Sport: Little Slam

When Robert Tyre Jones Jr. won all four of the world’s major golf champion-ships—U. S. and British Open, U. S. and British Amateur—in the single season of 1930, he accomplished a feat which seemed clearly incomparable. At Cleveland last week, another golfer accomplished a feat which, if not quite the equal of Jones’s “grand slam,” was definitely comparable to it and in some respects even more remarkable. William Lawson Little Jr. of San Francisco won the U. S. Amateur Championship for the second year in a row, after winning the British Amateur in 1934 and 1935.

Up to last June, no golfer had ever won three Amateur Championships in a row. To win four, Little had to beat 31 opponents straight at match play, most of them in 18-hole matches which, because they do not give the better man long enough to be sure of demonstrating his superiority against the hazards of the game, are the hardest kind. In all 31, he only once had to play off a tie. At Cleveland, last week, he played 156 holes 19 under par, went through the whole tournament without taking more than five strokes on any hole, and made it apparent that his superiority to the rest of the world’s amateur golfers today is at least as great as Jones’s was five years ago.

A brawny, curly-haired, snub-nosed young man who learned golf on a course built on the site of a Chinese graveyard near Tientsin, where his father was stationed as an Army officer, Lawson Little has given so much time to his game that at 25 he is still a Stanford undergraduate. His salient talent as a golfer is power. Where his game differs from that of most long hitters is that he utilizes the advantage his wood shots give him by superlative iron play and putting.

Last week’s tournament, like the ones Jones used to win, was not devoid of suspense. The suspense, as soon as Little had made it clear that he was playing better than ever, was merely that of waiting for the miracle that was plainly the only thing that could prevent him from winning. There were only two moments when it seemed likely to occur.

The first came in the semifinals, when Little and Johnny Goodman, U. S. Open Champion in 1933, came to the 27th hole. Little and Goodman were roommates at Cleveland’s Country Club. It had been a friendly good-natured match in which, while the two joked and chatted their way around the course, Goodman had pulled up to all-even after being 2 clown at the start of the afternoon round. Now, at a short hole, Goodman pitched his tee shot within two feet of the pin for an easy birdie. Little’s ball stopped rolling 15 feet from the pin. When he sighted the downhill lie he knew it was a shot that might well be decisive. He sank it to halve the hole, won the 28th and 29th, clinched the match on the 33rd, 4 up and 3 to play.

The only other moment when Little really seemed to be in danger occurred the next afternoon when he was playing slim 23-year-old Walter Emery of Oklahoma City. Far from friendly, the tone of this match had been set the day before when Emery, not in the least awed by reaching the final of the first Amateur he ever played in, admitted being thoroughly annoyed when Little refused to pose with him for photographers. They finished the morning round all even. Emery sat down in the club house, ordered lunch and arrogantly advised the waiter to “take an aspirin to Mr. Little.” In the afternoon. Little was 3 up at the tenth. Emery won the next two holes and it looked suddenly as if fate might still trick Little out of his fourth straight title.

Instead, on the 14th, Emery misplayed a recovery from sand and took 4 to Little’s 3. On the 15th, Little had a birdie 3 to Emery’s 5. At the 16th, with Emery dormie, Little hit two prodigious wood shots to a green 512 yd. away, sank his putt for an eagle, and walked over to shake hands.