GOLF POPULAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 6

GOLF POPULAR

FRANCE SECOND COUNTRY IN EUROPE.

With more than seventy golf courses. France comes second in Europe as a golf country. Regular players of golf in France number above ten thousand. Paris has thirteen golf courses in its immediate vicinity. France boasts the oldest golf course outside Great Britain, leaving Calcutta aside. This is the Pau golf course, founded almost a century ago. In its club house there is a roll of honour on which are many names of Englishmen, and particularly Scotsmen, famous in the game early last century. Everything about the Pau golf club is English, and once past the garden gate leading to the club house one might think oneself in England. Every year a contest is held between Pau and Biarritz, and the fight is always a keen one.

Biarritz boasts two very fine golf courses, with luxurious club house, and few courses in the world could be more picturesque than that of Chiberta, with its glimpses of the sea between the pines.

Le Mans has one of the best known golf courses in the west of France. Granville, on the Normandy coast, also has a tip-top course. The Riviera also has a number of courses, that at Cannes being among the best. Everywhere one meets English and Scots professionals, and most of the courses have been laid out by Englishmen. The club secretaries also are nearly always English. The French have taken golf with them to Algeria and Morocco, and in the winter one can find Arnaud Massy at Marrakesh coaching members of the Sultan’s family. Arnaud Massy is perhaps the only father to have a daughter named after a golf course. His daughter is named Hoylake, as she was born on the day he won the British championship title on the course of that name, more years ago, h’e says, than he cares to think about. '