The north's top golf clubs: Hamilton Golf Club

By BOB PEARCE

The approach to Hamilton Golf Club is littered with golfing memories. The course and the suburb are called St Andrews and there are Vardon and Braid Rds, honouring former British champions.

But there is also a Glading Place, which celebrates the feats of Bob Glading, who came to the course as a club-making assistant at the age of 15 and went on to win back-to-back New Zealand Opens in 1946 at Hokowhitu and 1947 at New Plymouth.

Glading is 83 now and lives on the North Shore in Auckland. He has played to his age or better every year since he turned 70 - "it's getting easier now".

He has fond memories of the Hamilton club, which recently celebrated its centenary. He met his wife, Margaret, there when he was 17 and she 15. They have been married for 57 years.

Glading worked as a teenager for the professional, Gerry Melvin, an old Scot whom he credits with teaching him the game. In those days the course was in the countryside, approached by an unsealed road.

Now it is in the middle of suburbia, though blessed with a riverside site alongside the Waikato.

"It is pretty much the same layout as it was when I was there," says Glading. "It is a very natural course of good championship standard."

The river borders four holes, with the 438m fourth one of the most challenging. A dogleg par-five, it offers several options on the drive, always with the prospect that anything to the right may end up in the river.

Elsewhere the course is undulating, with plenty of mature trees, and a good variety of holes, which seem to blend into the contours.

With the sprawl of the city northwards, the lush fairways have become an oasis within a short distance of the commercial centre.

The course has long been a venue for national amateur championships and the victors at those tournaments read like an honour roll of New Zealand golf: Sloan Morpeth (1920, 1927), Bryan Silk (1937), Walter Godfrey (1958) and Stuart Jones (1964). Four-time national champion Tim Woon won the title twice while a member at Hamilton.

In the women's ranks, one of the most successful New Zealand amateurs of all time, Oliver Kaye, learned to play at the club when her father was the professional.

These days Hamilton can claim credit for leading professionals David Smail and Steve Alker.

* TOMORROW: Titirangi Golf Club