Tips for a Golfer

Golfer Ike Eisenhower, who has his troubles breaking 90, got a few tips this week from Old Pro Tommy Armour, 57, who has trouble breaking 70 nowadays. But in his prime (the 19205), Armour managed to win professional golf's triple crown: the U.S. and British Opens and the P.G.A. Sitting down with a batch of Ike-in-action photographs for This Week Magazine, Armour tells the President what is right--and wrong--with his game. The rest of the U.S.'s 3,265,000 golfers could profit by Armour's tips.

The President, says Armour, is "at his golfing best" on the pitch shot: "the most valuable stroke-saving shot in the game" (head down, grip strong, feet close together). Says Armour: "It is probably the reason the President gets around the golf course in the respectable scores I read about." Ike is also a hot shot out of a bunker, with "practically perfect" technique (feet flat, head down, full follow-through). Says Armour: "Perhaps President Eisenhower has spent a lot of time in sand traps."

On the tee and fairway, however, Ike's swings and footwork have a few kinks--the result, Armour supposes, of a bad knee (an old football injury). Ike's main trouble in almost every picture: "His right knee, and consequently his right side, has 'locked' [i.e., stiffened] during the hit." Another of Ike's form faults which Ar mour calls "not permissible": his arms are sometimes bent on the follow-through, instead of going "straight out after the ball."

It is Armour's fond hope, he says, that Ike will ask him in for an hour or so of coaching some day. Armour's promise: to take five strokes off Ike's score.

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