlemore professional, has been listed in the collection because he holds the unchallenged right to the place as first stylist, either in the province or in the Dominion. An effortless swing with a maximum of result has placed him in the first rank of Australasian golfers, and has won him the New Zealand Open title, while he has been professional title-holder on several occasions.

Mrs. I. B. Stewart, who is provincial champion, won the title as Miss D. Horton. She is a member of a family that simply refused to be handicapped out of the first places in Titirangi and One Tree Hill competitions a year or so ago, and has been prominent for two or three years, though the most certain thing about women’s golf in Auckland is the uncertainty as to who is going to be at the top of the tree next.

Mr. Bobby Jones, the master golfer of the age. is an extraordinarily busy man at present, and people are beginning to wonder how it is he ever finds time to sleep. He has become a partner in a well-known firm of attorneys in Atlanta, and besides his journalistic work as a writer on golf, in the course of which he pours out a constant stream of articles, he has recently joined the staff of an American golfing journal as associate editor. It is confidently stated that in the course of three years, since he won the British championship at St. Anne’s for the first time, he has received from one syndicate or another well over £20,000. A player-writer indeed! According to the American golf law all this is permissible, always provided Mr. Jones writes the articles himself. He has been seen after a championship go to his room at his hotel and write long cables for the American newspapers. It seems a queer world, for what Bobby Jones may do Tilden may not do.