At Hot Springs

Maureen Orcutt broke 82, women's par, three days running; Glenna Collett played the first nine in even fours, three days running, last year's woman champion; Miriam Burns Tyson, went out in the first round; Marion Hollins and Dorothy Campbell Kurd stayed for the third round. A mob of female golfers failed to qualify and spent the ensuing days of the Women's National Championship Tournament waddling around the course at Hot Springs, Va., patrolling the gallery. This last was composed largely of strangely corpulent old men. There was nothing very exciting about the first days of the Women's National.

Favorites seldom finish in golf tournaments. There are too many chances for them to lose and 18 holes are not enough to inevitably determine superiority. But, at Hot Springs last week, there were six onetime champions in the medal play and several more future champions. One of these many favorites, it was safe to say, would win the finals. Such proved to be the case when Virginia Van Wie, who uses a mashie better than any other woman golfer, came up against Glenna Collett in the last round.

Collett is a gallery player; she gets distance from the tees and sometimes throws it away with her putter; she walks along as though she were singing to herself; like Bobby Jones, her grim determination frightens her opponents and beats them before the match begins. As Bobby Jones beat Perkins 13 up in the Amateur at Braeburn, Collett beat stocky little Van Wie 13 and 12 in the Amateur at Hot Springs.

Four other women, Hurd, Fraser, Curtis and Hoyt have won the Amateur three times. All of them succeeded for the third time when they were older than Collett, who was born in 1903 on the day her father, a famous bicycle rider, won his greatest race at the Paris Velodrome. Some of the women at Hot Springs would doubtless have liked to be cool to the daughter, my dear, of a man who used to be a bicycle jockey. Glenna, however, dressed more smartly, had better manners than many a woman whose fathers won their money without the aid of their sporting instincts. When she drives about in her blue Mercer, a police dog named after a wolf in a story by Ernest Seton Thompson, Lobo, sits up beside her; she leaves her fox-terrier at home.