Remarks to Representatives of World Amateur Golf Team Championship Conference.

I WAS PARTICULARLY PLEASED to meet this group. Not only do I have a great love for the game of golf--no matter how badly I play it--but I have also the belief that through every kind of meeting, through every kind of activity to which we can bring together more often and more intimately peoples of our several countries, by that measure we will do something to solve the difficulties and the tensions that this poor old world seems nowadays to so much endure.

So for just a moment I want to talk about two points.

First, I will talk about the real importance I attach to what I would call the people-to-people program, in this case brought about through this great amateur international association that will bring about these games through so many countries. Nothing but good can come from it. Through good sportsmanship, good friendships formed on the golf course, through the days of play and through meeting so many different people of so many countries, you are bound to go back with a better understanding of all of these people. And that is all to the good.

And now I have got one suggestion about golf. Every time we go to a tournament we get all the lowest handicap players and for the next three or four years they are the very best that we have. So they keep coming back again and again. And the game becomes the most important thing in the world, instead of friendships and the understandings and the real information that you get out of your surroundings as you go there.

So I would suggest that aside from the four hot-shot golfers that you bring with you--the scratch man and all of the fighting that will go between conceded putts and the rest of it--take along some high handicap fellows and let them play at their full handicaps. This way you never have to take back the same man, and besides golf doesn't become so important.

You see, as you return from a match and a man is a scratch fellow, he remembers one thing--that very bad "goof" he made on the sixteenth and he tells all his friends for the rest of his life that he would have won that international match if he hadn't hit it on the water on the sixteenth.

But people that are high handicappers, they know darn well there's no use telling their families or their friends about their golf. So they will tell more about St. Andrews, and about the wonderful Scot people, and everybody that they met there. I think if you take along some high handicappers and let them play at their full handicaps everybody will have a big time. That would do a lot to make some of our people not so interested alone in golf. It would get them thinking and looking around a little bit more and seeing the heather and the sea around good old St. Andrews, where by the way I hear you are going to have your first tournament. I should like to be there and see it.

Now I have given more advice to a group like this than I usually do, but this time I am serious.

Thank you. It's wonderful--and good luck to you all.