Advertisement

Golfers Flag, Falter in Ivy Tournament

Vik Finishes Fifth in Championship

The 36-hole Ivy League golf championship held over the Yale Golf Course on Saturday was nothing short of a lollapalooza of the links. The Yale University course is a Scotch surrealist landscape featuring Brobdingnagian bunkers, Cecil B. DeMille greens, and on Saturday Yale's Peter Teravainen and Dartmouth's Joe Henley performed a rendition of "dueling birdies" that could have been choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

Topeka Twister

Add near-typhoon winds and 40-degree temperatures to this tableau and it becomes clear the Harvard golf team was not out for a stroll in the park.

The linksters plummeted to fifth place in the tournament, after leading by a stroke over Penn after the first round of play. Not a single Harvard golfer managed to break 80 on the par-70 course in the afternoon.

Dartmouth, which had trailed the Crimson by ten strokes after the first 18, won the Ivy crown with a team aggregate of 640. Princeton, Penn and Yale followed the Big Green as all four were bunched within 10 strokes of one another.

Advertisement

Harvard finished with a team tot 1 of 654. The Brown linksters went around like a foursome of doddering octogenarians, taking a whopping 701 shots that placed them dead last.

Yale's Teravainen won the individual Ivy championship for the second year running with splendid scrambling rounds of 72, 73--145, three strokes ahead of Henley. Teravainen and Henley were all even after 32 holes of play, but the Eli rolled a 30-ft. downhiller for a birdie on the 15th and then eagled the par-five 17th.

Harvard captain Alex Vik, who won the individual title as a freshman and sophomore and was runner-up last year, finished fifth with 76, 81--157. He was one stroke behind Princeton's 6-ft., 11-in. Bruce Samaklis and Penn's Steve Scig.

"It wasn't so much a test of golf as much as it was a test of survival, and that's unfortunate," said coach Bob Donovan. The windswept. greens were billiard-table slick. "Anything less than a perfect shot to the green or on the green was a mild disaster," Donovan said.

Indeed, there was a cornucopia of calamities in store for the field. One Columbia linkster, who played with Harvard's Spence Fitzgibbons, took a 14 on the wood-lined par five 18th in the morning and an 11 on the same hole in the afternoon. Fitzgibbons fired an opening 80 but billowed to an 86 his second time around.

He three-putted the second through sixth holes, and then took a nine on the tempestuous par-five 16th. He tried to park a three-wood on the green, but after taking a lusty rip at it, he finished up like a knight at Agincourt who has just missed connections with his mace and chain. The ball disappeared, heading due west.

Glenn Alexander shot a 79, 82--161 for the Crimson despite spraying his drives. Jim Dales carded an 82 in the morning but the wheels came off in the afternoon. Vik was nine over par after 14 holes in the morning, but made a courageous charge by birdieing the 15th through 17th holes and landed a berth on the All-Ivy team.

Recommended Articles

Advertisement