Books, Arts & Manners

The skies they were ashen and sober, but the leaves they weren’t crisped or sere. It wasn’t night, nor in the lonesome October, but it was an immemorial year. It definitely was hard by the dim lake of Auber, in the misty mid-region of Weir; it was down by the dank tarn of Auber, in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. It was Mamaroneck, New York—a long walk from Fordham and not far from Broadway—where Edgar Allan Poe wrote or was inspired to write “Ulalume” in 1847, and where Samuel Jackson Snead shot a 67 in 1959. But the people who had gathered in the second and third weeks of this June weren’t there to discuss the landscapes of Robert Walter Weir, or Daniel François Auber’s composition le Lac des fées. They had gathered to identify—for the 84th time since 1895—the national champion of golf.

An indirect measure of the historical stature of the title at stake was the extent of international press and broadcast coverage. national review was there; and, sure, the New York Times, Newsday, UPI, and Time were there, as were such golf writers as Peter Dobereiner and Nick Seitz, not to mention the two most prominent golf correspondents active today: Herbert Warren Wind of The New Yorker, whose elegant essays and whose The Story of American Golf are contributions to literature; and Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, whose The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate is a collection of golf essays out of the tradition of Southwestern humor. These gentlemen were surrounded by an army of journalists from around the globe: There were the Adelaide News and the Adelaide Advertiser, as well as the Melbourne Herald. There were the Scottish Daily Record, the Glasgow Herald, and the London Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Times, Sunday Times, Daily Express, Evening Standard, Observer, Sun, Sunday Telegraph, and Daily Telegraph. There were France Golf, The Asian Golf Digest, the Tokyo International News Service, and La Vanguardia of Barcelona, among many others. American newspapers were not under-represented. The Staten Island Advance, the Pocono Record, and the Tuscaloosa News turned up. There were some 1,300 media credentials and the Goodyear blimp. If the Open was a place where one might meet that knowledgeable fellow Mr. Tony Cooper, the secretary/treasurer of the Fiji Golf Association, it was also a place where one could hear a toasted dumpling intone—in those accents known as “Larchmont lockjaw”—“Australia was something different, but God we loved New Zealand.”

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The skies they were ashen and sober, but the leaves they weren’t crisped or sere. It wasn’t night, nor in the lonesome October, but it was an immemorial year. It definitely was hard by the dim lake of Auber, in the misty mid-region of Weir; it was down by the dank tarn of Auber, in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. It was Mamaroneck, New York—a long walk from Fordham and not far from Broadway—where Edgar Allan Poe wrote or was inspired to write “Ulalume” in 1847, and where Samuel Jackson Snead shot a 67 in 1959. But the people who had gathered in the second and third weeks of this June weren’t there to discuss the landscapes of Robert Walter Weir, or Daniel François Auber’s composition le Lac des fées. They had gathered to identify—for the 84th time since 1895—the national champion of golf.

An indirect measure of the historical stature of the title at stake was the extent of international press and broadcast coverage. national review was there; and, sure, the New York Times, Newsday, UPI, and Time were there, as were such golf writers as Peter Dobereiner and Nick Seitz, not to mention the two most prominent golf correspondents active today: Herbert Warren Wind of The New Yorker, whose elegant essays and whose The Story of American Golf are contributions to literature; and Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, whose The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate is a collection of golf essays out of the tradition of Southwestern humor. These gentlemen were surrounded by an army of journalists from around the globe: There were the Adelaide News and the Adelaide Advertiser, as well as the Melbourne Herald. There were the Scottish Daily Record, the Glasgow Herald, and the London Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Times, Sunday Times, Daily Express, Evening Standard, Observer, Sun, Sunday Telegraph, and Daily Telegraph. There were France Golf, The Asian Golf Digest, the Tokyo International News Service, and La Vanguardia of Barcelona, among many others. American newspapers were not under-represented. The Staten Island Advance, the Pocono Record, and the Tuscaloosa News turned up. There were some 1,300 media credentials and the Goodyear blimp. If the Open was a place where one might meet that knowledgeable fellow Mr. Tony Cooper, the secretary/treasurer of the Fiji Golf Association, it was also a place where one could hear a toasted dumpling intone—in those accents known as “Larchmont lockjaw”—“Australia was something different, but God we loved New Zealand.”