Sport: The Wee Ice Mon

"These greens are awful," Ben Hogan told his new Scottish friends. "It's like putting on glue. I've got a lawnmower back in Texas. I'll send it over to you." Indeed, U.S. Champion Hogan, making his first practice rounds of the old municipal golf course at Carnoustie on the eve of the British Open, saw very little that he liked.

The Scots were riled; they are proud of windswept Carnoustie, chiefly because of its jagged hillocks, fiendish traps and stubbly greens. One crusty old codger on a shooting stick spoke up for all of Scotland: "Hogan talks a bloody lot about the greens...

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