Scorecard

THE NEW TRADITION

Golfers with any sense of tradition must have felt a bit empty when the United States Golf Association drastically changed the format of the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur championships last week. It was obvious that the changes were made primarily to enhance televising of the tournaments. So once again, lamentably, television reshapes a sport.

The grand distinction of the U.S. Open was that its final 36 holes were played in one day through which the winner not only had to display the best possible golf but nerve and stamina as well. For 40 years this format was a key element in setting the U.S. Open apart from the Hupmobile Classic, the Pop Bottle Open and whatever else the pros compete in week after week. Now, says the USGA, the Open championship, the most important golf event in the world, will be played like any other tournament, 18 holes a day for four days, finishing on a nice televisable Sunday.

The U.S. Amateur underwent an even more drastic change. Staged at match play since it began in 1895, it has been shifted to 72-hole medal (stroke) competition.

Executive Director Joseph C. Dey Jr. tried hard to make the moves seem for the better. "Increasingly slow play has made the 36-hole Saturday too much of an endurance test—more than eight hours on the course for each player," he said. "As for the Amateur, we've finally decided that stroke play is the best and most conclusive way to determine a golf champion." Maybe so, but it seems strange that it took 69 years to decide this.

"The changes may be deplorable as far as tradition is concerned," Dey said, "but in the context of the times they were the correct thing to do."

Now if Joe Dey, one of the finest administrators in the history of sport, is known for anything, it is for his stern and proper respect for tradition. It must have pained him to use that phrase: "in the context of the times." At the risk of sounding like old fogies, we feel that a great part of sport—every sport—is tradition. We are tired of the way traditions are being constantly cast aside in the name of TV for a dollar or a popularity race or whatever adds up to "the context of the times." As for golf and the USGA's changes, Joe Dey himself used the right word—"deplorable."

LESS DDT, MORE FISH

Things are looking up at Maine's Sebago Lake, where the world's largest landlocked salmon (22 pounds 8 ounces) was taken back in 1907, before DDT. In recent years fewer and fewer salmon have been caught there (SCORECARD, July 15, 1963), and the size of the fish has declined as well—at least in part attributable, according to fisheries biologists, to the spraying of insecticides along the lake's shores.

Now comes the cheery word that the DDT content of Sebago's salmon is decreasing. The average content found during the 1964 spawning run was 1.76 parts per million, compared to 3.22 in fish taken in 1963. Decreases in related hydrocarbons were even greater. Furthermore, the largest fish taken last year weighed 7 pounds 14 ounces, as against a record of 5 pounds 5 ounces the year before. And the spawning run of smelts, which constitute the salmon's principal feed, was the largest since 1957. Seventy per cent of salmon had smelts in their stomachs, compared to 38% the year before.