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Show AMAZING IS' VOGUE OF GOLF Many Americans Now Play Game Un. known to Them Twenty-Five Years Ago. Twenty-five years ago there was as much golf played in the United States as there Is baseball played in the central cen-tral villages of the Fiji islands. Which is to say, practically none whatsoever writes Grantland Rice in the New York Tribune. Yet facing 1917 there are 3,200 go!f courses, covering more than 3Ct0.i.) acres, inhabited by something like Sfj. 000 players of both sexes, from twelv to eighty years of age. In the b;o;i span of a sport no one can recall sni a development as this in so short a time. The change from ISOMo 1917 Is almost al-most beyond belief. No one knozs earlier conditions better than Jack Clark, the well-known professional at the Madison Country club, Madison, Conn. "I'll never forget," he says, "when I brought my clubs from Scotland through the custom house in Boston back in May, 1S90. The custom hoes officer first thought they were a peculiar pe-culiar brand of walking stick. He insisted in-sisted they could be nothing else, and my Scotch brogue was too much to make him understand. My brother Bob and I laid out a six-hole course at West Medford, Mass., and when w stnrted playing the entire communi7 laughed at us. The kids in the nei! field were playing baseball and th-y thought we were crazy. But a few of them consented to try It out, and immediately im-mediately took up the game when ttey found It so much harder than It looked. "The trouble in the early days," continued con-tinued Clark, "was loaning golf fcn"; and clubs. When we lost what few ba"s we had, we had to send back to Sect-land Sect-land for more, and wait six weeks, u we couldn't buy any over here. Ill never forget when I walked into a ll sporting goods) store in Boston In 1911. 1 told the salesman I wanted a p club. 'I know what you want,' he sail, and soon returned with a shinny stick. 'You call it golf over there,' he toil me, 'but we call it .shinny over here. And it was all I could do to make tm understand the two games were not tl same." |