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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 Grnntlnnd Hire in the New York Tribune. Yet facing 1917 there are 3,200 golf courses, covering more than 300,000 acres, inhabited by something like 900,-000 900,-000 players of both sexes, from twelve to eighty years of age. In the broad span of a sport no one can recall snch a development as this in so short a time. The change from 1S90 to 1017 Is almost al-most beyond belief. No one knows 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, 1890. The custom house 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 we started playing the entire community laughed at us. The kids in the next field were playing baseball, and they thought we were crazy. But a few of them consented to try it out, and lm- meuiateiy iook up me guuie nueu wej found It so much harder than it looked, "The trouble in the early days," continued con-tinued Clark, "was loaning golf balls and clubs. When we lost what few balls we had, we had to send back to Scotland Scot-land for more, and wait six weeks, as we couldn't buy ay over here. I'll never forget when I walked Into a big sporting goods store in Boston in 1911. I told the salesman I wanted a golf club. T know what you want,' he said, and soon returned with a shinny stick. 'You call it golf over there,' he told me, 'but we call It shinny over here. And It was all I could do to make him understand thetwo games were not the same." |