It took 20 years, but the 1976 Coeur d'Alene (Idaho) golf team was finally given justice.

Brett Robbins, a former Pocatello golfer, let his conscience get the better of him last month. Robbins wrote a letter to the Idaho High School Athletic Association, admitting he cheated in the 1976 state championship.

The one-stroke scoring error allowed Pocatello to edge Coeur d'Alene by one stroke for second place. Caldwell won the tournament by about 10 strokes.

"It should have been a tie and forced a playoff," said Pocatello athletic director Jim Chatterton, who has been at the school since 1963. "I can't see us having a playoff now. After 20 years, I would think a guy would forget about it. It must have really been eating at him."

At its August meeting, the IHSAA voted to award Coeur d'Alene a second-place trophy -- 20 years later -- and allow Pocatello to keep its second-place trophy.

"There was no reason to punish Pocatello," said Bill Young, IHSAA executive director. "This is high school athletics and we're trying to develop citizenship through athletics. We teach these kids to do the right thing. This sets a great example to stand up, be honest and be proud of yourself."

But Robbins, who has since moved to Idaho Falls, isn't exactly proud. Since his "confession letter" was made public, his family has been bombarded by the media. Robbins has refused every interview.

Greg Smith, who finished third individually in 1976 for Coeur d'Alene, recalled a dejected team on the long trip home from Twin Falls Municipal Golf Course. Only the top two teams left Twin Falls with trophies.

"We felt like we should have won the whole thing," Smith said. "We didn't want second place, either. We felt we were the best team at that tournament."

Smith praised his former competitor's ethics.

"Here's a man who responded in a very appropriate way," Smith said. "By no means did he need to come forward about this. It's obviously something that has weighed heavily on him for 20 years. I can speak for my teammates and say none of us hold any grudges. I'd like to shake the guy's hand."

Smith didn't remember the 1976 tournament very well. But his coach did.

Jim Kraus coached the Coeur d'Alene golf team for 25 years before retiring in 1994. He remembers the 1976 team as one of his best.

The 58-year-old expected to receive the call -- the one that came Aug. 7, 1996 -- much sooner.

"The Highland coach (Harm Longhurst) saw the kid take four shots on a par 3 and then there was a 3 on the scoreboard," Kraus said. "There was a big controversy going on. He [Longhurst] told the kid, 'You better confess. We go to the same church.' There was going to be a protest and we expected to hear back about it.

"We never did. At least not until a couple weeks ago. It's a little late to be a real thrill."

Former Pocatello coach Milt Carlson, who has also retired, recalled the same tournament and controversy. Carlson said the Caldwell team was so far in front, it was a heated battle for second place.

He said Longhurst, who coached at crosstown rival Highland, had it in for Pocatello from the start. Longhurst has since passed away.

"He had a team that was supposed to win state," Carlson said. "We beat them on their own course that year, so he was already upset with our team."

Carlson said he was shocked when Robbins called him with the news after he wrote the letter.

"I never could have imagined Brett would have done that," Carlson said. "He was a quiet kid -- the last person I would suspect of cheating. Knowing him, I can see why it's been eating at him all this time."

The IHSAA planned on sending Coeur d'Alene its trophy in early September. Larry Schwenke, Coeur d'Alene's athletic director, said the trophy would be presented to the 1976 team at a homecoming banquet this fall.

"Of course we're pleased to be getting it," he said. "We appreciate his honesty. It must have been quite a burden for him, but he had the courage to do the right thing. The human conscience is truly amazing."

After 20 years, that is.

"I'm glad he lost a few weekends thinking about it," Kraus said.

-- Derek Samson

BUY OR SELL? CHIP OR PUTT?

The next time you can't reach your broker at the office, try the golf course.

That's the gist of a June survey conducted on behalf of the Touchstone Family of Funds and Variable Annuities. Conducting random interviews with 400 investing professionals, it found computers allowed those in the financial services business to be more efficient at the office -- so much so they had more leisure time, which a fair number said they spent on the golf course.

Of the respondents who had been in the business for 10 to 20 years, 21 percent said computers allowed them to play more golf. The percentages dropped to 17 and 14 for two groups of less-experienced investors. Similar numbers were found among older workers. In the 45-to-54 age bracket, 21 percent said technology gave them more time to play golf.

And you thought the only numbers your broker fretted over were the ones on Wall Street.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

Carmel Valley Ranch wanted to be one of those clubs that helped celebrate the USGA's Centennial last year with its own festivities, but extensive renovations, both to its clubhouse and course, killed those plans. So the club did the next best thing: It celebrated this year.

During a celebration dinner, attendees enjoyed a showing of Golf: The Greatest Game, a video produced in conjunction with the Centennial commemoration.

The club also conducted a 100+1 Tournament, and with some members dressed in turn-of-the-century attire, players in the 18-hole event competed by following Rules more closely suited to those of a century ago. Piles of sand, from which tees were to be fashioned, were placed on each teeing ground, and stymies were in effect on the greens.

"They were certainly a major factor," said USGA Women's Mid-Amateur Committee member Marcia Juergens, who was also part of the winning team, "and everyone agreed it was an improvement to do away with them.

"A good time was had by all," she added, "and we are looking forward to doing it again in 99 years."

AN APPETIZER FROM THE MENU OF WILLIE PARK JR.

From the time he first arrived in New York in 1895, until his brother Mungo brought him back to Musselburgh in 1923, Scotsman Willie Park Jr. designed about 50 golf courses in the United States. Park was a two-time winner of the British Open who gave up competitive golf, his family and the safety of his homeland to work full-time in America from 1916 until Alzheimer's disease forced his retirement.

Park was at the forefront of the new profession of course architecture. He employed several crews, but personally supervised construction by frequently visiting all of his works in progress. His designs bridged the gap between 18 stakes on a Sunday afternoon and the lavish budgets that were to follow, yet many of the layouts he designed disappeared during the Depression and war years. The survivors that have been nurtured by appreciative superintendents remain challenging today, and center sophisticated clubs from the coast of Maine, west to the Great Lakes and south to the mountains of North Carolina.

Through the years the USGA has contested three titles on Willie Park Jr. courses: the 1928 U.S. Open (Olympia Field in Illinois), the 1968 Girls' Junior (Flint in Michigan) and the 1980 Junior (Pine Lake in Michigan). This month Tumble Brook CC, a 27-hole facility in Bloomfield, Conn., will serve as the secondary site for the Mid-Amateur, and each of the 264 contestants will take a small golfing exam at the hands of the Scottish professor who Sir Guy Campbell tagged "the doyen" of course architects.

Park visited the Tumble Brook site for the first time in March 1922. He found gently rolling terrain reminiscent of Sunningdale in England, one of his most famous designs. He chatted with his senior construction chief, Orrin Smith, and Melvin Title, a young man who would later become Tumble Brook club president for 25 years. Park walked the fields, listening to their discussions.

Later Title wrote, "Willie had what I called a picture mind. He could picture a hole before it was even on paper. We had enough land at that time for another nine holes and Willie plotted out the new holes which were built some 20 years later." It was Orrin Smith, by then an architect in his own right, who would complete those holes in 1948.

Historian Geoffrey Cornish notes, "It is often hard to distinguish Orrin Smith's work from Park's because he followed his design tenets so closely. There is little doubt that those 18 holes are Willie Park originals."

Tumble Brook is typical of Park's work, as players often walk off the green muttering, "Now why didn't I par that hole?" Their open and accessible nature belies subtle challenges that prevent their conquest by slapdash or casual play. The first hole is a perfect example as it bends alluringly right to left, and nearly every approach shot will be played with the ball above the player's feet. The natural tendency to pull the ball will result in a splash into sand left front, or a tough up-and-down from the left rear. Neither will guarantee an easy par putt on the contoured green.

This year's mid-amateurs should consider themselves fortunate to be playing the pure Park holes of the front nine. Exactly a century ago, in his book The Game of Golf, Park noted, "I consider it is only fair to permit a golfer to get warmed to his game before severely testing his abilities. If he does get into difficulties at the first couple of holes it will materially affect his whole game and deteriorate his play; whereas, if he gets a good start, he is not only less likely to break down under the strain of difficult golf, but even if he does come to grief it will not have the same depressing effect on his after play." The competitors will step up and receive the gifts an architect has waited a century to present. -- Bob Labbance

THOSE DARN RULES QUESTIONS

You never know the value of a thorough knowledge of the Rules of Golf. Just ask Stephen Keegan and David Bartholf. Keegan's story comes courtesy of The Boston Herald and golf writer Joe Gordon. Seems Keegan was playing in the second round of the Massachusetts Amateur at Myopia Hunt Club when his drive at the 253-yard third hole went long and left. Keegan hit a provisional and hooked it into a nearby paddock. We pick up the story from The Herald:

"'When we couldn't find the first ball, I had to play the one in the barn area,' said Keegan.

"Massachusetts Golf Association official Tom Landry told Keegan the only place he could get relief was worse than where he was.

"'He told me he'd hit it from the paddock,' said Landry, the MGA's assistant executive director. 'But when he walked toward the ball there was a horse in there that charged him. He walked away and when he went back in the horse charged him again and tried to bite him in the rear end. We saw a cowhand nearby and asked him to hold the horse while (Keegan) hit his shot.'"

Keegan, who had 83-84 and missed match play, hit the ball out of the paddock into a greenside bunker and then finished off a triple-bogey 6.

As if that is not weird enough, consider the events that led to the arrest of Bartholf, 66, charged with aggravated battery, according to a story in The Times-Union of Jacksonville, Fla. Record temperatures had tempers flaring at Hyde Park Golf Club. According to the paper:

"When (Bartholf's) ball was kicked off the fourth green at Hyde Park, the player could have just replaced the ball and carried on with his game.

"But the rules of human nature took over Monday evening at the Westlake club.

"(Bartholf) jumped into his golf cart and tried to run over the man who had kicked his ball, police said yesterday.

"Then, after a fistfight, the player grabbed one of his clubs -- a wood -- and bashed the man, who was playing in a foursome ahead of him, police said.

"Another player called the police on a cellular phone."

The newspaper turned to none other than USGA staff member John Morrissett, a "spokesman and Rules expert" who often handles delicate Rules questions from callers whose tempers are running hot.

The newspaper noted Morrissett's suggestion that in an informal game, the player should just replace the ball where it landed.

"You hear about a handful of cases each year where people literally get into fistfights on the course," The Times-Union said in quoting Morrissett. "But I haven't heard of that (using the golf cart and clubs as weapons). That's a new one."

SHE CHAMPIONS A GOOD CAUSE

When Carolyn Cudone and her husband moved from New Jersey to the South Carolina coast in 1966, she envisioned a quiet life of gardening and sitting on the beach with a good book. The 48-year-old already had a trophy case full of golf memories and figured her competitive career had seen its sunset.

"I was going to relax and let the world pass by," she says.

Then she turned 50 and started entering senior championships. She played in the North and South Senior Amateur at Pinehurst. And she started winning. And winning. And winning. "I'm still waiting to retire from golf," she says. "I'm not sure I ever will."

Today she sings the lament of all golfers -- "I'd like to play more, but other things preclude it" -- and devotes significant energies into passing the game along to juniors in the growing golfalopolis of Myrtle Beach. For 15 years she's run the Myrtle Beach Junior Golf Association and each year welcomes 150 to 200 youngsters to a summer full of learning fundamentals, Rules, manners and the joy of the game.

"I've had so much in golf, I've had such a nice time," she says. "The nicest things have happened to me in golf. If some of these kids can pick the game up and enjoy it like I have for a lifetime, it's been worth it."

The Junior Association started in 1981 when Cudone helped organize a group of local golf pros in a meeting at The Dunes Club. She's tweaked the format over the years, but basically the program sorts golfers into beginners, nine-holers and 18-holers. All groups convene Tuesdays and Fridays, from June through mid-August, with the first two groups attending clinics in June before beginning course play in July.

She charges $85 per golfer, with most of the costs going to a paid administrator, and assistant pros who conduct the clinics. She's grateful to the many local courses that have donated starting times for the youngsters. The beginners play four-hole rounds at the Cane Patch and Midway par-3 courses, while the older participants play at courses scattered from one end of the Grand Strand to the other, from Bay Tree Plantation at the north end to River Hills and Seagull at the south.

"I view this as an introduction to golf," she says. "We try not to make it too competitive. I want them to learn the game for the joy of playing, give them a good foundation.

"The life of your sport is with the young people," she says. "You've got to keep them coming. And what better way to advertise Myrtle Beach golf than with Myrtle Beach golfers?"

The only rules the youngsters must remember are that they're guests at the courses they play and that unsavory on-course behavior is prohibited.

"The second year we released two people for throwing clubs," she says. "That just will not be accepted. Nor will bad language. This is supposed to be a game for ladies and gentlemen. You will conduct yourself accordingly.

"The behavior you learn on the golf course will carry you through life. Learning the game the way it's supposed to be played is a model for anything in life."

Cudone's play in the Women's Senior Amateur has earned her a hallowed spot in USGA championship history. She won five straight titles from 1968-72, and no other golfer has won more than three USGA championships running. She was a member of the 1956 Curtis Cup team and the captain of the 1970 team.

"Being captain was the feather in my cap," she says. "That was the pinnacle. International competition is something altogether different. When you walk up to the first tee and stick your tee in the ground and you're playing for your country, not just yourself, that's a totally different feeling."

Cudone, spry and active at 78, still plays good golf today, breaking her age in 1995 with a 73. "I've missed it so far this year, but I still hope to shoot my age," she says. No doubt she'll get around to it in due time.

-- Lee Pace

MOSTLY HOORAYS FOR HOLLYWOOD

Tin cup invited a tough gallery inside the ropes at a screening a few days before the recent PGA Championship -- a room filled with approximately 150 broadcasters and writers who make a living covering the game.

For the most part, Tin Cup was greeted with positive response. Any feel-good, boy-chases-girl story in which the main characters celebrate their brightest moment in a Waffle House is certain to be a gimme among golf scribes.

Movies pertaining to the game hardly have any history, and that left Tin Cup a wide fairway in which to land. The movie did that. Even British Open champion Tom Lehman admitted to getting goose bumps as Roy (Tin Cup) McAvoy, played by Kevin Costner, made his way up the final hole at the U.S. Open.

Still, it was a picky crew that assembled to watch the movie, as one might expect. It was a little like inviting a pack of mice to a cheese-tasting; the standards are tough. And Tin Cup did not make the round without its share of bogeys, glitches such as:

• The movie's U.S. Open course, supposedly located in North Carolina, appears a better setting for The Players Championship. There is far too much water on the course to make it a U.S. Open venue, and the course appears far too modern.
• The Open is televised by CBS, not NBC, the network that presently covers it. And wasn't that the voice of Ben Wright we heard commenting at one of the finishing holes?
• When Roy McAvoy arrives at the Open, he gets to the practice tee and begins to hit balls next to . . . Johnny Miller? What's he doing on the range? A future Senior Open, perhaps.
• Playing in the next-to-last group is Jerry Pate, another apparent Cinderella story who has made his way back from the broadcast tower to the fairway. And the man who wins the Open? Well, you'll just have to see for yourself. This is Hollywood, after all.

"In general, I thought it was a real good attempt at authenticity," said Jaime Diaz, a writer with Sports Illustrated. "Costner's swing wasn't bad, but it wasn't a pro's swing. He was a little short and over the top, and his divots went way left if you watched closely. I do admit it's pretty amazing what he was able to do in a short time. And this did look more like a golf tournament than any movie I'd seen, although it had kind of a TV look to it."

Added Ron Sirak, golf writer for The Associated Press, "I think real golf fans will be annoyed by some of the details. Costner hits a 3-wood that sucks back off the green. That wouldn't happen. There are some good throwaway lines I enjoyed, like when Tin Cup admits his affection for Rene Russo's character and says, 'Wait a minute. I just hit an 8-degree driver off the cart path.'

"I might give this a weak two stars out of four. I think everyone who has grown up around golf knows a Tin Cup, somebody long on talent and short on ambition. I'd still say Caddyshack is the best movie made about golf."

-- Jeff Babineau

NECROLOGY

Anyone compiling a list of the founding fathers of the game's modern era should consider HOWARD R. GILL JR., who along with a high school friend, William H. Davis, turned Golf Digest into the world's largest circulation magazine on the game. Gill, 73, who died of cancer July 30 in his Connecticut home, was part of the team that took the publication from a freebie handed out at Chicago-area courses in the early 1950s to a seven-figure circulation in 1980.

In his 35 years with the magazine, Gill served in nearly every editorial capacity and was the magazine's publisher. After the magazine's purchase by The New York Times Company in 1969, he also served as publisher of Tennis, a sister publication, from 1976-85.

* * *

HORD W. HARDIN, who died Aug. 5 at age 84, may be remembered for his autocratic rule of The Masters, but as golf purists go there were few who could match his insistence the game be played without major influences of commercial interests.

Long before he served Augusta (Ga.) National Golf Club in a number of capacities, he was a fine player and an adept administrator, both on the regional and national levels.

"Hord was a tough taskmaster, no question about it," said Fred Brand Jr., an officer on the USGA Executive Committee when Hardin was USGA president in 1968 and '69, "but he gave 60 years or so to the game and left far more pluses than minuses."

He began his tenure as an administrator first with the St. Louis District Golf Association beginning in the 1940s, then with the Western G.A. He joined the USGA Executive Committee in 1958.

In 1964, when he was chairman of the USGA's Championship Committee, the panel that oversaw the conduct of the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur, he was a prominent force in changing the format of the Open, from a 36-hole final on Saturday to 18 holes on each of four days.

After Ken Venturi struggled through 36 holes in high heat and humidity on the final day of the 1964 Open at Congressional, Hardin wrote a memo to the USGA Executive Committee that recommended a change. The matter was voted upon, and amended, for the '65 Open, which was played at Hardin's home club, Bellerive Country Club in suburban St. Louis.

Soon after his two years as USGA president, he became chairman of the Rules Committee at The Masters, a position he held for 10 years before assuming the reins as chairman of the tournament, which he held until 1991.

He was a fine player in his own right. In addition to numerous club championships at Bellerive, he was runner-up in the 1946 Missouri Amateur, where he lost at the 37th hole, and competed in seven U.S. Amateur Championships and the 1952 U.S. Open.

* * *

As he checked out of his hotel in Carmel, Calif., in June 1972, PETER DOBEREINER announced he was "off to the wars." A versatile and immensely talented writer, he had just finished covering the U.S. Open, and now he was on his way to report on Northern Ireland's troubles.

Although he dabbled in many fields -- for instance, as a writer for the David Frost television show This Was the Week That Was, so popular during the 1960s -- he was known primarily for his commentaries on golf. He believed firmly that a form of golf as we know it today was played first in Holland, not Scotland, and he consecrated Bobby Jones as the greatest golfer of them all, better than Ben Hogan because, he said, when Hogan built his house he told the architect to put in only one bedroom. Why this should matter may puzzle the rest of us, but it was perfectly clear to Dobers.

A tall and ungainly man, Dobereiner died Aug. 2. He was 70, and he had been in declining health for a year or more. Three weeks earlier he had come from his home south of London to Detroit to write his impressions of the U.S. Open. It was his last assignment for Golf Digest, for which he had written since the 1970s.

Gentle and erudite, Dobereiner wrote with great charm and wit and never left a reader without a chuckle or two. He left behind a sizable body of work. For 25 years he contributed a weekly golf commentary in The Observer, one of London's Sunday newspapers, and he wrote 40 books. His The Glorious World of Golf not only traces its development, it captures the pure spirit of the game.

Bitten by the muse that occasionally nibbles on golfers and other creatures, Dobers went into golf course architecture in his later years. He worked with the late Henry Cotton on a course in Portugal, but his pride may well have been the nine-hole pitch-and-putt he built behind his house in Pratts Bottom, a village that does indeed exist in Kent. He opened his course in grand style with the Pratts Bottom Inaugural, a tournament elevated beyond reason by the appearance of three Ryder Cup players and an opening speech delivered by Ken Schofield, the executive director of the PGA European Tour.

No one held more affection for the game or understood it better than Dobereiner. In his finest works he was an essayist rather than a reporter; he hardly ever mentioned who played which hole with a driver and a 5-iron; rather, he showed more interest in the player himself, especially in his quirks of character or style.

Dobereiner's charm was in his style, a dignity and a manner that elevated the literature of golf.

-- Robert T. Sommers