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Show NEVER ABANDON HOPE Golfers Play in Belief They Will Regain Lost Laurels. Continual Struggle for Even Best Professional Pro-fessional Players to Keep Their Places in Limelight Few Ever Come Back. A reputation means much to a professional pro-fessional golfer. Moreover, the maintaining main-taining of the reputation which he has earned is a very serious matter to him. A man may succeed in winning four or five open championships and for a period of years may be considered 1he most successful player in the land, but with all the weight of the honors so attained, at-tained, if he shikild happen to strike a period of, say, two years, in which his game is not quite on a par with that displayed by several of his most serious seri-ous rivals, he will inevitably find himself him-self for the time quite out of the picture. pic-ture. He has then simply to bide his time until some great individual performance per-formance once again .raises him to his old position in the esteem of the public. pub-lic. To even the very best professional players it is a continual struggle, year in and year out, to keep their places in the limelight, and here they must of a surety be. They cannot afford the luxury of even one indifferent or lazy season as this will entail the effort of regaining ground which they have lost through a lapse of form which leaves them out in the cold while it lasts. This beating-back is not easy. Many fall, but few come back. The spectators at an open tournament, tourna-ment, not long ago, stood waiting for one of the young pro's who has come on rapidly, and admitted to be one of the two best in America. It happened that two ex-champions were drawn to play together.' Both are old-timers whose fame was waning before the young champion was known. He was a caddie after each of the others had "strut his little hour on the stage and then gone off to be seen no more" (that Is, seen no more in the limelight). As each drove 6ff, the crowd laughed and Joked with them. Good naturedly each laughed and joked in return. What else could they do? Yet each felt in his heart that some day he would come back. Maybe this very round would prove the return of the mastery of other oth-er days. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast," and in no breast more eternal than that of the golfer, amateur ama-teur and pro alike. |