IN JULY, when the first tee ball is struck at Green Mountain National Golf Course in Sherburne, the state of Vermont will finally get in step with the rest of the nation, being the last constituency to open a municipal golf facility.

It shouldn't be surprising in a state known for being first or last. Vermont was the first in the nation to ban roadside billboards, last to accept a Walmart inside its boundaries. Landmark environmental legislation made it difficult to build a golf course in the Green Mountains long before it was hip elsewhere.

The primary reason for the absence of municipal golf is the short season. Considering today's construction costs, it's hard to make the numbers crunch when you've got less than six playable months to work with. Most clubs don't open until May, and the pro shops are once again deserted by the end of October.

Rural demographics also contribute. Vermont is ranked 49th in population, with a fairly low per capita income. Fortunately, green fees have always conformed to that market, notes Jim Bassett, executive secretary of the Vermont Golf Association.

"There are several golf courses in the state which have been operated like municipal golf courses, even though they are family owned. Green fees range from $8, so golf is still very affordable in Vermont," boasts Bassett. There are numerous 18-hole courses to play for under $20.

A third reason is that golf is public in Vermont, with 84 percent of the clubs open to everyone. Getting out on the links is generally not the problem it may be in urban areas. More than a third of that public golf is played at ski resorts that have added championship tracks in the past 40 years, which makes the overall quality relatively high.

In 1970, Vermont passed Act 250, a comprehensive assessment of a proposed business's effect on the ecology, traffic patterns, water usage, wildlife habitat, wetlands, soils, historical importance, noise levels and visual degradation of the natural scenic beauty. Since the potential pitfalls are numerous, it takes commitment and fortitude to enter the Act 250 tunnel. In light of all this, why would any town take the chance? Part of the answer lies in the fact that Sherburne is home to Killington and Pico resorts, and this is not your average municipal project.

"We're a ski resort community with a large amount of infrastructure of beds and restaurants and shops, in the winter that fill up with 20,000 people a day," comments Dave Lewis, the Sherburne town manager who heads the project for his town's 891 year-round residents. "But in the summertime we have difficulty keeping a lot of those same businesses open, which creates some real economic hardship for those people, in that they have to base their livelihood on a good winter. The community is not a vibrant year-round community as it could be."

In 1992 the town added two cents to the tax rate and set aside the money as an Economic Recovery Fund, to increase year-round opportunities. "We've been trying for a number of years to increase summer activities to turn us into a four-season resort," says Lewis. "This was one area we felt had a lot of potential."

Pleased with the results of a feasibility study, the town tapped local construction talent for initial plans, then brought in Gene Bates, a former design associate of Jack Nicklaus who had both high altitude and resort golf experience. "Mixing the resort idea and style, along with daily fee reality, is part of our typical mode," comments Bates. "You like to make it look pretty; you like to make it look a little more intimidating than it is; but on the other hand, let it play fairly easily, and get the rounds around fairly rapidly."

The resulting layout is a gem, but it's been a battle to cut it from the ore. The winter was especially long in Vermont and the club has made a commitment to open in July, then host a Futures Tour event a month later. Already residents are grumbling about giving up the course, and the prospect of a $35 green fee, unaware that most players around the nation would die to play a resort-like municipal course at that rate. Nobody ever claimed golf was ordinary in the mountains of Vermont.

-- Bob Labbance

THESE PLAYERS RALLIED FROM SIX (INCHES) UNDER

THE MEDALIST in local qualifying for the U.S. Open on May 13 in Rochester, N.Y., should have been Noah, not David.

David Wettlaufer of Kitchener, Ontario, and the 50 other competitors who arrived at Monroe Golf Club probably were thinking an ark would be the best way to transport their clubs around the course.

Western New York endured its wettest spring in recent memory. Green Hills Golf Club -- original site of the qualifier -- was "under water," according to USGA Sectional Affairs committeeman Ed Thaney. "It was ugly."

Dan Woods, the head pro at Green Hills, called Thaney the morning of May 12 to forewarn him. He'd been on the range hitting balls and buried his 7-iron seven inches into the saturated turf.

"Here was the pro, who had the advantage of playing his home course, saying we might want to move it," Thaney said. "It could have been playable, but it would have been unbearable."

Puddles stood where eight greens should have been. Woods feared that on some holes players would not only plug their ball, but lose their shoes trying to walk to their shot.

So Thaney did something that is uncommon for a USGA qualifier. He moved it to another course.

With more than 550 qualifying sites for the USGA's 13 national championships, severe weather forces the occasional site switch. What made this unique, however, was making the move less than 24 hours before play. Western New Yorkers were not fazed by the site change: the 1988 qualifier was shifted from Centerpointe Country Club in Canandaigua to Monroe in mid-swing. Monroe's sand-based course came to the rescue again this year.

Just before noon May 12, Thaney telephoned Monroe head pro Jim Mrva with a request to use his course in less than 24 hours. Mrva didn't flinch. He turned to greens superintendent Patrick Gertner, who likewise didn't flinch. Club president Jim Spitz Jr. and golf chairman Don Bolger approved. Two hours after dialing "911," Thaney was on the phone telling the entrants of the course change.

Everyone who was expected showed up.

"We missed our day off, but it was fun," said Mrva, who went out Sunday night with assistant Tom Yeager and set hole locations, then greeted the competitors the next morning.

Something else greeted the players. Water. But from sprinklers, not the heavens.

"All the area pros were looking around, saying, 'Can you believe these sprinklers are on?'" Thaney said. "They won't see sprinklers at their clubs for three weeks."

-- Gary Fallesen

TWO-SIDED TRICK

SOME GOLFERS carry four woods in their bag. Others carry three wedges. Fran Cardillo of Williamstown, Mass., sometimes goes one better.

It's not unusual to peek into his bag and see both right- and left-handed clubs.

Don't laugh. He's parlayed his ambidextrous talents into single-digit handicaps from both sides, although now he's a 12 playing virtually all of his golf from the left side. Along the way he's collected seven holes-in-one, two from the right side and five as a lefty, including one he made last fall at the 152-yard 14th at Taconic Golf Club in Williamstown. The hole is one of his favorites; he's aced it from both sides and thrice overall.

"One year I played both ways. I couldn't make up my mind," said Cardillo, for 32 years the band director at Williams College. "For the past 10 years I've played left-handed, but I do a lot of chipping and putting right-handed. I carry a right-handed 8-iron and a right-handed putter. And sometimes I'll bring a right-handed sand wedge."

You think Cardillo's discussing his golf game, or do musicians really pay attention when they hear his "Right-Left-Right" cadence?

SOUTH AFRICAN NOMINATED AS R&A CAPTAIN

THOMAS Harvey Douglas, who became a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in 1956, has been nominated as its captain for the 1996-97 season.

Douglas started playing the game at the age of 7 with guidance from his mother, the South African Ladies champion in 1937. A former captain of the Oxford University golf team who now plays off a 6 handicap, Douglas last year won the Queen Victoria Jubilee Vase, one of the R&A's major competitions for its members.

NO MORE IN NEBRASKA

LAVON Sumption claims to be a University of Nebraska football fan, but even he admits he's seen only a few games in the 40 years he lived in Lincoln.

Sumption was too busy playing golf on weekends to see the Cornhuskers, but not until he leafed through his collection of scorecards and realized he'd played 100 different Nebraska courses did the idea hit him. Sumption then set a goal of playing every course in the state, an achievement realized in mid-April, some seven years after surpassing No. 100, at Happy Hollow Club in Omaha.

Because of his scorecard collection, Sumption, a 66-year-old retiree from the University of Nebraska, is able to update his career totals, which number more than 350 courses in 31 states and seven countries over the nearly 50 years he's been playing.

"This same feat may have been accomplished in other states," he says, "but I'm not aware of anyone doing so in Nebraska."

Sumption plans to update his Nebraska accomplishment, which now stands at 187, by playing the half-dozen or so courses set to open this year, and on one of his trips to or from Arizona, where he now lives, he figures he'll play in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Hmmm . . . that only leaves 17 states to go.

A CHAT WITH THE MASTER, LONG POSTPONED

THE 29th chapter of Golf Has Never Failed Me contains just 27 words. They bluntly expound the assertion in the chapter's title, "No Bunker is Misplaced." ("Regardless of where a bunker may be," writes the author, golf meisterbilder Donald Ross, "it is the business of the player to avoid it.") Indeed, what vast amounts of moaning and sniping could have been avoided had this statement -- from the pen of the great golf architect himself -- been published promptly after it was written some 80 years ago.

If it's true that a bunker cannot be misplaced, can an important manuscript? Were "The Lost Commentaries," as these memoirs are subtitled, literally lost? Golfers who purchase the new collection of old Ross writings published by Sleeping Bear Press will wonder aloud why their parents and grandparents were denied the chance to enjoy this book's terse intelligence and Ross's measured, avuncular tones. According to Sleeping Bear's president, Brian Lewis, who only last year published a volume of Alister Mackenzie's unearthed writings under the title The Spirit of St. Andrews, widespread interest in golf architecture is a more recent phenomenon than people realize.

"Twenty years ago," comments Lewis, "neither of these manuscripts would have been worth anything to a publishing house." The Ross manuscript, Lewis reports, had been spoken of to book publishers a time or two since Ross gave it to his longtime associate, J.B. McGovern. McGovern, before his death, gave the manuscript to William Gordon, who was a colleague and co-founder, with McGovern, of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. Gordon, in turn, passed the writings on to his son, David, also an ASGCA member.

The next step was to have the manuscript authenticated. Ron Whitten, architecture editor of Golf Digest and a member of the Donald Ross Society, came on as the book's editor and worked with Ross's descendants to prove the materials were legitimate. Family members, although not interested in royalties or other compensation, were enthusiastic about the find. They were determined that no shortcuts or false assumptions be allowed into the authentication process.

To the relief and delight of all involved, the type on the manuscript pages matched up with the characters on an ancient typewriter still owned by the family.

"There was a 'j' that struck high. That cinched it," Lewis recalls. He, Whitten and the Ross family had much other evidence that the Gordon manuscript was actually Donald Ross's work, including the fact that many statements in the text echo comments and beliefs he had been quoted on in speeches and conversations. Whitten was then able to secure, mostly from Ross Society members, the wonderful trove of vintage photography that accompanies the redacted text. Brought together between two covers, these words and images succeed in putting flesh on a figure who had somehow become more famous and less known with the passage of time.

"The survival of those pages is really against the odds," comments Lewis. "What makes it more amazing is that no other Ross writings have ever been published or collected. This is the sum total of his thoughts on his life and work. In the case of Mackenzie, it was different. He wrote quite a bit and was written about quite a bit. For Donald Ross, this book is it."

People who knew Ross through his course-building and his reputation as a highly successful innovator probably won't be thrown off by what they read in Golf Has Never Failed Me. In structure, the book is a methodical, often sequential explanation of how to build a proper golf links. Chapter titles like "Deep Grass Ravines," "Boulders," "Trees" and even "Brush," indicate the author's thoroughness in treating his subject.

But Ross's grasp of the cultural and economic forces that would shape the future of his game and livelihood are as evident in this book as his knowledge of grading, seeding and mowing. In travels from Dornoch to New England to the Southeast and California, Ross glimpsed the future demand for the game "in this big, glad country of ours" and correctly predicted its growth even as he helped fuel it. His lament over America's wasteful system of country-club management by a rotating panel of amateurs was to be echoed for most of a century. When you read his thoughts on the proper location of a clubhouse, you'll realize how fully he understood the essential experience of belonging to a golf club.

In addition to his towering presence as a designer, Ross was a fine tournament player and a successful marketer of Donald Ross golf equipment. The investment he made in the game was visceral and emotional as well as financial. The game never did fail him, and the memoirs Ross has left behind also do him great justice.

-- Dave Gould

PROVISIONALS

SHARP-EYED readers alerted us to four omissions in the March/April list of clubs celebrating centennials this year: Gardiners Bay Country Club in New York; Country Club of Harrisburg and Torresdale-Frankford Country Club in Pennsylvania; and Lac LaBelle Golf Club in Wisconsin.

Our pictorial review of this year's USGA championship sites ("Championship Caliber," May) misstated the par and yardage for a hole. The 10th at the Witch Hollow Course at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club, which will host the 96th U.S. Amateur, is a 194-yard par-3 hole.

NECROLOGY

BOB DRUM, 78 going on 156 but still only a little Drummer boy at heart, died May 9 in Pinehurst, N.C. In the words of his lifelong partner and mother of his five children, wife M.J. (Marian), "He died so gently -- so easy, so gentle, and that made me grateful. God knows, he sure didn't live easy and gentle."

Drum belonged to Brooklyn, where he was born. He belonged to Alabama, where he became a collegiate basketball All-America, to Pittsburgh, where he began his newspaper career, and to Pinehurst, where he made his home. But in the big picture, Bob Drum belonged to the entire world of golf.

In his raspy Brooklynese, Drum was an "awe-tha" as football and golf writer of 20 years for the Pittsburgh Press where, legend has it, he invented Arnold Palmer.

It was the mere beginning of a storied career for a gargantuan, happy-go-lucky galoot who not only would have been a Damon Runyan character, he'd have been a book, movie and television series. Fact is, Drum became a feature on the CBS golf telecasts for years, hosting "The Drummer's Beat," where he spared no one. One of his masterpieces was on noted course architect Pete Dye, famed for utilizing railroad ties. Drum characterized Dye as "the only guy who builds courses that can burn down."

An irascible raconteur skilled at turning four-letter words into three, Drum's career never stabilized but never strayed far from golf. He had trouble shooting his age for nine holes, yet he briefly became golf coach at VMI after newspapering, then to television and, more recently, magazine writing.

While his hulking body had been wracked by cancer, strokes and other ailments, his heart never strayed from the golfing fraternity. When he should have been in the hospital, he spent his last month at Myrtle Beach with the Golf Writers Association of America clambake he started 43 years ago, then to the Masters and on to Charlotte, N.C., determined to finish stories on Frank Connor and Jim Colbert.

The Drummer was acerbic, cherubic, laughable, loveable, a Don Rickles-Rumpole composite. While he discovered Palmer in 1945 when Arnie was a high school sophomore, Drum didn't achieve legendary status until a memorable moment at the 1960 U.S. Open at Denver's Cherry Hills. That was when the Open's final 36 holes were played on Saturday and Palmer, who that spring had won the Masters, trailed Mike Souchak by seven shots at the lunch break.

"What would happen if I'd shoot a 65 this afternoon?" Palmer said to his rotund pal.

"Nothing, you're out of it," Drum growled. "And don't bother me, I'm eating my hamburger."

"Well, doesn't 280 always win the Open?" said the steamed Palmer, who then drove the green at the 346-yard first hole, made birdie, shot 65 for 280 -- and won.

-- Kaye Kessler

* * *

HAROLD "JUG" McSPADEN was 78 when he made his golfing comeback, entering the 1987 U.S. Senior Open and sending the USGA on a joyous journey to learn more about his past.

Under the category titled "status" on his entry, McSpaden, who had retired from the tour in 1946, wrote: "Exempt, Member 1939 and '41 U.S. Ryder Cup teams." The Ryder Cup wasn't played those years due to the war, but McSpaden wasn't pulling a fast one -- U.S. teams were still named. In fact, the '41 team played an exhibition in Detroit, and McSpaden and Byron Nelson beat Bobby Jones and Gene Sarazen, 8 and 6.

"Nelson and I must have had five birdies between us," McSpaden remembered of his former "Gold Dust Twin" partner and more famous contemporary. "We were quite a team."

McSpaden, who died April 22 with his wife, Betsy, in their Kansas City, Kan., home of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, was quite a player in his own right, too.

In 1945, the year Nelson won a record 11 tournaments in a row, 18 overall, McSpaden was runner-up 13 times. But McSpaden won his share, capturing 17 official tour titles from 1933 to '45, including the 1939 Canadian Open, and a string of titles in 1944 highlighted by playoff victories over Nelson and Ben Hogan.

Undoubtedly, though, McSpaden was best known for his partnership with Nelson. They teamed for more than a decade in more than 100 exhibitions and clinics during World War II.

"Harold was my friend -- and the best golfer for his age, maybe in the whole country," Nelson said. "I was fortunate that I played well back then, but I was always lucky against him."

In his later years, McSpaden delighted press rooms at the Senior Open and other events with wonderful stories. He often said his idol was Walter Hagen, which explained McSpaden's often eyebrow-raising behavior during his playing days. McSpaden, an accomplished pilot, once had golfers diving for cover at the sight of his Piper Cub storming up the first fairway at a Fort Worth, Texas, tour stop.

McSpaden was also the first player on the tour to shoot 59, but his record was erased because it was shot during a practice round before the Texas Open.

McSpaden almost won the 1937 PGA Championship, but he was distracted by the whir of a movie camera and missed a four-foot putt at the 36th hole (witnessed, again, by Nelson).

As he neared 90, McSpaden often said he could never understand why he could play so well despite his advancing age. He bought a new set of irons two years ago and said his goal was to play until he was 100.

"A lot of it [aging] is mental," McSpaden said in a recent interview. "If you think you're sick, your chances of getting healthy are no good until you change the way you think. If you have a problem, get it off your mind. I don't hang around many 70-year-olds."

-- Jo-Ann Barnas

* * *

DICK PEARSE, 69, of LaCrosse, Wis., was an executive with the Wisconsin State Golf Association. He served the association as a director, committee chairman and vice president before becoming president in 1992-94.

In the summer of '96, municipal golf finally arrives in Vermont.

It was back in 1992 that Oakland Hills Country Club in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., dedicated its Walk of Champions, which commemorates the players whose titles were won there. The area near the first tee of the South Course will undergo an addition later this summer . . . but whose plaque will it be?

Motorized carts robbed the game of much of its exercise, and a glance at Vojtech Ackerman's invention would bring the conclusion that golf is becoming a lazy person's game. The Houston resident received U.S. patent 5,480,142 for a "reversibly elevatible golf cup" that lifts a holed ball so a player can grab it and head to the next tee. The invention has a battery-powered antenna that rises as much as 36 inches when a ball falls into the hole, and retracts when the ball is removed. Ackerman, a non-golfer, hopes the gimmick, which came to him while watching a Senior PGA Tour event on television, will help elderly and handicapped players unable to retrieve their ball from the hole. And he's already working on a modified product that will make room for a flagstick.