Crimson Golfers to Hit Florida Links

The snow-bound Crimson golf team will be escaping Cambridge over the spring break for those Elysian Fields of golf, the emerald fairways of Florida. The eight golfers embarking on the Southern sojourn look to be the nucleus of Harvard's strongest squad since the Crimson qualified for the NCAA tournament four years ago.

The spearcarrier for this year's team will once again be senior captain Alex "Ajax" Vik, who has had dibs on the number one position since his freshman year. Vik will try to regain the Ivy League individual title that was wrested away from him last year by Yale's Peter Teravainen in what emerged as one of the most furious two-man assaults on par in the annals of Ivy golfing. Both the Ivy Championship and the NCAA Division One tournament will be played over the venerable and illustrious Yale Golf Club this year.

Joining Vik in the Florida jaunt will be two-year letterman Spence Fitzgibbons, journeyman Dave "Paducah" Paxton, juniors Chris Ball and Ron Himelman, George Arnold, and highly-touted freshmen Glenn Alexander and Brett Johnson.

Jim Dales, a consistent sub-eighty shooter last year, will be limbering up while on vacation in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Alexander and Johnson, along with internationally-groomed fellow rookie Theo Melas Kyriazi should provide the linksmen with the consistency that prevented them from toying with the rest of the league last year.

Second year coach Bob Donovan says, "I don't think we'll have to face a situation like we had last year when we had only four dependable players and needed five for a tournament."

Alexander was a high school All-American and two-time Michigan schoolboy champ. Johnson, who saw limited duty on the hockey squad this winter, placed second in the prestigious and talent-laden Western Junior championship at Purdue last summer. Kyriazi, who hails from Lausanne, played number one on the Swiss Inter-club National Team.

While in the Citrus State, the linksters will be staying in St. Augustine where they will play their daily eighteen over the Ponce de Leon Golf Club. On the way back, the team will detour through South Carolina, where it will play at Hilton Head Island and in Charlestown against the Baptist College of Charlestown.

While in Florida on Tuesday, the team will play Sawgrass, the site of last weekend's Tournament of Players Championship won by Jack Nicklaus. The golfer playing Sawgrass sees his ball perform like a marshmallow in a wind tunnel; as even Nicklaus did not record a birdie while winning the tourney with a final round of 75.

The linksters will play a series of matches against host team Flagler College. The college's namesake was Henry M. Flagler, who singlehandedly developed much of Florida's east coast. The first golfing oasis he built was none other than Ponce de Leon. Flagler went on to develop what were to become Miami and Palm Beach, where he built what was then the largest resort hotel in America.

When Flagler decided to make St. Augustine into a tourist haven, the man he selected to design the Ponce de Leon course was Donald Ross. The son of a Scottish stonemason. Ross became the professional at the Dornoch course in his native town. A Harvard professor named Robert Wilson, who spent his summers in Dornoch and became enraptured with golf, persuaded him to emigrate to America. Ross arrived in Boston in 1898 with $2 in his pocket. He went on to design over 500 courses, many of which are among the outstanding tests of golf in the country.

Ross's masterpiece was Pinehurst, which he laboriously molded out of the sand hills of North Carolina by using mule-drawn drag-pans. Overnight. Pinehurst became the mecca of American golf. The idea of building a resort at Pinehurst was the brainstorm of another Bostonian, the soda-fountain magnate James W. Tufts. On Monday, April 10, the Harvard golfers open the new season with a dual match against Tufts and Amherst