British Open

Golf tournaments quite often end with a dramatic situation like the one which occurred in the British Open at Carnoustie, Scotland, last week. Tommy Armour was waiting around the clubhouse with his long nose in a highball glass, wearing the sly expression which comes partly from the formation of his face, with its sloping forehead and weak chin, partly from the way his eyelid droops over his blind left eye. Out on the course, the man who seemed likely to beat him--Jose Jurado, a slight wiry professional from the Argentine--was playing his last round. Armour had finished with a score of 296, four strokes less than critics had estimated would be necessary to win the tournament. Jurado had started his last round with 36 for the first nine and needed only to play the last nine holes in 39 (three over par) to beat Armour by a stroke.

Jurado, with his quick, almost jerky swing, his swart little face and peculiar accent, has been a spectacular figure in European golf since he first played in the British Open five years ago and tied for sixth place. This year, with Jones, who has won three times, and Hagen, who has won four times, out of the Open, it seemed that he, or one of several British players would have a chance. MacDonald Smith, another Americanized Scot, who finished second to Jones twice last year, won the qualifying rounds. In the championship play he slipped back and Jurado, Armour, Joe Kirkwood, stocky little Gene Sarazen, Johnny Farrell who carried a rabbit's foot in his pocket, and two British professionals, Cotton and Twine, were near the lead after the second round. Armour finished his fourth round early in the next afternoon with a brilliant 71 and had nothing to do but sit around the clubhouse while the other scores were posted.

Jurado started late and his gallery got larger as the players ahead of him finished. When he reached the tenth hole, there were about 20,000 people following him. One of them was his friend the Prince of Wales who, wearing a blue beret and the same kind of clothes, looked so much like Jurado that it was hard to tell them apart. Jurado made his big mistake when he sent his brassie shot into the crowd on the tenth fairway and took a five. At the 14th, playing into a stiff wind, he was on in three and down in three putts for a six. He played the next two holes in par and still had a comfortable margin--one over par to tie--when he teed up his ball at the 17th.

The safe way to play the 17th was to use an iron from the tee and play between two bends of the brook that crossed the fairway. Jurado played safe but he was nervous; his topped ball landed on a tiny island in the first bend of the brook, his third was trapped, and he took a six for the hole. On the long 18th he still had a chance to tie, if his second was on the green, or if he played his second short, got a good chip shot and sank his first putt. Jurado was cautious again. He played his second short of the brook, chipped to the green and almost smiled when he saw the ball roll to within three yards of the hole and stop. Any good professional would have been able to sink the putt eight times out of ten. Jurado leaned over the ball and tapped it with his putter. It rolled slowly across the green, wavered and stopped not quite up and to one side of the cup.

Said the Prince of Wales: "What a strain, even to watch!" Jose Jurado, his face suddenly relaxed, his manner gay, shrugged his shoulders, putted again, lifted his ball out of the cup, and walked over to shake hands with Armour, who had won.

When Armour came to the U. S. from Scotland as an amateur in 1920, he made himself unpopular by offering to play opponents who had beaten him "for dough." It seemed most unlikely that, handicapped by a blind eye and injured left arm, he would ever be as good a golfer as Bobby Cruickshank, with whom he had learned to play on a course near Edinburgh, but Armour, after he had turned professional, won the U. S. Open in 1927. Experts who studied his game then reversed their reasoning, decided that it was easier to keep one eye on the ball than two, found cause for Armour's brilliant long iron shots and powerful drives in his long peculiar hands, with their tapering fingers, heavy thumbs and broad palms.

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