The Spirit of the Links
by Henry Leach · English · Gutenberg #42348 · 527,328 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Spirit of the Links
Author: Henry Leach
Release date: March 17, 2013 [eBook #42348]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS ***
THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS
THE
SPIRIT OF THE LINKS
BY
HENRY LEACH
GREAT GOLF, WHAT POWERFUL CHARM IS IN THY NAME!
WHAT CUNNING WITCHCRAFT IS THY FASCINATING GAME!
_Blackheath Golfing Lays_, 1867
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1907_
CONTENTS
PAGE
SPRING 1
MEN AND THINGS 37
THE QUEER SIDE 75
THE WANDERING PLAYER 118
THE SUNNY SEASON 163
THE PROFESSOR ON THE LINKS 194
THE FABRIC OF THE GAME 219
WINTER 251
THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS
SPRING
I
To discover the secret of its wonderful charm is not the least of the
problems of golf. It is a game that encourages the reflective and
philosophical mind to close investigation, and so it is not enough for
the worthy player that he should take the things that he sees and feels
for granted, with no questions concerning the mystic influences that
seem constantly to brood over the links, and the people who are of them.
Each day as we go forward to the game, and in particular if it marks the
beginning of a special period of play, we feel these influences strong,
and it may happen that for a moment we wonder again as to their cause
and their origin.
Many minds have made great efforts towards the discovery of this secret,
but the fruits thereof have not been satisfying. Golf is not like other
games which stir up great enthusiasms in their players. Long spells of
failure or of ambition thwarted often kill the passion that has fed the
energy of the players of these games; but that is not the case with
golf, and golf almost alone. Nor does a surfeit of play lessen the
desire for it as it does in the case of other field sports, which need
close seasons for their healthiness. When one day’s golf is over, the
thought is of the next that will succeed it, and the hope already goes
forward to anticipation of the superior delights that may be in store.
And it makes the same appeal to all persons of all classes who once
attach themselves to it, and it has been found that the golf impulses
are as strong in the men of other races and of other colours as they are
in the British who have cultivated the game. This universality, the
constant enthusiasm, the unweariedness of the golfer, and the intense
ardour that distinguishes him from the players of other games, suggest
to us that some strong emotion of the human mind is touched by golf in
some peculiar way, that its principles and the conditions of its play
make a special appeal to some elementary feature of simple human nature;
for it is the appeal to these primitive instincts that is always the
strongest, the most overpowering.
Upon this line of investigation we come upon a clue that leads us to a
more satisfactory idea as to the secret than any other which has been
suggested. The strongly humanising tendencies of the game are evident to
all, and admitted. No cloak of convention can be worn over the manners
and thoughts of the player; he is the simple man. And what are the
subtle features of the primitive instincts that are awakened in him so
constantly, at almost every stroke, in every round, and on every day? It
is sometimes difficult to seize upon them, floating in a vagueness as
they do, but it does seem that all the strong emotions of the golfer
combining to make up his grand devotion to the game, are clustered round
the simple human instinct, most human and most potent of all, the
instinct of Hope. It is this hope that leads the golfer on through all
his troubles and disappointments, and it still urges him forward when he
has already ascended to a great delight. It is a hope that will never
permit complete satisfaction. This simple formula that the mystic charm
of golf is hope, will explain all the emotions that rise up in the
golfer in the course of a year of play. Take him from the first tee to
the end of his game. It is the fresh morning, and the ardour of the
golfer is warm within him, and he has a yearning and a high hope for a
great day’s sport. Here, on the teeing ground, he is animated by a great
desire to play the first hole as well as ever before, and to drive a
clean far ball that shall speak well of his skill and make good augury
for the strokes that are to come. If he succeeds his hope but increases.
Does he play the tee shot badly, and his hopes go forward to a great
recovery with the second shot of the game. If that should fail,
vexatiously, there may still be the chance of a wonderful approach, and
though the approach be not so wonderful, is there not the possibility
that the gods may be so kind as to steer a very long putt into the hole?
These are exactly the alternating sentiments; and if the fulfilment of
the hope be denied to the last putt, and the hole be lost, at the second
tee there is hope again that the indifferent start will be succeeded by
a flash of brilliance as shall restore the position and the complete
equanimity of the player.
And so it is from shot to shot and from hole to hole all the way round
the course, and “_Spero meliora_” is the eternal motto, even though the
present state be happy. If the whole round be weak and the result of it
adverse, there is the hope of the afternoon; and at the end of the day
the unfortunate golfer, moved almost to despair by his failures, soon
recovers again that optimism which is his constant succour, and then his
hopes are of the morrow. Does he not know now what it was that he was
“doing wrong,” the golfing sin that he committed all the day? To-morrow
the fault shall be corrected, and the swings that are made in
after-hours now give fair promise of a great change. A well-prepared
heart has the golfer, the like of which, as Horace says, hopes in the
worst fortune, and in prosperity fears a change in the chances. Give it
that the man has golfed above his true ability, and how he does fear
that the next game may put him back again; but here again there is
buoyant hope in evidence, and when the evening is filled with the
exaltation of it, how sweet it is to wander a little over the resting,
deserted links and mark the places where balls were pitched, and the
lines along which fine putts were made, and the points to which play
shall be directed when the next round is in the making, perhaps the best
of all.
So it is hope and hope all the way through the golfer’s life, and it is
the most joyous, the most uplifting of all the instincts, and the most
intensely human, and that which is given to man alone. It is because
golf strikes always this chord in his nature that it makes the strong
appeal to him. There is no other game or sport that permits him to hope
through failure in the same way, that leads him on, coaxes him, cajoles
him, even fools him. And this drama of the emotions of the individual is
played always in the most perfect setting for such a simple human
play--the sea and green fields and plain earth, and the simplest tools
to move a little white ball, not along marked lines or within narrow
limits or in protected arenas, but anywhere along that green grass, over
the hills and through the valleys and across the streams and rushing
rivers, while the wind blows now this way and then that, and the rain
pours. All the time the golfer pursues the little ball, alone with plain
nature and his human adversary. Here he is released from all the
conventionalities of mind that hold him in his other doings in this
complicated civilisation. The primitive instincts are in command; they
have the fields and the sea for harmony in the scene, and the golfer is
away from all the intricacies of the twentieth century, and is the
simple man and the hopeful man.
That is a fair creed concerning the command of golf, and we may reject
the theory that indomitable, persevering mankind finds the fascination
of the game merely in the failures and irritations that it brings and in
the desire to overcome them. The activity of that instinct of hope is
the mystic charm, and surely it is to the credit of a game that it
should teach the man to look forward with courage and cheerfulness, and
to be always something of an optimist, and the more of it the better for
his game. These things lead to the making of a good man as well as a
good golfer.
II
Men of other races, whose skins are not white, are afoot with this game.
Black men are playing; yellow men are becoming expert; red men have
achieved great skill. A few years since a golfer traveller found his way
to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and he saw the wild Red Indian
at golf, and thought that it suited him better than his old game of
lacrosse. Spotted Horse drove off along the prairie--a plain prairie
with only a few shrubs about--and he followed and played the ball for a
couple of miles to the turn, and then played it back. There were no
holes; the game was to play the course in the fewest strokes. Here,
indeed, is the primitive golf. Some of the Indians are said to have made
fine drives--as good as the best that white men do--and this was all the
more remarkable inasmuch as it is the Red Indians’ pretty custom to yell
and howl in a frightful chorus while one of their number is addressing
the ball preparatory to making his stroke. So it does not seem easy to
put the red men off.
Golf, indeed, is the one world game; it is in essence that very simple
sport which so easily and certainly spreads over the planet. Everywhere
the British are pioneers, and they are by far the more numerous players;
but native proselytes are coming in fast in almost every quarter of the
globe, so now it may fairly be said that no other game is being played
everywhere by so many different sorts of people as this game of ours.
Sit on a magic carpet and be transported to any place, and there,
somewhere about you, will be a golf course.
I have lately had some talk with men from the East, who tell of the good
game that half-naked tribesmen, standing and walking in bare feet, have
learned to play; and, moreover, of the beautiful clubs, most exquisitely
finished and sometimes inlaid with ivory and fancy woods, that they have
made. I am assured that the “professional champion of Ceylon” is a
Cingalese caddie who holds the record for the Ridgeway course, made when
he was playing against a British golfer of thoroughly good class. The
Japanese are beginning to play, and good judges have been led to express
fears that their qualities and temperaments will bring them to a higher
state of perfection in the short game than has ever been attained
before, and which will surely threaten the supremacy of the white man.
Golfing at Kobe is a peculiar experience. The course is at Rokkosan, on
the top of a high mountain, and you must therefore climb the mountain
before you can golf on the course. You go by rickshaw to the foot of the
Cascade Valley, and are then carried up the mountain slope by coolies
for an hour and a half, when the tees and the bunkers come into view.
Those who play there hold that the view from this course is the finest
from any, though it can hardly be better than that from the course on
the top of Senchal Hill at Darjeeling, for from here there is
Kingenjunga, 28,000 feet high, to be seen, and from the summit of Tiger
Hill, overlooking the course, there is Mount Everest itself in view.
And there is golf in China too, six clubs for it. We had no sooner come
to the conclusion and officially announced some years ago that
Wei-hai-wei was a very desirable resort, than the golf club was duly
established there. In these days the building prospector first settles
upon his golf course, and advertises it, and then he builds his houses
round about; and in the same way it is realised that it is the proper
thing when seeking to make a new centre of Europeans abroad to start
with a golf course. I have been with men on shipboard who, having golfed
on the queer course of Tangier, have then speculated unceasingly in the
smoke-room as we sailed along the smooth waters of the West African
coast about the kind of golf that would be vouchsafed to them on
reaching the Canary Islands. Some time since I had a letter from a
highly-placed British official at Chinkiang on the Yangtse River, and he
told me how they had just begun to play the game out there on a new
course which was covered with crater-like excrescences. These are
Chinese graves, and they are said to make most excellent hazards. There
are pig-tailed fellows for caddies, and it was carefully ascertained
that no Chinese sentiment is injured in the matter.
There are golf clubs in all the States of Europe. There are very many in
France, and there are more each year, and it is remarkable that the
Frenchman is now establishing them for his exclusive use. At Boulogne
the Englishman and his friends of France golf together on a course where
some of the hazards were the earthworks of Napoleon’s camp--the camp
that held the Grand Army that lay in readiness for the invasion of
Britain. What irony is here--that the British golfer should play over
the Emperor’s camp! The Master-General must himself have walked many
times over the lines of our tee shots, and the shadow of the monument
that he built to commemorate his invasion of Albion, almost lies across
the course from which Albion herself, uninvaded, may be seen. And the
Mayor of Boulogne gives prizes to the British golfers who make the best
golf on Napoleon’s camp. I come to realise the depth of the meaning of
the lines cut into a marble tablet that I saw on the side of a staircase
in the Museum at Boulogne one day--“France and England have more good
sense than all the world,” and those lines were put on the stone more
than sixty years ago.
France is fair and free, but the game is played in Europe where the
times and conditions are not at all the same. There is golf in Russia,
and to it there was added a new course but recently. At the first
thought it seems a little odd that such a peaceful game should be played
in holy and revolutionary Russia even by Britishers. They have had two
courses in Russia for a long time past--one near Moscow and the other at
Mourino, a small village a few versts out from St. Petersburg. The men
who play here are of a hardy, determined strain, fine men for pioneers.
To get their golf they have to drive thirteen miles out from the capital
over bad roads; and in order to obtain a fair amount of satisfaction
from their game they have to returf their putting greens almost every
year, owing to the extreme sandiness of the soil. The Kaiser is
encouraging the game in Germany, and has given prizes for it; there are
eight clubs in Italy; and others in Austria, Holland, Belgium, and all
the rest. The game has flourished for twelve years past in the dominions
of the Sultan of Turkey, that is to say at Bagdad, and the golfers
there are pleased to tell you that their course is no miniature affair
as are so many at the outposts of the empire of St. Andrews, but that it
consists of full eighteen holes, and that, in the desert, they are very
sporting indeed.
It goes without saying that the game flourishes greatly in all the
Colonies. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the
others there are little booms of golf in progress, each of its own kind.
At Pretoria and at many places at the Cape the greens consist of
diamondiferous gravel, smooth and sparkling, and the first local rule of
the Kimberley Club startles the newly-arrived golfer from the homeland,
for it tells him that “It shall be lawful for a player to level the
ground on the putting green in any manner he pleases.” In India there
are some forty flourishing clubs, and that at Calcutta, with its five
hundred members and two courses of nine holes each, having been
established for nearly eighty years, takes rank as one of the premier
clubs of the world. There is the Aden Club in Arabia, the Royal Bangkok
in Siam, where an old and very imposing Siamese temple does duty for
clubhouse, and others all over Asia, as one might almost say. There are
many golf clubs in the Argentine Republic and the other South American
States. The Sandwich Islands are full of the game, for there are five
clubs there. In the East Indies there are three, and in the West Indies
there are eight. Wherever the Britisher goes he leaves his trail of golf
behind him. There is a story of Captain Adair holding a golf competition
in his camp when pitched on one of the passes leading into Thibet, at a
height of sixteen thousand feet above the sea-level. I have no
information about the game having been played in the North Polar
regions; but I am told that when the recent British Antarctic Expedition
was made in the _Discovery_, the Commander, Captain Scott, who is a keen
golfer, took some clubs down there with him, and in some leisure moments
“had a knock,” by way of reminding him of the old links at home, and of
seeing what the sensation of South Polar golf was like. It is said that
forged iron has a peculiarly cold and numbing touch in the frozen south.
It is the same game everywhere, and the law is always taken from
Fifeshire; but the conditions and makeshifts are sometimes peculiar. We
have said how at the Cape they putt on gritty earth that smacks of
diamonds, how in China there are graves for bunkers, and how across the
Channel, Napoleon’s trenches serve for the same purpose. Boulogne, after
all, is only in the nature of a corollary to our courses at Walton Heath
and Huntercombe, for hereabouts the golfers play where the legions of
mighty Cæsar were encamped, and the stables and the kitchens that Cæsar
made, huge pits deep in the earth, are in the line of play, and things
are so arranged that they constitute fine traps for erring balls, and
offer remunerative opportunities for skill with iron clubs in playing
out of them. And yet, if one must play bad shots, it is well that they
should be played in the direction in which Cæsar dug, for these pits
were made so long ago and are so deep that they are often beautifully
turfed with soft springy stuff, which anywhere except in a pit would be
a delight to play from, being so congenial to one’s iron. We must
applaud the Romans in this matter. It is nearly a pleasure to go into
their kitchens and stables; they were made so long ago and they are so
green and nice. There is golf at Old Calabar on the West Coast of
Africa, and there the putting “greens” are made of fine coal dust. So
they are “blacks.” At Mexico and many other places they are merely
“browns.” In Egypt, where there is much golf, they are often made of
rolled and baked Nile mud.
It is not necessary to say that there is nearly as much golf played in
America as there is in Britain, and that the time may possibly come when
there will be more. But it is not generally appreciated on what
old-established foundations American golf is played. The game has
traditions in America now, even as in Britain. In the archives of
American golf there is still preserved a document which shows how little
of a new thing is the game in the United States. It is an invitation,
reading as follows: “Golf Club Ball.--The honour of Miss Eliza
Johnston’s company is requested to a ball, to be given by the members of
the golf club of this city, at the Exchange, on Tuesday evening, the
31st inst., at seven o’clock. (Signed) Geo. Woodruff, Robert Mackay,
Jno. Caig, Jas. Dickson, Managers; Geo. Hogarth, Treasurer. Savannah,
twentieth December 1811.” The original is in the possession of the
granddaughter of the recipient. There seems to be some suggestion that
these pioneers of American golf were of Scottish origin, as pioneers of
the game until lately mostly were, and it might be appropriate to
mention that Savannah, whose people are said to be celebrated for their
love of pleasure, piety, and sport, has in it the oldest theatre in the
United States, while it also claims to have started the first Sunday
school in the world, founded by Wesley and perpetuated by Whitefield. If
it started here, this was not a bad place for American golf to start at.
III
Rulers, statesmen, diplomatists, begin to take more serious account of
the sport-loving factor in human nature than has been their wont.
Downing Street, Washington, the Quai d’Orsay, and all the other
nerve-centres of international affairs, where there are housed all the
cleverest modern masters of opportunism, have entered upon the study of
its peculiarities and tendencies, recognising that here is an instrument
of the most delicate perfection for the cultivation of amity between
people and people when the bureaucrats have set the lead. The British
Empire is being soldered up with sport. Besides the constant visits of
Colonial cricketers, have we not had with us recently two separate
detachments of Colonial footballers, and has it not been evident that
while the Colonial Governments have given their representatives the most
open and material support, even to the extent of voting them certain
supplies, Downing Street has smiled approvingly, and has, now and again,
when not many people were looking, given a pleasant little pat to the
wheel of friendship as it went rolling along from Cornwall to Edinburgh,
and from Blackheath to Dublin? And was it not an open secret that the
“very highest influences” were brought to bear upon the controlling
authorities, with a view to avoiding the recent breakage in the regular
sequence of Anglo-Australian encounters on the cricket field? The
_entente cordiale_ with France is being promoted from a toy model to a
big machine that is working in the streets, largely as the result of the
awakening of popular sympathies by such means as games. All the
congruous elements of different countries far apart are being attracted
to each other, as if magnetically, by such influences as the motor car,
the bicycle, cricket, football, and, far from least, by golf: and the
potency of these charms lies in the fact that when they are set to work,
men’s minds are relaxed from the general materialistic sternness of
their business times, and the humanity in them is asserting itself.
Now, all those good men who take the cosmopolitan view of human
happiness must see that among all games with powers like this there can
be none of greater adaptability and general use and efficiency than
golf. It may be, and is used by people of every colour, race, creed, and
temperament, in every climate and all the year round. No recreation,
apart from the simplest contests of the river and field, has ever been
so universal since the world began, with the single exception of chess.
And wherever and whenever it is played it extends its benign influence
towards the promotion of fast friendship among the players. There is no
freemasonry like the freemasonry of golf. To its temples in every land
are always welcomed the faithful and earnest craftsman from where’er he
came, and he is passed on the signs of the bag and the stance and the
little pimpled ball. For it is one of the articles of belief that no man
can be a good and enthusiastic golfer of experience and at the same time
a thoroughly bad fellow, for at the outset of his career the bad fellow
would never be happy in his game; others would not help to make him so,
and he would either be stung by the consciousness of his own defects and
reform, or he would slip away into the small silent pitiable minority
who leave the links one day never to return. Thus has our happy game of
golf wound a bright cordon round the world, and so does she play her
part in the great evolution of general contentment.
IV
“In spring,” we have been told in the _Georgics_, “heat returns to the
bones.” And the blood runs eagerly through the golfer’s veins. April and
May are the months of hope and of exultation. There is joy in the
present, in the showers and the sunshine, and a great joy in prospect in
the future. Each true golfer is a lover of Nature, and something of a
philosopher, and at this season, as at no other, when he gets wakened on
a bright morning and sees the country clean and fresh, and coming again
into bright green and many colours, while the birds sing at _allegro_
and _fortissimo_, a deep pleasure fills his being, the pleasure of
spring. He is alive, alive; and it is fine to be alive. Summer is
glorious, autumn is beautiful, cold winter has charms for those who have
proper feeling for it; but spring, the Germinal, is surely Nature’s
favourite season, and the golfer must always love his spring.
It gives him hope and thought. Change always induces reflection, and
here we have the change of the seasons, and a little of all of them in a
short space of time. An old proverb says that “April borrows three days
of March, and they are ill.” But as often she borrows several days of
May, and they are warm and sunny, and so hereabouts we have the winds,
and the showers, and the sunshine; and who can walk on the links to-day
and not think something of what the rain has been doing, and what the
winds have done, and what the sun is doing and is going to do? Here they
are all together, great master wonders to be thought much of. They are
much to all men; everything to the sportsman and the folks of the
outdoor life.
The sun and the rain are in such daily association in the days of the
sportsman’s spring, and more than ever is he inclined at this season to
give some passing thought to the phenomena of Nature, that one comes to
wonder sometimes whether he reflects as he might do on the eternal
exchange, how the drops of water that the sun takes up from the fields
over which he tramps, the golf links that he plays over, the rivers and
streams that he fishes, are every one of them placed back again, perhaps
not on the same fields or in the same rivers, but in some field or river
somewhere. The bare fact is one of elementary knowledge; but its
extensions are not so much so, and are interesting to think upon. If the
sun always gave back to each particular sportsman the rain that it had
taken away from his own playing fields and rivers, how dull would his
life be from the knowledge of what the weather and the seasons had
certainly for him in the future? With the caprice of the clouds and the
wind there is no such even and regular return of that which was taken
away. The golf links of the Lothians may be kept rained upon and moist
so that the turf is the most perfect, all with the rain that was sucked
up from the courses of the south coast of England, round about Deal and
Sandwich and Rye; and surely when the links in the south are parched,
and when they are green and moist in the north, we must think of that.
V
It behoves every earnest golfer to keep a match-book in which there
shall be faithfully recorded the results, with some particulars, of all
the matches whatsoever that he shall play in the course of each season.
Yet it is likely that not more than two or three golfers in every club,
if indeed so many, keep such a record of the golf that they have played,
which is sinking away into the forgotten history of their golfing lives.
The idea of the private match-book may have occurred to many golfers,
who, on a careful consideration of the circumstances of the case, have
rejected it, though it goes without saying that the chief reason for the
absence of the book in the majority of cases is simple neglect. Those
who deliberately avoid the intellectual pleasures of the match-book do
so either because they conceive that there is something namby-pamby in
the thing, and that it savours too much of the keeping of a little diary
which so few people know how to keep, consequently degenerating into a
record of the trivial acts instead of the life-governing thoughts; or
they are deterred by the fact that there are no such books with ruled
columns ready for the purpose which are at all agreeable to their ideas
as to what a match-book ought to be. Certainly there is no ready-ruled
match-book; the little things to fit the waistcoat pocket are hopelessly
inadequate, and really are only fit for doll’s golf, so that it is one
of the things to wonder at that there are still apparently some
thousands of golfers--beginners for the most part, you may be sure--who
buy these trifles year by year.
But perhaps it is as well that there is no stereotyped form of
match-book, to which we might be persuaded to attach ourselves with some
misgivings as to its form, and the irritation that would be caused us in
the future by the attempt to fill up constantly one particular column
that might seem to be either unnecessary or suggestive of indelicate
revelations. You will not find the ideas of many men in agreement as to
what ought to go down in the book and what ought not. One will want
spaces reserved for full particulars as to wind and weather, of the ball
with which he played, and of the many other little details of varying
importance, forming the sum of the circumstance of the day’s golf.
Another will have a horror of such conceits, and will limit his
confessions to statements of the date, the opponent, and the result. As
in other matters, the medium is the happiest choice; but the difference
of taste which could not be accommodated by so many different varieties
of match-book, suggests at once that the proper course to pursue is for
each player to purchase a perfectly plain book and rule it off in so
many columns to his own satisfaction; or even, indeed, for the sake of a
neater and less formal appearance, and an arrangement which is more
accommodating, leave it blank, and let the facts of the match be
inserted in order, just as the man is disposed to insert them at the
time of the entry. Then a blank column will not in after years convey
any reproach in the matter of a possible suppression of the truth, nor
one overcrowded tell too much a tale of despondency and excuse on the
one hand, or on the other of that boastfulness that comes not well from
the heart of a good golfer.
Now the beginning and the continuation of a match-book is a serious
matter, and the golfer will do well to come to an understanding with
himself beforehand as to the policy that he will pursue in regard to it.
It is essential that the strictest truth, and all the essential truth,
should at all times be set down, and it is only a simple extension of
the principle involved that if any matches are to be recorded they must
all be so. The chronicler of the time must not consider himself as
historian, and set himself to discriminate between what is important and
what is trivial; for, as in all things, it will be many years hence,
when the matters have been well sifted in the cold recollection of the
mind, before such a determination can be accurately made. Therefore it
is the duty of the chronicler to state the full facts, that is to say,
as full as he determined they should ever be according to his system of
match-book keeping, and he must leave it to himself in after years,
when, the chronicler now exalted to the student of his own history, he
can ponder over the statements in his leisure and make such judgments
upon them as he is disposed. Thus it is of the essence of the proper
making of such match-books that no fault of the maker at any time or in
any game shall be in any way extenuated, and that nothing to the
discredit of the opponent shall be set down maliciously, so that in days
to come, when the player shall have advanced many more seasons towards
the end of his golf, in turning over these pages and with their honest
help fighting his matches over again, he shall truly behold “the bright
countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.”
So it seems that the best match-book should rightly be a strictly
private thing; if it were meant as a book for the table or any other
place where it might be exposed to the gaze of the curious, there might
at some time come a reluctance to the owner to state in full the truth
of the day’s play, since the honest criticism of a partner in a foursome
or of an opponent, to some who did not understand, might not appear so
necessary as was actually the case. This faithful record should be kept
under lock and key, and it should be taken with him when the golfer goes
far afield for play which is to last more than a day, and the entries
should be made on the night of each day. It will be soon enough for
others to pry into this confessional when the golfer who whispered into
it at nights is no more. That such present labour will afford a rich
sequence of future pleasure there can be no doubt. Just as there are no
friends like the old friends, and no wine like the old wine, so one is
sometimes disposed to fancy that there is no golf like the old golf that
is now indeed but a memory, and one often much too dim at that. The
match-book will refresh the mind to the recollection of dear friends
with whom one is no longer associated, and of fine sport that one had
with them on days when the thrills of life seemed to be a little quicker
than they are now. By the mention of an incident, and occasionally by
giving the score of a few holes, much of the whole game, shot and shot,
is conjured up in the memory in all its keenness and its tensity.
And it shall come as a good recommendation in this matter that the
golfer who is the favourite hero of us all, as he was a pattern of the
golfing virtues, made a match-book for himself while he was still
playing the schoolboy golf, and kept it continuously for the rest of his
time. Freddie Tait’s match-book was just what we might expect it to be.
It was a very honest thing, and Mr. Low, who has handled it and copied
some of it for the deep interest of us all, remarks on the way in which
the brave soldier golfer never spared himself, his partner, nor his
opponents, but dealt out praise and censure with a level hand. One day,
though he had halved his round, he says, “Played as bad a round as
possible”; and at another time his comment is, “Never played worse with
the exception of a few iron shots.” Then as to a foursome it is, “The
characteristic of the game was the bad play of both”; and of his partner
in another match he remarks, “The play of Mr. ---- was feeble in the
extreme.”
There were eight column divisions in Tait’s match-book. First there was
the place for the date, then for the name of the links, and the third
for the statement of the parties to the match. The fourth column was for
the mention of the odds of the handicap if any, or for the name of the
competition if he was engaged in one. Then there was one column for
holes won and another for holes lost, a broad one for “remarks,” and a
last little one at the side of the page for the total of the score.
Generally the “remarks” were brief and pointed, and it is these which
make the record of the play of the most beloved golfer we have known so
real and human, so that it is a pleasure to sit by the fire and create
some fancies of these matches. Now and then there is a little humour;
here and there a touch of sarcasm at the expense of “F. G. T.,” as he
generally referred to himself. Round by round there is the full story of
the way in which he won the championship at Sandwich, and the next entry
concerns the very next match that he played, which was the day after at
Rye, when, with his honours new upon him, he essayed the task of playing
the best ball of Mr. H. S. Colt and Mr. J. O. Fairlie. The remarks run:
“H. S. C. and J. O. F. too strong for the golfed-out Champion, to whom
they showed no mercy. H. S. C. and J. O. F. both played a good game and
did some very fine holes.” Here there is a 6 in the “Lost” column, and
it is a notable thing that this, on 23rd May, was the first figure that
had appeared in this column of defeat since 16th April, though golf was
being played almost every day. In his comments on the final of that same
championship he twice pays compliments to the pluck of Mr. Hilton, who
in the game was very soon left without the slightest chance of victory,
and was beaten by a full eight holes. The gods would never permit the
favourite Freddie to be beaten by the finest player of his time, and
that player now refers to his early engagements with the soldier as the
day when Tait “commenced his career as the slaughterer of Hilton.”
Another day we find Freddie revelling in two glorious matches with
Andrew Kirkaldy on the new course at St. Andrews. In the morning he lost
by a couple of holes, but in the afternoon he was the winner on the last
green. “Another splendid match,” he rejoices; “both in great form.
F. G. T. only halved the third hole by carelessly moving his ball with
hand while removing a piece of grass. The hole was played out and won by
F. G. T., but he had, of course, to lose a stroke, according to the
rules of golf. This unfortunate accident made the difference of one
hole. A. K., 80, a magnificent score. F. G. T., in: 4 3 5 4 4 4 5 4 4 =
37.” Here is another comment, “R. T. B. very fair. Self good at first,
but got too many up, and then got careless, with the usual result.” He
lost that match by a hole. Another time, when he was playing the best of
two balls, he wrote: “Played badly. The two balls also bad.” That match
was fittingly halved. In this way we can follow the happy Freddie all
the way through the spring and summer to the end of the year on all the
best links that are to be found, and these judgments of his will serve
as models to other men who in this small matter would copy the methods
of the perfect golfer.
There is this entry in the match-book alongside the date 31st July 1888,
concerning a match with Mr. Norman Playfair: “Driving very poor. Put a
ball through a man’s hat and had to pay five shillings.” Young Freddie,
then only eighteen years of age, went to old Tom Morris to complain of
his ill-luck in the matter, but Tom answered him wisely, “Ah, Master
Freddie, ye may be vera thankful that it’s only a hat, and no’ an oak
coffin ye hae to pay for.” Even now, when the sad happenings of the
South African War, which at the time so wrung our heart-strings with
misery, have been somewhat mellowed by time, the great consoler, it is
impossible to glide into this channel of reminiscence without feeling
that the pleasure of it is touched with melancholy that the body that
held that noble soul should be resting among the trees by the banks of
the Riet River.
VI
There is nothing like the winds of March for testing the golfer in every
department of his play. Quite timid golfers are sometimes heard to say
that they don’t mind rain; but if a man does not mind big winds, regards
them both from the sporting and scientific standpoints, and manages to
make some respectable golf while they are in charge of the air, he is a
worthy player, and he may make his mark some day. It often happens that
you can apply test after test to two different golfers, and they will
both answer equally to them; but the wind test will separate them at
once. The man who can play the real game in a high wind, and use it to
his advantage at every opportunity, knows golf as others do not. He is a
finished player, and he rather likes the days of March for the rich
sport that they afford--the real big game of the links. The other man,
when he hears the wind playing like a German band round the side of the
house as he tries to get himself off to sleep at night, thinks to
himself that he will have to give up the idea of golf in the morning. He
should not. Even if he never learns the scientific treatment of wind in
golf, he would find his game improved generally and made more powerful
by playing it at times like these under severe difficulties, and it is
worth playing in a wind if only to taste the sweet joys of golfing in a
calm afterwards, just as there is one point of satisfaction in getting
wet through on the links because the change afterwards is so delicious.
You always find that a golfer is very much the better for a short season
on a very windy course. When he goes back to his home course, very
likely inland and protected, driving seems such a simple, easy thing,
and he lets out at his tee shots with a freedom and a certainty which
make for a greater boldness and strength in his game. North Berwick is
one of the windiest courses. You do get wind there in the spring months,
and there are hundreds of golfers who testify to the good that a short
stay there has done to their game. They have simply got to learn to golf
in all kinds of winds. It is like throwing a non-swimmer into seven feet
of water with only a thin piece of rope round his middle. He very soon
invents a way of making greater security and comfort for himself. Stay
at North Berwick long enough, and it may affect your style for life.
Mr. Robert Maxwell has a peculiar punching, but withal very powerful
style, which is attributed to his upbringing at North Berwick. A man
disposed to probe very deep down for causes and effects might arrive at
the conclusion that the reason why, speaking very generally, there are
better players and better courses, and more of each on the east coast of
Scotland than on the west, is because it happens that the links there
are more exposed, and there are more windy days upon them than on those
on the other side of the country. Not that there are not big winds very
frequently to be dealt with in the neighbourhood of Troon and Prestwick,
which surely have their full share, and it was at a championship at
Prestwick that old Willie Park delivered himself of his famous remark,
“Guid God! When I get ma club up I canna get it doon again!” so strongly
was the wind blowing on that occasion.
VII
In the spring the professionals come tumbling on to the stage of golf
once more with their happy welcome cry, “Here we are again.” Sometimes
in the middle of the summer season people are apt to say that we get at
least enough of these professional competitions, and that it would be
agreeable if we had a little more time to think of our own golf in all
its varied charm, instead of our attention being invited day by day to
the many permutations and combinations of “the quartette” in exhibition
matches, and the aspirations of such as Jones among those next to them.
But what a dull season it would be if Vardon and Braid were not up
against Taylor and Herd somewhere or other--it does not matter
where--just as in the olden time, or Herd and Braid did not show once
again at the little course of Slocum-on-Mudbury that there was something
wrong with their running in that never-to-be-forgotten foursome when
four hundred sovereigns were at stake. And then when Rowland Jones is
included in one of these foursome combinations, we say, quite pleased,
“Ha, Jones is coming on! Jones is going to assert himself!” One day Jack
White is in again--that happy-hearted Jack, who came by a great
championship in 1904 at Sandwich, where records were falling in every
round--and then we say to ourselves very good-naturedly, “I hope Jack
will get on to his drive again in one of these matches!” Or the fourth
man may be Tom Vardon, and that is very interesting, because Tom is a
great big sportsman who is stuffed tight with the effervescing joy of
life. If it is Andrew Kirkaldy, as it is occasionally, we rub our hands
and observe, “Grand matchplayer is Sam! Now we shall see how a foursome
should be played! Good as the best is Sam!”
The fact of the matter is, that these professional matches and
competitions are now a fast and integral part of our golfing system. We
may think that we could do without them, and in the summer-time we rail
constantly against them, and say that they never would be missed. But
how we should miss them! Golfing life would not be the same if there
were not occasions to make such almost daily observations as those just
quoted. The season would be without salt, and our little amateur combats
would seem to be lacking in an unknown stimulus that was always there
before.
Then what a void in golfing life would there be if there were not
constant occasion to express admiration for the supremacy and the
prowess of the triumvirate--Harry Vardon, Braid, and Taylor. When we are
too frequently told of the achievement and the skill of the heroes of
the olden time, it is well to think of what the triumvirate has done and
still can do. Perhaps not many golfers, even among those who pay
faithful attention to such matters, have a proper sense of the amazing
record of these three men. I had occasion to analyse it lately, and I
believe not in any other sport have the periods of three such champions
coincided as they have done in golf during the last few years. It is a
strange thing that the fates should have pitchforked Braid, Vardon, and
Taylor into the arena at the same time, each man being so much above
all outside the three. It is as if Ormonde, Donovan, and Flying Fox had
been in the same race for the Derby. In one sense it seems a waste of
exceptional talent on one period, to the possible impoverishment of
another, but golf spectators and players should appreciate the advantage
of the times in which they live, for it is unlikely that three such
golfers will ever be to the fore at the same time again after these
three have gone their way, and it is as certain as anything that a
hundred years from now the golf world will speak reverently of the great
triumvirate of the early days of the twentieth century. It will
certainly be remembered that after this triumvirate had been established
eleven years in each other’s company, they wound up a championship
first, second, and third against the biggest field that had ever
contested a championship, this being at Muirfield in 1906.
Three times in those eleven years the triumvirate collectively achieved
the highest possible distinction in this way, the first being in 1900,
which was Taylor’s year, the second in 1901, when Braid won, and the
third in 1906, when Braid was again successful. Taylor was the first of
the three to show activity, and he won the championship in 1894 and
1895. Not until 1896 was the triumvirate definitely constituted, as it
were, by the whole three, Vardon, Taylor, and Braid appearing in the
championship at the same time. In that year Vardon finished first,
Taylor second, and Braid sixth. In the following year Braid, in the
second place in the lists, was the foremost man of the three. Then there
was a remarkable run, for the triumvirate found the winner in seven of
the next nine years. Vardon scored twice running to begin with; then
Taylor and Braid; in 1902 Vardon and Braid tied for second place; the
next year Vardon was first again; Taylor and Braid tied for second
position in 1904, and this was followed by two championships for Braid.
Only three times in eleven years did the triumvirate let the
championship go out of their small circle, and it may be mentioned that
the three men who beat them on these respective occasions were
Mr. Hilton in 1897, Herd in 1902, and Jack White in 1904.
Adding up the records of positions and scores of all golfers who took
part in these championship competitions when the triumvirate did, and
making, so to speak, one long championship of it, the triumvirate lead
the way, and the rest--the very best of them--are absolutely tailed off.
The scores registered in the championships, added up, afford the
following result: Harry Vardon, 3426; James Braid, 3446; J. H. Taylor,
3454. Herd fittingly comes fourth with 3527, and then there is an
enormous gap between him and the fifth man. Taylor would, of course, be
in a different position if we counted in the two early championships
that he won, and let it be said for Taylor that, including this year of
1907, he has been second for the championship four times in succession
and five in all--a magnificent record such as stamps him as the most
brilliantly consistent champion of all time. But it is a heartbreaking
record for Taylor all the same, and this great and popular player has
all golfers’ sympathy.
Golfers are not like the brooks of poets; they cannot go on for ever. We
shall look to see the great men of to-day playing fine golf in twenty
years from now, and upon occasion they will play such rounds as will
make us say, “That was just as in the olden time!” But their average of
merit must diminish, and probably all the premier three, or at least two
of them, have passed the high-water mark of their ability and their tide
of supremacy is receding. Who, then, is to succeed them? For years past
we have been looking for likely and worthy successors. There are many
fine golfers on the links, and occasionally great things are prophesied
of some of them; but disappointment almost invariably follows. The times
do not seem to be breeding any more Vardons, Taylors, or Braids. A
triumvirate of the future is not yet in the making. Our grandparents and
other good people constantly tell us that there are as good fish in the
sea as ever came out of it, and it might seem a foolish thing to suggest
that we shall never again have such a band of supreme artists at the
game as those whose works we enjoy witnessing in these days. But are not
the chances heavily against there being again in our time simultaneously
three more men of such outstanding ability as these three, each one of
whom would be the sole man of his generation if it were not for the
other two? Cricket did not produce three Graces at the same time;
billiards had only one Roberts. You could not imagine three Graces and
three Roberts. But we have had them in golf in late years.
One is inclined to think that the fact is that the men who are great
to-day were trained in a severer and more heroic school than their
successors will be, and they had each a spark of genius which the
conditions of the time fanned into the full flame of glory. We cannot
expect three more of them to come along at the same time; but we might
expect and do want one more, someone who shall be an acknowledged chief
of the game, someone whom we shall be glad to see win the championship,
as we cannot be so glad when it is won by a golfer than whom there is no
one more unlikely ever to win it again. I am no believer in these things
going in a round of comparative mediocrity. What seems to be the matter
with most modern aspirants is that they have not that touch of genius
which is so evidently possessed by the men who have been making golfing
history during the past decade. They may drive well, play their irons
well, putt well, and they may do many grand holes and accomplish
numerous brilliant rounds, breaking many records. At times they may beat
the champions and past champions. But they are not the same golfers.
Watch them play a round and you can see the difference. They have not
the same genius. They are merely ordinary human golfers, though good
ones at that; they are palpably suffering too much from mere human
weakness. You see them trying hard, trying so very hard. The triumvirate
do not seem to try. It is just there. There is one of them who tries
less than any golfer who has ever been born, and he does more when
trying less than those others trying hard. Yes, it is just there--the
genius for the game.
VIII
We may set it down with some conviction that William Shakespeare was a
born golfer. It does not matter that golf was as rare in the glorious
days in which he lived as are eagles in twentieth-century Britain. We
do not say that he played golf, had seen it played, or had ever heard of
it. So far as we are aware, there is no evidence to support any such
propositions. Yet he was a born golfer, and if the game had come his way
he would have played it, and one doubts not that he would also have
excelled in it; so that it is well that it was after his time, or
England would not have been proud in the possession of such work of his
as is the envy of all other nations. For, of all the classic writers
whose work we read, there is none who gives such evidence in almost
every line of it that he was possessed of a perfectly ideal golfing
temperament, of a philosophy that seems constantly to have a subtle and
most perfect application to the life of the links. Through and through
it is the real golfer’s philosophy, that which is the best suited to the
intensity of the game, to its deep humanity, and that which serves for
the complete appreciation and full joy of the game. You may read all the
other poets, from Homer and Virgil to Byron and Tennyson, without ever a
thought of the links obtruding upon your study; but it is no evidence of
a vagrant mind, or one that is indifferent to the sweetest music of
words, that not three consecutive minutes can hardly ever be spent in
reaching Shakespearian lines without the fancy being touched by the
perfection of the philosophy and sentiment when applied to the peculiar
pleasures and pains of the golfer.
Only one other classic writer with whom we are familiar can give such
solace to the troubled player, such wise counsel to him who errs or is
in doubt, such chastening admonitions to those who have offended against
the spirit of the game and whose consciences are disturbed. That is
Marcus Aurelius, and we pass on the volume of his rules of life to all
those players who from time to time seek their homes at night weary and
depressed after a day on the links, when all has been for the worst and
despair broods darkly over the soul. After all, the golfer who is
indifferent to the ills he sometimes, nay often, suffers, and can in an
hour completely forget the tragedies of two rounds, is somewhat too
phlegmatic, and there will always be denied to him the higher ecstasies
by which the men of finer and more nervous temperament are uplifted. We
do not set it against a man that when he has done discredit to his
capabilities, he should show many signs of inward turmoil and display
much active vexation towards innocent persons and things on seeking his
home. He may rail against the arrangements of his household, and he may
appear peevish to the members of his family, and find new faults in
their manners and conduct. If they are the kind, sympathetic people that
they so often are, they will bear with him and wait patiently for the
passing of the cloud. On the morrow the good game may be back in all its
fulness and richness, and then at eventide there will trip lightly
homewards a happy and withal a penitent golfer, who will not be slow to
confess his fault and to make a full measure of amends. The colour of
life will have changed from the dull grey to the red of roses. And how
much thinner and poorer would be the days of our golfing life did they
not contain such constant change and yield to us such a variety of
emotion! But it is the days of sorrow rather than the days of gladness
that teach us the great lessons that all worthy golfers should learn,
and they should not neglect the cultivation of the philosophic spirit
for which the best opportunities are then afforded. So it is likely the
stricken player may find a deep and wholesome contemplation in his
lonely privacy at the end of the day, by meditating with Marcus Aurelius
on the morals of life and events. He will tell you that “you have
suffered a thousand inconveniences from not being contented with
performing what your capacity was given you to perform,” and so, by such
a little hint as this, he will lead you home to the simple truth that
your proper game is not your best game, and that much of the misery that
obtains in the world of golf is due to the universal habit of too high
appraisement of the quality of one’s play.
But it is Shakespeare who teaches us best to be good golfers, and the
secret of the perfect application of his sentiment and philosophy to the
golfer’s life is that his writings are so intensely human, and that of
all the diversions of man there is none that so much stirs in him the
simple instincts, reduces him to the simplest human elements. A round of
golf will sometimes bare faults and qualities in a man that have been
hidden from the time of their formation in his early years. It is to the
man who constantly undergoes this fierce analysis that Shakespeare will
most appeal. Let the golfer test his text and see the perfection of the
result. The quotation selected for the first day of the year for a
Shakespearean calendar that was hung up in a golfer’s den was--
“Like a bold champion, I assume the lists,
Nor ask advice of any other thought
But faithfulness, and courage.”
Could a golfer take a better motto?
IX
No class of man looks forward to the spring with keener anticipation
than the golfer. Overburdened with his winter’s discontent, he fancies
it as a time of sunshine, of dry courses, of sprouting young grass that
holds up the ball on the suburban links and gives us the first good
brassey lies that we have had for some months, of the frequent
retirement of the energetic worm, of the quickening of the greens, of
the leafing of the trees and the hedgerows, and the brightening of the
face of Nature. The golfer is generally a strongly human man, who is not
careless of natural beauties as are too many in these increasingly
prosaic and strenuous days. Perhaps he likes the coming of the
springtime best of all, because he is then enabled to play his game in
the best degree of comfort. He is less hampered with heavy clothing, and
his hands and wrists keep warm without any cumbersome artificial
assistance. And then also he is persuaded, and he is evidently right,
that the balls fly very much better in the spring sunshine than they
ever did through the heavy and often murky atmosphere of the winter
days. Even the golf ball welcomes the coming of spring, and given that
it is properly struck it gets a better and longer flight through the air
when it is dry and light, and it runs better on the dry turf when it
comes down, so that the player finds himself being given encouragement
that helps him wonderfully on to his game. And so the man who usually
goes by the name of the Average Golfer believes all through every autumn
and winter that he comes on to his game best of all in the spring, and
that that is the only time of the year when he really does play his
best, his real game. The only time when he does not believe that he
plays his best game in the spring is in the spring.
The fact is that the conditions of springtime are rather made up of a
set of contradictions of a very aggravating character, and they often
play the devil with the game of this Average Golfer, the system of which
is not too firmly consolidated. This person, one takes it, is a man of
medium young to middle age, a great enthusiast, of good means, one more
or less constantly engaged in business, having a fair number of social
obligations to attend to in evenings, and a golfing handicap of
somewhere between six and twelve. This man is possibly afflicted with a
troublesome liver, and this organ has a peculiar and most aggravating
way of asserting itself in the springtime as it has at no other season.
Then it is up to all kinds of tricks, the entire physical system of the
man is disarranged and thrown out of gear, and the result is that when
all Nature is smiling and the larks are piping as though their little
throats would burst with the fulness of their melody, the erstwhile
hopeful golfer is in a wretched state of mind, trying new stances for
his drive, new ways of gripping, a swing much longer or much shorter
than usual, and manœuvring with his strokes in all other kinds of ways,
in the vain hope that he might be permitted to drive at least as well as
he did in January, instead of foundering one ball in three and lifting
up one of the others high towards the heavens. But there is compensation
in the increased hopefulness of spring. The game may be poor, weaker
than it was hoped to be. But it will mend; it will surely mend.
MEN AND THINGS
I
For one reason, if not for more, a Liberal Government is popular with
golfers of true feeling--because it gives Mr. Arthur Balfour, the
ex-Prime Minister, more to the links than when he is burdened with the
care of Ministerial office. In the days of the sweet idleness of
Opposition we find him at play on a golf links here and on another one
there; now opening a new course and delighting the assembled players
with a little speech, which is rich in the spirit of the game; and at
some other time enjoying a foursome with some old political friend, or
with J. H. Taylor or James Braid as his partner. As Mr. Balfour is the
better, as he will tell you, for being a golfer, so is golf the happier
for his intimate association with it; and some people who do not know
and cannot understand, not being of golf, think we make over-much of a
statesman’s interest in our pastime, as if the great of the land were
not bound closely up with other sports. Good and earnest-minded golfers
feel that they are kin to this player, because he is himself a pattern
of the man imbued with the best sense of the honour and glory of the
game. He is loyal to it, he has the sentiment of it, and he has seen
through to the inner recesses of its charm. Thus he is not ashamed, as
no good golfer ever is, of abandoning himself entirely to its delights,
of setting all his emotions and his thoughts free to race and frolic in
the joy of the links, and of allowing the high dignity of the great
statesman to sink away into the simple naturalness of the earnest
golfer. So we like this late Prime Minister not because of his political
rank, but because he loves his game and does his best by it, and is at
all times an example to the acolytes who come forward in nervous
ignorance of the great meaning of golf.
Then it is less interesting to consider what style of player Mr. Balfour
is, than what kind of man he shows himself to be amid the trials and the
triumphs of the links, where, it is indisputably held, a man’s entire
human nature, despite all efforts at repression, is forced up to the
surface for all to see. Here, then, we see the real Mr. Balfour as he is
never seen on the Front Bench at Westminster. There are no mashie shots
to foozle, and no drives to top into the bunker in the House of Commons,
to make a man feel that life is yet a feeble, disappointing thing. To
the Parliamentarian, the nearest thing in pleasure to laying a long
approach shot “dead” against the hole is a successful speech, or the
engineering of a majority on a division which is something above par,
and these are dull things in comparison. Mr. Balfour, then, as we have
studied him many times at this testing game, is a man of many and
quickly changing emotions, of a temperament somewhat highly strung and
nervous, and capable of enormous enthusiasms and alternative
depressions. There is nothing that is phlegmatic about this Ministerial
golfer. There is something of the schoolboy left in him. One day I saw
him driving from the tee and getting a beauty, so that his ball was
cleanly flicked for the best part of two hundred yards in a straight
line to the hole. It is not in human nature to wait for tardy praise in
such ecstatic moments, and he, his face aglow with pleasure, turned
about to his opponent, exclaiming, “I _do_ push them away, don’t I?”
On the other hand, there are times when he is sadly mindful of failure,
and he is much too serious a golfer ever to forget the most evil things
he has done. One time we saw him playing in a foursome--his favourite
form of golf--with Mr. Eric Hambro as his partner, and after foozling
his approach in a deplorable manner, he called out wearily to his
partner, “Do you know, Hambro, I once did that kind of thing for a whole
fortnight!” It must have been the blackest fortnight in the right
honourable gentleman’s career. He is something of a philosopher on the
links, and when he makes a bad stroke he sometimes explains how it came
about to those who are near him, or to the course and the sky, if he is
momentarily isolated. This, indeed, is one of the very few respects in
which the Prime Minister falls from what we may regard as the standard
of the ideal golfer. He is inclined to reach too hastily at a
conclusion, and some say to speak too much. Some masters have held that
the perfect golfer plays in absolute silence, and Mr. Balfour is not an
absolutely silent golfer, though in his case he is none the less
earnest. It has been stated that never on the links does he make use of
any other ejaculation than “Dear me!” but this statement, besides being
untrue, is absurd, and is not complimentary to him as a golfer. Let him
miss a shot or do anything which he ought not to have done, and the
human man comes out above the statesman, though, of course, nobody has
ever heard Mr. Balfour commit himself to any unbecoming remark. But in
the production of effect from the minor expletives he is most skilful.
“Botheration!” is the commonest of his ejaculations, and as he says it
whilst witnessing the descent of his little white ball into a yawning
bunker, one, as an old golfer, sometimes realises that the most
satisfactory results in this respect are not always produced from the
use of the strongest materials. “Oh, this is indeed shocking!” is
another favourite form of expression, which, as he says it, speaks a
volume upon the agony of the mind.
For the rest he is just a good, determined golfer, who is a first-class
sportsman, never giving any quarter on the links, and never expecting
any. You never see Mr. Balfour pick up his ball whilst there is still
the remotest chance left of his dividing the hole with his opponent, and
he would reject with scorn, like every other true golfer, the suggestion
that he takes his golf for the sake of the exercise only. It is because
he is thus keen that other and better players find it a constant
pleasure to match themselves against him, or to become his partner in a
foursome. They know then that they are out for golf.
“Big” Crawford, his old-time favourite caddie, who keeps a ginger-beer
tent alongside the eighth green at North Berwick, flies the Scottish
standard from the top of it when Mr. Balfour is on his most beloved
course. A Russian grand duke, who did not know the truth, once naïvely
suggested to Crawford that the flag was flying as a compliment to him,
the Russian. “Na, na, sir,” said Crawford, “begging your pardon and
with great respect, but it’s for one greater than you.”
“Who is looking after Mr. Balfour?” they whispered one time at
St. Andrews, when the right hon. gentleman was playing himself into the
captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Club, and was then Chief Secretary
for Ireland, and regularly attended by plain-clothes detectives in case
of accident. “I am looking after Mr. Balfour!” Crawford said when he
overheard. “I’m enough.” And he would have been.
II
It should not be set against a golfer for foolishness or faddism that he
gives pet names to some of his favourite clubs that have served him well
through many hard campaigns, and between him and which there has grown
up a very close degree of intimacy, for some of the greatest players
have given this rank of name to their trusted clubs. “My driver,” even
“My best driver” or “My old driver,” is a cold term to apply to that
fine head and shaft that you think have no equals on the links--at least
for you. All drivers may be called drivers; shall we have no other name
for the champion that has roamed with us and played with us over courses
all the way from Dornoch to Westward Ho!? Call him “Bill” if you like,
and “Bill” is a very good name; or if your fancy leans that way, and she
is slender and whippy, you may call her “Bess.” But better keep to human
names. There is a man who calls his baffy “Jumbo,” and it does not seem
a nice name. I have a golfing friend who has a driver that he calls
“Ephraim,” and it is one of the most wonderful drivers ever seen, with
such a long shaft that it needs a giant to wield it, but its owner is
something of a giant too. When I hear him ask for Ephraim I know that
mighty schemes are afoot, and, straining my eyes to the far distant
green, I wonder that even old Ephraim should ever be called upon to make
such efforts. But Ephraim has a way with him that makes for success. He
is not to be used often, and then when he is he does his job well. That
is Ephraim. And do not many of us know the famous golfer who has a dear
wooden putter who goes by the name of Fanny? Fanny has done fine duty in
championships ere this, and her master knows her every whim and mood.
She is a delicate creature is Fanny, and she is not so young as she used
to be, and Mr. John, her master, never takes her out in these days when
it is wet.
III
Many golfers carry in their minds a fairly clear picture of a club that
they regard as their ideal. They have some notion as to its looks, the
shape of the head, and the length and the thickness of the shaft.
Particularly do they know what that club feels like in their hands as
they grip it to make the shot for which it, and it alone, is perfectly
adapted. They have never seen such a club, and they fear sometimes that
they never will. Some old favourite of theirs has some of the points
that are possessed by this ideal, but it has not got them in the same
ripe perfection, and it has obvious faults which at times have cost
their master dearly. There is no reproachful word to say against that
old favourite. It is a good club, and it has done a fine service on the
links, and as for its imperfections, are they not what its maker gave to
it, trifling imperfections, too, which we are generously disposed to
overlook when considering that fine record of service. But it is not the
ideal club; it does not feel like that club that we sometimes handle in
our imagination, and then enjoy a glorious sense of power as with no
other.
It is a pleasant thing to treasure in the mind such a club as this; but
let it stop at that. If one grand delusion in which there is nothing
harmful, and which on the whole but makes for good, as most ideals do,
is not to be destroyed, never set out to reduce that club, now made of
but filmy thought, to cold iron or clumsy wood. It will not be the same,
be the fancy ever so exact. The first efforts will bring forth results
that will be far poorer in quality than those made by old favourites of
whom we have spoken, and it will be as if the favourites have jealousy
and resent these new-born interlopers, so that they will for the time
being cease to give their best work to the man who is so plainly
discontented, and who, being so, is lacking in confidence. And the
faults that are in those first models that come thus from the mind only
increase and aggravate the more as attempts are made to repair them. It
is a Will-o’-the-wisp, indeed, is this ideal club, be it driver or
brassey or cleek or iron, and it may lure the golfer to a shocking fate.
Let us cling to the old favourites and be kind and generous to them. It
has been said, and it is no doubt true, that the perfect wife has never
yet been born, and some men may reflect upon the advantages of life if
they had a perfect wife such as one whom they have painted in their
fancy. But in their honesty they will turn their thoughts away from such
conceits, and let them dwell upon the manifold excellences of the wives
they have, who have hearts that beat, and who, kind and patient and
generous, have those human weaknesses which would be faults in the
ideal, but which only seem to give to the being the greater human
completeness and even perfection. Thus, with this tolerant affection and
appreciation, must we look upon our favourite clubs, and leave the ideal
to lie unmaterialised and worthless in the mind, a pretty thing to think
about, but impossible.
Once there was a man who made a grand effort to materialise the ideal
that he had cherished through many seasons. It was a brassey. Some
twenty brasseys had he had made, but none of them was quite the thing
that he craved. There was something wanting, and thus his shots had not
the sting that they ought to have, or that he thought they should
possess. But, so often disappointed, he let alone his search for the
ideal for a while, and made good friends with one of the real. But he
could not forget the ideal brassey, and it grew more and more definite
in his imagination. He would look at it there with a smile on his face
as he would be going home in the train, and he would handle it and make
with it that long carry against the wind that no club of wood and brass
in his hands had ever made. Then he took the professional clubmaker into
his confidence, and in odd moments after rounds, in the shop they would
sometimes talk of this great club, but neither would venture to suggest
that it should be made, though they spoke of it as if it were made. They
would pick a new one from the stand, and the idealist would say, “Now,
Solomon”--he always called it Solomon--“has a shade more hook than that,
and there is a little sharper angle to his nose.” The worthy clubmaker
entered fully into the spirit of the fancy, and seriously, and he would
answer, “Ay, sor, but Sawlaman wasna made by my apprentice!” Another day
the golfer would recount the story of his play at a fateful hole, and of
the narrow margin by which a fine long shot failed to clear the hazard.
It was a moving theme, and after a moment of silence the maker of clubs
would say in summary, “Ay, ay, sir; it was a pity ye no had Sawlaman in
yer bag!” Yes, it was Solomon that was wanted, just Solomon.
Then one day the player fell to temptation again, and, stirred as of
yore by his foolish hopes, he resolved that he would pluck Solomon from
the stronghold of his fancy. It was a desperate thing to do, a mad and a
reckless thing, a defiance of the spirit world of golf. He told the
clubmaker of his resolve, and begged that he would give his closest
attention to the details of the commission and his personal care to the
execution thereof. The clubmaker, a good human man, was afraid.
Awe-stricken, he said, “Ye’ll no have ma try to make Sawlaman--a real
Sawlaman, sir. I couldna do it! I couldna do it! I canna make a
Sawlaman!” But the player had steeled himself to his resolve; and so for
days and days old Sandy laboured in his shop, and head after head was
shaped and rejected, and stick after stick was shaved and thrown away.
It was a weary task. Then the golfer went away for a stay at another
links, and a month later he returned, and on passing Sandy’s shop he was
beckoned in. “Yes, yes, Sandy! Got him? Got him?” In Sandy’s face there
was written a look that was half of disappointment and half of pride.
He whispered, “Not Sawlaman, sir, not Sawlaman; he’ll never be seen on
the links this life. But I’ve got David, and here he is!” And David,
with a black varnished head, most beautifully shaped, a fine greeny
hickory shaft scared on, and a feel and a balance when handled, and a
lie to the ball that spoke well for power and clean hitting. The golfer
fondled the club for a while, for he was pleased with it, but he could
see, despite his pleasure, that it was no Solomon and that the great
ideal had not been realised, and he knew now that it never could be
realised; for while he was conscious that this club was wanting in some
of the points that made Solomon so great, his imagination failed him to
discover them. It was a grand club, but it killed a great hope; and
there was something of sadness in the manner of taking it over. “Never
mind, Sandy,” said he. “It was a fine try, a very fine try; and I’ll
tell you what we will do. We shall never see Solomon, the real Solomon;
but let us have something to remind us of him, and then we will never
talk of him, the real one, again. We will call this one, not David, but
Solomon. He shall be the Solomon,” and so he is to this day, and in his
name he marks the renunciation of that great ideal. And some very fine
things he has done, for he is a most worthy club.
IV
The 1st of September is a fine date for the golfer, for it seems to mark
for him the beginning of the period of play which is the best of the
whole year. The summer heats are cooling, the tints of Nature are
turning to beautiful golds and browns and crimsons, and with a little
rain the turf begins to yield more to the foot and the club, and play is
pleasanter than it was in the dog days. We would have no sorrows to mar
the pleasure of such a day; but the golfer need only be braced to skill
and worthiness by the reminder that this date has a little black edge
round it in his calendar, for on that day there died one who was
certainly one of the greatest golfers who ever lived. That was Allan
Robertson.
It will always be a difficult matter to compare the golfers of a living
generation with those of a dead one, or to estimate the relative quality
of the golfers of two different generations, both of them of the long
distant past. We have no standards that are carried on from decade to
decade and century to century, and while men do not change, their
implements do, and the courses on which they play, while, what with the
alterations in implements and courses, the methods are much changed, so
that it is quite the same game no longer. Therefore it is impossible and
futile to make any comparison between the man we have to-day and whom we
like to think is the greatest golfer who ever handled a club, and some
of the great heroes of the past. That is a question that can never be
settled. What we do know, and we can think it for our modern
satisfaction, is that there are of necessity many more fine players in
these days than ever there were before, and there are dozens for every
one that there was in the days of Allan Robertson and young Tom Morris.
Therefore it must be much harder to assert supremacy in these days than
formerly, and all the greater is the feat of doing it not once, but many
times. If some of the old golfers triumphed as often, or nearly, we can
say for the men who live in our time, that, in the numerical weight of
their conquest at all events, theirs are by far the greater
achievements, and they must have that credit.
As in all other matters, it happens that estimates of the merits of
things of the past are necessarily indefinite; they vary from time to
time. One generation will have it this old-time celebrity was the
greatest in his line; while the sons of that generation make
hero-worship of another master, and say that he was the best. So it is
in golf. One time there will be a feeling that young Tom was
incomparably the best of the golfers of the early period of the game.
Then by and by a little of this enthusiasm will fade, and it will be
agreed that there was no one better than Allan Robertson. Sometimes a
wave of feeling will roll over these discussions in favour of good old
Tom, and of late years poor Bob Ferguson has been having justice done to
the magnificent skill that he displayed when he was in his prime. Now,
taking a mental vote from all the authorities one can remember to have
spoken or written on these weighty matters, it seems to result in Allan
and young Tom coming out at the top. Bob Ferguson is too near our time
for his merits to be properly appraised. Our grandchildren may better be
able to give his due to the man who won three championships in
succession, and tied for a fourth.
But there can be no doubt that Allan was a really great player in every
way. Like Bob Ferguson, and like Harry Vardon in our own day, the beauty
of his achievement lay largely in the concealment of his effort, and
this is the perfection of style. It has been handed down to us as
indisputable, that the easiness of his style was its most remarkable
feature, and that he never, never seemed to hit hard at the ball. His
swing was a long but a gentle one, and his clubs were light. He was the
first man to cultivate in its perfection that fine cleek play from long
range up to the hole that in our day has been accomplished with such
magnificent effect by Vardon. The 79 that he did at St. Andrews in
1858--he was then just turned forty-three years of age, having been born
in the year of Waterloo--was then and for a long time later regarded as
a most superlative achievement. That time he was out in 40 and home in
39, winding up with a 4 and a 3. That great things could be and were
done in those days, even reckoning their merit on the most exacting
modern standard, may be realised from the circumstance that, taking the
best scores at each hole in all Allan’s rounds on the old course, which
he kept, and making up a composite round from them, that round works out
to the strange total of 56,--out in 27 and home in 29. In this strong
essence of Robertsonian golf the ingredients, in the order of the
eighteen, are, 3 3 3 3 4 4 3 1 3 to the turn, and 3 2 3 4 4 3 3 4 3 on
the way back.
Allan was a great golfer, and a fine exemplar in every respect, for he
was a great-hearted player who never knew when he was beaten, was always
cheery and with a smile, and he possessed the very perfection of a
golfing temperament, as most, though not all, great players do. That was
why everybody found it such a delight to play with him, and why he and
old Tom, who had also a fine temperament, were as a foursome pair just
as strong and invincible as men could be imagined to be. That lionlike
finish of theirs to their historic match with the Dunns deserves all
the celebrity it has achieved, and will for ever hold, not so much
because it was an exciting thing and a great match, but because it was a
triumph of the golf temperament over another that was not quite so good.
Allan had the spirit of the game within him; he had the true soul of a
golfer, and his most casual utterances constantly indicated how he saw
right through to the back side of the game. “It’s aye fechtin’ against
ye” was a common observation of his, and there is only too much truth in
that simple remark, that the game is hardly ever with you, that it is
fighting against you the whole way round. He had no greater admirer than
his famous pupil. An “awfu’ good player” was Allan to Tom. “Puir Allan!”
soliloquised Tom once, when his old master was no more. “The cunningest
bit body o’ a player, I dae think, that iver haun’led cleek an’ putter.
An’ a kindly body, tae, as it weel does fit me to say, an’ wi’ a wealth
o’ slee pawky fun aboot him.”
“They may toll the bells and shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for
their greatest is gone,” somebody said when he died. He had golfed all
his life from the time when he first knew that he was alive. His father
and grandfather were golfers, and the first things that he played with
as a child were golf clubs that were made for him.
V
Surely we must account old Tom Morris as one of the wonders of the
sporting world, as he is indubitably in that relation to the world of
golf. How many times have we heard that the light of that long and
happy life was flickering towards its extinction, but the rumour has no
sooner been spread than Tom comes forward in some activity to give it
full denial. Long may he continue to do so; every time that we hear he
is sick upon his bed may a telegram come to us from St. Andrews to say
that again he is sitting in the chair outside his shop, watching the
couples as they come forward in their turn to hole out on that beloved
eighteenth putting green, which, with the clubhouse of the Royal and
Ancient beyond it, has during recent times comprised almost the entire
circle of his daily vision. Each time I go to St. Andrews I find him
still cheery, and indeed it seems to me a little cheerier than the last
time that I saw him taking the sun in his chair. There is the cheery
respectful greeting and the felicitous remark that it is “a gran’ day
for a roond,” and in the next moment he turns his head to mutter a
grumble towards those “boys,” who are idling away a few spare minutes
outside Forgan’s shop, and are giving evidence of the freshness of the
life that is in them, to which Tom, a stickler for decorum in all
connected with golf, however humbly or indirectly, demurs. Like most
others who are running up the score of their life’s round towards the
ninety mark, he is prone to tell you that times have much changed, and
that the boys were more sedate in the days when he was one of them. That
is as it may be. But despite all the antics of the boys, and the little
irritations that they give to old Tom, he remains a cheery Tom to the
last, just as he has always been. His life throughout has been imbued
with an optimism which has always been the most attractive feature of
his character. Every good golfer is an optimist. I deny that it is
possible to be a good golfer in the best sense and not be an out-and-out
optimist.
Another fine thing about Tom, and one that has always endeared him to
the golfing world, is the fact that there has never been anything in the
least niggardly in the gratitude which he extends towards the game with
which his life has been bound up. Suggest to Tom that there is anything
better in life than golf, and you have done the first thing towards
raising up a barrier of reserve between him and you. Listen to how he
spoke of the game of his heart on a New Year’s Day twenty-one years back
from now, when even then he was by way of becoming an old man. “An’ it
hadna been for gowff,” he said to the patron who greeted him in the
customary form for the first day of the year, “I’m no sure that at this
day, sir, I wad hae been a leevin’ man. I’ve had ma troubles an’ ma
trials, like the lave; an’ whiles I thocht they wad hae clean wauved me,
sae that to ‘lay me doun an’ dee’--as the song says--lookit about a’
that was left in life for puir Tam. It was like as if ma vera sowle was
a’thegither gane oot o’ me. But there’s naething like a ticht gude
gowing mautch to soop yer brain clear o’ that kin’ o’ thing; and wi’ the
help o’ ma God an’ o’ gowff, I’ve aye gotten warsled through somehow or
ither. The tae thing ta’en wi’ the tither, I haena had an ill time o’t.
I dinna mind that iver I had an unpleasant word frae ony o’ the many
gentlemen I’ve played wi’. I’ve aye tried--as ma business was, sir--to
mak’ masel’ pleesant to them; an’ they’ve aye been awfu’ pleesant to me.
An’ noo, sir, to end a long and maybe a silly crack--bein’ maistly about
masel’--ye’ll just come wi’ me, an’ ye’ll hae a glass o’ gude brandy,
and I’ll have ma pint o’ black strap, an’ we’ll drink a gude New Year to
ane anither, an’ the like to a’ gude gowffers.”
Sportsman, in the best sense, Tom has always been, and he was a worthy
predecessor of the men who are to-day at the head of the ranks of the
professional golfers. That is a pretty story that is told of Captain
Broughton’s challenge to Tom to hole a putt for £50. As everybody knows,
Tom was once famous as the man who missed the very shortest putts, to
whom there was duly delivered, when he was at Prestwick, a letter which
was addressed only to the “Misser of Short Putts, Prestwick.” On the
occasion under notice Tom was playing to the High Hole on the old course
at St. Andrews, and had got into sore trouble, so that he was playing
two or three more when Captain Broughton happened to pass by and became
a witness of what was happening. Tom, be it noted, always belonged to
golfers of that fine and sportmanlike persistency, who would never give
up a hole while there was a single spark of hope remaining alight. “Oh,
pick up your ball, Tom, it’s no use!” said the Captain half chidingly.
“Na, na,” answered Tom, “I might hole it!” “If you do I’ll give you
£50,” retorted the Captain, and it seemed a very safe retort too.
“Done!” responded Tom, and thereupon made one more stroke with his iron
club, and lo! the ball hopped on to the green, and glided on and on
towards the hole, hesitated as it came nearer to it, curled round
towards it, crept nearer and nearer until it was on the lip--and down!
He had holed! Then said the triumphant Tom, “That will make a nice
little nest-egg for me to put in the bank,” and the Captain looked very
serious and went his way. A few days later the Captain came along with
the £50, and with a smile and a compliment offered it to Tom as the
fruits of his achievement; but Tom declined absolutely to take a penny
of it. “I thank ye, Captain, and I’m grateful to ye all the same; but I
canna tak’ the money, because, ye see, ye wisna really meaning it, and
it wisna a real wager.” And to that he stuck.
VI
There are alarms and excursions in the ball business daily, and the
player takes a devoted interest in them all. The trade is striving with
might and main to put ten yards on to the drive of little Tomkins, and
poor old grandfather, who began his golf at sixty, may think as he goes
off to sleep at night that perhaps by the morning there will be a new
ball on the market which will enable him to get his handicap down to 20.
The good inventors are doing all that they can for him. They are trying
everything and each thing in all possible different ways. The other day
a great professional was taking stock of his shop, and he found that he
had twenty-seven different varieties of rubber-cored balls in hand. And
many golfers feel that they must try them all and each new one as it
comes out. The evolution of the golf ball is one of the most wonderful
things of its kind. All of us who have played golf for more than five
years can plume ourselves on the fact that we lived in golf in the
earlier era of the gutta; it is strange to think that possibly half of
the present golfing population cannot say that, so quickly has the game
been coming on of late. But not one golfer in five thousand of those
living now played in the days of the feather-stuffed ball, which was the
pioneer. It had the game to itself up to 1848, which was the year that
the gutta came in. St. Andrews was the great centre of manufacture of
the “featheries,” and in the shop of Allan Robertson alone there were
some three thousand a year made. Of course three thousand rubber-cores
would be nothing in these days, but making a ball was a big job then,
and they were expensive, costing about four shillings each. And a single
topped shot with an iron finished them absolutely! The ballmakers bought
the little leather cases ready made from the St. Andrews saddlers, a
small hole being left to stuff the feathers in. The feathers were
boiled, and it took a large hatful to stuff a ball tight with them.
Mr. Campbell of Saddell is believed to have taken the first gutta balls
to St. Andrews, and when he did so there was consternation everywhere.
They thought the trade in the featheries would be ruined, and that
anyone could make the new balls. So an attempt was made to boycott them,
and it is even said that Allan Robertson bought up all the lost balls
that were found in the whins and destroyed them by fire! Tom Morris was
working in his shop then, and they quarrelled so violently the first day
when Tom used a gutta that they parted for ever. Tom himself tells the
story in this way: “I can remember the circumstances well. Allan could
not reconcile himself at first to the new ball at all, just in the same
way as Mr. John Low and many other golfers could not take to the Haskell
when it first appeared. But the gutta became the fashion very quickly,
as the rubber-cored ball has done, so what could we do? One day, and it
is one that will always be clearly stamped on my memory, I had been out
playing golf with a Mr. Campbell of Saddell, and I had the misfortune to
lose all my supply of balls, which were, you can well understand, very
much easier lost in those days, as the fairway of the course was ever so
much narrower then than it is now, and had thick, bushy whins close in
at the side. But never mind that. I had, as I said, run short of balls,
and Mr. Campbell kindly gave me a gutta one to try. I took to it at
once, and as we were playing in, it so happened that we met Allan
Robertson coming out, and someone told him that I was playing a very
good game with one of the new gutta balls, and I could see fine, from
the expression of his face, that he did not like it at all, and when we
met afterwards in his shop, we had some high words about the matter, and
there and then we parted company, I leaving his employment. There are
two big bushes out there in Allan’s old garden. Well, one of them was
planted by him and the other by me, just about that same time, so they
cannot be young bushes now.” But by 1850 the guttas were in general use
and nobody was much the worse.
It is odd to reflect that golfers were very near the rubber core several
times during the fifty-four years that the gutta held office. As we were
told in the big law case, an old lady made balls that were wound with
rubber thread to make them bounce more; but, nearer to our rubber-core,
there were two golfers who at different times and places are said to
have made what was to all intents and purposes just the same ball in
principle that we use to-day, but not so thoroughly made and perfected.
One of these golfers used to make them and give them to his friends.
But there was no advertising and not so much enterprise in the way of
companies with big capital in those days, and these inventors let their
chance go by. What a chance! There were millions, and millions again, in
their idea.
None the less the Americans deserve the credit for being the men who
gave us the rubber-cored ball as we know it. But for their belief in it,
and their enterprise, there would have been no rubber-cores to-day, and
perhaps far fewer golfers. Let me tell the real story of how they came
by their idea and their determination. In the early summer of 1898,
Mr. Coburn Haskell was the guest of Mr. Wirk, one of the magnates of the
American rubber industry, at his house in Cleveland, Ohio, and both
being golfers, they golfed all day and talked golf during dinner and
afterwards. It was these dinner conversations that brought about the
Haskell ball, revolutionised the game, and made an industry which is the
most thriving of all connected with sport. Both gentlemen agreed that
they wanted a better ball than the gutta, something that would go
farther. At last, after many sittings, one of them observed that
something might be done by winding rubber under tension. Winding it
without such tension would result in the ball being too soft. This idea
was elaborated during the next night or two, and then Mr. Wirk hurried
away to his factory, obtained some rubber strands, and he and
Mr. Haskell spent nearly a day in winding, by their own hands and in
secret, the first ball of the new era. They covered it with gutta-percha
and gave it to a professional to try, without informing him of the
nature of what he was trying. They watched anxiously for the result,
and with the very first shot that the man had with it he carried a
bunker that had never been carried before, beating the best drive that
had ever been made on that course by many yards. Then the two makers
smiled happily at each other. They knew that they were “on a good
thing.” It took more than two years to invent a machine to do the
winding, and some time longer to perfect the process. Then the Haskell
killed the gutta in a season. Before that Britain supplied America with
all her balls. Afterwards she sent none; but the makers of the Haskell
bought 30,000 dozen that had been sent over, for the sake of the
gutta-percha of which they were made, and at the bare price of that
material.
In the first five months of 1903 the American people shipped 40,000
dozen of their balls to this country. So were the tables turned. Now
they ship very few indeed, as we make our balls ourselves. Instead, they
are threatening American golfers as to what will happen if they catch
them playing on American courses with British balls. Of the little ball
that was thought out over the dinner table in Ohio on those hot summer
evenings there are now half a million used in a week in the busy season
on British courses, and some fifteen millions, at a cost of about a
million pounds, in the course of the season!
But yet not one man in a thousand who looks upon his beautiful white
rubber core when it is new knows what and how much is inside it. In one
ball there are 192 yards of thread, the whole of which is stretched to
eight times its original length, so that, as it is in the ball, there
are 1536 yards of it--nearly a mile. This thread has to be wound round
something. It has commonly been wound round a tiny piece of wood; now,
in the case of some balls, it is being wound round little bags of
gelatine and things like that. Some people are under the delusion that
in the case of such balls the whole centre is gelatine, and that there
is no rubber.
VII
The man who has the courage to enter upon a medal round or a match with
a keen opponent and play with a cheap, or cheaper, ball, is a rarity,
and an admirable one. Faith goes for a long way in these matters. Give a
man the most expensive ball on the market to play with, and he feels
that he has got something which will do justice to his capabilities, and
occasionally let him off with light penalties for some of his errors.
Let him have a cheap ball and he is uneasy, with the idea that nothing
is likely to go right for him. When he has faith in his ball--his
expensive ball--he plays accordingly, that is to say, he plays with
confidence, and the probabilities are, of course, that in such case he
will play better than he would otherwise do, especially if he makes a
good start. If he has not so much faith in his ball--because it is
cheap--he will not play so well, because he will play without
confidence. This is really a truism which is emphasised over and over
again on the links every day. As this player cannot test his balls
accurately and show for a certainty which one is better than others, he
has naturally faith in the more expensive, because it ought to be
better, whether it is or not. So one comes quite logically to the
conclusion that the most expensive balls are the best. Now suppose that
the makers of any of our leading brands of florin balls were at this
stage to reduce the price of their specialities to a shilling each. What
would be the attitude of these golfers to that ball? They would say to
themselves, or suspect, that these makers were taking something out of
the quality of their wares, and if they suspected that, they would
almost certainly find innumerable happenings in their next match, which
in their opinion would give the utmost possible support to their theory.
Every drive that fell short of the proper standard would be put down to
the makers of the ball; this really very funny golfer would shake his
head and say that it was a great pity, and so forth, but that he would
have to give up this shilling ball, of which at two shillings he was so
very fond. And he would do it. But all the time there may not be a
particle of difference between the old two-shilling ball and the new
shilling one.
Once again one is tempted to the fancy that there is a good future for a
reasonably good ball to be sold at five shillings. It would not be a
popular ball, because there is a large proportion of players to whom
this one would at last be too expensive; but all who could afford to
play with it by making some little sacrifice, such as by cycling to the
links instead of going by train, by carrying their own clubs two or
three times a week instead of employing a caddie, or, simpler still, by
reducing the weekly or monthly allowance for domestic purposes to the
lady of the household because of the hard times, would certainly do so.
And as the rich golfers would play with it also, it would have a good
sale, and if it cost no more to make than the florin balls it would be
very profitable to the manufacturers. All the ordinary golfers would
play well with it. They would feel that they had the very best, that at
last they could do themselves justice. They would have confidence. Queer
world this of golf!
VIII
“The course is black with parsons,” was said one fine Monday at the
outset of his game by a man who had been kept waiting for a most
unconscionable time while a minor canon and a plain vicar had been
worrying away in bunkers on opposite sides of the first short hole. In
this observation there was some evident exaggeration, but it is being
borne in upon us every day how more and more popular is this diversion
becoming with the cloth, as indeed it should and might be expected to
be, since golf makes its greatest appeal to those of the most thoughtful
and philosophical temperaments, such as clergymen should possess.
Excellent is this association, and it is a poor and threadbare humour
that is constantly fancying the cleric in such exasperation with his
game that ordinary modes of expression are insufficient for him. Having
heard of the worthy divine who was horribly bunkered and in a heel-mark
at the Redan at North Berwick, to whom the most excellent of caddies,
“big” Crawford observed, “Noo, gin an aith wad relieve ye, dinna mind
me”; and of the other one who was reported as repeating the Athanasian
Creed at the bottom of “Hell”--the bunker of that name on the
St. Andrews course--one would wish to go no farther with such stories.
The celebrated Bishop Potter of New York was playing golf on the course
at Saranac, and he made a mighty attempted drive that topped the ball,
and another one that tore up the turf, and yet a third that almost
missed the ball, and each time he uttered a soothing “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh!”
But the caddie was himself a golfer of a very stern and human school,
and in his great annoyance he exclaimed, “Man alive! sh-sh-sh-sh won’t
send that ball where you want it to go to!” The Rev. Silvester Horne,
who is one of the keenest of the clerical golfers, and has been known to
captain a side of parsons occasionally, once drew up a system of conduct
to be observed by brother clergymen when playing the game, and a very
excellent system it was, with severe adjurations against the doing of
many things such as are common with the ordinary golfer, and certain
small licences permitted to make the path a trifle less difficult than
it might otherwise be.
There was a worthy rector who was given to golf, and was somewhat
sensitive upon the subject of the large scores that were made by his
foozling. He had a pretty way; he did not count his score himself,
though who knows what subconscious ideas he may or may not have formed
as to its dimensions? But be that as it may, he would say to his caddie
as at last he flopped the ball on to the green at the short hole, “Now,
my boy, how many have I played this time?” The caddie, being official
counter to the rector, would say at once, “Six, sir!” Then the reverend
gentleman would stop suddenly in his march forwards, and would turn upon
this miserable little boy with a severe and awful frown, and would say,
or almost shriek, “Six! six! six! Whatever are you saying, my boy? Have
you been watching the game? Do you really mean six?” The caddie was
utterly cowed. “N--n--no, sir,” he would stammer, “I’m very sorry; I
m--m--mean five!” “Ha! That is better,” his reverence smiled. “Yes, no
doubt it is five; five, certainly. Let it be five. But”--and this very
seriously--“my boy, it is of the greatest importance to count the
strokes correctly at this game, and let this be a warning to you. Take
great care with the counting.” And yet it was six.
But, tell us, why is it that the clergyman, with all his magnificent
opportunities, is so seldom anything like a good player, so often has a
handicap deep down in the teens? You may see him on the links six days a
week, and yet he goes on from year to year no nearer to the degree of
scratch, still driving his short and very wayward ball with that
nervous, fearful stance of his, that slow, hesitating swing. I can
almost tell the clergyman on the tee, however he may be disguised, he is
such a doubter. Yet, with his opportunities, the Church ought to be by
way of finding a candidate for the championship. Can it be that the
philosophical temperament in excess kills keenness and makes a man
content in his own little kingdom of foozling and shortness--
“Contented if he might enjoy
The things that others understand.”
There can be no other explanation. But it is to be set down perhaps to
the clergyman’s credit that he is so often unorthodox in his methods.
On the links he is the broadest-minded man alive, and he is tolerant of
all things. Why, if ever in London one wants to be reminded of just the
way in which the Barry swing is done, one might seek out none other than
the Bishop of London, for if ever a man performs that fall-back,
bent-kneed swipe it is Dr. Ingram, as photographs will prove. If this is
to be, then an archbishop might play no stymies, and how then shall a
curate become a champion?
IX
We have not that form and ceremony in the management of our golf clubs
that our ancestors had, nor is there so much idea and sentiment
employed. Golf in these days seems often to be regarded too much as a
work-a-day affair, so that at few places besides St. Andrews is there
any real preservation of the old feeling. Else, the true spirit
dominating, why should there not still be chaplains to all the
old-established golf clubs? How much the chaplain counted for in the
great golfing days of old may be gathered from the minute of the
Honourable Company which they made when settling an appointment to the
office. The club then had its home at Leith, the date being 1764, and it
was entered in the book--“The Captain and Council, taking into their
serious consideration the deplorable situation of the Company in wanting
a godly and pious Chaplain, they did intreat the Reverend Doctor John
Dun, Chaplain to the Right Honourable the Earl of Galloway, to accept
the office of being Chaplain to the Golfers; which desire the said
Doctor, out of his great regard to the Glory of God and the good of the
Souls of the said Company, was Religiously pleased to comply with.
Therefore the Company and Council Did and Do hereby nominate, present,
and appoint the said Rev. Doctor John Dun to be their Chaplain
accordingly. The said Reverend Doctor did accept of the Chaplaincy, and
in token thereof said Grace after dinner.” Whether the general company
of golfers is at present in as “deplorable situation” as the Honourable
Company was at this time, is a nice point which need not be inquired
into.
X
In a day when the young school of golfers is making such a determined
advance it is often difficult to make distinctions of merit and to
determine who are the most promising and who will most probably become
the really great golfers of the future. We are a little too much
inclined to get into the way of saying that this man is likely to be an
amateur champion of the future, and that that player is almost a
certainty for the high honours of the game. When people talk in this
irresponsible fashion they forget several things--that competition now
is many times keener than it was in the days when the Balls and the
Taits and the Hiltons first became champions, and when it was quite safe
to prophesy beforehand that they would be, and that in the future it
will be keener still; that there is more luck than ever in the game and
in the selection of champions, and that if the honour is to be denied
to such a fine player as Mr. John Graham, who has forgotten more about
the game than some of the younger school know, nobody should say that
others are likely to be champions; and that because a man does some fine
golf for a week or two it does not follow that he is a fine golfer.
The game no doubt is easier now than it used to be, and it is more
difficult for fine distinctions in merit between players to be
reproduced in the balance of holes; but still in the long run knowledge
and skill will tell, and those men of the younger school who are deeply
thoughtful and scientific golfers will in the end separate themselves
from those of their rivals whose methods are more of the slapdash order.
With all the advance of the young school, and its scores of men with
high plus handicaps, each of whom is declared to be good enough to win
the championship if it finds him on his day, one would seriously
hesitate to suggest that there are more than five or six young players
at the present time who show any promise at all of becoming as good
golfers as Ball and Hilton and Laidlay have been. The remainder may be
only the veriest trifle their inferiors, and the difference may be so
small that it may constantly be not indicated in the results of
competitions, or it may even show a balance to the credit of the players
whom we are regarding as the inferior ones. But in the long run the
minority, who know more about the game, will triumph, and will be
separated from the general ruck. With all the talk that there has been
about the levelling up of the players as the result of the rubber-cored
ball, depend upon it that in twenty years from now we shall still have
a high table in golf, at which will sit the acknowledged masters of the
game, just as some of those whose names we have mentioned have sat at
this table for the past decade or two.
XI
Perhaps it would be as well for the golf of some of us if now and again
a time of quiet and inactive thought were enforced. It is certain that
many men feel much the better in their game for having been deprived of
play for a time, greatly irritated as they have been. The fact is that
he who is a faithful golfer often plays it mentally when real shots on
the links are denied to him. It turns out that this mental golf is of a
very thorough order; never is the player so analytical and severely
critical of his methods as then, and never does he grope more patiently
or more intelligently for the hidden light that is the source of
success. It is simple fact that men have discovered grave faults in
their play in this way, such as they never suspected during the whole
season that they had been committing them in real play on the links. And
in the same way others have come upon great secrets of fine details of
method, making for the improvement of their game, which they would never
have encountered at golf on a course.
The chief, if not the only reason, and one that is quite good enough to
be convincing, for this somewhat peculiar state of affairs is, that this
is essentially practice and experimental golf, in which the player is
constantly wondering and trying something new; while the golf that he
plays with clubs and balls on the green grass is far too often
exclusively match-play or score-play golf, and that is regarded at the
time as too responsible a thing to permit of any experiment. The old
ways may be bad ways, and no doubt many of them are; but we must stand
by them on occasions of this kind, we say to ourselves, when the wise
precept of an old player-friend flashes across our mind, the opponent
being one up with three to go, and a very vindictive fellow. It is
evident, then, that we do too much of this match and score play, and
that the consequence is that we are never given time and the opportunity
for thought and practice and the working out of experiments and ideas
that might prove of the utmost moment. Our game runs along a little
old-constructed channel, and it gets clogged with fault. When we go out
to golf for the day, no other possibility presents itself to our minds
than that of the two rounds, one before luncheon, and the other one
after, with living opponent or opponents, and always upon such occasions
we must trust to the old ways to pull us through. How much would it make
for future improvement if one of the rounds, or a long afternoon, were
devoted to simple lonely practice with one club, or at most two, in
which new ideas might be tried, theories considered, and different and
perhaps more effective ways to salvation worked out. Spend an hour thus
in close communion with one’s cleek or iron, and what an intimacy is
established that never would have been otherwise! There used to be
suspicion, distrustfulness, fear, and neglect--and what may follow upon
such relations save utter failure?--but now there is friendship, and an
appreciation of capabilities and qualities that bodes ill for the
arrogance of the opponent who has seen so many failures with this cleek
or iron, that he has come to think that when it is unbagged it is time
for him to be adding one more hole to his score. The man who never does
any of this practice golf never gives himself a chance of learning how
to play more than one stroke with one club, and when there is only one
stroke to a club it is not generally a very good or very reliable
stroke, as can easily be shown.
Thinking thus, we perceive the value of influenza and the minor
illnesses, and come to realise the truth of the remark by one earnest
golfer, that the thing that of all others had most improved his game of
golf was a severe attack of typhoid fever, which all but summarily
terminated his career. When this man told us that he emerged from that
disquieting experience a new and better golfer, and one more thorough,
the observation seemed cryptic to the point of absurdity, and it was not
taken very seriously. But it is certainly true that a very earnest
golfer will think long and hard upon all points of his game during a
dull period of enforced rest and idleness such as comes at sickness, and
then all the sins of omission and commission loom up in his troubled
mind, and he corrects the faults that he knows now, as probably he would
not admit before, went to the undoing of his game. The entire position
is revised; in the early days of convalescence we send downstairs to the
study for some favourite volumes, and we look up Vardon, Braid, or
Taylor on a subtle point of which we have been making mental
examination. The thoughtful studies of Mr. John Low are a stimulant at
such times. Such introspection is a fine thing and most fruitful, and
little wonder after all that the player does indeed return to health a
wiser and a more complete golfer, who will now go farther in skill upon
the links than ever he would have done in the old, narrow, careless
days.
What follows is a story that bears somewhat upon the moral that we have
been thinking over. There was a man who was in want of a shot that would
come between the driving iron and the wood, and he could not find one.
Of the cleek he had no good word to say; he could not play it. Of
driving mashies he had several, and some of them were well enough at
times, and at others they were like the cleek, so that what with his
driving mashies and his cleeks, this man was in constant jeopardy when
there was a shot of a hundred and sixty or seventy yards to play, and so
he was unhappy in his game. It happened that one of his driving mashies
was one that had been gifted to him upon a day by a great player, who
said, “I pick this from all that I have seen; may I never play more if
it is not a perfect club!” The man tried it, and it seemed to him that
the head wanted more ballast, and after a little while he allowed the
club to be gathered to his fine collection of idle relics, saying to
himself consolingly, “What suits one man does not suit another.” Thus it
came to pass that the perfect club that a champion player declared he
would love to play a long-short hole with to save the life of himself or
his dearest friend, lay for months and years in a dark cupboard.
In the even cycle of this golfer’s life the time of torment came round
once again, and, as it had seemed before, it was more desperate than it
had ever been. There appeared to be no remedy. All the tricks had been
tried, and all the clubs generally put into commission had been
experimented with, and there was no good result. And then a strange
thing happened. Things were at about their worst, when, as sometimes was
the case, this poor tormented golfer awoke in his bed very early one
morning in summer. The sun had not long broken the darkness; it was
about three o’clock. Being a man who went to bed betimes and who was
early refreshed, he did this time, as on others, lie in long thought
upon the events of life and his own affairs, the perfect stillness of
the time conducing to effective contemplation. And, as was inevitable,
the chain of reflection brought him round to the prevailing worry of the
game, and for half an hour or so he considered this grave problem from
every conceivable point of view, and subjected each iron instrument that
was concerned with it to the severest cross-examination, from which none
emerged with an unspotted reputation. It is not always in the human
golfer to attach entire blame to flesh and blood, and wholly exonerate
inanimate iron. Pride must have its place, even in the times of
adversity. This man was self-assured that one reason for his
failure--not the whole reason, perhaps; but still one reason--was that
all his searchings and purchasings had yet left him without the club
that he really needed, that one which was resting somewhere in a shop or
in another man’s bag, that was the affinity of his game, the thing that
was meant for him and which one day might come his way. He had a vague
instinct of what the feel of that club would be like, of the shape of
its head, its balance, and the length of the shaft. When he encountered
it he would know it at once for the long-sought-for club.
Then, as by a gift of the gods, an idea flashed through his mind and
caused him to start up, thoroughly roused from the dreamy state of
lethargy. That club! That old despised club that had come to him from
the champion with such a glowing recommendation, wasted entirely! That
was the club that was wanted; it must have been one of the most
irresponsible and illogical moments of his golfing lifetime when it was
rejected. Did it not conform to that ideal that was vaguely felt in the
mind? As he handled it in imagination now, did it not seem quite
perfect, that above all other clubs its true motto was “Far and sure.”
When a golfer makes discoveries of this kind about his old clubs, that,
poor things, cannot speak for themselves and tell him what he is doing
wrong, he is man enough to own his previous mistakes, and this player
owned them. He was all contrition, repentance, humility. He wished to
abase himself before the champion club and promote it to the captaincy
of his bag. Therefore when there is no sound to be heard save the
chirruping of the birds and the creaking of stairs, see this inspired
golfer leave his room, clad in a dressing-gown, at half-past three in
the morning, and go forward to the ransacking of a rubbish cupboard in
search for the wanted club. And there it was found at last, a little
rusty, the marks of privation from golf and of severe neglect written
plainly upon its face, but sure enough that same grand club that had
lived in the remembrance until at last it was appreciated. Yes, it was
just as it had been imagined to be. It was the perfect club; it would do
what all others had failed to do. Happy club in which there is placed
such belief and confidence, for the less likely is it ever to
disappoint! In his mood of repentance the man gets a little emery and
brightens up the blade until the first shafts of the morning sunlight
glint upon it. Being a handy man with a tool or two, he takes out the
tack at the end of the grip and unwinds it, laying it back again in some
way to suit the fancy of the time. And then the grip is waxed, and the
club is ready, and it is laid to a ball on the hearth-rug, and how that
ball could be hit, with a fine, low, skimming flight that would yield
much length, and the stroke, having been something of a push, would dump
the ball at the end of it just down beside the flag! It is no use. Let
it be four o’clock or twelve, why should the conventions keep us off the
links when these exalted moods are upon us? The golfer hurries through a
bath, puts his clothes about him, and with the whole world of golf save
this one unit still asleep, even unto the most watchful greenkeeper, he
hurries down to the course with a few balls and just this one club, this
one fine club. And there the truth of it all is realised. It is the club
that was wanted, and the shots that come from it are just as perfect as
shots by this man will ever be. The balls are fired off up to the first
green one by one, and it is found then that such are the virtues of this
club of exquisite balance that it is a splendid thing to putt with!
It is a glorious morning. The pearly sky seems to speak well of weather
prospects for the day when it opens out, and there is not wind enough to
curl a wavelet on the sea, which simply makes a little soothing creamy
lapping on the pebbles. How grand is the fine expanse of the course in
this morning freshness, and is there not something of rugged beauty in
that huge sandy projection which marks the short hole far out? This
indeed is the time of day for the golfer to be abroad. Happy man who is
in this mood, having found that which was lost. The golfing life is not
the same. A little thought and much confidence, and see to what they
will carry you! Make the most of them, you happy fellow, for they may
not last--they may not last!
THE QUEER SIDE
I
Probably it is true that golf carries its votaries farther in enthusiasm
than does any other game or sport. It is characteristic of the golfing
enthusiasm that it does but increase as time goes on, and that not in
the case of one man in twenty does it show any diminution, while the
game is such a jealous mistress that it is rarely the convert to golf
maintains any regular association with other sports unless he is of such
complete leisure that it is impossible for golf alone to fill up his
hours. Practically every golfer, therefore, is a keen enthusiast, and
though we dislike to hear the phrase come from the lips of those who are
not of us, we have to confess that there is some justification for the
extremity of this enthusiasm being described as “golf fever”; for indeed
at times it provokes the player to the doing of many things which in the
cold light of reason afterwards would not be regarded as completely
rational. We are all enthusiasts; but who was the greatest enthusiast
who ever was? An impossible question to answer, of course, if for no
other reason than that the limit appears to have been reached by
hundreds; but tradition can always settle matters of this kind in its
own way, and it has determined for us who was the keenest golfer, and
has seen to it, moreover, that his memory shall be safely perpetuated.
Thus we have old Alexander MʻKellar as the patron saint of the man who
likes to get his three and four rounds a day in the summer-time, and is
miserable unless he has a club in his hand in his resting hours.
It is something to have become regarded as the keenest golfer, for it
goes without saying that every other worldly consideration of every
description whatsoever must have been sacrificed to the attainment of
that vast distinction. Such a man must have really earned the title of
“Cock o’ the Green,” which was given to MʻKellar, and with that title
his fame will be handed down through the generations as it is affixed to
an historic print. This picture of the old worthy, who indeed was fairly
“mad” on the game, was first circulated more than a hundred years ago,
and has become one of our most cherished golfing antiquities. His
enthusiasm brimmed over when in the act of play, and “By the la’ Harry,
this shall not go for nothing!” as he used to say involuntarily when
addressing the ball, became something of a catch-phrase in his district.
He did his golf from Edinburgh, and Bruntsfield Links was his playing
ground. How often does one find that they are the keenest golfers who do
not take up the game in their youth? It may be true that generally the
man who does not swing a club as a child has not such a good chance of
becoming a player with pretensions to championship form as have those
who made such early acquaintance with the game; but do we not find that
these men become the fondest and most thorough players, making up in
enthusiasm and real enjoyment what they lack in skill? Thus there is a
grand compensation after all, and let us weep no more for the golf that
we missed in our schooldays; for some of those who played it then are
they who now find their greatest ease of heart for some weeks of the
year at fishing, shooting, or some other sport in which something has to
be killed.
And so the “Cock o’ the Green” did not begin his golf at all until he
was quite a middle-aged man, and all likelihood of his ever becoming a
really finished player had completely vanished. And he was of
comparatively humble means. He had saved a little money, such as went
for some justification for his constant idleness; but his wife found it
necessary to keep a tavern in Edinburgh when they went to live there.
MʻKellar gave no hand in the management of this tavern; he had no time
for anything but golf, and bitter were the upbraidings that he had to
endure from his worthy and industrious dame as a consequence.
Mrs. MʻKellar may indeed be set down as the first that we know anything
about of that long line of sufferers who go by the name of golf-widows.
This lady might have borne her isolation better if it had not been the
fact that she was somewhat mocked for it, and found the name of her lord
a byword in every neighbour’s house and at every street corner for his
over-indulgence in the game of golf, fair “cracked” on it, as everybody
took him to be. She tried to shame him once, but had much the worse of
the experiment. She thought to make him a butt for the laughter of his
companions by taking to the links one day his dinner and his nightcap.
But when she arrived there he was in the throes of a hard-fought match,
and when she offered him the meal he answered her kindly, but with some
touch of impatience, that she might wait if she chose until the game
was completed, when he would attend to her, but that for the time being
he had no leisure for dinner. And the game went on. So she came to
loathe the very name of golf, and was scarcely civil to the tavern
customers who were players and friends of her good man. But one day she
had a sweet revenge upon him. She set out for a journey to Fife, and was
expected to be away for at least a day. No sooner was her back turned
than hospitable MʻKellar went forth to bid his golfing friends to his
house, which, when its lady was in residence, they might in no wise
enter. A fine feast was prepared, and the party was a merry one, when
the door opened, and there stood, with a countenance drawn with
suppressed wrath, Mrs. MʻKellar, who had been obliged to return, through
the ferry being impassable as a consequence of the severe weather that
prevailed.
Every morning the “Cock o’ the Green” hurried through his breakfast, and
away he went to Bruntsfield Links with all the haste possible, never
returning home again until night had fallen. Sometimes, indeed, he did
not come then, if there were any good golfing excuse for not doing so.
Many were the times when he was discovered playing at the short holes by
the dim glimmer of a lamp, and a moonlight night was an almost
irresistible temptation to him. Heat and cold did not diminish his
ardour; and in the winter, when the snow covered the course, he would do
his utmost to persuade an opponent to share a round with him; and if he
failed he would go out alone and wander the whole way round playing his
ball from flag to flag, the greens and holes not being discoverable.
Like all keen golfers he loved the foursome, and preferred to be tested
by it if he could find a partner of any quality whatever. One day he was
in Leith and fell in conversation with some strangers there,
glass-blowers they were, and, as always, the subject turned upon the
game, and from the game in general to the prowess of the “Cock o’ the
Green” in particular. The men of Leith affected to think little of his
play, and challenged him to a match, upon which moment a Bruntsfield
youngster made his appearance. “By gracious, gentlemen!” exclaimed
MʻKellar, “here is a boy, and we will play you for a guinea!” The match
took place, and victory lay with MʻKellar, who was so excited when the
last hole had been played that he ran post haste to the shop of the
clubmaker, screaming, “By gracious, gentlemen, the old man and the boy
have beat them off the green!”
The artist Kay, who made the picture of him, went out on to the links
one day to draw it from the life unbeknown to the hero, and when he came
to know about it afterwards he was sorely disappointed that he had not
been given the opportunity of posing. “What a pity!” he lamented. “By
gracious! If I had but known I would have shown him some of my capers!”
Perhaps it was as well he did not. When he won his match he would
sometimes be so mad with joy that he would dance round the hole for a
minute. Such delight was pure, for though he did wager a little on his
matches he did not risk more than he could well afford to lose, and it
was the game he tried to win and not the little that he bet. On Sundays,
when there was no golf to be played, he fulfilled the duties of
doorkeeper to an Episcopalian church, and held the plate. Douglas
Gourlay, the famous ballmaker, one day put a ball into the plate by way
of joke, guessing what would happen. He was right, MʻKellar’s golfing
cupidity was too much for him. His eyes glistened, and in an instant the
ball was transferred to his pocket. Poor old MʻKellar! Weak enough he
may have been, but he did love his game as absolutely nothing else in
life, which for him ended nearly a century since.
II
It is an ancient game; but let no man think yet that we have realised a
fair part of the curious situations that may arise on the links when the
golfer hits a ball, or that we have a full appreciation of the
possibilities of their complexity. Very quaint are some of the
difficulties that twice a year are presented to the Rules of Golf
Committee sitting at St. Andrews for the special purpose of discovering
solutions thereto.
From far Manawatu once there came a plaintive cry for help. These
New Zealand golfers confessed that in all the holes on their greens
there is an iron box with a small flag on the top to mark the holes. In
an inter-club match the caddie of one of the players before leaving the
green, when replacing the box, put it into the hole, flag downwards,
exposing a sharp point on the top. One of the next two players, when
approaching to that hole, landed his ball on the top of the box in the
hole, and it remained there. Then the arguments began, and not until a
letter had sailed the seas from the Antipodes, and the Royal and Ancient
Club had sent her answer back to this outpost of her empire of golf, did
they subside. The man who had executed this wonderful shot had held that
he could reverse the box and put it into its proper position and claim
the hole. It hurt St. Andrews to think that away there in New Zealand,
left to their own resources, they should give themselves up to such
queer-fangled contrivances as hole flags with boxes on them. If a bit of
cloth and a stick of sorts is good enough for the old course, why should
Manawatu want what these Royal and Ancients sarcastically referred to as
“mechanical contrivances”? The high authority begged leave to observe
that the Rules of Golf did not provide for such “mechanical
contrivances,” and the New Zealanders were recommended to make local
rules to suit them.
You may always tell from the form of the answer when the St. Andrews lip
has curled at the question that has been asked of it. Nowadays the
committee can hear the mention of a hedge without a rise in its
temperature; but when the secretary, in reading out the problem of the
moment, has to say “mud” there is uneasiness still. The committee move
in their chairs, they fidget, they scowl, somebody mutters “Tut, tut!”
and they all cough to hide their agitation. “Mud” is the word you must
not say. I have not seen the committee in this agitation; nobody except
its own members has, for it is a very private committee; but this sudden
disturbance can be imagined most clearly. Yet these inconsiderate
golfers will keep on mentioning mud, and St. Andrews answers them back
with as much asperity as is consistent with the preservation of its own
dignity. One time in a matter of this kind they gave a snubbing to a
Kentish course. The club there, in all seriousness and innocence,
propounded a very pretty point. “Playing in a foursome,” they said, “A
is left by his partner’s approach shot a six-inch putt for the hole; but
A’s ball pitched in a small piece of wet mud left on the edge of the
green (presumably from the boot of a player in front). A small piece of
this mud clung to the ball, and was on the side of the ball A had to
strike. A played the stroke, and the ball and the mud stuck to his
putter, and the head of the putter and the ball on it were exactly above
the hole.” This was surely a most delightful situation! See how pretty
is the combination of this foursome pair, and how they do play each the
game to suit the other, thus: “His partner then with his putter tapped
the ball off A’s putter and it fell into the hole.” A charming incident!
“Did A or his partner lose or halve the hole, and would A have been
within his rights in shaking the ball off into the hole, or what should
they have done?” Said the Committee to the secretary, “Tell these good
people that the Committee have no experience of such tenacious mud, and
such a contingency should be provided for by the local rules,” and then
they hurriedly spoke of the weather and the wind and the state of the
eighteenth green, and how the Major got a bonny 3 there the night
before--anything to get this taste of Kentish mud out of their
St. Andrews mouths.
A point of some curious interest was that which arose in the course of
medal play on the course of the Higher Bebington Club some time ago. A
player had one of those most tantalising putts a yard in length to play,
and, like many a man before him, he missed it! In his aggravation at the
circumstance he snatched back his ball, and, without having holed it
out, he replaced it where it was before, in order to try his putt over
again, to satisfy his _amour propre_ that the holing of such a putt was
not beyond his mortal capacity. This is an old way of attempting to gain
some small crumb of satisfaction from a very disappointing business. At
the second attempt he holed that putt, but his partner then told him
that he was obliged to disqualify him from the entire competition for
not having holed out when making his putt. The competitor agreed that he
had done wrong, and accepted this fate; but some time later, when he had
fully thought over the business, and read up the rules, he protested.
Yet his committee maintained that he really should be disqualified, and
after much argument the seers of the Royal and Ancient were begged to
give their decision. And it was a very interesting decision. The high
court held that Rule 10 of stroke competitions applied, and that,
therefore, if the player replaced his ball directly behind the spot it
occupied after he had missed the putt, the penalty was two strokes only,
the second putt thus counting as in the competition, though it is fairly
clear that the competitor never intended it for it. “But,” said the
committee, “otherwise he was disqualified.” Those who discover feelings
and frames of mind behind the mask of simple sentences would be moved to
say, in this case, that in that last simple sentence St. Andrews was
trying to cover up somewhat the absurd position to which the rules
brought this case; for it was clear that the essence of the problem in
relation to the law was as to whether the player replaced his ball
behind the spot where it first stopped, which came simply to this--Was
he short of the hole the first time, or did his ball run to either side?
If he was short, then he was saved, and he is allowed to go on under
penalty of two strokes; but if he over-ran the hole--which from the golf
point of view was better than to be short--or if he went to either side,
then he would be disqualified. That ruling has grown since then.
Pity the club committees in their constant troubles. Was ever committee
so sorely beset as that which had come, by devious means, to knowledge
of the faults of its members, and when honour seemed to forbid that the
knowledge should be acted upon, though otherwise would an injustice be
done to the sinless golfers. It was in County Sligo. A medal competition
had been played, and when all was over the members of the committee--as
such high officers constantly solicitous for the welfare of things
will--wandered through the rooms and the corridors of the club. And it
came to pass that one of them overheard a conversation that he was not
supposed to overhear, between two members of the club, in which it was
alleged that certain competitors had played on the putting greens before
starting. The committeeman knew then that these men should be
disqualified; but how was he to act? He told his colleagues, but they
likewise were sore in mind as to whether they were justified in taking
notice of the fact that had thus come to their knowledge. Were they
bound to investigate this matter, and prove it one way or the other, or
was it sufficient if they waited for someone to lay a formal objection?
In their despair they appealed to St. Andrews; but this again is one of
the nice points that the chief authority would rather others settled for
themselves, and they said accordingly, that the committee must use their
own discretion as to whether it was a case for their interference.
Upon other occasions the committee at St. Andrews has been called upon
to indicate the proper course of procedure when a ball, after being
played, lodged in the turned-up part of a player’s trousers. It has been
somewhat naïvely asked by Kenmare whether, in a mixed foursome, when the
lady missed the ball off the tee, she should “try” again, or whether her
gallant partner should rid the tee of that persistent ball. It had to
tell the County Down Club that a player could not carry a special flat
board round with him from which to make his tee shots; and it has had to
straighten out some quite frightful mix-ups in ladies’ competitions.
Sometimes it happens that some casual decision of this sort serves a
good purpose in bringing the portion of the golf world that has been
somewhat inclined to wander, back to its duty in the observance of the
strict letter of the law, as in the autumn of 1906, when on the appeal
of Aldeburgh it declared how, when in long grass or anything of the
kind, the player was only entitled to move so much of the obstruction as
would enable him to find his ball in the first instance, and was not
entitled to arrange things so that he could see it while attempting to
play it. A player is not so entitled to a full view of his ball, though
he will sometimes tell you that he is.
III
That which was regarded by our ancestors as a most amazing feat, namely,
holing with the tee shot, has become exceeding common. One week not long
ago it was done in five different parts of the country, and in three
other separate weeks there were four cases reported. Why this increase,
then, of doing holes in 1? The reason is simple after all. It is not
that it is any easier to do the trick than it used to be. Probably it is
rather harder, since it is more difficult to flop the rubber-cored ball
down plump on the green at the short holes than it used to be in the
days of the late lamented gutta, and a good deal harder to make it sink
down into the hole as it ought to do when it gets there, instead of
running around it and then away, and generally behaving badly. If it
were any easier to do than it was formerly, would not the champions be
doing it? But they are not. Harry Vardon has still only one hole in 1 to
his credit, and while Braid gets his 2’s very often, the 1’s don’t come
his way. The simple reason for the frequency is the great increase of
golf. Everybody plays golf now and is always playing, and in such
circumstances somebody must always be holing in 1, or very nearly. That
is the simple fact, and the man who now performs this feat is no longer
worthy of a paragraph all to himself in the morning newspaper. He will
simply go along with half a dozen others in the weekly list.
Still there is room for distinction in holing in 1 yet, and the men who
crave for such notoriety need not despair. If every man can hole in 1,
obviously the proper thing to do is to find some particular way of
doing it that every man cannot equal, or at least is not likely to do.
For example, J. S. Caird, the Newcastle-on-Tyne professional, was out
playing the other day, when in the course of his game he took the
fifteenth in 1 in a very strange way. He popped his ball up into the air
with his mashie, and down it came plump into the hole, falling clean
into the tin and never bouncing out again! Fancy pitching into the hole
in 1! Luckily the caddie was standing there and took out the flag in
time, and one cannot be surprised that he was so overcome with the
strangeness of the thing that happened, that his imagination was fired
until he saw something of the supernatural in it, and believed that his
eyes had witnessed more than they really had. At all events, to the
players and to the people afterwards he described in the most
circumstantial and convincing manner how the ball at one time seemed to
be flying far past the green, but how when just above him it came to a
sudden stop in mid-air and then fell vertically into the hole! Why were
we not told the name of this ball?
Another advance on the simple feat of holing in one stroke is to do it
twice within a year. The first man to do this was Mr. L. Stuart
Anderson, who took the tenth and fifteenth at Balgownie (Aberdeen) in 1
in 1895. Since then I have heard of three other men having done it, one
at Fort Anne, another at Bristol, and the third at Tunbridge Wells.
Mr. Anderson, by the way, who is now the secretary of the Royal Portrush
Club, holds the record for the greatest number of times that one man has
done a hole in 1; and here again is another suggestion to the ambitious
one-stroke man. Mr. Anderson has done it seven times. He began by doing
it at the expense of his sister, Miss Blanche, at North Berwick, which
perhaps did not matter much, as sisters are indulgent, and wound up for
the time being by doing it (the seventh at Tavistock) in the presence of
and in a match against a parson, which, to say the least, was
indelicate. I have heard of a lady who has done this thing four times.
Another out-of-the-way feat is to hole in 1 just when you hear that
someone else has done so. One April evening, when the course at Heaton
Moor had not the appearance of stirring events happening upon it, such
as would go down into history as records, two of the members of the
club, not playing together, did two different holes in 1 each. At
Christmas time in 1899 a most remarkable feat was performed by Mr. P. H.
Morton, celebrated in his day as a Cambridge bowler, who took the first
hole on the Meyrick course at Bournemouth twice in one day, morning and
afternoon, with his shot from the tee. It is a better achievement than
usual to take a tolerably long hole in one stroke, and, in this class,
honours at present are with Mr. J. F. Anderson, who with a wind behind
him and playing on a frost-bound course got the ninth at St. Andrews in
a single shot, and the ninth measures 277 yards. It must be accounted
excellent also to do the trick one-handed, as did an amateur with the
promising name of Willie Park when playing to the eleventh on the relief
course at Troon. Mr. Park had to do it with one arm or not at all, for
he has only one, and he was certainly to be congratulated on the fact of
his unfortunate state not preventing him from graduating as a
hole-in-oner.
Men who seem to have an abnormal sense of humour say that it is killing
to do a hole in 1 when the other man is giving you a stroke. The other
man has then to do it in nothing to halve, or 1 less than nothing to
win, and the situation is delightful. I have authentic information of
this situation having arisen, and it was rendered all the more
interesting from the circumstance that the man giving the stroke was an
Open Champion, and the other party was a lady. It was at the twelfth
hole at Walton Heath, and one need not hesitate to say that the man who
was giving the stroke was James Braid, who thought awhile on the wonders
of this most interesting world, and then took a short cut to the next
tee without troubling to play the short hole.
Concerning the coincidence connected with the name of Park, just
noticed, it may have been perceived that two of our greatest heroes in
these matters are of the name of Anderson. This coincidence can be
carried a long step farther, for perhaps the most valuable hole in 1
ever gained was by another Anderson, and that was Jamie, the champion.
He was playing for the championship at Prestwick and making his last
round. He knew he was very close up, and that he had nothing to spare.
He was playing the next to the last hole on the course as it used to
be--not as it is--and was just about to hit his tee shot when a girl
standing close by remarked to her father that the player had teed his
ball outside the teeing ground, and that accordingly, if he played his
shot from there, he would be disqualified altogether. Jamie heard,
looked, and quietly removed his ball and placed it within the limited
space. Then he made his shot and holed out in 1, and very properly he
raised his cap to the little girl and said, “Thank you, miss!” for she
had done him a very good turn indeed. A few minutes later he was in
possession of the Championship Cup. That was in 1878. It is clear that
the Andersons are the men who do the holes in 1, particularly as another
of them, Mr. W. W. Anderson, once in 1893 worked most gradually and
systematically up to a hole in 1 at North Berwick by taking the fourth
in 3, the fifth in 2, and the sixth in the minimum 1. One in 1 and three
in 6!
The worst of these tricks is that you don’t get anything for doing
them; you must pay instead. The injustice of this arrangement has been
borne in to many minds, notably to that of Mr. Balfour. The right
honourable gentleman has never holed in 1, but he has done a hole in
two strokes when he received a stroke from his opponent at it, and his
caddie ingeniously argued with him that this was exactly the same
thing--2 − 1 = 1. It was Point Garry out at North Berwick, and
Mr. Balfour was playing with Tom Dunn. “I am astonished!” said
Mr. Balfour, pretending that he was. “Am I to pay you for looking at me
doing this? Should I not rather receive the money for performing the
feat?” But he paid.
There is one hole in the world where you do get paid for achieving a 1,
that is if you happen to do it at either the Easter, Whitsuntide, or
Autumn meetings. This is what is called the “Island Hole” on the course
of the Royal Ashdown Forest Club in Sussex. It is an excellent hole, and
a gentleman who played it on one occasion fell so much in love with it
that he endowed it with a sum of £5, the accumulated interest on the sum
to go to the competitor at any of the meetings named who should do this
trick of getting it in 1. Ever since the endowment was made the interest
has been growing and growing, and nobody has qualified for it. Money
accumulates so fast once it gets a fair start, that we can imagine this
interest some day amounting to a fortune, and then what a scene there
will be at the Island Hole at Easter when the golfer, having been
training at the Redan, the Maiden, and a few like holes for a whole
month previously, comes here with weird clubs and balls made of lead,
and has greed written in large characters across his face.
The moral of the hole in 1 is excellently stated by a great master of
the game. It demands not only a perfect shot but a perfect fluke. It is
a case of the gods giving to them that have, and those that have not are
cast into the bunker in front of the green.
IV
Curious, indeed, are some items in the list of the feats of golf. In the
game heroic there is testimony to the pluck, perseverance, and
enthusiasm of Mr. J. W. Spalding, who in the spring of a recent season
came by an awful motor smash in France and lost an eye, but had no
sooner risen from the hospital bed and been sent to Italy to recuperate
than he was at his golf again, playing himself back with his single eye
to the game of scratch quality that he enjoyed before, and--good for
you, Mr. Spalding--but a few weeks went by ere one more scratch medal
came his way. Nor shall we forget how a popular champion struggled home
to the seventy-second green at Prestwick while the blood was oozing from
his lungs.
There are feats of other kinds, as those which count as freaks, poor
things enough but wondered at by some. What shall we say of the
Pittsburg golfer who wagered four thousand dollars that he could play a
ball over four and a half miles of the city streets in one hundred and
fifty strokes? Beginning at five o’clock in the morning, he did this
thing in one hundred and nineteen strokes, but lost a thousand dollars
in damage done to property on the way. That man found an emulator in
London who undertook to play a ball from Ludgate Circus to a fountain
basin in Trafalgar Square. There are men who like to drive fine balls
from the glass faces of other people’s expensive watches, and others who
prefer the tamer sport of driving from the eggs of hens. There was the
man of Sandwich, who, with a champagne bottle as his only “club,”
played, and--Oh, shame upon it!--beat a neophyte who carried a full bag
of the most improved clubs. There was the old-time golfer who lofted
balls over the spire of St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, and another
who tooled his gutty from Bruntsfield Links to the top of Arthur’s Seat.
Better and more purposeful was the practice which Mr. Laidlay used to
undertake before championships, when, with Jack White for caddie, he
would play a ball from the first tee at North Berwick to the Roundell
Hole at Gullane, six miles away, by way of the Eel Burn Hole, the sands
along the shore, the neighbourhood of the fishermen’s cottages, and
away over Muirfield and the rough country to the top of the hill,
playing from whatever lie his ball chanced to find, and once doing this
course in a total of ninety-seven strokes.
V
Do we not sometimes hear one sort of sportsmen make it a complaint
against golf, that the player does not run any personal risk of injury
to his life or his limbs? Some of these men will tell you that you only
arrive at real sport when such dangers are incurred. It may be so, but
we shall not on that account seek to increase the risks of golf. It is
one of the glories of the game that it is such fine sport and commands
the wild enthusiasm of the best sportsmen, though it threatens the life
neither of the player nor any of the living creatures made by God that
give the fulness to Nature, and add, though it may be unconsciously, to
the golfer’s joy as he strides over the links on a fine morning. In
other sports, when man goes wandering over the hills, he takes his gun
with him that he may kill something. Leave him alone with Nature, and as
the lord of creation he is impelled to go forward to the attack on the
lesser beings. In golf alone does he roam over the country and by the
side of the sea with never a thought of what he may kill passing through
his mind. He has a great joy in his own life, and he is all benevolence
and wishful for the happy life of others.
Things have been killed--accidentally--at golf. Many luckless birds have
got in the way of tee shots, and even a fish lost its life on a golf
course, and is now in a glass case in the clubhouse at Totteridge. By
some devious means it got on to the course one day when there had been
heavy rains and much overflowing all about. And--let it be whispered to
the shooters and the mighty hunters!--men have been maimed, and even
killed on golf links, though we pray that, despite the extra sport,
there may be no more of them, and that the single pain of the game may
be the skin-blisters and corns that sometimes will come up at the bottom
of the left forefinger and elsewhere. I did not think better of golf as
a sport when one day, in playing my way outwards on the North Berwick
links, a ball from a hidden tee came upon me unawares and carried the
pipe that I was smoking away with it for some twenty or thirty yards,
while I stood to wonder what was happening. And even by his own deeds
may a man court perils, for we heard the other day that one was playing
at Ravenscar when he took a full mashie shot with the object of clearing
a stone wall; but the ball struck the wall and rebounded with great
force against his head. And from his head it rebounded again over the
wall, so it was said; and it was not astonishing to hear that the player
was slightly stunned! If adventure in the form of fierce conflict with
wild beasts and reptiles is what the full-blooded sportsman wishes, he
may have it. A member of the Royal Sydney Club played his ball down a
hole, and he put his hand down it to see if he could recover the ball.
He seized hold of something soft and drew out a venomous brown
snake--which he hurriedly pushed back. I am told by my golfing directory
that at Umtala, in Rhodesia, “the course consists of nine holes. In
addition to other hazards, lions are occasionally in evidence.” I happen
to have had some private confirmation of this report, and it is told me
that if ever a golfer in Umtala indulged himself in such a freak as golf
by candlelight, as players have been known to do elsewhere, he might not
complete the game that he had projected, for the king of beasts is
accustomed to prowl over the land at night, and picks up any little
living thing that he may find about. In other respects there is
something quaint about this golf at Umtala, for I am informed that in
the daytime the course is frequented by crows with white bands round
their necks, which go by the name of “Free Kirk Ministers.” They are
thieves, and now and again they swoop down and fly away again with the
ball.
They are fine pioneers of the game in South Africa, and it deserves to
prosper there. They have needed strong hearts and much patience and
forbearance. I have been to golf with a man who has lately come back
from a short visit there, and he says that their “greens” look as if
they were covered with millions of garnets; and poor as the putting may
be from some points of view, it can be performed with marvellous
accuracy, and the people of the Colonies deny that anybody loves the
game more than they do, or is more enthusiastic in it than they are.
Their trials are uncommon and severe, but they become accustomed to
them. At Wynberg, or some place like that, there is a lake to carry at a
short hole, and one knows what sometimes happens when there is a water
hazard between the tee and the green, one shot away. Here the avoidance
of it is not made any the easier, because a long line of Kaffir boys is
formed up on the near side of the lake, stripped, with eyes aflame with
eagerness, and wildly gesticulating with their arms and hands, and
jostling and scolding at each other while they seem to be appealing “Me!
me! me!” to the golfer on the tee. Away the ball goes from the tee, and
at the slightest indication that it was struck with dangerous
inaccuracy, splash go all the Kaffir boys into the water. It is very
much like the game of throwing sixpences overboard when your ship of
voyage is at anchor off some Eastern port.
VI
Rummaging through a second-hand book shop in Oxford Street one day, I
came upon an old volume of sporting anecdotes published far back in
1867, and long since out of print and forgotten. Turning over the pages
in the evening, and encountering therein many stories of doughty deeds
by river and on field and moor, I came at last upon what must evidently
be the original version of the story which has been more briefly told by
others of the golf match at night for £500 a hole, and I cannot do
better than quote it direct from the book. One of the contributors was
quoting from a letter he had received from a well-known sporting friend
of his, in which this gentleman gave him a short description of golf,
about which nobody else belonging to the book appeared to know anything.
In his prefatory remarks concerning the game the correspondent said:
“The game of golf is quite a Scotch game; it is played at Blackheath,
Wimbledon Common, and a few other places in England; but the players are
always Scotchmen. It is a game requiring a good eye and great skill;
and people who get over the first difficulties of the game are generally
quite as fond of it as the English are of cricket.” With no
disparagement of the attractions of cricket, one would be inclined to
say that in these days the English who get over the first difficulties
of the game of golf, and even those unfortunates who do not get over
those difficulties, are much fonder of it than the said English are of
cricket.
Then, concerning that great match, the correspondent writes: “Lord
Kennedy and the late Mr. Cruickshank, of Langley Park, were good
players, and had frequent matches for large sums of money; but the most
remarkable match ever played by them came off during the Montrose race
week many years since. At the race ordinary they got up a match of three
holes, for £500 each hole, and agreed to play it then and there. It was
about ten or half-past ten p.m. and quite dark. No light was allowed
except one lantern placed on the hole, and another carried by the
attendant of the player, in order that they might ascertain to whom the
ball struck belonged. We all moved down to the golf course to see this
curious match. Boys were placed along the course, who were accustomed to
the game, to listen to the flight of the balls, and to run to the spot
where a ball struck and rested on the ground. I do not remember which of
the players won the odd hole; it was won, I know, by only one hole. But
the most remarkable part of the match was, that they made out their
holes with much about the same number of strokes that they usually did
when playing in daylight. I think, on an average, that they took about
five or six strokes in daylight, and in the dark six or seven. They
were, however, in the constant habit of playing over the Montrose
course.” Surely this must be accounted one of the most extraordinary
games of golf we have heard of.
VII
In days gone by the position of the lady in the great world of golf was
something of a doubtful quantity, but there can be no question that she
is now an established institution, and that she will stay. There have
been men who have said that golf is not a lady’s game, and many who
still stoutly maintain that it is at all events only a game for very
young ladies who have not taken upon themselves any serious domestic
cares. But it makes little difference what they say. For the first time
in history a married lady won the Ladies’ Championship in 1906. The
ladies have a golf union of their own, which is the kind of thing that a
large section of rebellious men have been sighing for for many years,
but are apparently still far from getting. Moreover, they have an
inter-county championship, which again is what men say they ought to
have, but cannot get.
Some of the oldest but least common golf traditions have reference to
women, and it seems to be the fact that one of the first monarchs in
England or Scotland who ever sought pleasure and relaxation in trundling
a golf ball over the links was Mary Queen of Scots, and that she played
on golfing ground no less celebrated than St. Andrews. This was in 1563.
During that winter Mary occupied a house in South Street, and it is
generally believed that she yielded to the spell of the place and played
golf on the links with Chastelard, the favourite, who was subsequently
beheaded. Although the evidence that she did thus play at St. Andrews is
not conclusive, it is very likely that she did so, for it is quite
certain that she played at Edinburgh and elsewhere, and it is variously
quoted as a specimen of her heartlessness on the one hand and of her
enthusiasm for the game on the other, that she was found playing it only
a few days after the murder of her husband.
It is suggested that the golfing ancestors of the present lady players
were fish girls, and the evidence on the point is comprised in a minute
of the Royal Musselburgh Golf Club, dated 14th December 1810, which
reads thus: “The club to present by subscription a handsome new creel
and shawl to the best Female Golfer who plays on the annual occasion on
1st January next, old style (12th January, new), to be intimated to the
Fish Ladies by William Robertson, the officer of the club. Two of the
best Barcelona silk handkerchiefs to be added to the above premium of
the creel.--(Signed) ALEX. G. HUNTER, Captain.”
But the modern golfing ladies absolutely ignore all this ancient
history, and, in a manner, started afresh with a Year 1 on the inception
of their championship, like the French people did at the time of their
big Revolution. What happened before did not count. Thus, from their
point of view, they arrived at a sort of millennium straight away,
having no brakes of custom and conservatism on their wheel of progress.
Consequently it is no business of the modern writer to argue as to
whether the fair sex ought or ought not to play golf; the fact is there
that they do, and that more of them do so every week. And they do it
very whole-heartedly. In the box-rooms of the houses of golfing ladies
are sundry old tennis racquets with their stringing limp, despised and
rejected, and their once favourite croquet mallets have been cut down in
the shaft and are now used for odd jobs of carpentering about the house.
It is said that the golfing girl does not care a jot what she wears on
the links or--_mirabile dictu!_--what she looks like, so long as she has
boots or shoes on with which she can get a firm stance, or upper
arrangements which enable her to swing with ease. Thus one hears that
she has enormous nails in her footgear, wears the loosest of Irish
homespun costumes, and wouldn’t be seen in a picture hat. And she is a
fine, robust, healthy creature, who loves the game as much as anyone.
The great professionals say that she is a splendid pupil--better even
than the men. Harry Vardon holds that the American ladies--whom he has
studied on their native links--are better and more thorough than ours;
but he thinks that ours are very good when they roll up their sleeves
and give up the big hats. “They seem (ladies in general, that is) to
take closer and deeper notice of the hints you give them, and to retain
the points of the lesson longer in their memories,” says Vardon, and
James Braid concurs in the judgment. The only drawback to all this big
hitting, hard tramping, and devil-may-care spirit of the girl on the
links is that, according to Miss May Hezlet, one of the queens of the
links, it enlarges the hands and feet! But think of the freedom!
When the ladies play among themselves--as they generally do--they
employ, according to report, a golfing vocabulary of their own, which,
though unconventional, let it be said in haste, is quite proper.
Elsewhere than in happy England, the blessedness of whose sporting girls
has been sung by Gilbert of the Savoy, it may not be the same; indeed it
appeared in the newspapers a little while since that the minister of a
fashionable church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, declared from his pulpit one
Sunday that information had reached him that “women who went to church
on Sunday, went to golf on Monday and swore like troopers!” When this
was brought to the attention of the English ladies, they said that the
information that had been given to the reverend gentleman was very
likely true, as those ladies probably played such a very bad game. In
England there was no occasion to make use of such expletives as were
suggested, and a “Dash!” and “Oh, you naughty, _naughty_ little ball”
were generally found sufficient to meet the exigencies of the most
trying situations. At one time there seemed to be some considerable
rivalry and jealousy, quite characteristically feminine, between the
British and American lady golfers. But Miss Rhona Adair as was went over
to the States and won all her matches, the strain of the
effort--believing that she really had the credit of her country at
stake--being, so it was authoritatively said, largely responsible for
the breakdown in her health that ensued. Then the Americans sent over a
big team of ladies to try to capture our Ladies’ Championship with one
of them. The battlefield was at Cromer, and such a scene was there as
one by one the American flags were hauled down! At the end of the
meeting the British lioness held undisputed possession of the field, and
she placed the Cup on her tea table.
VIII
Perhaps there is more to be said for keeping one’s score for the round
when playing a match than is allowed by many people who occasionally
discuss this matter with some heat. It may be agreed at once that the
golfer who consistently subordinates the importance and interest of his
match to his anxiety regarding his aggregate score is to be condemned,
and more than ever so when his reckoning of his figures is done openly
and audibly, and when he is guilty of remarking, for example, a
splendidly fought match being all square at the eighteenth tee, that he
has a 4 left for 79, showing in what direction his strongest ambition
lies for the time being. Such a person is an undesirable opponent, and a
nuisance on the links. In match play the match is the thing, and those
who do not want the match, but only the score, should go out alone with
their caddies. Yet at the same time it must be remembered that a man’s
scores for the round are often the only real indication that can be
afforded him of knowing what exactly is his form for the time being, and
how well or badly he is playing, and it is eminently desirable that he
should from time to time be posted with this knowledge, which in either
case should act as an incentive towards the improvement of his game. A
man may be winning all his matches with two or three holes to spare, and
if he is of a placid temperament and not given to any closely
discriminating analysis of the details of his own game, he may often be
living in a fool’s paradise with regard to the quality of his golf and
the accuracy of his handicap. It may be true that handicaps are provided
chiefly for match-play purposes, and that if a man can win half his
matches with the handicap that is given him, there is not much cause for
fault-finding; but, after all, handicaps are supposed to represent the
relative strengths of all players, even though they do not, and it is
reasonable to expect that the holder of a certain handicap should be
able to go round his course, say, one time in three or four at a net
score that would come out at par. One must doubt whether the average
seven or eight handicap man does this, which, of course, leads to the
usual conclusion that the general tendency in medium handicaps in these
days is to make them too flattering.
And, again, when a player finds himself winning his match with so much
ease that the match itself has really very little interest for him, if
any at all, when he is playing well and his opponent’s game has gone
completely to the dogs, it is surely pardonable for him to concentrate
his chief attention upon his score for the round, so long as he does not
do it obtrusively, and does nothing to indicate to his opponent that he
has other things in mind besides the question as to whether he shall
achieve victory at the twelfth or thirteenth hole. It is simply a matter
of common sense and good manners, and all scores should be kept
mentally, and should not be spoken of until the round is over. The
keeping of a score will often urge a man to greater effort and the
display of greater skill in a particular emergency, and will thus tend
to the improvement of his game. Nearly all players of great skill and
long experience agree that there is nothing in the world like much score
play for the betterment of the golfer. It strengthens the sense of
responsibility, and of the need for the utmost concentration of thought
and effort upon every shot that is made, and when a golfer has taught
himself to do this he has gone a long way towards the achievement of
that severe self-discipline which is an essential characteristic of the
good and sound player whose game has always to be feared. It is because
they have not that self-discipline and have not cultivated that sense of
responsibility, that the majority of amateurs are absolutely terrorised
by a card and rendered incapable even of playing anything like their
real game. They do not so much fear to make a bad shot when it will only
mean a lost hole, which may be won back five minutes later; but it is a
different thing when the bad shot may cost three strokes, which have to
enter into the final reckoning. Yet the bad shot is equally bad in
either case and ought to be equally regretted, but is not. And if an
amateur does not keep some mental account of his score when engaged in
matches, he has scarcely any other opportunity of practising medal play,
since it is not customary and is not desirable that pairs should go out
together matched with each other on the strokes for the round and not on
holes.
Apart from the objections which have been urged against it, and which it
has been suggested may not be quite so well founded as some people
appear to think, one is inclined to fancy that in many cases one of the
drawbacks to the continual counting of one’s score is the inclination
that is bred in the player to self-deception, and in the course of our
golf we come across many curious instances of it. The simplest and most
frequent is the waiving of the lost stroke for a stymie. If the
player’s ball is within two feet of the hole when the stymie is laid
him, it may be legitimate enough for him to reckon that if he had been
engaged in pure score play he would have holed the putt that he was in
the actual circumstances unable to hole, and therefore to deduct a
stroke from the actual number taken on the round. But in the weakness of
their human nature many who are thus engaged in score counting go much
farther than this in giving themselves the benefits of doubts. It is
difficult or impossible for them to draw any line between that which it
was very likely they would do and that which they might possibly do. If
for the purposes of their score they give themselves the two-feet putt
which they would have holed but for the stymie, then surely there can be
no objection to giving themselves a thirty-inch putt, and if that, then
one also at a yard, and a yard and a half--two yards, three yards, four.
And, pursuing this process of self-cheating, you will find the golfer
submitting it to himself that he may count it as one stroke to get down,
when he is fifteen or twenty feet from the hole, on the reasoning that
many a time in his life before he had holed such putts, and was certain
to do so again, so why not this time?
This is but one of the many frauds that players are brought to practise
upon themselves in their yearning for a good round. Have we not known
them to give themselves a four or five feet putt when their opponents
had already given up the hole, because, though they had the time and
opportunity for making the stroke, they were afraid that they might miss
it, and so spoil that nice score which they were building up? They say
to themselves that if they did putt it they would be certain to succeed,
so what matter. And worse still is the case of the man who goes up to
his ball in such a circumstance and putts at it, perhaps with one hand,
pretending to himself that he is not trying! Yet if the ball goes in he
feels a wholesome satisfaction of having done his duty by his card; and
if it does not go in he still counts it as having done so, because it
would have done if he had tried properly. There is also the case of the
other man who, having missed such a putt by half an inch, perhaps
unluckily, makes a bargain with himself that if he can do that putt
immediately and successfully four times one after the other, he will
count it to him after all, having thus proved that it was well within
the scope of his ability, and that his first failure was an accident and
not likely to occur again. And I have heard of men who, counting their
scores, and having obtained a lie of most exceptional badness after a
good shot, have declined to include in their mental reckoning the
fruitless stroke that followed, on the ground that the chances of their
getting such a lie in a medal round were a thousand to one against!
Strangest case of all, I once played with a man who told me at the end
of his round what a good score he had done, and proceeded to detail the
figures 4 5 5 3, etc. “But,” I said, “you were in the bunker at the
first hole and took 6.” “Yes,” he said, “but in counting my score I
always give myself a 4 at the first hole, no matter what I take;
because, don’t you see, if I were out to make the best return possible,
as if trying to break a record, I could play the first hole two or three
times, if necessary, until I got my par 4, and then go on with that
round. I would be giving up the round each time when I failed, and
starting a fresh round; so, you see, the 4 at the first is always
certain, and so I always count it, whatever I do.” I saw,
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive,”
even to deceive ourselves.
Thus does this score counting and this yearning for one’s record round
breed a moral cowardice in such men. There is only one score to count,
and that is the one which would be passed according to the rules of
stroke play. If golfers must count scores they must be just to
themselves, and they must not even temper their justice with any mercy,
for the laws of golf are inexorable, and in them there is no mercy.
IX
There are many who hold that the most exasperating opponent of all is he
who is afflicted with an amazing indecision when about to make his very
shortest putts. For a minute he will stand with his putter to the ball
as if in abject fear of his fate, and surely at such a time there are
strange fancies flying through his brain. They must be like the fancies
of a drowning man. It was agreed among a company of his friends that
these must be the jerky thoughts of such a man whom they well know when
he was engaged gloomily upon the dreaded task of putting a ball that lay
eighteen inches from the hole, the little patch of putting green that
intervened being perfectly smooth and level:--
This is a very simple job,
And when I have holed the ball
I shall be certain of my half-crown.
Still, I must be careful. It is very easy to miss these short putts;
And I have missed many thousands, costing me
Many pounds--scores of pounds.
And now that I am up against it,
And looking at this putt,
It does not seem quite so easy as it did at first.
It will require most careful management--a most delicate tap,
And very accurate gauging of strength.
One needs to be very cool and deliberate over these things.
One’s nerves, and stomach, and liver must be in prime condition.
I wish I had not been out to dinner last night.
Was it Willie Park or Ben Sayers
Who said that the man who could putt could beat anybody?
I believe him--Willie or Ben.
This is really a most awkward putt.
The green looks slower than the others. It is very rough.
Why don’t the committee sack the greenkeeper,
Who ought to be a market gardener?
It is like a bunker between
My ball and the hole. Such very rough stuff.
One, two, three--six--nine--why!
There are eleven big blades of grass
Sticking up like the rushes at Westward Ho!
The grass becomes so very stiff and wiry in this very hot weather.
(Yes, it is too hot to putt properly.)
My ball will never break through this grass.
It is one of the hardest putts I have ever seen,
I wish I had more loft on my putter.
I _was_ an ass not to bring that other one out from my locker,
Where it is eating its head off (so to speak).
I think, also, that a little cut would do this putt a lot of good.
But how? The green slopes from the left;
Yet it seemed to slope from the right.
Also, it goes downwards to the hole.
This is a perfect devil of a putt!
I know my stance for putting is not good,
But Harry Vardon says that every man has his own stance,
So perhaps it is all right.
But I had better move my left foot; it seems in the way.
I see that two--four--six--seven of the pimples on this ball
Are quite flat.
Nobody can putt with a ball like that.
A man ought to be allowed to change his ball
Even on the green at times like this.
I must allow for those pimples.
Confound that fellow Brown!
He seems to be waiting.
And he is smoking his dirty shag so much
That I can hardly see the hole for smoke.
If I lose this hole I shall lose the match.
I am quite with Johnny Low in his new idea for handicapping,
When he says some of us should be allowed to play
Our bad shots over again.
In that case I would have one good smack at this ball
To get the strength and the hang of
Everything. And I am certain--yes, I am quite absolutely certain--
That I would hole the ball next time.
However, what does it matter?
Better men then I have missed such putts,
And I am not a chicken--live a hard life--lot of work--
Office to-night--awful day to-morrow.
And as the wife was saying--
Let me see. Oh! hang this putt!
He can have his half-crown if he wants it,
But I am going to have one good smack
At this ball. Now--
No, that was wrong. Now, yes, yes--
* * * * *
My godfathers!
And my godmothers!
I have missed that putt again!
[_When the ball came to a standstill it was just an inch and
a half short of the hole, and considerably to the left of
the proper line to the middle._]
X
Some of those cantankerous people who have no sympathy with games, and
but a limited confidence in the wise precept that the healthy mind is
most frequently to be found in association with the healthy
body--practical people they like to call themselves--will sometimes ask
you what is the good of golf. It is generally useless to attempt to
humour them by advancing the proposition that it returns a dividend of
fifty per cent. in mental and physical efficiency, and seventy-five in
the general happiness of the subject.
What are really the least convincing examples of the practical value of
golf are the most effective in argument against such folks. With them it
may count a word in favour of the game that a man once playing it found
that his ball from a full drive came to rest on a sixpence which had
evidently dropped through a hole in the pocket of a previous player.
Here, indeed, was a material practical gain! They will be impressed also
with the possibilities of the game when they are told a little story of
how a man, who was not in quest of art treasures at the time, discovered
an old master accidentally, and entirely through the medium of his golf.
It was in this way. A Montreal art dealer was playing the game on a
country course one day in 1903, when he sliced a ball so badly that away
it went through the window of a cottage hard by. Thereupon there came
out from it an old lady, a French Canadian, who was possessed of
remarkable power of speech, of which the golfer was given much
evidence. Presently, when her attack was somewhat exhausted, the poor
golfer offered to recompense her for the damage done to the window; but
then it was put to him that the broken glass was not the only casualty.
The ball, after passing through the window, had continued its course of
destruction by breaking the glass that covered the picture; and without
making any examination of the nature of this damage the player agreed
that he would give a matter of a pound for the picture besides paying
for the broken window. This soothed the feelings of the lady of the
cottage, and she pressed upon him the picture, for the damage to which
he had paid so handsomely. He took it away with him, and at home in the
evening he was led in a spirit of curiosity to make some examination of
it, when, to his astonishment, he discovered that it was a Dutch
interior by Teniers, which he sold a few days later for £500. To the
credit of this golfer be it said, he sent a cheque for half the amount
to the cottager. This is an excellent story to tell to the absurd and
practical people, and a true one.
It might be of service to add to it an account of a shot that was played
on one occasion by a gentleman of no less scientific importance than
Professor John Milne, who is known as a great seismologist, the man who
is most in evidence when earthquakes are troubling. When the earth is
still the Professor will leave his instruments in the Isle of Wight to
their own care for a period, and he will wander away to the links for
some golf. To what great feat has the golf of this professor led him?
Why, he of all men became the first to drive a golf ball across the
Victoria Falls on the Zambesi River--a hundred and sixty yards of
roaring, foaming water. That was when the British Association went for
its annual meeting to South Africa, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the
celebrated Cambridge pathologist, was so much impressed by the
achievement, that he too attempted to drive the Zambesi, and succeeded.
But these are the things that may be done by Professors once, and not
always. Two more balls were teed on the bank, and the Professors smote
them with their clubs, but those balls were claimed by the Zambesi, and
perchance they have been digested by the crocodiles. Now here you have
something done by golf which was not golf, but which marked the advance
of civilisation into the dark regions of the African continent. Our
practical friends must allow this to the credit of the game, not only
for the achievement in itself, but for the possibilities that it
suggests, for is not a picture at once conjured up of the resourceful
golfer driving a ball from the shore to a sinking ship, when all other
means of establishing communication therewith had failed? To the ball
there will be tied a silken thread, and the thread will help a string
across, and the string will drag a rope. Thus must we plead for golf!
While in these serious aspects of the battle of life the game is thus to
come to our aid, it shall be of similar service also in the gentler
paths. Once upon a time a maker of golf balls told me how he had
suspected a rival of putting cores from old balls made by him A into all
so-called new ones made by the rival B. Therefore A for a little while
wound a tiny piece of tissue paper with the rubber of his cores, and on
the paper there was written A’s name and address. Some time later the
tissues came home again through the medium of the balls that bore the
name of B. There was this damning evidence of the pilfering of the
cores. This story is not told as a hint to the trade, but surely it will
convey one to ingenious persons who wish for a mode of secret
communication with others which will be sure and safe. May it not be
that some Romeo of to-day has already come by the device of lofting a
ball or two on to the balcony of the fair Juliet, who in the seclusion
of her chamber may be discovered in operation upon the cover with
hair-pins and fire-irons, and presently in raptures upon the endearments
expressed in the _billet doux_ of her Romeo?
Perhaps it will not avail us as golfers to tell our practical friends
that the principles of the application of physical force which have been
taught us in the game, as of the steady body, the fixed centre of
movement, and of the hand being under the constant leadership of the
eye, have benefited us not merely in the playing of other games, such as
billiards and tennis, but in the attainment of greater proficiency in
some of the most practical and useful of domestic occupations, so that
the man of all others who may be depended upon to hang up the pictures
in a new house as pictures should be hanged, is the golfer who has got
his handicap down to 6. We will tell also to the critic of our game that
it affords a scope for a kind of humour that is of occasional service to
some wits and others. It helps them to raise a laugh over the tea-cups
when they say that they will take the odd or two more in sugar. We do
not like this jugglery with the terms, and it is only to be excused in
such exceptional cases as when the doctor tells the new golfer that his
temperature is 99° and the patient inquires anxiously as to what the
bogey is; or when, in discussing the frowning fortunes of some
unfortunate acquaintance who has had a hard time in life, and is called
upon for severe labour in his last days, it is said of this poor chap
that he is playing the nineteenth hole and has made an indifferent
drive. But, in seriousness, we like our golf to be kept sacred to
itself, and unassociated with the generally duller pursuits of this
workaday world.
XI
Is there not a considerable superstition of the links? Even great
players have old clubs that they carry about with them, not so much for
their practical value as for the luck of the thing, as they fancy it;
and a man once said at Prestwick that he always carried in his bag a
queer-shaped iron, though he never used it in these days. This was
because on one famous occasion many years before, when he was seven down
with eight to play, and won the match by a brilliancy that did not
belong to him, he could only account for it by the circumstance that
this club had somehow found its way into his bag by accident. As a small
acknowledgment to the gods, and a hint that such favours would be
welcome in the future, he vowed that he would carry that club with him
on the links for evermore, but that never would he play with it. And he
keeps his vow most steadfastly, to the irritation of the burdened
caddie.
Some sentiment clings to that cleek belonging to Mr. Edward Blackwell,
which, it has been said, is “shaped like an old boot,” but which, as we
all know, has done work upon which any cleek might be congratulated. And
is it not declared that before Mr. Travis set out to play in the
championship at Sandwich, Ben Sayers lent to him for mascot his
favourite spoon?
Other golfers have other fancies. Some have it that it is unlucky to go
out to play without a supply of money, for then surely shall the
half-crown be lost; and others fear that it might go hardly with them if
they had not the company of their favourite pipe. On severely important
occasions, Andrew Kirkaldy will hie himself beforehand to his
tobacconists in St. Andrews and buy himself a new pipe for luck. Does
not special fortune attach to special golfing clothes, and is not the
light grey jacket that which brings most luck? Think of all the fine
players who jacket themselves in this way with darker wear below, which
is out of the usual order. Mr. Hilton has a jacket which goes always
with him as the lamb went with Mary, and has thus played its part in
championships innumerable. This is a jacket that has won its place in
golfing history.
The superstitions about the winning of certain holes are stupid and
general. Why is it such an unfortunate thing with some people to win the
first hole? And yet do they always try to win, and do not bemoan their
fate if they lose. A trifle more reason, perhaps, is there in the old
couplet:
“Two up and five to play,
Never won a match, they say.”
But of course matches have been won when the winner was two up with five
to go, hundreds and thousands of them. There is one man of high
championship rank who has a list of exceptions to this rule, which he
applies for his own consolation when the fates decree that he shall be
two holes to the good as he stands upon the fourteenth tee. If it suits
him, he will put it that the spell will not work if it happened that he
fluked the thirteenth with a long putt; and he holds upon suitable
occasion that it has nothing to do with a foursome. One may suppose that
the essence of the idea is that the man who is two up at this state of
the game is just short of being in nearly the strongest position
possible, and is sometimes a little inclined to be slack in consequence;
and then, if he loses the next hole, and is only one up with four to go,
a sudden fear seizes him: he feels that he must fight for his life,
becomes flurried, presses--and then the rest of the tale is soon told.
But the best and the worst of the proverb lies in its recitation by the
man who is down when his opponent, bold in confidence, is taking the
honour at the fourteenth.
It must be held as an unfortunate thing to play a ball into a graveyard,
and it is better, perhaps, that one’s attention should not be called to
the memorial stone hard by the eleventh tee at Deal, which tells of a
foul murder committed upon some fair maiden at this spot in the long ago
when Deal was unacquainted with the game that has given her fame.
We hear that the most famous lady players carry charms when engaged in
their most important games. She who won fame as Miss Rhona Adair is said
to have invariably worn a particular ribbon with a gruesome device of
skull and crossbones upon it whenever she very much wanted to win her
match. White heather is supposed to be a most potent charm, and it has
been told as a secret that some ladies decline to wash their hands
between rounds, though luncheon comes in the interval, lest evil should
befall them afterwards.
THE WANDERING PLAYER
I
The golfers and other people who know nothing of St. Andrews are often
inclined to fancy that some of the enthusiasm professed by those who
have a tolerable golfing acquaintance with it is affected, because it
“is the proper thing,” and because it harmonises with the feelings of
many revered members of the old school of the game. Perhaps such
scepticism is pardonable, particularly when it is known that there have
been many hundreds of golfers who have gone to St. Andrews once and
failed to be impressed by it, and have not hesitated to declare their
doubts about its supremacy on their return to their native links. These
people belong to one of three classes. The first is the smallest of the
three, consisting of good golfers of sound discrimination, whose
idiosyncrasies of taste lead them honestly to the conclusion that
St. Andrews is greatly overrated, and that it has superiors in various
other greens. The second and largest batch is composed of men who lack
both the necessary golfing knowledge and the true golfing spirit. The
third consists of those who have not had sufficient time to know, for
verily St. Andrews is, to a large extent, a cultivated taste, and there
are many worthy golfers to whom its first appeal has not been entirely
convincing. There is a more or less vague something that attracts
instantly, but the rest only comes to the Southron stranger after two or
three, or even more, visits of fairly long duration.
The English golfer does not generally love St. Andrews at first sight,
but he shows that interest in her which leads him to talk about her and
awakens the suspicions of his friends. Then he may speak of her with
indifference, but he goes back to her again and again, and at last one
day, when he returns to his home after one of these visits, he feels an
exquisite soreness at heart, a sweet longing, a strange exaltation, and
he knows that a change has come over his golfing life, that he is at
last in love with St. Andrews, and that he cannot do without her.
Forthwith his plans for future golfing expeditions are changed and
modified. He must now always think of St. Andrews. If he is a man of
leisure he must go there at least once a year, and even if he has but
little time to spare he will be going to Scotland once in a twelvemonth
with his bag of clubs, and must so arrange his itinerary that he shall
touch Leuchars Junction going or coming, and shall run down that little
strip of railway which makes to the golfer the finest travelling in the
world, for two or three days of heartening play on the premier links.
All golf is good, but there is something subtle about the St. Andrews
golf which makes it not quite like the other, and the man who learns to
love it, though the love come in his riper years, when the emotions are
slow of action and may be weak in result, is faithful to it for the rest
of his golfing days.
Probably no man has been able completely to define the charm of the
place. Its charm is of its golf, for though it has some natural beauty,
and is greatly historic and of celebrity for its ruins, it casts no
enduring spell over the man who does not know the use of a driver. The
constant talk of it and its tradition has something to do with the
charm, no doubt. The stranger, who has never struck a ball there, feels
something of nervous ecstasy as he hears the brakes go on the train that
slows down on its approach to the station. There, during the last two
minutes of his journey, is a view of the links, the Swilcan Burn, the
players going out to the second and approaching the seventeenth--and
there goes a ball on to that famous road!--just like the fathers of golf
used to do in the olden days as it is written in the books. Then,
walking in St. Andrews, one seems to breathe golf as never before. All
the men and boys one sees are players or caddies; there is a knot of men
at the street-corner talking about the 76 that one of the professionals
did in his evening round; there are many golf shops; it is all golf. On
the walls, and in the hotels and post offices, there are displayed
official notices, giving the warning that those who play on the course
with irons only, or who practise putting on the eighteenth green, may be
fined 20_s._ or--wonderful enactment!--be sent to prison for a period. A
personage of no less consequence than a Cabinet Minister, this being
Mr. Asquith, has been stopped under this rule. The pipes that one hears
seem to be skirling a song of the greatness of the game and the glory of
the men who used to play it here in the olden days. Above all, one comes
instantly by a deep sense as of walking on hallowed ground, of being one
of the heirs to a great heritage in golf, and to a great
responsibility. Life and the game are stronger things than they used to
be. That same subtle oppression of soul is felt as when one has a first
glance at the Pyramids or at the tomb of the great Napoleon in the
Invalides. These things stand for what was a great might, and in its
golf St. Andrews is truly mighty.
And so it comes that the spirit of the game seems to brood over this
hallowed spot, and stirs the golfer with fine imaginings and gives to
him great impulses. It is all so different from anything else. On the
evening of his first day he knows that St. Andrews is not like the other
places, and when, after his first rest, he kisses the morning, he is
glad and he is exalted, because he is at St. Andrews, and there is not a
man or woman in the place who will not talk to him of the game that he
loves and sympathise with him in his ardour. The golfer has come home at
last.
It is difficult to describe the merits of the wonderful old course. It
is there. The people who do not know it cannot be made to understand,
and the people who do know it have not to be told. It would be hard for
anybody to prove that it is not the best, if the severest, test of
scientific golf. Nothing but scientific golf will avail the player here.
Of late years people have been railing against the bunkers on the
course, and the increase thereof; but after all it is to be remembered
that the placing of the majority of these bunkers has been the result of
the aggregate of thought of some of the best golfers in the world for a
period of scores of years, and they must be considered in the spirit
that Mr. John Low suggests, that no bunker can really be unfair. It is
there to be avoided, and it is the best shot that avoids it. No doubt
this view might lead to awkward conclusions if pressed in some cases,
but it is apparently sound as a general principle of scientific golf, as
apart from the mere pastime and the sensual passion for hard hitting. If
a bunker is in the middle of the course at just the distance of a good
drive, it is obviously the duty of the driver to play to one side or the
other and avoid it; and that is just the characteristic of proper play
at nearly all of the St. Andrews holes, that the tee shot has not only
to be cleanly played, and at the proper strength and so forth, but that
over and above all these things it has to be so accurately placed as on
no other course. Position means everything at St. Andrews, and the
number and variety of the undulations of the course, the constant
bunker, and the extreme diversity of the glorious putting greens and the
approaches thereto, bring it about that a man may play a hole a thousand
times and it has something new to offer him every time, and he might
play rounds on this course all the time from his childhood to his old
age, and those of his last years would be riper with interest than any
that went before. Here, indeed, is a course for character; there is
nothing like it.
II
Hoylake is new in comparison, but Hoylake is old for England, and it is
the leader of golf in the southern section of the kingdom. Hoylake has
fine traditions of its own which it would not exchange for those of any
other centre or club, and while it has always had the most perfect
respect for the dignity and the conservation of the game, it has
occasionally shown a commendable disposition towards useful progress. It
was the Royal Liverpool Club at Hoylake that took the initiative in the
establishment of the Amateur Championship and the international matches;
and at other times it has impelled St. Andrews towards unwilling, but
necessary, action. The club may look back with pride upon the
ear
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