Golf Slips at Yale

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--Call it the B.J. Thomas Open.

Remember "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" (and putts keep failing to drop)? Weather, not golf, dominated the talk here at the Yale Invitational on Saturday. Steady rains were broken up only by dense fog, turning an already-tough Yale University Golf Course into a monster.

Nobody in the field came within four shots of breaking par, and the Harvard men's golf team, did only "respectably," in the words of Coach Bob Leonard.

The Crimson finished with a four-man total of 335, placing it seventh in the 18-team field. Led (only in the lemming sense of the word) by junior Lou Body's 81, Harvard's struggle for pars can largely be attributed to course conditions more suitable for steeplechase than golfing.

"Kind of like hitting off of a wet sponge," said Captain Jack Wylie of the fairways splotched by mud and casual water.

On-again, off-again rains kept umbrellas dancing like a semaphore signal routine. The three Harvard freshmen competing at Yale for the first time also had a more basic problem: finding the hole. They had never seen the golf course before, and when they arrived, they still couldn't see it.

Fog at times kept visibility below 150 yards, meaning that many of the blind approach shots to be found at Yale were literally that--blind.

"Out of all of the golf courses I have ever played, this would be the one I'd least like to play given [the fog]," freshman Joel Radtke said.

On top of that, 25 three-putts and two four-putts by five golfers made the round Twilight Zone material.

"The greens were pretty fast for this early in the season," Wylie said. "And they were typically bumpy, so there was very little consistency between greens."

Emblematic of the Crimson's problems was the 10th hole, a par-four of around 400 yards, with a 45-degree incline facing golfers on their second shots and a green with the flatness of the Alps once up the hill. Three of Crimson golfers missed putts inside of four feet after poor lags to the far-left pin position. But Radtke had perhaps the cruelest break of all. His drive was too perfect, stopping halfway down a slope, impeded by a burrowing animal hole, and leaving him with no chance to hit a shot with enough elevation to clear the rise in front of him.

Then again, conditions hindered everyone. On the whole, Harvard performed admirably in relation to its Ivy League competition, losing only to tournament-winner Dartmouth and Brown (with Princeton not present). Body himself expressed bewilderment at the high scores posted by the home team. None of the nine Yalies playing broke 80, prompting Body to remark, "If I ever failed to break 76 on my home course, I'd want to kill myself. But look at [Yale]. God, that's awful."