Golf Is Different

There was a gentle sea breeze off the ocean, the sun was warm, and 6,834 open-shirted fans had paid to see the first round of the $10,000 Los Angeles Open. Shortly after noon, Ellsworth Vines shambled to the tee and drove off. It was a 250-yd. drive--but out-of-bounds. He tried again; his second ball went out. He was hooking badly. He tipped his cap to Jim Turnesa, who with Sam Snead made up the threesome. Drawled Vines: "Try it, Jim. Think I'll rest a while." A few minutes later, Vines got off a third try; it hooked too, but took a lucky bounce off a tree onto the fairway.

The man who had once been the best tennis player in the world was not usually so inept at his new profession as he was last week. In the past year, he had driven his Mercury some 35,000 miles and slept in many a hotel bed too short for his 6 ft. 2 in. No tank-town tourney was too small for him; he played in 44 big & little ones, a grind that would wear out most pro golfers. By sheer persistence, he had earned $12,000 in prize money (compared to $50,000 his first season as a tennis pro). His score varied between seven under par and seven over par. Says Vines: "Tennis got too tough for me. I was beginning to age, and Don Budge helped me decide to get out of it. I can continue as a golfer for years--in tennis I was an old man."

Now 35, Vines has not touched a tennis racket for five years ("and I ain't about to"). He believes that each game has its particular swing, and one interferes with the other. Says Vines: "Golf takes less stamina, and less training. You get very tired playing tennis--but it is so fast that you have little time to think about each shot. I can forget a tennis match the minute it's over . . . but I remember a missed putt or a bad drive for hours."

Forty Pounds On. In 1937, two years before he quit tennis, California-born Ellsworth Vines took his first golf lesson. He had two handicaps from tennis: a pair of glasses, the result of eye-strain in night matches; and an overdeveloped right wrist that once stroked the most devastating forehand in tennis. By 1942, he had chopped his game from the 90s to the 70s and become golf pro at the Southern California Golf & Country Club. When he became a fulltime playing pro last year, his tee shots were usually long & straight, his irons still wobbly. But on the greens, he had a master's putting touch. "The only bad habit I've picked up in golf," says he, "is getting fat." He now weighs 195, about 40 pounds more than his tennis weight.

Several of golf's elder statesmen, including ex-Champion Gene Sarazen, have predicted that Ellsworth Vines will one day become U.S. golf champion.* In his shaky beginning last week, Vines looked as if he had some distance still to go. He finished 15 strokes behind the winner. Said he: "Somehow, there don't seem to be more than two or three good tennis players at one time . . . but golf is different. You must whip an awful lot of fellows to get on top." Some of the "awful lot" were among the 130 who teed off at Los Angeles' Riviera course. There was a top layer, of such men as icy cool Ben Hogan (TIME, Nov. 18), which would take some cracking. Last week Hogan shot four under par, won first place and $2,000.

* A tennis-playing woman once came close to it. Mary K. Browne, U.S. women's tennis champion 1912-14, reached the finals of the 1924 U.S. women's golf championship.

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