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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Golfer, by Henry Leach
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Happy Golfer
+       Being Some Experiences, Reflections, and a Few Deductions
+       of a Wandering Golfer
+
+Author: Henry Leach
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2011 [EBook #37136]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY GOLFER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Bergquist, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
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+
+
+
+
+                             THE HAPPY GOLFER
+
+                 _BEING SOME EXPERIENCES, REFLECTIONS, AND
+                  A FEW DEDUCTIONS OF A WANDERING PLAYER_
+
+                              BY HENRY LEACH
+
+   AUTHOR OF "THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS," "LETTERS OF A MODERN GOLFER," ETC.
+
+
+    MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+    ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+
+    1914
+
+    COPYRIGHT
+
+
+
+
+     CONTENTS
+
+
+     CHAPTER I
+
+     THE SEVEN WONDERS OF GOLF, AND THE ABIDING MYSTERY OF THE GAME,
+     WITH A THOUGHT UPON TRADITIONS AND THEIR VALUE                    1
+
+     CHAPTER II
+
+     THE UBIQUITY OF THE GAME: WITH AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY
+     OF GOLFERS, AND A NOTE UPON THE EFFECT OF ST. ANDREWS SPIRITS    28
+
+     CHAPTER III
+
+     THE TRAGEDIES OF THE SHORT PUTT, AND A CONTRAST BETWEEN CHILDREN
+     AND CHAMPIONS, WITH THE VARIED COUNSEL OF THE WISEST MEN         56
+
+     CHAPTER IV
+
+     OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A
+     SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME                             88
+
+     CHAPTER V
+
+     A FAMOUS CHAMPIONSHIP AT BROOKLINE, U.S.A., AND AN ACCOUNT OF HOW
+     MR. FRANCIS OUIMET WON IT, WITH SOME EXPLANATION OF SEEMING
+     MYSTERIES                                                       110
+
+     CHAPTER VI
+
+     THE BEGINNINGS OF GOLF IN THE UNITED STATES, AND EXPERIENCES IN
+     TRAVELLING THERE, WITH AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CLUB MANAGEMENT   140
+
+     CHAPTER VII
+
+     THE PERFECT COUNTRY CLUB AND THE GOLFERS' POW-WOW AT ONWENTSIA,
+     WITH A GLIMPSE OF THE NATIONAL LINKS                            166
+
+     CHAPTER VIII
+
+     THE U.S.G.A. AND THE METHODS OF THE BUSINESS-MAN GOLFER, WITH A
+     REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT OF MUNICIPAL GOLF                        199
+
+     CHAPTER IX
+
+     CANADIAN COURSES, AND A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AT TORONTO, WITH MATTERS
+     PERTAINING TO MAKING A NEW BEGINNING                            226
+
+     CHAPTER X
+
+     GOLF DE PARIS, AND SOME REMARKABLE EVENTS AT VERSAILLES AND
+     CHANTILLY, WITH NEW THEORIES BY HIGH AUTHORITIES                251
+
+     CHAPTER XI
+
+     RIVIERA GOLF, AND WHAT MIGHT BE LEARNED FROM LADIES, WITH A
+     CONSIDERATION OF THE OVERLAPPING GRIP                           277
+
+     CHAPTER XII
+
+     ABOUT THE PYRENEES, AND THE CHARMS OF GOLF AT BIARRITZ AND PAU,
+     WITH POSSIBILITIES FOR GREAT ADVENTURE                          302
+
+
+     CHAPTER XIII
+
+     THE GAME IN ITALY, AND THE QUALITY OF THE COURSE AT ROME, WITH A
+     SHORT CONSIDERATION OF THE VALUE OF STYLE                       324
+
+     CHAPTER XIV
+
+     THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN
+     MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES                339
+
+     CHAPTER XV
+
+     THE SUPERIORITY OF BRITISH LINKS, AND A MASTERPIECE OF KENT, WITH
+     SOME SYSTEMS AND MORALS FOR HOLIDAY GOLF                        364
+
+     CHAPTER XVI
+
+     THE OLD DIGNITY OF LONDON GOLF, AND ITS NEW IMPORTANCE, WITH A WORD
+     FOR THE CHARM OF INLAND COURSES                                 392
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE SEVEN WONDERS OF GOLF, AND THE ABIDING MYSTERY OF THE GAME, WITH A
+THOUGHT UPON TRADITIONS AND THEIR VALUE.
+
+
+The first of the seven wonders of golf is a mysterious fascination that
+it sets towards mankind, from which, overwhelming and enduring, no
+people are immune. The game seizes men of all ages, of every
+nationality, all occupations, dispositions, temperaments--all of them.
+The charm acts upon men and women alike. Sometimes we have suspected
+that males are more whole-hearted golfers; but there are circumstances
+of quick recurrence to cause a doubt, and even were there none the
+fancied difference would be capable of explanation. It has nearly become
+an established rule that they golf the most who golf the last, for there
+is no man of the links so keen, so simple and humble in his abandonment
+to the game, as he who but lately held aloof and laughed, with many a
+gibe upon the madness of the class. Savages have attempted golf and
+found they liked it, and the finest intellects are constantly exercised
+upon its difficulties. So this diversion, pastime, game has become a
+thing of everywhere and everybody as no other sport of any kind has ever
+done. The number of people who play no golf decreases daily, and events
+of the last ten years have shown that its supremacy as the chief of
+games is sure. It is clear, indeed, that, so far as the numbers attached
+to it are concerned, it is still only at its beginning, in toddling
+infancy. A few years hence its intimate part in general life will be
+better realised; even now you do not so frequently ask a man of movement
+and intelligence whether he plays golf or not as what his handicap may
+be and what kind of ball he likes the best. No other game or sport
+exercises anything like such power of fascination upon its people as
+this. A tennis-player may leave tennis if he must; the cricketer often
+voluntarily gives up cricket for no compelling reason; a man of the
+hills and moors may cease to care for shooting; and one who has made an
+automobile speed like the wind along the roads may sell his car and be
+motorist nevermore. But the golfer will and must always golf, and never
+less but more while strength permits. Men who go to the sea in ships
+take golf clubs with them; I have known golfers carry their materials
+into deserts, and one of the greatest and noblest explorers the world
+has known took them with him to one far end of earth. Surely this is a
+very remarkable thing, a feature of life that is strange as it is
+strong, and it is not nonsense to suggest that this is no ordinary game
+and cannot be considered as a game like others. Somewhere in a
+mysterious way it touches the springs of life, makes emotions shake. It
+grips; it twitches at the senses. Why?
+
+No person has yet answered that question well and with decision, though
+many have attempted to do so in written words, and ten thousand times
+and more have players in their talk touched upon the lasting problem,
+and then, with that natural human avoidance of the impossible, have
+shuffled off to some topic more amenable. Here, it seemed, was one of
+the mysteries of life, and these are such as it is better not to meddle
+with. So through neglect and our timidity the problem has seemed to
+deepen. It has become the Great Mystery. Wonder and awe are thick about
+it. Men who were innocent and have turned to golf do not give a reason
+why; they are silent to the questioner. They say that he too will see in
+time, and then they golf exceedingly. Surely, then, this Great Mystery
+of its fascination is the first of the seven wonders of golf; and it is
+appropriate enough that a game that covers the world and embraces all
+mankind should have special and well-separated wonders numbering seven
+like the seven others of the earth at large: the traditions of the game,
+its amazing ubiquity, St. Andrews, the short putt, the achievements of
+golfers, and the rubber-cored ball are the other six. Each has its
+well-established place, and between the seventh of the group and the
+eighth, being chief of the thousand minor wonders, there is a wide
+separation.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not for one poor atom in a great and complex golfing world to put
+forward with any look of dogma a suggested solution to this subtle
+mystery which the philosophers have probed so long and fruitlessly. He
+will subscribe with others in a consoling renunciation to the view that
+it is not for human mortals, who should be happy with delights that are
+given them, to tear down veils from the faces of hidden gods. But as a
+theory--shall we say?--he may advance an explanation which is
+satisfying to one who has wondered as much as any others and inquired as
+often during many years, while yet it still leaves a place for mystery
+and a suggestion of eternal doubt. And the chief difference between this
+theory and others that have preceded it is that this is what might be
+called Collective while the others have commonly been theories of single
+ideas. Philosophic research towards the solution of the mystery
+hitherto has been almost exclusively based upon the supposition of there
+being one peculiar unknown cause for the amazing fascination, a
+magnificent _x_, something that in our present imperfect state of
+knowledge could hardly be imagined, but which has been vaguely conceived
+to be connected in some ways with the senses--and maybe the spirit. We
+have known that in some mysterious and it has seemed almost supernatural
+way the emotions have been stirred, most deeply shaken, by the pursuit
+of golf, and the case has seemed so inexplicable that the existence of
+an overwhelming unknown factor for the cause has been suspected. Here
+investigation has naturally faltered. I myself for long enough was
+inclined to the possibility of the single-cause theory being correct,
+and with devotion was attached to that "Hope" suggestion which satisfied
+most requirements and went far towards an explanation of all the
+mysteries. That this doctrine, whose merits shall be considered, is
+largely correct, that it does account for much of the mystery, I am well
+convinced; but we who have studied in the latest schools of philosophy
+are now unwilling to believe that it accounts completely for everything,
+that, in fact, this hope, which the circumstances of the game cause to
+flame continually in the golfer's mind like the great human passion that
+it is, is the one and only Force of golf, though it is almost certainly
+the major force of a group and dominates the others. Our new idea for a
+solution to the grand mystery is that there is a number of forces or
+causes of widely different character but associated in complete harmony
+for the production of strong emotional effects in the mind of the
+subject--emotions of the simplest and most natural character, but, like
+others touching at the mainsprings of life, in their action most
+intense. In a simple, unanalytical, and rather unphilosophical way, the
+game of golf has often been compared to the game of life, just indeed as
+other games and pursuits have been pointed for comparisons with the
+process of human existence. So we have been exhibited as starting in
+life at the teeing ground, abounding in hope and possibility. The
+troubles, ills, and worries that have soon afflicted us have been found
+their counterparts, all the analogies made to suit the careful people
+who play short of hazards and enjoy a smooth existence, the bold
+adventurers who brave long carries and like best the romantic road, the
+deep bunkers of misfortune, the constant menace of the rough for those
+who hesitate upon the straight and narrow way, the unexpected gifts of
+Providence when long putts are holed, the erratic inclination of the
+poor human when the little ones are missed. But now we find that in a
+far deeper and more consequential way this sympathy between golf and
+life exists, and that in this gentle play there is a repetition in
+lighter tones of the throbbing theme of existence.
+
+In the strong action upon the emotions which takes place during the
+practice of the game there are effects which are purely physical and
+others which are largely mental and spiritual. The physical thrills of
+golf are above the comprehension of any man or woman who has not played
+the game. We are certain that in the whole range of sport or human
+exercise there is nothing that is quite so good as the sublime
+sensation, the exquisite feeling of physical delight, that is gained in
+the driving of a golf ball with a wooden club in the manner that it
+ought to be driven. This last provision is emphasised, for this is a
+matter of style and action, and the sensuous thrill is gained from the
+exertion of physical strength in such a mechanically, scientifically,
+and physically perfect manner as to produce an absolute harmony of
+graceful movement. It is as the satisfaction and thanks of Nature.
+Sometimes we hear sportsmen speak of certain sensations derived from
+particular strokes at cricket, others of an occasional sudden ecstasy in
+angling, and one may well believe that life runs strong in the blood
+when a man shoots his first tiger or his first wild elephant. But the
+feelings of golf are subtler, sweeter, and that we are not stupidly
+prejudiced or exclusive for the game may be granted if it is suggested
+that we reach some way to the golf sensations in two other human
+exercises, the one being in the dancing of the waltz when done
+thoroughly well and with a fine rhythmical swing, and the other when
+skating on the ice with full and complete abandon. In each case it is a
+matter of perfect poise, of the absolute perfection of co-ordination of
+human movement, of the thousands of little muscular items of the system
+working as one, and of the truest rhythm and harmony being thus
+attained. We come near to it also in some forms of athletics; we have it
+suggested in the figures of the Greek throwing the discus. In golf there
+is an enormous concentration of this effect in the space of a couple of
+seconds--not too long to permit of becoming accustomed to it, not too
+short for proper appreciation. In this brief time, if the driving is
+properly done as Nature would have it, the emotional sensation is
+tremendous. Again one insists on the method and manner, for, especially
+in late years, ways of driving have been cultivated as the result of the
+agreeability of the rubber-cored ball, in which the physical movements
+are restricted and changed, and nearly all of the thrills are lost. It
+is still, even then, a fine thing to drive a good ball; there is
+peculiar satisfaction and a sense of smooth pleasure felt in doing so;
+but it is not that great whole-body thing that is enjoyed when there is
+the long swing and the full finish. That is why, even if style be so
+difficult to attain and there are ways of playing which are far easier
+to cultivate and more certain of their good results, it is worth all the
+pains and study expended in acquiring it, and a hundred times again, for
+the pleasure that comes afterwards. In the winning of holes or in the
+making of low scores the driving may be a comparatively unimportant part
+of the play, as it is said to be, though a certain high standard of
+efficiency is demanded continually; but it will always be the favourite
+part of the game because it appeals so much to those physical emotions,
+stirs them up so violently, rouses the life of the man, and lifts him
+for a moment to a full appreciation of the perfection of the human
+system. Some of these emotions are experienced in a minor key when
+playing the short game, as we call it, particularly in finely-made
+pitching strokes with iron clubs. Here there are restraint and
+sweetness; it is as if we listen to the delicacy of Mendelssohn after
+the strength and stateliness of Beethoven. Undoubtedly there are keen
+physical sensations enjoyed in this part of the play. When it comes to
+the last and shortest strokes, to the putting, only a faint trace of
+action upon the physical emotions remains, and the pleasure and
+satisfaction--if any--that are gained are purely mental. So in the short
+space of five minutes, in playing one hole of fair length, we may run
+along a full gamut of emotions, and herein is a great part of the joy of
+golf.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This, however, would be insufficient. The strong, self-controllable man
+would not, in their absence, crave for these emotions. But other
+influences are at work to kindle and continue the golfing fever in him.
+For the highest and deepest pleasure of civilised and cultivated man a
+combination of the best physical and mental emotions--with a little
+disappointment and grief--is essential; one without the other is always
+unsatisfying. Here, foremost among the mental experiences, so powerful
+as to have a certain physical influence, is our Hope. The major force of
+all life is hope. It is life itself, for without it the scheme of human
+existence would collapse. To look forward, to anticipate, to hope for
+better things, and believe in them--that is the principle of life. It is
+for that reason that the atheist comes so near to being an
+impossibility. An incredible he is. He asserts himself not only as an
+ignorer of gods but as a rejecter of Nature, and his position is
+untenable, impossible. He endeavours to place himself outside the scheme
+of creation. Without hope man could not and would not continue. He would
+give up. Motive would have vanished, and motive is essential to action.
+We strain analogy to no extravagance when we hold that it is the same in
+golf. It is pervaded with hope, lives on it, is played with it, depends
+upon it throughout in its every phase. At the beginning of the day's
+play a man hopes for great achievement. He does not ignore the
+possibilities, and rarely, whatever his temperament and disposition,
+does he wait for events, content in a manner of perfect wisdom to take
+things as they come. He anticipates, and in the human way he builds
+castles made of thoughts, and in his calculations overlooks existing
+facts and past experience. Thus are charm, eagerness, and romance given
+to life and the game. Never yet was golfer who did not believe that now
+his great day might come.
+
+So on the first teeing ground there is hope in the highest. Should the
+first stroke be successful the hope is stimulated; if the stroke is bad
+the hope is intensified. In the one case something more of the human
+power of man, the strong right arm and the fingers deft, is poured into
+the physical and temperamental boiler where the forces are being
+generated. The success has increased probability, the man can a little
+the more stand by himself, his independence increases, and his hope has
+a rock of fact beneath it. In the other event, the first drive having
+been a failure--as, alas! with the wearinesses of waiting and the
+anxieties they engender, first drives so often are--the hope is
+intensified by the addition of highly concentrated faith. The element of
+the practical indefatigable man is slightly reduced, and in its place
+there is filled the sublimer, grander essence of spirituality that is so
+far above the merely human. The hope is not the less. Providence is
+brought into the schemes, and the heart lives well. If the second shot
+is a good one there is more of the human given to the hope and the
+spiritual is a little subdued again; if the stroke should fail there is
+something like another mute appeal subconsciously made to Providence.
+
+These are the hopes of strokes. There are the hopes for holes; the hopes
+for days; the hopes for seasons, each series being units made of
+collections as years are made of months and days are made of hours. One
+who loses the first hole hopes to win the second, and is even insincere,
+for the encouragement of his hope, in saying and trying to believe that
+to lose the first hole does not matter and is often an advantage. If the
+second is lost there is a coming equality in the match imagined for the
+fourth or fifth. Three or four down at the turn, even five, and the man
+still lives and hopes (he is no golfer if he does not), and there have
+been magnificent struggles made when players have been six down with
+seven to play, or have even been dormy five to the bad. He who has only
+lost the first hole holds his hope in a state that is highly charged
+with belief in his own human capacity; he who is dormy down when the
+match is far from home still keeps hope, is buoyed well with it, but he
+does his best in a half-cheerful, half-nervous way, knowing that the
+time for supreme human endeavour has passed, and he gives the matter
+over to kind Providence, submitting that his deserts are good. So one
+who has played badly in the morning hopes for success in the afternoon;
+and where is the man who, having made poor shots all the day and lost
+holes and matches by them, does not fall to sleep at night consoled and
+peaceful in reflecting upon a discovery that will make full amends upon
+the morrow? After the failures of a summer season hopes arise for better
+fare when cool autumn makes the play more pleasant; when there has been
+one whole bad year there is hope enough that the game will mend in the
+time that follows.
+
+In this way it is hope all through, hope always, in the beginning and
+the end and in the small things with the great. Hope is the most human,
+most uplifting of all the emotions. Banish this emotional quality from
+the human mind and the golf clubs would be disbanded, for the game would
+cease to be golf for another day. The charm would have gone completely.
+Only the nature of the hope sometimes varies as we have shown, and the
+most wonderful feature of this wonder of golf is the sublimely simple
+way in which the man of a match, when all seems lost, when the cause
+seems wholly ruined, when by nothing human does it seem that a situation
+hanging upon a thread so thin can possibly be saved, believes in the
+future still. Providence still exists for him. Every human reckoning
+would show that he approaches the impossible, and yet he sees it not,
+but only the narrow way of escape to success beyond. And there is
+infinite satisfaction to the soul, much that is splendidly destructive
+of utter materialism, in realising that often the seeming human
+impossibility is broken and Providence pulls us through. In golf we
+often ask for miracles, and sometimes we obtain them. It seems to me
+that the golfer has one satisfying motto, and only one, and it is _Spero
+meliora_. What is the use of the "far and sure" that the ancients have
+bequeathed to us? Nearly meaningless it is. And if those words of hope
+are emblazoned on his coat of arms, the golfing man should have the
+Watts picture of "Hope" in his private chamber, courageous Hope
+straining for the faintest note that comes from the one lone string that
+remains on the almost dismantled harp.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such strong exercises of emotions, physical and soulful, accounting, as
+we may believe, for much of the fascination of the game, are supported
+by others, subtler but also of large effect. There are the aggravations
+of the game. It suggests an object that no man has ever completely
+achieved and never will do, since none has ever arisen to a state of
+skill and consistency when he plays perfect golf and plays it always,
+though such success may nearly be achieved at other pastimes. And it is
+not given to the player to know why the skill he feels himself possessed
+of does not bear its fruit. He is left in wonderment and aggravation.
+The game goads, it taunts, it mocks unmercifully. Old Tom Morris
+expressed the simplest overwhelming truth when he said it was "aye
+fechtin' against us." It does so from the first hour, the first minute
+of the golfer's existence as such, when he misses the ball which it had
+seemed so easy to strike. Then, his vanity wounded, he attacks, and the
+lifelong feud begins. What always seems so easy becomes the nearly
+impossible. There is always something new to learn, always another scrap
+of explanation of mystery to be gathered, and the player is always
+groping and being taught. But he moves forward only to fall back again,
+and the simple consolation he has from this ever-recurring process is
+that the tide of discovery, when it rolls back, returns a little higher
+up the beach with the next wave and in the long succession there is a
+gain. But this process is not so regular as the running of the tide, not
+so much a matter of calculable natural law, and therein is the
+disappointment and the aggravation. A man retires to his rest at night
+feeling himself a good and well-satisfied golfer with rapid advancement
+certain, and lo! the morning will be little spent when he is shown to
+himself as one of the poorest and most ineffectual players. The mystery
+of this reaction is quite insoluble; only the cold fact is clear,
+convincing. No more tantalising will-o'-the-wisp is there than form at
+golf. It is a game that lures a man, it coquets with him, trifles with
+his yearnings and his hopes, and flouts him. So does it excite him, and,
+hurting his pride, stirs his ambition and his desire to obtain the
+mastery. The spirit of adventure and conquest is aroused, and the strong
+man who has failed in no undertaking before declares that he will not
+fail in this. And so, with his everlasting hope, he perseveres and will
+not give in. But it is the game that wins.
+
+It appeals to the emotions of the primitive man in another way that may
+often be unsuspected. In essence it is the simplest and the most natural
+of games. It is indeed a game of Nature, and it is played not on the
+smoothest surfaces with white lines drawn upon them, but upon plain
+grass-covered earth, a little smoothed by man but still with abounding
+natural roughness and simplicity. Here on the links are space and
+freedom such as are afforded to people, especially those of towns and
+cities, rarely in present times. The tendency in all life now is to
+confine itself closely. We live in small spaces, with many walls and
+low roofs; we move through thronged streets and by underground railways.
+Things are not the same as when there was the Garden of Eden and the
+open world outside it. His confinement is a wearing oppression to the
+modern man, though he may not always suspect it. Because it emancipates
+and gives us back a little of our lost freedom is the chief reason for
+the popularity of motoring, and it was to attain more freedom still that
+man made up his mind to fly and now flies accordingly. We cannot
+entirely escape from this unnatural confinement which modern conditions
+of life have forced upon us, but for a little while at intervals,
+through the medium of this sport, we may experience the sense of space,
+of freedom, of the something that comes near to infinity. Unconscious of
+this cause, a golfer on the links is uplifted to a simpler freer self.
+He has a great open space about him, the wilder the better, and the open
+sky above. He takes Nature as he finds her, accepting her every mood,
+and that is why this game is and must be one for all weathers. There is
+the ball upon the tee. Hit it, golfer, anywhere you please! Hit it far,
+no limit to the distance! Strike with all your strength! Until in the
+game the time for wariness comes, as with the hunter upon his prey, see
+no limitations, accept all consequences. The golfer's freedom has a
+flavour that other people rarely taste.
+
+Emotions serve the human system better than comforts and conveniences,
+for these emotions are the pulse of life and the conveniences are mere
+aids to existence. Golf, being complete, has its advantages of
+convenience as well as its thrilling emotions, and when the players
+reason to their relatives and their friends upon the good of the game,
+shaping their excuses for a strange excess, they exhibit with a limited
+sincerity the real advantages and conveniences. The game may be played
+anywhere and everywhere. It is the same in principle, the same in rules,
+the same in actions; but yet again it is like a new thing everywhere,
+and it is always fresh. There is a golf course wherever a man may go;
+and there is a new experience for him always. He needs only one man to
+play with him; or indeed, if there is no such man available, he may play
+with the game itself as his implacable opponent, fight it in the open
+and without the medium of a human opponent to break the shocks for him.
+If variety is the spice of life, then here is spice enough. Then it
+gives us such companionship as can be gained by few other means, for it
+brings us to inner intimacy with the man we play, bares his hidden
+nature to us, strips from him all those trappings of manner and
+suggestion by which in the ordinary social scheme every person plays a
+part as on a stage and rarely is well discovered. No man plays a part in
+golf; his individuality, in all its goodness and weakness, is unfolded
+in the light. He is known entirely and for his own true self. The game
+gives us fresh air and the most splendid exercise. These are enormous
+advantages in golf, and we extol them in defence of our enthusiasm and
+they are accepted; yet, honest to ourselves, we know that we do not play
+golf because of fresh air and exercise, and indeed we only think of them
+as gain when, in the slavery to which we have been subject, our emotions
+for a day have been shivered and shocked by failure. It has the
+advantage that we can play it when the period of life for other games
+has passed, and we can play while life leaves to us but a flick of
+vigour. Some of the meanest men, who are barely worthy of being in this
+excellent community where the sense of brotherhood is so good, have been
+gross enough to say that golf serves their professional and commercial
+purposes thoroughly well--as indeed it may--by giving them intimacy with
+valuable and helpful friends. These are men who would buy their idols
+and sell them for a profit of five per cent. The advantages of golf are
+there; but they are the accident of circumstances, or not perhaps the
+accident but simply like the scheme of Nature in supporting what is good
+with good itself; but they do not and cannot in any measure explain the
+mystery of the fascination of the game, for that mystery lies in the
+emotional, the spiritual, the psychological, and not in anything that is
+just material. Golf is something of a passion, and passions are of the
+blood and have nothing to do with conveniences and rules of life for
+health and plain advantage.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The traditions of golf are the second of its wonders. All things that
+are old have certain traditional sentiment clinging to them, and it
+makes a good flavouring to life, for it is suggestive of age and time
+and continuity and eternity. Had golf no traditions now, those emotional
+effects in its subjects might be produced the same, but yet the sport
+would not be the same rich colourful thing that we know it to be, but
+something grosser. And again we could stand for golf and say that no
+other sport can testify to its past and present worth and greatness with
+such excellent tradition. Three only can rank in the same class, and
+those are cricket, hunting, and the turf. Their traditions indeed are
+rich, they uphold their sports to-day, and they abound in those rare
+stories which, even if they have lost nothing with time, make fine
+things for the listening now and have the tendency always to promote a
+better sporting spirit. But three things are essential to good
+traditions, the first being acts, the second persons, and the third
+places, and the last of the three is far from being the least important,
+because birds do not love their nests more than traditions do the plots
+of earth where are their homes. They cannot live in space; there they
+would lapse to a state of film and would fade away. Give them abiding
+places, real solid ground upon which their delicate ghostly structures
+may rest, and they have a substance which gives them a fine reality. If
+a character of the past were invented, given a real name, all his
+manners and customs, his feats and follies carefully described, even his
+father and mother most properly identified, and a statement made of the
+provisions in his will for those who followed after him, that would
+still be likely to linger on as a character merely, a possibility of the
+past but a thing of no account, not an influence. He could not be
+placed. If we give ourselves a licence to roam the earth in search of
+golf, we like to think of the good men of the old traditions as being
+comfortably settled, as being at special places where, in our fireside
+fancies on winter nights when the winds are moaning and the rains are
+lashing against the window-panes, we can see them and sit down with
+them. The wandering hero of tradition does not suit. And here is a great
+virtue of the people of our golfing traditions: we can catch them tight,
+nail them fast. We have special plots of land--the majestic links of
+Scotland, the old course of Blackheath, almost every yard of which
+might, if speechful, tell a story of some old golfer of the past. The
+old golfers trod those links some time in their earthly days. We know
+the shots they played, where balls pitched and how they ran, the bunkers
+where they had disasters, their amazing recoveries and the putts that
+they holed and missed--for even the golfers of tradition missed their
+putts at times. We know where those golfers walked, and so the
+traditions are of the links and the men with the links, and the links
+are the same now as once. Let us then hope fervently that they may
+remain the same, though a hundred kinds of new balls, each farther
+flying than the one before it, should be invented, and such courses
+should be declared to be weakened and out of date. It is easy enough to
+invent a character, but it is not so easy to invent a links and then
+declare that by sea encroachments on the coast it has been swallowed up
+and has gone. The tale is weak and unconvincing. But invent your
+character, and then produce your place, and say: "He was here; his feet
+were on this teeing ground; here he took a divot; it was in this bunker
+that he was caught," and there is nothing more that is needed for
+complete conviction.
+
+Having seen a little of the way in which certain potential and probable
+traditions of the future are now being made, I have a suspicion about
+some of the amazing histories of the past that have been reported to us.
+Such suspicions are developed in the minds of those who have themselves
+been parties to some exaggerations of things done on certain links, and
+have lived to see those exaggerations improved upon by further tellers,
+and of a rich story, with scarcely a base of fact, being thus
+established in history and made ready for a monument. Having our plots
+of land, with their permanent marks and milestones, it is easy to do it
+so, and all golfers cannot be commended for complete veracity, though
+their lies are tolerably honest of their kind, being, like their shots,
+made subconsciously, and the cause, being companionable conduct, is a
+good one. Listeners believe in them and so make them three-parts truth.
+Cricket and racing have had their splendid men, and they have had
+certain sorts of places, but nothing homelike, merely round patches of
+smooth land with rails and grand stands, to which traditions can never
+cling like ivy to the crumbling tower. The ghost men of these old
+traditions were fine creatures; well did they do their work; they fought
+and won; but they seem lonesome creatures. They lack location, and they
+have no family histories and traditions of their own. They are mere
+particles of the past. Nearly all the men of our great traditions are
+heroes of fine countenance and rich character, brilliant in their
+individuality, with that proper touch of pride and arrogance blended
+with the finest old conservatism, which all good traditions should
+enjoy. Only the ancients of the chase are good company for them.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It seems to me that our traditions and their associate legends might be
+separated into five periods. There is the primeval, the prehistoric, the
+most royal and ancient, the early Scottish, and the late gutty periods.
+Of the primeval there is no more to be said than there is of primeval
+man. We know the latter was born, that he did work of sorts, that he ate
+and slept, that in his way he lived and perhaps he loved, while
+certainly he died. Of the primeval golfers we are solid in the belief
+that they had clubs and balls, for they must have had, and they had
+holes or marks, for they could not have done without them. We suspect
+them of stymies, for only the weight of tradition has held the stymie to
+us still, and for its power this tradition must be far extended. Almost
+certainly they made their first clubs from the branches of trees, but
+there was nothing grand in that, for Harry Vardon and brother Tom,
+Edward Ray as well, all three beginning their golf in their native
+Jersey, did the same, and they played with stone marbles for their
+balls, played in the moonlight too. There would seem here to have been a
+tendency towards a throw-back in Jersey golf; but Vardon and his
+associates have made an ample advance since then. Good Sir Walter
+Simpson, in his deep researches, leaned to a more exact and defined
+theory or tradition of the primeval golf, and he gaily marked for it a
+beginning and a place. It is attractive and it is reasonable, and this,
+with the theory of the spontaneous and inevitable origin of the game in
+many places in the early times of man, theories with living detail
+thickening on them, come near in quality to real tradition. Sir Walter,
+you may remember, supposed a shepherd minding his sheep, who often
+chanced upon a round pebble and, having his crook in his hand, he would
+strike it away. In the ordinary way this led to nothing, but once on a
+time, "probably," a shepherd feeding his sheep on the links, "which
+might have been those of St. Andrews," rolled one of these stones into a
+rabbit scrape, and then he exclaimed, "Marry! I could not do that if I
+tried!"--a thought, so instinctive is ambition, as Sir Walter says,
+which nerved him to the attempt. Enter the second shepherd, who watches
+awhile and says then: "Forsooth, but that is easy!" He takes a crook in
+his hand, swings violently, and misses. The first shepherd turns away
+laughing. The two fellows then perceive that this is a serious business,
+and together they enter the gorse and search for round stones wherewith
+to play their new game. Sir Walter Simpson was a terrible man, and he
+must needs work into this excellent romance the declaration that each
+shepherd, to his surprise, found an old golf ball, every reader knowing
+that they "are to be found there in considerable quantity even to this
+day." Then these shepherd-golfers deepened the rabbit scrape so that the
+balls might not jump out of it, and they set themselves to practising
+putting. The stronger shepherd happened to be the less skilful, and he
+found himself getting beaten at this diversion, whereupon he protested
+that it was a fairer test of skill to play for the hole from a
+considerable distance. When this was settled it was found that the game
+was improved. The players, says the theorist, at first called it
+"putty," because the immediate object was to putt or put the ball into
+the hole or scrape, but at the longer distance the driving was the chief
+interest, and therefore the name was changed to "go off" or "golf." In
+the meantime the sheep, as sheep will do, had strayed, and the shepherds
+had to go in chase of them. Naturally they found this a very troublesome
+and annoying interruption, and so they hit upon the great idea of making
+a circular course of holes which enabled them to play and herd at the
+same time. By this arrangement there were many holes and they were far
+apart, and it became necessary to mark their whereabouts, which was
+easily done by means of a tag of wool from a sheep, fastened to a stick,
+which, as is remarked, is a sort of flag still used on many Scottish
+courses in much the same simplicity as by those early shepherds. And Sir
+Walter wrote with reason that since those early days the essentials of
+the game have altered but little.
+
+After the time of these first shepherds there were doubtless more
+shepherds, and the bucolics in general would be given to the game. Yet
+it should never be understood that even in its origins this game was one
+that was practised chiefly by persons of low intellectual strength.
+Indeed it was not. In the ancient classics there are references to ball
+games that bear close resemblance to primitive golf, and then when games
+began to appear in Holland and France that had golf in them, even though
+they were not golf, it was not the common people always who were most
+attracted. And in passing, it must be said, that while golf as we have
+it now is British--Scottish, if you like--and there is enough authority
+and substance in the claim for the satisfaction of any pride seeing that
+the laws of St. Andrews have been for ages back the laws of the world at
+large, it is too much to believe that a game so simple in its
+essentials, so obvious and so necessary and so desirable, should have
+had an exclusive origin in any one country, to be copied by the others.
+The elements of golf must have come up spontaneously in many different
+parts of the world, although they were without rule, organisation, and
+might not have been known as a game or anything like that by those who
+employed them. But it was there, as eating and kissing were; and it fell
+to the lot of those canny and most discerning Scots to regularise it, as
+it were, to declare it a game and give it definiteness, and in due time
+to set up laws and a government, all of which were just what they should
+be and the best conceivable. It might not have been such a good game as
+it is now had it not been nurtured at St. Andrews, Leith, and
+Musselburgh, and in those other early cradles of the pastime; but I
+cannot believe that if there had been no land north of Newcastle there
+would have been no golf, and we should be moaning now in vague
+discontent for a mysterious something lost to life.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I may adduce some circumstances from most ancient history and tradition
+which have not been applied to this question hitherto, but should have
+been, for they seem to be apposite and remarkable. In these days
+Ireland, with a fine spirit, is struggling for better golfing
+recognition, and should have it. When a game is for the world, what is
+the Irish Channel? The country has some very splendid links, and has
+produced some players--if few of them--of the finest quality; but a
+people who exhibit frequently a fine appreciation of the spirit of the
+golfing brotherhood, and to the wandering player extend a hospitality of
+which it can only be said that it is Irish, are treated coldly in
+championship dignity being withheld from their courses and their not
+being admitted to the higher councils of the game. I remember with
+gratitude a very early acquaintance with the golf of Newcastle in County
+Down, that glorious course in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains, and
+with Portrush in the north, while about Dublin there are links that fear
+no comparison with the best of other lands. The ordinary records may
+indicate that there was no golf in Ireland until 1881, when what is now
+the Royal Belfast Club was formed; but listen to a story which is
+brought to me in some spirit of triumph by a friend, Mr. Victor Collins,
+a golfer, who practises his game, for the most part, not on any mainland
+but out on the Arran Isles, west of the Irish coast, out on little
+Inneshmor, where he lives when he is not in London, and where he has a
+small course of just a few sporting holes for his own delight, one which
+would have been as agreeable to the golfers of the prehistoric period as
+it is now to a modern gentleman who occasionally becomes a little tired
+of over-civilisation and likes to retreat to simplicity and Nature. It
+is a considerable change from Stoke Poges to Inneshmor, but only a poor
+soul would not like it for a period. In London one evening we talked of
+golf and Inneshmor, and he told me a legendary story, the documentary
+narrative of which he has since produced in the form of an extract from
+"O'Looney's unpublished MS. translation of the 'Tain bo' Cuailgne' in
+the Irish Royal Academy, Dublin." Knowing little of these matters, I
+quote Mr. Collins direct in saying that this is the most famous of Irish
+epics, and describes the war Queen Maeve of Connacht, assisted by her
+vassal kings of the rest of Ireland, waged against Ulster to obtain a
+bull which was reputed to be a finer animal than the one she herself
+possessed. The central hero of Ulster was the famous Cuchullain, the
+greatest of all Irish heroes, in truth an Irish Achilles. Fergus,
+ex-king of Ulster, who had taken refuge with Maeve, tells her who are
+the champions against whom her armies will have to contend, and these
+lines occur in the course of his terrifying account of Cuchullain, whose
+age at the time of this expedition was between six and seven: "The boy
+set out then and he took his instruments of pleasure with him; he took
+his hurly of creduma and his silver ball, and he took his massive
+Clettini, and he took his playing Bunsach, with its fire-burned top, and
+he began to shorten his way with them. He would give the ball a stroke
+of his hurly and drive it a great distance before him; he would cast (?
+swing) his hurly at it, and would give it a second stroke that would
+drive it not a shorter distance than the first blow. He would cast his
+Clettini, and he would hurl his Bunsach, and he would make a wild race
+after them. He would then take up his hurly, and his ball, and his
+Clettini, and his Bunsach, and he would cast his Bunsach up in the air
+on before him, and the end of the Bunsach would not have reached the
+ground before he would have caught it by the top while still flying, and
+in this way he went on till he reached the Forad of the plain of Emain
+where the youths were." This young Cuchullain does appear to have been
+appreciably better than scratch. Apparently he was going to attend
+something in the nature of a club gathering, and his way of getting
+there was much in the nature of cross-country golf with a touch of trick
+in it; for there are professionals to-day who make a show in their idle
+moments of pitching up a ball and catching it with their hands. My
+informer tells me that Cuchullain was not confining his attention to
+golf alone, but doing feats of jugglery as well in order to while away
+the journey. "The description of driving the ball before him," he
+remarks, "evidently contains the germ of golf. Some years ago I saw in
+an illustrated paper a reproduction of a picture of a tombstone from
+some place in Ulster dating to the twelfth century. It was the tombstone
+of a Norseman. On it were a double-headed sword, the sign of his
+profession, and below it the perfect representation of a cleek and a
+golf ball, his favourite amusement. It would be interesting to make a
+serious search in old Irish records for further information on the game.
+'Clettini' is from an Irish word for 'feather.' It was evidently a
+feathered javelin he hurled. 'Creduma' means 'red metal,' that is brass.
+Hurly of creduma therefore comes curiously near the quite modern
+brassey. Bunsach is a very obscure word. In middle Irish there was such
+a word, but it meant a kind of dagger." This discovery opens up an
+excellent speculation.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The periods of the traditions of course impinge upon each other and
+softly blend, so that the game some way or other seems to go back
+continuously from now to the beginning. We have in the most royal and
+ancient period the Stuart kings playing their golf, and Charles the
+First hearing of mighty troubles to his throne perpending while he was
+golfing on the links of Leith; of James the Second with his court
+playing the golf at Blackheath and sowing seeds that were to bear
+amazing fruit in the south at a far-off date; of Mary Queen of Scots
+golfing with her favourite Chastelard at St. Andrews. There was
+Archbishop Hamilton, who signed the authority that was given to the
+Provost and magistrates of St. Andrews to put rabbits on the links,
+which authority recognised the rights of the community to the links,
+more especially for the purpose of playing at "golff, futball, schuteing
+at all gamis, with all other manner of pastyme." This was a kind of
+ratification of a Magna Charta of Golf. There was Duncan Forbes, of
+Culloden, first captain of the Gentlemen Golfers, now known as the
+Honourable Company, in 1744. A marvellous man was Duncan Forbes, Lord
+President of the Council, and we know that he played for the Silver Club
+in 1745--for the last time, probably, because just then the rising of
+the clans obliged him to set out for the north, where he exerted himself
+to the utmost to prevent them from joining the cause of the Young
+Pretender. And here in passing let it be written that there is good
+cause to think that Bonnie Prince Charlie himself was the first to play
+real or Scottish golf on the continent of Europe, for he is believed to
+have had a course made for himself when in Italy, and was once found
+playing in the Borghese gardens, so Mr. Andrew Lang once told us. There
+was the wonderful William St. Clair, of Roslin, so much skilled at golf
+and archery that the common people believed he had a private arrangement
+with the devil. Sir George Chalmers painted a picture of him, which is
+possessed by the Honourable Company, and Sir Walter Scott wrote that he
+was "a man considerably above six feet, with dark grey locks, a form
+upright, but gracefully so, thin-flanked and broad-shouldered, built, it
+would seem, for the business of war or the chase, a noble eye, of
+chastened pride and undoubted authority, and features handsome and
+striking in their general effect. As schoolboys we crowded to see him
+perform feats of strength and skill in the old Scottish games of golf
+and archery." And from there the tale passes on with life and colour to
+the beginnings of the Royal and Ancient Club; to the activities of the
+early members like Major Murray Belshes, and the interest of William
+the Fourth, whose gift medal is played for at St. Andrews to this day;
+to such fine gentlemen of the old school as the late Lord Moncrieff and
+the Earl of Wemyss; to the professionals also like the Morrises and
+Allan Robertson, and old Willie Park. So on along from the ages past to
+such as Frederick Guthrie Tait, who gave to the modern history of golf
+something that glows as well as the best of the old traditions.
+
+Now it may be said that these traditions and all the others, like them
+and unlike, make the game no better, and that they add nothing in yards
+to our driving from the tee. After a consideration I will not agree
+either that they make the game no better or that they add nothing to the
+driving. The spirits of a romantic history are a continual influence.
+They give a dignity to the game which is felt right through it. Only the
+golfer knows how true this is. Men who look upon it lightly as a pastime
+before they know anything of it, learn upon their initiation, and not
+only learn but feel, that there is all that is mysterious, wonderful,
+and awe-inspiring in the game and its past, a new and deep respect is
+created, and there is no more beginner's lightness and nonsense. Age and
+solemnity, and many ceremonies great and small, have given to golf some
+of the attributes of a religion, and with membership of it there comes
+responsibility. When a new Nonconformist chapel has the same exalting
+influence upon the mind and sentiment of a person of intelligence and
+sympathies as an ancient cathedral with all its tombs and relics, and
+the dim pillars among which echoes seem to float and mingle with spirits
+of the past and the great eternity, or when the dining-room of a flat in
+Knightsbridge inspires and dignifies its company like the banqueting
+hall of some ancient castle, I will perhaps agree that the traditions of
+golf are of no practical effect beyond that of merely preserving the
+game from vandalism and giving it a place above the others. Often when
+reflecting thus one feels that in duty to the game one's policy in
+matters should be "St. Andrews, right or wrong." But yet one could wish
+that these mighty traditions were not at times invoked for improper
+purposes. There is too much free and unintelligible talk about them in
+these modern times. They are wantonly applied to base uses; a man will
+urge the traditions in his favour and against his opponent when he
+attempts some vile procedure. When a crafty person is beaten in
+argument, he cries, "The traditions!" and people who speciously, and
+with insincerity, condemn what we may call the modern advancements of
+the game will murmur that the rubber-cored ball and clubs with steel
+faces are not according to "the traditions." Truly they are not, and
+those old traditions had nothing to do with gutties either; but Duncan
+Forbes would have rejoiced in the possession of a modern driver and
+mashie niblick. It is too often and absurdly assumed that the ancients
+used the tools they had because they were the best conceivable and most
+appropriate, just right in practical quality and proper sentiment. They
+were merely the best that had been discovered up to then. The Stuart
+kings might have had a happier time had they possessed some rubber
+Haskells to coax and lead them on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE UBIQUITY OF THE GAME; WITH AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY OF
+GOLFERS, AND A NOTE UPON THE EFFECT OF ST. ANDREWS SPIRITS.
+
+
+The ubiquity of this game--being the third of the seven wonders--is
+remarkable, for it is played everywhere by everybody. No other sport has
+ever achieved such universal favour, and we may be sure that none will
+ever do so, because, apart from the fascination it exercises upon the
+people of different countries and different races, it is so strong in
+its simplicity--the stick, the ball, the mark, and, with them being
+given, the object plainly suggested. It has already been suggested that,
+in its essentials golf being obvious, it must have been practised from
+the earliest times. Everywhere the simpler emotions of man are the same,
+and so everywhere the game must make the same appeal when it is
+understood. So here, strange as it is still, we have a nearly satisfying
+explanation. What is yet wonderful beyond it is the fact that the
+regulated game with the rules and restrictions that have been agreed
+upon and codified by the high authorities at St. Andrews are everywhere
+accepted, and even in such embellishments it is the same game
+everywhere. Nothing can approach it in this universality. Yet that also
+is nearly explicable.
+
+By a process of continuous thought and deduction from observation the
+people of St. Andrews, past and present, have gained a code of
+regulations which seems most completely to satisfy the requirements of
+the case. It has often been urged against the numerous and lengthy laws
+we have that they suffer from too many niceties and too many
+complications, and that they represent a remarkable evolution of
+man-made intricacy from the one simple governing principle that the ball
+shall be struck by the stick, and that if the object be not achieved by
+the first blow it shall be struck again from the place where it then
+lies. In that simple principle there is all golf, and by it the game
+must surely have been played at the beginning. But it is the disposition
+of man to depart from the most absolute simplicity in the direction of
+what he regards as improvement upon it, and therefore bare principles
+get covered up with fancy wrappings, while again there is in the human
+species an immovable distrust of each other and a tendency towards the
+setting up of safeguards and protections--laws. When this is done in
+different places, and by different peoples, the results also are almost
+certain to be widely different; and with the assistance of time and
+further development two peoples might at length produce two games which,
+originating in the same basic principle, might be in appearance,
+materials, and actions quite dissimilar. Nearly all ball games, indeed,
+must have had much the same original principle. Golf, as we know it, has
+had its integrity preserved, and has established its amazing
+universality because, despite the numerous and lengthy laws, the spirit
+of the game has been so completely preserved in them. Between absolute
+simplicity, the one natural law of golf, as we might call it, as just
+enunciated, and a lengthy, confusing, and sometimes even contradictory
+code there can be little compromise, and perfection and completeness in
+golfing law are impossible, because no two courses are alike, no two
+shots are quite the same, and there can be no end to new situations
+until there is an end of the world and man. It sometimes seems that St.
+Andrews, indefatigable, pursues an impossible finality, and thereby
+makes difficulties for itself. That through ages and generations it has
+produced a code of laws, and defined the principles of a game that is
+accepted all over the world, and causes the same game to be played
+wherever the sun may shine, is not merely an achievement in intelligence
+and discernment, but something that suggests a grand inspiration. These
+are times of change, when old systems of the world are being abandoned
+and new ones being set in their places. It may happen, though it is as
+unlikely as it is undesirable, that St. Andrews itself as a governing
+body will fall; but nothing that ever happens to the game in the future
+can equal the marvel of its foundation and establishment by this
+authority and its associates.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not without good reason that they call golf the world game now. It
+has alighted upon every country, and wherever it has touched it has
+seized. The yellow man likes it; the black man in some places has to be
+kept away from it, because it is found that he grows too fond of it. One
+day when I was golfing at the Country Club, near Boston, they showed me
+a most primitive kind of club that was kept with some other relics in a
+glass case. It had been fashioned from the branch of a tree, and with
+this crude implement a nigger boy in one of the southern states had not
+long previously driven a ball over two hundred yards. Other games are
+for their own countries, like the country's foods, and they would
+neither be suitable nor adaptable elsewhere; but in its nature golf
+will do for all, and it has the same subtle attraction for everybody, so
+that what was once thought to be the "golf craze" of the British people
+only became the craze of the Americans too, then of the French, now of
+the Germans and others, and of really everybody. Its qualities and
+conveniences make it the only possible world game. At present in some
+countries it is confined to a few people of unusual distinction or
+circumstances, but it has been found in old and recent history that,
+following a beginning of this kind, the game in a new land has never
+languished, but that presently it has extended from the pioneers, who
+were probably from abroad, to the native people, and from the upper
+classes to the middle, and then to the lower. In France at the present
+time we see the game being started among the general French, and I have
+news that the statesmen have begun to play; yet a little while since the
+golf of Gaul was carried on by British only.
+
+Recently some of us were looking over the map of the world for odd
+countries that might be golfless, and it appeared then that there were
+but four: one being the Balkan States, considering them in the piece,
+another was Afghanistan, a third was Persia, and, scattering the
+attention over the islands of the earth, one reflected that no golf in
+Iceland had been heard of. But shortly afterwards this brief list of
+lone golfless places was reduced to one. To a little gathering of
+friends one night an adventurous gentleman was describing the
+excitements of a day's rough golf that he had had one time when near to
+Reykiavik, and, if the course was to some extent made for the occasion,
+little enough did that matter then. There were some real holes, and the
+pioneer declared one of them to be the longest and most sporting he had
+ever played; and we knew he had played some good ones. So Iceland came
+into the fold. It was discovered during the recent wars that there was
+golf here and there in those worrying Balkans. Then lo! the land of the
+Afghans was also delivered to the game, and it was the Ameer himself who
+was chiefly responsible, thus emulating the rulers of many other lands.
+He had heard of golf, had seen it, realised it, and had been fascinated.
+Thereupon he had a short course prepared for him in the neighbourhood of
+Kabul, and began to practise with royal assiduity at his driving,
+pitching, and putting. Humble, doubtful, and yet loyal subjects observed
+this done from a respectful distance, and they wondered. After a little
+while they perceived that it was a game, and that the chief of Afghans
+invariably sought with his little ball the holes that were placed upon
+the course. Being practical people, they conceived that they might turn
+the game and their royal master's fondness for it to their advantage,
+and thereupon began to deposit in the holes at night such petitions as
+they had difficulty in getting placed before the royal eyes by any other
+means. They believed that by their new system the Ameer was sure to see
+and read what was intended for him. Yet it proved that he was somewhat
+angered by this manner of approach, and gave orders that all petitions
+found in his golfing holes should be burned unread. The petitioning
+parties had not understood how seriously the game he played was taken,
+nor the deep effect it had upon the mind and the disposition of the
+player, else they would surely have moved craftily and warily with their
+prayers, and then they might have gained imperial favour. Had they seen
+their ruler miss his drive, foozle his second, put his third into the
+pond, slice among the trees with his fifth--even Ameers being penalised
+a stroke for lifting from the water--and eventually reach the putting
+green in nine, three more strokes then being needed, they would have
+been stupid Afghans had they not at a convenient moment taken their
+petitions from the holes, or withheld them if they had not placed them
+there. But when an Ameer hits a good one from the tee, when his ball
+flies fast and straight from his royal brassey (and rulers also laugh
+when a topped ball runs a bunker!), when by enormous luck he lays an
+approach quite close to the hole, and afterwards the putt is truly
+played--why, many an Afghan might pray for the release of a brother from
+prison in Kabul, and the brother, pardoned, might be raised to office in
+the palace, perhaps to be an executioner. Now, if the petition had been
+submitted when the sovereign had done his hole in twelve, the brother
+might have died as arranged, perhaps the petitioner also, and who knows
+but that the neglectful greenkeeper, for not having seen that all holes
+for the day were free of pleas, would not have joined the departures for
+another world. Wandering players may look forward now to some future
+golf in Afghanistan. Have we not heard of the Shah at the game? If it
+cannot be proved, Persia must be left in an Asiatic golfless solitude,
+with the gibe against her that even celestial China has her courses, and
+that they are everywhere save in the Persia where Omar was, and in fine
+worldly philosophy bade us take good pleasures while we may.
+
+Golf's vast ubiquity is illustrated in another case recalled by this
+reference to kings who play. Miss Decima Moore of the theatres has a
+love for roving far which has led her to many raw places of the earth
+for hunting and shooting and adventurous exploration when she has tired
+of the footlights and has longed for Nature with no mask at all. Then,
+being golfer too, she has wandered with her bag of clubs into many
+distant lands, and one morning in London, just back from Central Africa,
+she told me of some strange experiences of a golfing woman. She has
+played the game up in Uganda, and explained the quality of the play of
+King Daudi Chwa, who is a ruler of those parts. Even once before, a
+colonial bishop had informed me of the golf of this dusky king. He had
+had some holes laid out for himself, so I was instructed, and when not
+engaged in duties of his kingly office, which were seemingly not
+onerous, he devoted himself earnestly to the reduction of his handicap
+and to lowering his record for his private course--upon which strangers
+in those parts are always welcome to a game. The bishop said that his
+Majesty drove an excellent ball, played his irons well, and putted with
+a good instinct for line and length, and the actress backed the bishop's
+story. In the region of the Victoria Nyanza there are no Sunningdales to
+be found, but the royal course of nine holes is considered a creditable
+thing. The king, who was lately in England and played a little here,
+will be glad to see any golfers who may go that way, and it may be his
+pleasure to call one of his holes by a name of theirs as, with a good
+African grace, he called one "Decima" when our English lady played it.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These wandering golfers do bring home great stories, and others send
+them. A friend, poor Tom Browne, who is dead, the clever artist in black
+and white, sat with me once at lunch in the Adelphi, and we talked of
+golf in distant lands and many things concerning it, for in the morning
+he was going eastwards to China and Japan. He said he should play as
+much as possible, and he did. While at the table he drew a sketch on a
+piece of paper and passed it to me with a smile. It was a picture of
+himself leaving on a golfing holiday to those very foreign parts, with
+numerous bags of clubs, cases of spare clubs guaranteed for all
+climates, and innumerable large boxes piled up all round him, each one
+labelled "One gross of best balls." Poor Tom always did take his clubs
+with him to foreign lands, and on this occasion he made good, as one
+might say, on that little sketch he drew at lunch by the places he
+played at afterwards, and queer drawings he sent to me of the courses
+and the people at them. He wrote from Tien-Tsin that the one they had
+there was just outside the town and was a flat plain covered with
+Chinese graves, the course being really nothing but one huge graveyard.
+"The Chinamen," he said in his letter, "plant their graves anywhere that
+suits them, and they consist of raised-up mounds which enclose the
+coffins. Off the graves the ball will bounce at all kinds of angles.
+Sometimes after heavy rains the mounds fall to pieces and expose the
+coffins. The golf club can remove any of these graves by buying them at
+four taels a coffin, and when a grave is bought in this way the native
+takes the coffin away, buries it somewhere else, and the grave is then
+flattened down. Fore-caddies are employed on this course. The 'greens'
+consist of baked mud, as is usual in these eastern parts, and are
+generally circular in shape. Chinese caddies do not understand the game
+and think that the foreign devils who play it are surely mad. They
+continually ask the players, 'When will you finish hitting and following
+that ball about?' And they have a local rule at Tien-Tsin that 'a ball
+lying in an open grave may be picked out and dropped without penalty.'"
+
+This graveyard golf, as I know, is not at all peculiar to Tien-Tsin, for
+not long ago I had a letter from a British official at Chiankiang on the
+Yangtse River, in which he told me that they had just begun to play the
+game out there on a course covered with crater-like excrescences, these
+Chinese graves again, and he declared that they made the most excellent
+hazards. It should be added for their credit's sake, golfers being
+considerate people and mindful of others' feelings, that they carefully
+ascertained in this case that no Chinese sentiment was injured by play
+in these cemeteries, if they are to be called by such a name. Again, I
+recall that a little while since the golfers who have a course in the
+Malay peninsula went down to it one morning and found a Chinaman digging
+up the remains of a deceased relative from one of the putting greens,
+intending to remove them to China; because it is a common thing, as I am
+told, when a Chinaman dies abroad, for his people to inter him
+temporarily if they can and give him another burial in his native land
+when opportunity chances. There has been a great move in things in this
+country lately. The Government has changed; the people, according to
+some trade returns that I have seen, are taking extensively to smoking
+English cigarettes and wearing unlovely English clothes. So it is
+inevitable that in their vast multitudes they will one day come into
+golf, for a little advancement towards modern ways often leads to
+strikes and golf. One fears to think that when China has a championship
+her people may compete in such a costume as is favoured by some of the
+oldest and best Scottish professionals (and if asked for a name we shall
+mention good Sandy Herd as a captain of the class), who always wear dark
+trousers and a light-grey jacket to their golf. There must be some
+virtue in this unconventional arrangement of tints; for so many of the
+great are attached to it.
+
+In other parts of Asia there is golf that is peculiar, especially in
+India where it flourishes to the extent of forty or fifty clubs,
+including those of Calcutta and Bombay, which are not merely the oldest
+in India but rank high in seniority among the golf clubs of the world.
+Both were well established before 1860, at which time there were only
+two or three in England, and the game was all but unknown in America.
+Despite the fact that it was born in 1842 and was really an Indian
+offshoot of the famous Royal Blackheath Club, the Royal Bombay remains a
+little primitive in the matter of its course. It is a golf course for
+one part of the day and something else for the remainder, and it is
+perhaps the only course in the world which is dismantled daily. The fact
+is that it is situated on what is called the "maidan," an open space
+near to the European business quarter, and the golfers, having no
+exclusive possession of it, are not allowed to play after half past ten
+in the morning and are required, when they have done, to remove their
+hazards. This obviously necessitates unconventional obstacles, and the
+club has had to resort to movable screens, varying from four to ten feet
+high, which are put up when play begins and taken away again when it is
+finished. Having become accustomed to this sort of thing it ceases to
+annoy, and in Bombay the course is considered good and sporting, and the
+greens are well attended. Then up on the hills at Darjeeling there is
+the highest golf course in the world, for it is situated at an elevation
+of more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea on the
+abandoned cantonment of Seneshal. Scenery often does not count for very
+much with golfers, and the better the golfer the keener he is on the
+game and the less does he care at times about the surroundings of the
+course. Yet, as I am told, it would be a dull poor soul that was not
+moved by the views from the Darjeeling course, with Mounts Everest and
+Kinchinjunga, both nearly thirty thousand feet high, in one direction
+and the plains of Bengal in another. But perhaps the most curious of the
+Indian courses is that of the Royal Western India Club, upon which is an
+idgah, or kind of temple, some thirty feet in height and fifty long,
+with bastions at either end and minarets in the middle. This idgah
+serves the double duty of club-house and a hazard also, for it has to
+be driven over from the tee on the way to the eleventh hole, and many
+are the marks on its walls that were made by balls that were hit too
+low. The course has another peculiarity in that it possesses seventeen
+holes only, no amount of ingenuity being enough to scheme out an
+eighteenth on the land available, so one of them has to be played twice
+over to make up the usual eighteen. This club has its course at Nasik,
+and mention of the idgah reminds one that the Royal Bangkok Club of Siam
+used to have an old and very imposing Siamese temple for a club-house. A
+little while since, when travelling northwards from Marseilles through
+France, I met, in the restaurant car of my P.L.M. train, an officer just
+going home on leave from India, and he assured me that he had found no
+place in the country where there was no golf, and he gave me some good
+examples of the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the golfers there. Thus at
+Multam, for the betterment of their sanded putting "browns" they keep
+them oiled all over, so that the ball runs evenly along them, and at a
+reasonable pace. There is an attendant to each green, who smooths over
+the track that is made by every ball when putted. And my companion told
+me also that in the season at Gulmurg in Kashmir, where they have two
+courses, there is such a crowd of golfers that it is difficult to
+arrange starting times for all of them.
+
+As one would expect, the game is played in Japan, and there is a highly
+flourishing club at Kobe, whose course is on the top of a high mountain
+at Rokkosan. It is a splendidly interesting course when reached, with
+views that can only be second in magnificence to those of Darjeeling;
+but for the occasional visitor the chief pleasure would seem to lie in
+the reaching, rather, perhaps, than in golfing on it afterwards, for the
+players have to 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 at last the tees and bunkers come to view.
+
+Thus it is indicated what great work must have been done by the pioneers
+of golf. They have been fine adventurers and explorers. In their
+strength of purpose, their resourcefulness, their enterprise and daring,
+and in their joy of doing beginnings, they have had some of the burning
+zeal and the quick inspirations of the voyagers of Elizabethan time.
+They too were discovering a world anew. When a golfer reaches a place
+afar where there is no course, his first and most natural impulse is to
+make one. Sir Edgar Vincent, keen player, told me once how he and that
+most distinguished amateur and ex-champion Mr. J. E. Laidlay, had a
+considerable hand in the starting of golf in Egypt, where it is now as
+well established as the Pyramids and Sphinx. Sir Edgar went to Cairo,
+and with him took his clubs, but on arrival found there was no course
+whereon to play, and there was Laidlay disappointed in the same way. So
+they twain obtained shovels and other implements of labour, enlisted the
+service of native helpers, and went out into the desert, making there
+the first golf course of Egypt. But theirs was not the distinction of
+hitting the first golf ball in that ancient land. Long before then a
+Scottish golfing minister did it. There is no better enthusiast than
+these ministers, about whom the best stories are told, as of the worthy
+who was left muttering the Athanasian creed in the lowest depths of
+hell, being the bunker of that name on the old course at St. Andrews,
+and the other who felt he would have to give it up because he played so
+ill and was so much provoked--not give up the game but alas! his
+ministry. And so the Rev. J. H. Tait, of Aberlady, went for a golfing
+holiday to Egypt long before the two gallants who did the spade work
+there, lumbered himself up to the top of the great Pyramid, and then,
+feeling in his pocket, curiously enough discovered an old golf ball
+there. To tee it up, to address it with the handle end of his umbrella,
+and to despatch it earthwards to Egyptian sand with the thwack of an
+honest east-coast swing, was the labour of no more time than would be
+needed to recite a verse of Psalms.
+
+A whole book having been written on Australian golf we may leave it
+unconsidered here. Hardly an island but there is a links upon it. The
+other day, when I had myself but just come back from foreign golfing
+parts, I was mated for the game on a London course to one who told me he
+had only then returned from Fiji, where his last game was at Suva and
+was a foursome in which the local bishop, the attorney-general, the
+chief trader, and himself were engaged. He explained the part that was
+played by _mimosa pudica_, being the "sensitive plant," in the golf of
+the Fiji islanders. When this herb is touched by anything, its leaves
+droop and close upon the object, and, _mimosa pudica_ being all over the
+fairway of the course, balls would be too often hidden and lost but for
+the agile caddies who are sent in front to watch for them. In these days
+one is hearing frequently of travellers' tales like this.
+
+Spain having been captured by the game, as I shall relate in time, there
+is little need to dwell upon the other conquests of golf in Europe. In
+Germany it is fast advancing, and the German Golf Association, which
+publishes a German Golf Year-Book, is an enterprising body. The Kaiser
+has encouraged the game, and has given land for it. At Baden Baden they
+have given the most valuable prizes to professionals; at Oberhof, in the
+Thuringen Forest, there has been made under the guidance of the Duke of
+Saxe-Coburg one of the nicest courses a German need wish to play upon,
+and the girl caddies in pretty uniform are the most picturesque alive.
+In Norway and Sweden, in Denmark, and nearly everywhere there is golf,
+and much of it. It flourishes in Italy, as is to be shown in a later
+chapter. Even in Russia you may golf. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow
+have their clubs and courses, and the Mourino Club, belonging to the
+former, has its place near a small village some dozen miles from the
+capital. The golf is good for Russia, but one does not quickly forget
+the roughness of the road in reaching it. And down at the bottom of that
+side of the map there is golf at Constantinople too! The game is done on
+the _yok maidan_ just outside the city, _yok_ being Persian for "arrow,"
+and _maidan_ the word for "plain," the fact being that it was on this
+land that the sultans and their suites in days gone by were accustomed
+to practise archery, and there are still on the plain many stone pillars
+erected to the memory of great shots that were made. The
+English-speaking colony had some difficulty to gain permission to golf
+on this ground, and, having no exclusive rights in the matter, are
+harassed by many worries. It is used largely for drilling soldiers, and
+is described as being "a favourite resort for Jews on Saturdays, for
+Greeks on Sundays, and for Turks on Fridays." The golfer may need to
+delay his stroke while a long string of camels passes through the
+fairway, and again he may have difficulty in persuading a party of
+Turkish ladies, closely veiled, taking the sun on one of the putting
+greens, to retire therefrom for a little while. Yet the game is much
+enjoyed by the officials of foreign Governments in Constantinople, and
+the turf on the _yok maidan_ is good.
+
+In the rich remembrances of the game there is little that is mournful;
+but one sad moment comes when I read a letter reminding me that golf
+was once played "farthest south," where man does not abide save briefly
+for exploration and adventure, where there is eternal ice and snow.
+Captain Robert Scott, the glorious British hero of the Southern Pole,
+whose friendship I enjoyed, was a golfer too. One of many letters of a
+personal kind I had from him, just before he set out on his last
+magnificent but fatal expedition, was addressed from the Littlestone
+Golf Club. He asked me to send to the ship a certain piece of golfing
+literature, believing that "members of the expedition would read it with
+interest and, I hope, with benefit to their handicaps!" He had taken
+some clubs and balls up there into the Antarctic on his previous
+expedition, when farthest south was reached. On one of the last days he
+spent in London I had some talk with him on different matters, and we
+joked about ways of playing Antarctic shots. We were in his office in
+Victoria Street then. "Good-bye!" he said in parting, "And you must come
+to meet me on my return!" And if none met him coming back, yet we know
+the game he played.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fact that there is golf nearly everywhere on earth will make it
+appear to some minds, reasonably too, that here is a convenient
+diversion for those travellers who like this sort of thing, something
+with which they can fill up time when held up for a while in a distant
+country and being impatient or weary. True, golf is good for that; but
+the unsophisticated who imagine that this is the full relation between
+travel and the game, and that this is the function of the courses
+everywhere, suffer from a poor delusion, which is expensive.
+
+It is a modern necessity to the traveller. In these days we are a people
+of wanderers; railways offer cheap journeys, steamships carry us over
+seas at little cost, hotels are good and comfortable; and why should
+those who like and have the hours not be always roaming and seeing the
+open world? But travelling sometimes has its inconveniences and its
+tedious days. Some wanderers unconsciously exert themselves towards
+loneliness, and they do not love it when they have it. The joy of
+meeting with a friend when one is half a globe away from home! With all
+the travelling that is done in these days there has come a great
+increase of loneliness. Golf has been set to destroy it. There are still
+people who travel and do not golf, but they are fewer daily, and as each
+new travel-golfer is established he wonders how he lived and moved and
+was moderately well contented and satisfied before. His travelling was a
+plain occupation then; now it makes more emotion and thrill, and,
+positively, it is more educative. There was a time, when I was very
+young, when I did not golf as I travelled abroad, partly because there
+were few courses to play upon and no golfers to play with, for it is
+only in recent times that the game has been established in every country
+in the world; and as I look back upon those days it is hard to realise
+that they were in this present life. They should have belonged to some
+other existence, which in the course of time and nature was given up, a
+reincarnation having followed ages after.
+
+The traveller who is golfless has often no friends at the places that he
+visits. Some men and women have good capacity for making them at each
+hotel they stay in; others have not. In any case these acquaintanceships
+are exceedingly thin; the people do not really know each other;
+oftentimes they say not what they think, and they have no common
+interest. This kind of friendship with all its making of artificial
+conversation is poor stuff at times. The golfless wanderer in his
+travelling does one of two things; either he does hardly anything at all
+or he goes to see the sights; and one suspects that much of the peering
+through the gloom of dark cathedrals and the lounging in picture
+galleries is done merely for the killing of time, and for the formal
+recording of places that have been visited and sights that have been
+seen. Some travellers are happiest when they have done their business
+with the churches and the local castles and may leave by the next
+train--one day nearer home and still working well!
+
+The case of the golfing traveller is very different. He has friends in
+every big town in every country, and all await his coming to make
+pleasure and happiness for him. He needs to scheme nothing in advance;
+they are prepared for him always. The automatic management of this real
+society of friends is most marvellously perfect. The wanderer, let us
+say, is advancing towards a new place--one that he knows nothing of.
+From the people about him now he may make inquiry as to which is the
+golf hotel at his destination, for often there is one to which golfers
+most resort, and, with his golf directory containing the names of all
+the golf clubs in the world, and with some particulars and the
+secretaries' addresses, away he goes complete and well prepared. His
+corny hands and his bag of clubs are his passport to every links. By the
+perfect system that we have, every man who is a golfer and a member of a
+golf club is _ipso facto_ a travelling member of nearly every other golf
+club in the world, and is admitted to full playing and other privileges
+without delay on paying the trifling fees of temporary membership,
+sometimes with even less than that. And one golf club seems very much
+like another--just a branch of it; the atmosphere is the same, and the
+men are the same. The stranger reaches his new destination, in England
+or in India, in France or in America; he registers at his hotel; and as
+soon as may be he seeks direction from the manager or the hall porter
+as to the whereabouts of the golf club. There he goes. At once, then, he
+is admitted to the local community of players, and they make much of
+him. They arrange games for him, surround him with the most hospitable
+companions, discover that he and they have many mutual friendships in
+different parts of the world, and linger upon other common ground in
+their memories of the third hole at one and the seventeenth at some
+other place. How the talk goes on! This golfer arrived among the unknown
+at ten in the morning, and at four in the afternoon he is tied to as
+many good friends as man could need. They invite him here and there;
+they take him to their homes; they make much of him. Stranger indeed! A
+thin voice of a petulant cynic may be heard again. "Yes," says he, "but
+in travelling one does not wish to spend all one's time in playing games
+and lounging about golf clubs!" True; and the golfing traveller, though
+he likes to visit courses in other countries, and finds it well to have
+an object always and something good with which to fill the daylight
+hours and keep his health in a well-balanced state, uses the game and
+its people to greater advantage than even that. The golf community of a
+place is always the most active and the most useful. There are the local
+dignitaries, the people of influence and consequence, men who know
+everything about the town, and can do most things. They can open doors
+that are locked, and take you to the most secret places. And so the
+golfing traveller, the first desire for the best of games being
+satisfied, always finds that his new friends wish to help him. Perhaps
+the ambassador is here, and ambassadors are serviceable men. All wise
+people golf a little at the present time. They give their guest letters
+of introduction; they tell him how to go about. They do much more than
+that, for they get out their cars and take him. Places which seem
+unfriendly to others are always friendly to the golfer. There is no
+particular community, no society, no association, no brotherhood in the
+world that is so real in its effectiveness, so thoroughly practical as
+this of golf. A quarter of a million British golfers know that this is
+true, and they know the reason why.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the consideration of this busy world of golf in general it is an
+easy move in thought to the one wee spot of it from which it has to a
+large extent developed, upon which the great scheme continually hangs,
+being the fourth of our seven wonders of golf--ancient St. Andrews. In a
+measure I developed this idea at the beginning of the consideration of
+golf as the world game; but now for a moment regard the capital of golf,
+not as the parliament place where the high statesmen do ponderously
+deliberate and with stern visage that befits their lofty authority most
+solemnly severally and jointly promulgate various laws and ordinances,
+but as the wonder city of the golfing world where one gathers emotions
+from a ghostly past, a city where golf is everything and nothing else is
+anything, where golf is life. This is the aspect of St. Andrews, and the
+only one, in which it is really great. We have much respect for our
+rulers. They are wise men, and we believe that they maintain the spirit
+of the game better than any other body of men could or would. They are
+well born and trained in golf, and the atmosphere of St. Andrews keeps
+them straight in the true golfing way. One who lived in an inland
+manufacturing town or spent his days in the office of a colliery would
+lose his golfing perspective early in middle age. But these excellents
+of Fifeshire play a little, read a little, talk much and deliberate,
+and the social and intellectual atmosphere keeps them strong in their
+golfing sense always. The government of St. Andrews is really one to
+respect and have faith in, but it is not the existing wonder of St.
+Andrews. When you visit the place, such of these rulers as live there do
+not impress you for anything save their good golf, their excellent and
+pleasant manners, their keen wit, their fine sense in matters of
+intellect, their tolerable aestheticism, their shrewd judgment in
+political affairs, their sound advice on financial questions, their fine
+epicurean taste, their kingly cellars, their magnificent hospitality,
+and their charming women. In nothing else that I can think of do they
+excel, and as minor deities, or as a college of cardinals with a captain
+for pope, endowed with powers transmitted from a golfers' heaven, they
+are failures. They are merely human, very good, and excellently
+conservative.
+
+No sort of people make St. Andrews. Only in two circumstances are the
+living humans of the place specially interesting. One is on the occasion
+of the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club, when the cannon on
+the hill is fired, when the new captain plays himself in with ceremony,
+and when all the ancient rites are properly observed until far on in the
+night. The other is in the attitude of the people generally towards this
+game as a thing of life, their seeming feeling that it is nearly the
+beginning and end of all things in this world. This may not be a proper
+view, and it is for something of the kind, but yet long distant from it,
+that the golfers of the south are chided and ridiculed for their
+enthusiasm. That, again, is why the real golfer, heart and soul for the
+game, who, if he would confess it, does let it take a larger part of his
+life sometimes than is very good for him (but who knows what this fellow
+would be doing if not golfing?), feels happy when at St. Andrews, feels
+that at last he has come to his real home. For here the people look upon
+him just as merely right and normal because he is a golfer and nothing
+but a golfer--and a man with a little money to spare. His chief
+peculiarity is not that he stammers or is deaf or is a total abstainer,
+that he is a peer of the realm or mayor of his town or a professor of
+Greek, but that he addresses his ball with the heel of his club or pulls
+a little always. The place is attuned to his feeling of life; it is in
+sympathy with him. It is either a fine day for the game--as most days
+are--or it is no day at all. If we lose our match it does not matter
+what the papers say of politics or Germany; if we win it, the papers
+matter less. The caddies know that you are a golfer and what is your
+handicap; and if you are the real thing that is enough for them. Be not
+a golfer at heart or a namby-pamby person hanging to the game, and their
+contempt is rarely hidden. In the hotels they know what golf means to
+people; the chambermaid on calling you in the morning may tell you the
+direction the wind is blowing, knowing that it matters more than any hot
+water. The men in the club-makers' shops are sorely concerned in your
+domestic difficulties about the length of the shaft of your driver and
+your quarrel with an iron. They know what it is; they are kindly,
+worldly-wise doctors, who are the constant recipients of the confidences
+of poor sufferers. They will try to put you right. All the
+advertisements on the walls are of golf; the notices in the shop windows
+are of golf matches and competitions. The streets are called after golf,
+the taverns have golf names. Yes! golf is in all the air and all the
+earth and all the people of this ancient city with its far-seen spires.
+
+But yet even these things do not give to St. Andrews its ineffable
+charm; if they are all that the wanderer notices he is not the real man
+of the game after all, nor is the splendid quality of the holes on the
+old course and on the new enough either, great as is that quality. The
+wanderer missed St. Andrews if these things were all that were
+discovered. He should understand that here we feel that the Swilcan Burn
+is greater than the Dardanelles; Asia is a trifle when we survey the
+vast extent of the fifth putting green, and little enough do we worry of
+hell when with a fine long shot with the brassey we can carry "the
+devil's kitchen" on the way to the fourteenth green. Here the game is in
+the air; we breathe it, feel it. And the reason why is because the
+spirits are in the air, the spirits of the ancients who at St. Andrews
+laid the foundations of this game, served for its traditions, set it up
+and shaped it to the good service of men, and gave their stamp to every
+inch of this great old course. Do not misunderstand. These men, I do
+believe, were often very ordinary simple human beings; they may have
+been no better than we are. There is a possibility that they were worse.
+They may not have been worthy to be canonised as they have been; but let
+us not inquire upon these matters, for we should not peer too closely at
+the gods. What matters is that in the first place undoubtedly they were
+in at the game before we were, in at it the first of all, were evidently
+uncommonly shrewd people, and for their discovery of golf and their
+presentation of it to us their perpetual dignity was well won. It
+matters also that we have many volumes of good stories about them, and
+none that is in any serious sense against them. On legend and anecdote
+they win well. And, third, whatever they were, we believe them to have
+been these great men, we set them up in our imagination as such, we
+recreate them to our fancies and desires, and they seem somehow to
+respond.
+
+So we imagine, believe, and are well satisfied, and therefore the
+spirits of golf take advantage and seem always to hover in the air of
+the old grey city, brooding upon the links, contented that things are
+moving as well as they are, and that what they began prospers so finely,
+though they wail a little, one would imagine, about what the
+rubber-cored ball has done, and the wraith of old Allan Robertson turns
+round to the ghost of the elder Morris, murmuring, "D'ye mind, Tammas,
+the awfu' trouble that we bodies had wi' ane anither when the gutty ba'
+kem hither to St. Andrews, and I caught ye, ma servin' man, ye ken,
+playin' gowff, as ye wad say, wi' Campbell of Saddell and wi' the gutty,
+and me a maker o' the featheries tae!"
+
+"Aye, I ken weel eno'," croons the shade of Old Tom, "and I'm telling
+ye, Allan, man, that I was fower up on Mr. Campbell at the eleventh
+hole, and I was playin' ma very best, and wi' ma second shot at the
+fourteenth, eh mon alive----"
+
+"Na, na, Tammas, nane o' yer rantin' aboot the shots as ye played at St.
+Andrews, when ye spent the best pairt o' yer time ower theer at
+Prestwick, and ye never could mak' up a scoor from a' yer ither scoors
+as wad come to 56 like mine. Ye ken that, Tom! And dinna forget, ma
+laddie, as I was goin' to tell ye, that when I saw ye wi' that awfu' new
+ba' as wad ruin every bit body o' us I tell't ye straight, ma man, as ye
+must go, and never a bit o' wark did ye do in ma shop again."
+
+And then Tom, good-natured old ghost as he is, and loving his Allan
+still, just answers, "Puir Allan, ye always were a cunnin' body o' a
+man, and a guid man tae, and fun aboot ye a' the time!"
+
+And all this about ghosts and the times they have in the air over St.
+Andrews old links may look like nonsense, but those who do not believe
+it, or do not feel that they believe it by mental adoption, have not
+been to St. Andrews properly, and do not understand her.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The most utterly non-golfing and sceptical person may be convinced in
+another way, by matters not of ghosts and fancies but of laws and
+prisons, that St. Andrews is all golf and is not as other places are.
+There are laws of the town approved by Act of Parliament, by which it is
+made illegal to practise putting on the eighteenth green or to play on
+the course with iron clubs only, the penalty for offences in these
+matters being a fine or imprisonment. Where else is there a place where
+a golfer may get fourteen days for depending for all his long shots on
+his driving iron or his cleek? Clearly, the law is made for the good of
+the precious turf and the teeing grounds of the old course, and that it
+is not law made to be looked and laughed at is proved by the fact that a
+Prime Minister himself was once warned for infringing it. One time when
+at St. Andrews I made an examination of the complete bye-laws in which
+these prohibitions are included. They are embraced in the St. Andrews
+Links Act, which was passed in 1894, and in the Burgh Police Act of
+Scotland, which was made law two years earlier. The regulations for the
+use of the old and new golf courses make up these bye-laws, and they are
+twenty-one in number. Following them are four "general regulations for
+the whole links as defined by Schedule I. of the Links Act," and at the
+finish there is a clause about penalties, wherein it is said that "any
+person who shall contravene any of the foregoing bye-laws shall be
+liable, on conviction, in a penalty not exceeding one pound for each
+offence, and, failing payment, to imprisonment for any period not
+exceeding fourteen days." There it is, the law, and it is that last
+clause with its sting that gives the point to the whole story.
+
+Now let us look at these bye-laws and see how careful we must be when we
+go to the great city of golf, and for what we may be fined a pound or
+lodged in a Fifeshire gaol for a full fortnight, during which our game
+might go to rack and ruin.
+
+In the first place it is set down that "no person shall play cricket,
+football, or any game other than golf upon the golf courses." Surely
+nobody who ever went to St. Andrews would wish to play any other game,
+but here we have it plainly set forth that the golf of St. Andrews will
+bear no rivals, and it must be remembered that the great putting green,
+on which the fifth and thirteenth holes are made, is big enough for
+several cricket pitches, and also that the large flat space along which
+a fairway for the first and eighteenth is situated might be made into
+various football grounds. But what sacrilege! It is well that men may be
+sent to prison if they ever committed it. Then you may be punished by
+law if you do not begin your match at the first teeing ground, but no
+doubt some thousands of people in their time have risked chastisement
+for this offence. "No player shall, in teeing his ball, raise the turf
+of the teeing ground." There is sand there for him who wants it, and he
+must not make his tee in the prehistoric way. After this there are some
+points of etiquette which are made matters of law. Elsewhere, if we
+disregard the etiquette of the game as set forth at the end of the
+rules, we are merely told about it by other people and regarded as very
+badly-mannered golfers, but at St. Andrews the sovereign or fourteen
+days needs to be considered. Thus "no player shall play from the tee
+until the party in front have played their second strokes and are out
+of range, nor play to the putting green till the party in front have
+holed out and moved away." And again, "players looking for a lost ball
+must allow any other match coming up to pass them," and "every caddie,
+and every player unaccompanied by a caddie, shall replace any turf that
+may be accidentally removed by the player's club, and shall press it
+firmly with the foot." Then we may be fined or sent to prison if, when
+practising, we drive a ball off a putting green, that is, within twenty
+yards of a hole, and the eighth clause is that which is known to all
+men--"To prevent destruction of the turf of the golf courses, play or
+practice with iron clubs alone is prohibited." Also, "no practice is
+allowed over the first and eighteenth holes of the Old Course, nor shall
+any practice be allowed over any part of the golf courses so as to
+obstruct or delay players."
+
+Upon all this, it is enacted that when playing with three or more balls
+we must allow those who are only playing two, as in an ordinary single
+match, to pass us on being requested to do so, that we must let a match
+through if we do not play the whole round but cut in somewhere, that we
+must not pierce the ground with any golf club support nor with the flags
+from the holes, nor must we drive towards any person without calling out
+"Fore!" and waiting until he gets out of range. No man when at St.
+Andrews is allowed "to play the short game at the regular golf holes,
+except when engaged in a regular game of golf," and, as said, "no
+practising is allowed on the eighteenth putting green." There are five
+other bye-laws, mostly long, but the only other one which is specially
+interesting is that which is designed to preserve the integrity of the
+Swilcan Burn, which has played its part so thoroughly and drastically at
+times of great competitions. No other golf stream is protected by an
+Act of Parliament in the way that this one is, and its high dignity is
+unimpeachable. We are warned, under the usual penalty of a fine or
+imprisonment, that "no one shall wade in the Swilcan Burn, so far as it
+flows through the Old Course, nor shall any one, except players or
+caddies in search of their ball, do anything to cause its waters to
+become discoloured or muddy." There are surely times when we feel that
+we could not do anything to make the Swilcan Burn appear uglier than it
+does at those times.
+
+Why a distinction should be made between the "bye-laws" and the "general
+regulations," four in number, is not quite clear, but it would appear
+that the penalties of fine and imprisonment may be inflicted if the
+latter are disobeyed as well as the former. If that is so, we begin to
+wonder when we see the warning that "no one shall use profane language
+upon the links to the annoyance of the lieges." Let us then hope, for
+the sake of the law and our respect for it, that the lieges are not
+habitually in the neighbourhood of the putting green when putts are
+being missed that should not be. But it is good to see that there is a
+kind of general warning that "no one shall annoy or interfere with any
+one exercising a legitimate use of the links," which means, of course,
+playing golf. We golfers, according to these bye-laws and the Act of
+Parliament which supports them, may be sent to prison for doing so many
+things that it is excellent to know the common people may be cast there
+also if they meddle with us when we play the game in our own good way,
+and manage by thought and attention to avoid infringement of the many
+cautions which the fathers of St. Andrews have prescribed for our
+welfare and that of their dear old course. The Sheriff of Fife has set
+it down that he "allows and confirms" these bye-laws, the Secretary of
+Scotland has officially approved of them, and the staff employed by the
+Green Committee are authorised to see that they are obeyed, especially
+those about replacing turf, playing with irons only, and practising at
+the first and eighteenth holes. Contemplating these enactments, we
+conclude that St. Andrews is the best and proper place for the
+upbringing of the golfer's son.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE TRAGEDIES OF THE SHORT PUTT, AND A CONTRAST BETWEEN CHILDREN AND
+CHAMPIONS, WITH THE VARIED COUNSEL OF THE WISEST MEN.
+
+
+The case of an earth so well explored by golfing travellers having been
+considered as the third of the wonders of the sphere, and the
+peculiarity of St. Andrews as the fourth, there is a clear suggestion as
+to which is the next or fifth wonder of the series. Inevitably one
+recalls the tearful situation of the mighty hunter in a story which is
+passed in company as fact. He declared he had encountered all the
+manifold perils of the jungle, had tracked the huge elephant to its
+retreat, and had stood eye to eye with the man-eating tiger. It is
+believed that he had done all these things. Then he added, "And never
+once have I trembled until I came to a short putt." For me one of the
+most remarkable things I have seen in golf was at an Open Championship
+meeting at St. Andrews when, watching and musing by the side of the
+eighteenth green, I saw four of the greatest players of this or any
+other time come up to it in the competition one by one and have putts of
+less than eighteen inches at that hole. Three of the four missed! In the
+old days, at all events, when the greens were not quite as they are now,
+but became very glassy and slippery with much wind and constant play
+upon them, I believe there were more short putts missed on the old
+course at St. Andrews than on any other two courses in the world, and
+the task of holing the little stupids on that home green was a most
+tormenting ordeal.
+
+So, with the broken-hearted explorer, and the tragedy of St. Andrews,
+there is pointed to us for the next wonder of the game the missing of
+the short putt. And I do believe, and so must others, that the missing
+of such a short putt as it seems humanly impossible for any man, having
+the control of his limbs and being _compos mentis_, to miss is one of
+the most remarkable features of any game, and one that would be
+completely and absolutely inexplicable did it not in itself offer a most
+splendid illustration of the full effect of strain of mind on physical
+action, of the pressure of great responsibility on an over-anxious man.
+It embraces nearly the whole psychology of golf. The short putt largely
+explains the game, and it is testimony to the soundness of this view,
+and the rightful selection of this as a permanent wonder, that the
+general public would never believe the truth as we know it, that it is
+possible for the greatest players with what is to them, for the time
+being, almost as much as their lives depending on it, to miss putts so
+little that no walking baby properly fed would miss. The general public,
+with its vast stores of common sense, would not believe the fact; it
+would ridicule it and treat the whole suggestion with contempt, and it
+might in a sense be right; but then the general public has not been
+fighting its way round a golf course against another and very truculent
+general public, driving, playing seconds and thirds, getting bunkered
+and recovering, and encountering all manner of difficulties and dangers,
+and then had its fate for the day depending on a short putt at the
+eighteenth green! By psychology of the game, as just mentioned, we mean,
+of course, the way in which the mind and the emotions act and react upon
+the physical system and its capacity, how doubts and fears are
+engendered, and things from not seeming what they are become really
+different, so far as the attitude of the player to them is concerned.
+Thus, as has been well said, a putt of ten inches on the first green is,
+as one might feel, a putt of thirty inches--though still in fact of the
+same length--when that green is not the first but the thirty-seventh,
+and that on which a long-drawn-out match is being finished.
+
+One summer's day, on a course in France, a little party of us were
+discussing the slow and sure methods of certain Americans then in
+Europe--if, really, they were quite so sure as they were slow. Indeed
+they hustled not. The point was put forward by one of us that there is a
+moment in waiting when inspiration and confidence come together, or at
+least come then as well as ever they can or will, and that if the
+hesitation is prolonged beyond that moment, the result is inevitably
+loss of faith, increasing doubt and timidity, and a distorted view of
+the situation arising from fear of fate. Half the difficulties of golf
+are due to the fact that the player has an abundance of time to think
+about what he is engaged to do and how it should be done. In that time
+hopes and fears and many emotions race through his mind, and tasks which
+were originally simple become every moment harder. In no other game has
+the player such ample leisure in which to think, to be careful, to be
+exact, and to decide upon the proper action, and thus responsibility is
+heaped upon him for what he does as it is in no other sport or
+recreation. He is oppressed with a mighty burden. That which he does he
+is entirely responsible for, and it can never be undone. It follows that
+this game has an extensive and peculiar psychology such as is possessed
+by no other. I shall proceed to tell a little story, dramatic in its
+circumstances, abounding in significance. It embraces the meanings and
+mysteries of golf.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The strange case of Sir Archibald Strand is one that caused much excited
+attention among the members of the golf community in general some months
+ago, and it is still discussed in the club-houses. Sir Archibald Strand,
+Bart., is a fair example of the thorough, enthusiastic, middle-aged
+player, who treats golf as something rather more than a game, which is
+as it should be. He is one of tolerably equable temperament, a good
+sportsman, and a man of strong character and physique, who did a long
+term of military service in India. Nowadays he spends an appreciable
+portion of his time in golfing, and a fair part of the remainder in
+contemplating the enduring mysteries and problems of the links. The game
+worries him exceedingly, occasionally it leads him to unhappiness, but,
+on the whole, he feels he likes it. He is a member of several London
+clubs, including Sunningdale, Walton Heath, Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and
+Woking, and of his seaside clubs those he most frequents are the Royal
+St. George's at Sandwich, and Rye. His handicap is 5, and generally he
+is what we consider and call a good reliable 5.
+
+He and his opponent, to whom, as a matter of discretion and confidence,
+we must refer as Mr. A., had just ended their match at Mid-Surrey one
+pleasant day, and Sir Archibald was trying his last putt over again as
+golfers often do. It was a putt of two feet. He had missed it before;
+but now, of course, he rolled the ball in every time. A question arose
+about circumstances altering cases, as they so commonly do in golf, and
+of responsibility weighing heavily on the mind that hesitates; and Sir
+Archibald declared that nobody in good health could be such a fool as to
+miss a two-feet putt like that, if he really examined the line
+thoroughly, and took the proper pains. Just then the open champion of
+the period was passing by the green, and they called him up and asked
+his views upon the missing of two-feet putts. Taylor denied that a man
+was a fool for missing them. He mentioned the psychology of the
+business, and very forcibly argued that a two-feet putt was a very
+difficult thing, that the more important it was the more difficult it
+became, and that the longer one thought about it the more impossible did
+it seem to hole it. "Ah!" said he, with the solemn countenance he
+assumes when discussing the terrors of this game, and the deep emphasis
+he makes when he admits the difficulties it creates for him, "Ah!" he
+murmured, "if I had never missed any putts of one foot, let alone the
+putts of two! I tell you, sir, the two-feet putt, when it has to be
+done--mind you when it has got to be done--is one of the most difficult
+things in the world to do, and never mind the fact that your babies can
+do it all the time! Take that from me, sir!" This was a touch of the
+real Taylor, the true philosopher, one who knows the game.
+
+Mr. A., who is sometimes aggressive in manner, brought the matter in
+discussion to a pretty point at once. "Look here, Strand," said he, "I
+will tell you what I will do. I will place this ball here, so, exactly
+two feet from the hole, and I will give you a fortnight, but not less
+than a fortnight, to hole that putt. You are not to practise it here at
+this hole on this green in the meantime; but you may place the ball in
+position if you like, and look at it. And a fortnight to-day, at ten
+o'clock in the morning, you must make the putt, and I will bet you
+fourteen guineas, being a guinea a day for waiting, that you do not hole
+it. We will have the position of the hole properly marked, so that a
+fortnight hence it shall be in the same place."
+
+The champion said he would tell Lees, the greenkeeper, and that should
+be done. Strand, with a laugh, accepted the wager, and the matter was
+settled.
+
+The events that followed were curious. In the club-house there was then
+little disposition to attend to the accounts of the proceedings that
+were furnished by both parties. The men who had finished rounds were too
+much occupied with their own troubles or joys.
+
+At his club in town that evening, Sir Archibald, over dinner, related
+the circumstances of the wager to a few friends, with an appearance of
+considerable satisfaction with himself, and seemed a little surprised
+that the other members of the party did not at once approve of his
+proceeding as sound and businesslike.
+
+"Of course, you know, Strand, my good man," said Mr. Ezekiel Martin, a
+successful stockbroker, "these putts are missed sometimes, and I don't
+suppose it makes it any easier for you by waiting a fortnight. It's like
+carrying over in the House till one is a very tired bull."
+
+"Nonsense!" exclaimed Sir Archibald, "I could go out now and hole that
+putt nineteen times out of twenty in the dark!"
+
+"I believe you could," answered Martin, "but doing it in the dark, when
+you cannot see the hole and realise all the imaginary difficulties, is
+very different from doing it in broad daylight; and putting now, on the
+spur of the moment, as it were, is very different from putting when you
+have a whole fortnight to think about what you are going to do."
+
+"I don't see it," replied Sir Archibald, yet he began to feel a little
+uneasy. On returning home that night, instead of going to bed at once he
+went into his study, laid a tumbler on its side on the carpet, and
+putted from a measured two feet for about half an hour. He holed most
+of them, and tumbled into bed feeling that Martin had been "pulling his
+leg," as people say. In the morning he engaged a gardener to smooth down
+a piece of his lawn, planting in a little putting-green turf, and he had
+a hole made in it, and a circle with two feet radius drawn round the
+hole, so that he could putt from every point. When this work was done,
+he spent an hour in practising there, and succeeded well. He only missed
+about one in ten. He tried seven different putters, with approximately
+equal results. In the afternoon he went down to Mid-Surrey, played a
+match, and lost it by missing a short putt at the home hole. After tea,
+he went out on to the eighteenth green, found the spot where the hole
+was the day before, examined it carefully, and saw that there were
+slight differences in the texture of the grass round about, and that
+there was a little depression to the left side. He had not noticed this
+before. However, said he to himself, it would be easy to make allowances
+for these things, but he began now to doubt whether thirteen days ahead
+he would use his wry-necked putting cleek or bolt the putt with an
+aluminium putter. Where there are troubles of that kind it is often
+better to make short work of the putt by the bolting way, and have an
+end of it. At home that evening he did more putting practice on the
+carpet, and did not hole them quite so well. Lady Strand, who
+understands her husband thoroughly, and is the sweetest, gentlest
+sympathiser, coaxed him to telling her the trouble, for she saw that one
+existed. With perfect wisdom she suggested that he should wipe the
+fourteen guineas from the current account as already lost, and face the
+task as one who had all to gain and nothing to lose. Of course, her
+husband said, it was not the money, but the frightful jackass he would
+look if he missed the putt.
+
+He went to his club in town the next day instead of going to golf, and
+took with him a book containing a chapter on putting, by Willie Park. He
+stretched himself out on a Chesterfield in a corner of the library, and
+gazed at two spots on the carpet which he had measured as being two feet
+from each other. Eventually, he decided that that was not good for him,
+since equal distances in furnished rooms, as is well known, look longer
+than they look outside. He lunched with a few friends, and brought up
+the subject again.
+
+"Give him the money and have done with it, Strand. You are sure to
+lose!" said the brutish Martin.
+
+"I wish I had not to wait for a fortnight," murmured Strand.
+
+"Ah! He knew! The other man knew!" rejoined Martin. "He knows the game
+of golf! What I cannot understand is why he did not give you a year and
+make it 365 guineas. You would have sold out in six weeks at £200!"
+
+Sir Archibald wrote a letter to Mr. A. that evening, intimating that he
+would probably have to leave town the week after the next. He hinted
+that it might be convenient if they got their wager out of the way
+beforehand, and if he putted a week from then. Mr. A. replied that he
+was sorry it would not be convenient for him to attend then, and that
+the signed terms of the contract had better be abided by.
+
+Sir Archibald bought two new putters on the following day, and in the
+afternoon he had Taylor out for an hour, and they went practising on the
+putting lawn just outside the garden gate. Sir Archibald was putting
+very well then; but he insisted that it would be a good thing to change
+the ball he was using, which was rather lively. After he had done with
+Taylor, he went to look at the place on the eighteenth green where he
+would have to putt, and it seemed that the coarse grass had fattened up
+considerably with the rain that had fallen, and that the sand below it
+was distinctly gritty. It began to seem that he would have to run the
+ball in at the right side of the hole. He asked Lees some questions
+about the grasses on that green, and was sorry he could not take a
+little Mid-Surrey turf home with him. He was feeling a little tired when
+he reached his home that night, and as it was Thursday he suggested to
+Lady Strand that they should go to Folkestone for the week-end, and not
+bother at all about golf, which they did accordingly. He found it
+delightful to linger on the leas and not be worried with the game.
+
+This kind of thing continued and became worse and worse again during the
+days that followed. There was practice, thought, and purchase
+continually, and unfortunately the proportion of missed putts at two
+feet, both on the carpet, on the practice lawn, and on the greens at
+Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and Woking, began to increase. At putts of
+three feet, four, and five, Sir Archibald was marvellous, and, of
+course, he never missed the very little ones; but the two-feet putts
+bothered him all the time. He attributed it to his liver; and he was
+certainly looking worn. Matters were not improved by such inconsiderate
+remarks as were made by Martin, Evans, and others, whenever he had a
+two-feet putt to do, such as "Now, Strand, that's just your distance!"
+It was only a joke; but in the circumstances it was not perhaps in good
+taste.
+
+On the evening of the twelfth day Strand, after deliberation, wrote a
+letter to A. in which he said he feared he would not be able to go down
+to the course at the appointed time, and intimated that, according to
+the terms of the wager, he would hand over the fourteen guineas to him
+when next they met. Before posting this letter he went and did a little
+practice in the dusk on the lawn outside the house. He seemed to get
+them down with some confidence on this occasion, and Lady S., watching
+him, called out cheerily, "Silly boy! as if you could really miss! Now
+what shall I buy with the fourteen guineas?"
+
+So Strand tore up the letter and went to bed for rest.
+
+On the night before the appointed day he slept badly. He was putting in
+his mind until three o'clock in the morning. Then he rose, went in his
+pyjamas into the study, made a line on the top of his aluminium putter
+indicating the striking point, and went back to bed, but did not sleep.
+For some time he tried an imaginary humming of the "Jewel Song" from
+_Faust_, and repeated a few lines from Scott's "Lady of the Lake"--old
+dodges of his for assisting distraction and sleep--but they did not
+serve, nor did a fixed vision of millions of balls falling in an endless
+stream from the mouth of a pump and disappearing instantly through a
+golf hole in the ground.
+
+At five-thirty he rose again and took his bath. He hesitated as to what
+golfing suit he should wear. Finally, for the sake of complete ease, and
+that there should be nothing to attract his eye from the ball, he put on
+some dark-blue flannels.
+
+He looked at his breakfast, pecked at a sole, and at nine-fifteen,
+feeling distinctly unwell, he took a taxi for the course. He had one
+great consolation upholding him. At five minutes past ten it would all
+be over. He felt that he knew how glad a condemned criminal must be that
+at five minutes past eight on a certain morning--or a minute or two
+earlier with a little luck--a black flag would be hoisted on the prison
+pole.
+
+At seven minutes to ten he drank a large brandy and soda and went out to
+the eighteenth green. Mr. A. and a few others were there to see the
+business properly carried out. Taylor placed the ball exactly two feet
+from the hole, which was cut in the proper place. He had his watch in
+his hand.
+
+Sir Archibald bent down and examined the putt with great care. He
+essayed to pick up what seemed to be a "loose impediment" on his line,
+but saw that it was not loose. The putt seemed very difficult now, and
+he wished he had brought his plain putting cleek out with him, but it
+was too late.
+
+At ten o'clock exactly, Taylor said, "Now, Sir Archibald, will you
+kindly putt?"
+
+Sir Archibald Strand looked like a man who had been hunted down. He made
+one swift glance around him, but saw no escape, so he pulled himself
+together, smiled a little sadly, and said to himself, "Don't be a fool,
+Archie!" Then he faced the putter to the ball; the club was trembling
+slightly. He swung it back much too far, checked it in the return swing,
+and came on to the ball in a nervous, stupid sort of way, doing little
+more than touch it. The ball took a line to the right of the hole, and
+did not run more than fourteen inches.
+
+You may have thought that Sir Archibald used unfortunate words and was
+dismayed. He did not. A look of established happiness and placid
+contentment spread upon his countenance, as a streak of sunlight might
+flash across a plain. "Ha!" he sighed in relief. He took from his pocket
+a cheque for fourteen guineas already made out, and handed it to Mr. A.,
+and then joyfully exclaimed: "Thank heaven, it is finished! Now, my
+friends, we will honour this unusual occasion in a suitable manner at
+your convenience, and this afternoon I leave for Sandwich for a week of
+golf. And no letters are being forwarded."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us now enter consideration of this matter in a proper frame of mind,
+seriously and not looking contemptuously upon the problem of holing
+even the very shortest of putts as no problem at all after the affected
+manner of the inexperienced and uninformed general public. Let us
+approach it cautiously and in an analytical spirit. We should take the
+evidence of expert witnesses upon happenings in their careers, in our
+endeavour to discover the real truth. We have already remarked upon the
+case of the hunter who shot tigers and cringed at putts, and of the
+great champions who all missed them on the eighteenth green at St.
+Andrews, when they were playing for nothing less than the championship.
+We have also contemplated the circumstances of the distressed baronet
+who was given a fortnight in which to hole a two-feet putt, suffered
+intolerable agonies during the period, and was only restored to
+happiness when he had failed at the stroke. Now let us pay regard to the
+experience of a little child only six years old, who was completely
+successful at many putts in succession, at distances of from one to six
+feet, all the most perilous situations. This remarkable demonstration
+was witnessed by the proud parents, by a great professional, and by
+myself.
+
+The child is a boy, and not, as has been stated, a winsome little girl.
+There is, if I may say it without offence, nothing remarkable about his
+parents. They are excellent kindly-mannered people, of tolerable
+middle-class education, simple in their manner of life, and of no
+pronounced tastes in any direction. The father is in a large timber
+business in the Midlands, and has probably an income of about six
+hundred pounds a year. His handicap is 14. He is not a very keen golfer,
+and seems to spend a fair amount of his time in his garden. A total
+abstainer, he smokes little, and has no strong tastes in art and
+literature; but he once told me that in addition to much Scott and a
+sufficiency of Dickens he had read one of my books on golf. That is the
+father. As to the mother, she is just one who might be called in the
+north a nice little body. She is a thoroughly good housewife,
+domesticated, affectionate, and if she does not play golf she
+sympathises with it. These are people who are tolerably satisfied with
+their state. They live in a pleasant house, employ two maidservants, and
+have no motor-car. Here, surely, is nothing to suggest the creation of
+genius. Yet they are the parents of this remarkable child who did, with
+no hesitation, with confidence, certainty, and frequency, what the
+mighty hunter, the champions, the bold but misguided baronet, and you
+and I have failed to accomplish.
+
+There is a man of wit and wisdom, Andrew Kirkaldy, who, when you inquire
+of him what is the most difficult thing in golf, responds with no
+hesitation that it is to hole "a wee bit divvle of a putt that long!"
+and so saying he will hold his hands four feet apart. Occasionally he
+may vary the phraseology, not to its advantage, but the meaning and
+effect remain the same. Andrew is solid on four feet. But authorities
+differ a little in this matter of measurement. Some will reduce the
+distance to thirty inches; others have it that the yard putt is the most
+trying; I have heard eighteen inches put forward. But it all amounts to
+much the same thing, that what looks ridiculously easy is very, very
+difficult. Now this tender little child, who knew nothing of the fears
+and dangers of this awful game, placed the ball at a distance of two
+feet from the hole on a curly and slippery green, and with a sublime
+aplomb hit it straight to the middle of the hole--the first putt of his
+life and a good one. Then he putted from a yard and holed it again, then
+from Kirkaldy's distance and played the stroke just as surely and
+successfully, and then repeated them many times, never faltering, never
+failing. We who watched were a trifle sad, and perhaps ashamed. We knew
+that with all our thought and skill and golfing learning, all our
+strength and manhood, we could not do the same when at our games, and
+that, the more we needed to do it by the importance of the golf that was
+being played, the more difficult it was. Our selfish consolation was
+that in time the little child would grow up and then he would not be
+able to hole those putts, for then he would know that it was a difficult
+thing to do, and would be embarrassed and defeated accordingly. For it
+is the golfer's consciousness of imaginary difficulties that makes him
+such a strange coward when this putting business is being done. He knows
+that really the putting is easy, but he knows also that he must not
+miss, that an inch lost here is as much of a loss as two hundred yards
+in the driving--and he fears his fate. It is consciousness of the
+stupidity of missing, nerves, fears, imagination, that make this missing
+of short putts by the cleverest players, champions as much as any
+others, the most remarkable thing that happens constantly in any game.
+There is nothing like it. If it were not so easy, if there were good
+excuse for failure, those putts would not be missed so frequently. In
+putting, said Sir Walter Simpson, there is much to think about and much
+more not to be thought of. "When a putter," he reflected, "is waiting
+his turn to hole out a putt of one or two feet in length, on which the
+match hangs at the last hole, it is of vital importance that he think of
+nothing. At this supreme moment he ought studiously to fill his mind
+with vacancy. He must not even allow himself the consolations of
+religion. He must not prepare himself to accept the gloomy face of his
+partner and the derisive delight of his adversaries with Christian
+resignation should he miss. He must not think that it is a putt he would
+not dream of missing at the beginning of the match, or, worse still,
+that he missed one like it in the middle. He ought to wait, calm and
+stupid, till it is his turn to play, wave back the inevitable boy who is
+sure to be standing behind his arm, and putt as I have told him
+how--neither with undue haste nor with exaggerated care. When the ball
+is down, and the putter handed to the caddy, it is not well to say, 'I
+couldn't have missed it.' Silence is best. The pallid cheek and
+trembling lip belie such braggadocio."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The truth is that the man who golfs will unceasingly think of the things
+he should not think of, and that is what makes this easy putting so
+difficult, and it explains why the innocent child, unthinking, finds the
+business as simple and pleasant as swinging under the boughs of a tree
+on a sunny day in June. While there is one quite easy way of doing
+nearly every putt, there are perhaps a dozen more or less difficult ways
+of missing it, and it is these that are uppermost in the golfer's mind
+when the time of his trial comes, and so once more is vice triumphant
+while angels are depressed. There is the hole, a pit that is deep and
+wide, four and a quarter inches in diameter, and there is the little
+ball, only an inch and a half through the middle, and the intervening
+space between the two is smooth and even. It would seem to be the
+easiest thing in theory and practice to knock the ball into the large
+hole; but how very small does the hole then appear to be and how much
+too big for it is the ball! But the golfer knows that he should hole
+that putt, and that if he fails he will never, never have the chance
+again. Should he putt and miss the act is irrevocable; the stroke and
+the hole, or the half of it, are lost, and nothing that can happen
+afterwards can remove that loss. Should he at the beginning of the play
+to a hole make a faulty drive, or should his approach play be very
+inaccurate, he knows that he may atone for these mistakes by special
+cleverness displayed in subsequent strokes, and with the buoyant hope
+that constantly characterises him he thinks he will. But the hope seems
+often to desert him at the end; confidence lapses. The short putt is the
+very last stroke in the play to that hole, and if it is missed there is
+no further opportunity for recovery. In this way it does seem sometimes
+that there is a little of the awful, the eternal, the infinite about
+that putt. The player is stricken with fear and awe. He knows it is an
+easy thing to do in the one proper way of doing it, but raging through
+his mind are hideous pictures of a dozen ways of missing. Once upon a
+time I put the question to a number of the greatest players of the age
+as to what were their thoughts, if any, when they came to making one of
+these little putts on which championships or other great affairs almost
+entirely depended, and almost invariably their answer was that at the
+last supreme moment a thought came into their minds and was expressed to
+themselves in these words: "What a fool I shall look if I miss this
+putt!" Those words exactly did Willie Park, the younger, say quietly to
+himself just as he was about to make the last short putt of a round at
+Musselburgh, which would or would not give him a tie for the
+championship with Andrew Kirkaldy. He did not say that if he missed the
+putt he would lose the championship. He said he would look a fool.
+
+The other day in a quiet corner of London, away from the game but, as it
+happened, not from the thought of it, I had Harry Vardon with me engaged
+in some serious talk in a broad and general way upon golfing men and
+things. Ten years ago, when we were doing some kind of collaboration in
+the production of a new book, he said to me very impressively and as one
+who wonders exceedingly, "It is a funny game; let us impress that upon
+them all, it is a very funny game," and now, having played perhaps five
+thousand more rounds and won another Open Championship, he went forward
+to the admission, "It is an awful game." He meant it, and one reason why
+we like our Harry Vardon is because he too has always been awe-stricken
+by this so-called game, and because there is no other man in golf who
+sympathises better with the trials and tortures of the moderate player.
+On this morning of spring he was telling me of another new and great
+discovery he had made in putting methods, and in giving to me an account
+of his pains, his sufferings in missing all the short putts he had
+failed at in recent times--how dearly have they cost him!--he said it
+was the two-feet putt that frightened him most of all, and declared
+solemnly and seriously that he would rather have a three-yarder than
+such a putt, and that he would hole the former oftener than the latter.
+He said the two-feet putts frighten him, that as soon as he settles
+himself down to the business of putting in such a case the hole seems to
+become less and less. "I am overcome," says he, "with the idea that in a
+moment it will be gone altogether. Then I am in a state of panic, and I
+snatch at my putter and hit the ball quickly so that with a little luck
+it may reach the hole before it goes away altogether and there is
+nothing to putt at. When I have missed I see that the hole is there, and
+as big as ever or bigger!" Vardon once tried putting left-handed, a
+doctor having advised him to do so, and he found that the idea worked
+splendidly, but he did not like the look of it. He believes after all
+his sorrows that one of the greatest and best secrets of good putting is
+to keep more absolutely still than do most golfers, who seem to think
+it matters less in putting when it matters so much more.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now the golfer in his wisdom, ingenuity, and resource has tried every
+way he can think of to solve this problem of nerves and doubts by
+mechanical and other means. Those who would be successful in
+competitions have retired to bed at nine o'clock in the evening for a
+month, and some of them have sipped from bottles of tonics hoping that
+physic would serve to give them strong nerve, steady hands and courage,
+but such methods have not availed. For no part of this or any other game
+have so many different kinds of instruments been invented, though the
+little child could do the putts with the head of a walking-stick or a
+common poker. Scarcely a week goes by in the season but some new kind of
+putter is introduced to the expectant multitude of harassed players, and
+now and then a thrill runs through the world as they receive a clear
+assurance that at last some special device has been discovered which
+will make their putting ever afterwards easy and certain. There is a
+thrill as if a secret of long life had been found. But the chill of
+disappointment follows quickly. Golfers have now tried all things known,
+and more short putts are missed than ever. Hundreds of different kinds
+of putters have been invented. They have been made with very thin
+blades, and with thick slabs of metal or other substance instead of mere
+blades. They have been made like spades, like knives, like hammers, and
+like croquet mallets. They have even been made like putters. They have
+been made of wood, iron, aluminium, brass, gun-metal, silver, bone, and
+glass. Here in my room I have the sad gift of the creator of a forlorn
+and foolish hope. It is a so-called putter made in the shape of a roller
+on ball bearings which is meant to be wheeled along the green up to the
+ball. Like some others it was illegal according to the rules. To such
+extravagances of fancy the desperate golfers have been led in their
+desire to succeed in this putting that the authorities have had to step
+in for the defence of the dignity of the game to declare a limit to the
+scope of invention in this matter. And yet I once knew a man who for a
+long period did some of the best putting that you would ever fear to
+play against with a little block of wood that had once served to keep
+the door of his study ajar, to which had been attached a stick that was
+made from a broom handle. This improvised putter was a freak of his
+fancy at a time when he thought there might be some virtue in a return
+to prime simplicity. Then Mr. James Robb, who has won the Amateur
+Championship once and been in the final on two other occasions, has
+putted all his life with a cleek that his sister won in a penny raffle
+when he was a boy and gave to him. Likewise Mr. John Laidlay has also
+putted uninterruptedly since he was a boy with a cleek that is now so
+thin with much cleaning that his friends tell him he may soon be able to
+shave himself with it. But these are the grand exceptions after all.
+Such fine settlement and constancy are unknown to the average player. It
+was but the other day that I learned that a friend of mine, one most
+distinguished in the game and of the very highest skill, had used
+fifteen different putters on the day of an important competition--three
+in the morning's play, nine others in noonday practice, and three quite
+fresh ones in the afternoon game. The same good man carried a choice
+assortment of his own putters to a recent amateur championship meeting,
+but at the beginning of the tournament made love to one of mine,
+borrowed it, and used it until he was beaten--not a long way from the
+end of the competition. Sometimes it seems that what is rudest in
+design, almost savage, is now best liked when in our frenzy we have
+ransacked art, science, and all imagination in search of the putter with
+which we can putt as we would. There is the spirit of reaction; we would
+return to the primitive. Putters that look as if they might be for
+dolls, some of those stumpy little things made of iron on a miniature
+aluminium-putter model, which some of the great champions have been
+using, have hardly become popular. The crude and the bizarre, suggestive
+of inspiration, please well. I shall not forget Jean Gassiat, good
+golfer of France, coming up to me one championship day at Hoylake,
+holding forward in his right hand, and with its head in the air, what
+was evidently meant for a golf club, but which was as much unlike one as
+anything we had ever seen. On the face of the player was spread the grin
+of pleasure; wordlessly he suggested that at last he had found it, the
+strangest, the most wonderful. In principle this new club, as it has to
+be called for courtesy, is akin to the affair of the door-stopper and
+the broomstick. It consists of a plain flat rectangular piece of wood
+about four inches long, two inches wide, and three-quarters of an inch
+deep, and its two-inch nose is cut quite square, while for a couple of
+inches at the end of the shaft the grip is thickened to twice its usual
+size. It is weighted and balanced by large and small lead bullets in the
+sole. It is possible to frame a good argument in favour of a putter made
+of anything; nothing is without some advantage. It could be said for a
+ginger-beer bottle that it would insist on the ball being most truly hit
+from the middle of the vessel as the ball ought to be hit, and, given
+notice, one could prepare a statement of claim on behalf of an old boot
+seeking to be raised to the putterage. So there are good things to be
+said for this putter from France, and one of the best is that after
+smiling upon it Jean Gassiat began to wonder, then thought,
+experimented, and fell in love with this putter completely. Some weeks
+later I saw him doing those marvels on the green as are only done when
+man and putter have become thoroughly joined together, and Gassiat has
+always to be taken seriously in these matters, for, like Massy, he is a
+Basque, and, like the old champion, he is one of the most beautiful
+putters, with an instinct for holing. This most remarkable invention,
+without desiring its extinction in the least, one would say, surely
+departs a whole world of fancy farther from the traditional idea of what
+a golf club should be than the poor Schenectady of the Americans which
+St. Andrews proscribed. It was not the idea of Gassiat, nor of any other
+than the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, a French sportsman of
+thoroughness and a very keen golfer. Seeing what Gassiat was doing,
+James Sherlock obtained one of these barbaric tools, and at this the
+public came in.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every thinkable variety of putting method has been adopted. Bodies,
+hands, feet have been placed in all positions, and the stroke has been
+made in every conceivable way. Are there any two players who do it just
+the same, or have the same advice to give? For a violent contrast take
+two of the most able amateurs of the time, both of them long since
+distinguished in the foremost competitions, Mr. John Low and Mr. H. S.
+Colt. The former favours the wooden putter, and he has one of that kind
+to which he is keenly attached, but he putts with all sorts of things as
+the spirit moves him on consideration of special circumstances. He was
+one of the early members of the thoughtful school of golf which has made
+such a strong advance in recent times. Nearly always, however, you will
+find him standing nearly upright when doing his putting, grasping a club
+with a tolerably long shaft somewhere quite near to the top of the
+handle. This erect attitude is that which our fore-fathers of the
+traditions mostly favoured. Those splendid gentlemen, as we have agreed,
+were fine golfers who conducted their game nobly, but it has always
+seemed to me that they were an unimaginative lot. It never appears to
+have occurred to them that because the club has a handle at the top was
+no reason why they should grasp it up there instead of nearly at the
+opposite end, as do a large body of the most enterprising and inquiring
+amateurs these days. Of this advanced party the eminent architect is a
+shining example, for he holds his putting cleek so far down, so near to
+the ironwork, that the shaft seems useless, and in addition to this he
+defies all teaching in putting by planting the heel of the club down on
+the green and holding the hands so low that the toe of the putter is
+cocked up, and with this toe he hits the ball, and, as it looks, he tops
+it. But that putting of his is too much for most of the men who have to
+play against it. When those who do not understand see men putting in
+this way, or something like it, they say to themselves, and perhaps to
+others, that they cannot see why the men do not have the unused part of
+the shaft cut off so that it may not be in the way. But there they show
+their deficiencies of knowledge, though one is not sure that all the men
+who putt with a low grip quite know why they do so. They only know that
+the method suits them, but the truth is often that in these cases the
+balancing piece of the shaft above the hands acts as a steadier for the
+piece below. A few students have carried this idea a point further by
+having a piece of lead attached to the top of the handle to increase the
+weight and the balancing influence of that part. Mr. Hammond Chambers is
+one of them. The amateurs are the most original and peculiar in their
+putting methods. For the most part the professionals, although adopting
+widely different stances, hold themselves fairly well up when doing
+their work on the green, and putt with an easy following-through stroke
+as is recommended by the old masters. Strange that we should realise
+that quite the most impressive, stylish, and beautiful putter of the
+erect school is M'Dermott, the brilliant young American champion, who
+stands straight up with his legs and heels touching, grips his putter at
+the very end, and moving nothing but his club and hands, makes the most
+delightfully smooth swing. The low-grip method is not at all conducive
+to the gentle swinging, following-through putt, but encourages a sharp
+little tap.
+
+All the old original philosophy and instruction in putting can be
+summarised in a very few words, but hundreds of thousands would be
+needed for discussion of the variations, most of which have been used
+successfully at some time. The majority of advisers make a point of it
+that the ball must be hit truly, but they would not all be agreed on
+what that "truly" was except that it was hitting it as they meant to do.
+What most of them have in mind is that there is on the face of the
+putter a proper hitting point, from which the ball will run more
+accurately and with less disposition to slide off the right line than
+when hit with any other part, that being the point of balance or the
+sweet spot which every iron club possesses, and this point should be
+brought to the ball by an even swing from the back, and the swing should
+be continued after impact by the steady smooth advance of the head of
+the club along the line that it was making at the moment of striking.
+Absolute steadiness of the body is quite essential, and lack of it--just
+the most trifling and almost undiscernible lack--is responsible for more
+putting failures than almost any other cause. Most of those who tell us
+what to do in golf advise that we should keep the arms and forearms
+quite still also, and putt entirely from the wrist. And yet even these
+canons, as they are considered, are defied by large bodies of players.
+There are thousands of golfers who putt from the toes of their clubs,
+and believe in the method. They say they can feel the ball better and
+direct it more surely.
+
+I quote again one of the first preceptors, Sir Walter Simpson, because I
+think in most matters of feeling and practice he stands so well for the
+old solid school of golf that has nearly died away. He insists on the
+wooden putter, to begin with, and maintains that no good thing upon the
+green can come out of iron, but therein he was mistaken and time has
+cried him down. And then he writes: "I have just said there are, at
+most, two or three attitudes in which good putting is possible. We are
+nowadays inclined to be more dogmatic, and to assert that there is but
+one. The player must stand open, half facing the hole, the weight on the
+right leg, the right arm close to the side, the ball nearly opposite the
+right foot. To putt standing square, the arms reached out, is as
+difficult as to write without laying a finger on the desk." Had he lived
+on to these more modern days he would not have been nearly so dogmatic
+as that. Some of the very best putters do not play with the open stance,
+but putt entirely from the left leg, that leg thrown forward and in
+front and bearing all the weight, the right being merely hanging on
+behind. Then they have the ball right opposite the left toe, and they
+putt with a sense of strain which they believe in such circumstances is
+conducive to delicacy. Tens of thousands of others could not putt in
+this way, but those who can are very successful, and this is just
+another indication of the danger of dogma in golf. As to the right arm
+at the side, it may be said that there is now a fast increasing practice
+on the part of those who bend down somewhat to their putting to rest the
+right elbow or forearm on the right knee. J. H. Taylor experimented with
+this idea on the very eve of the 1913 championship at Hoylake, his
+putting for some time having been bad. He adopted it, won the
+championship, and gave the new way of putting all the credit.
+
+Now see how high and deeply thinking authorities can differ about the
+ways and means of doing this thing that the little child does so
+thoroughly and well. "A great secret of steady putting is to make a
+point of always 'sclaffing' along the ground," said the baronet. "The
+best putters do this, although it is not evident to an onlooker, the
+noise of the scrape being inaudible. To be sure of the exact spot on the
+putter face which is invariably to come in contact with the ball, is, of
+course, essential to the acquirement of accuracy. If you play to hit
+clean, your putter must pass above the ground at varying heights, as it
+is impossible to note how much air there is between it and the turf. In
+the other way you feel your road. But the greatest gain from treating
+putting as a sclaffing process is the less delicate manipulation
+required when short putts are in question. At a foot and a half from the
+hole the clean putter often fails, from incapacity to graduate inches of
+weakness, whilst the sclaffer succeeds because he is dealing with
+coarser weight sensitiveness."
+
+Now time and experience have showed us all that we cannot be dogmatic
+about anything in golf except that the ball must be struck somehow, and
+least of all may we venture to dogmatise in the matter of putting, and
+we will only say now that the late Sir Walter has a heavy majority
+against him on this suggestion that in doing the short putts it is well
+to let the putter scrape along the grass when going forward to the ball.
+It seems a small matter (that little man child never thought of it, but
+I noticed he did not sclaff), yet a whole world of good and ill upon the
+links is bound up with it. We shall set this happy golfer as he was, and
+friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, against one of the great champions and
+one of the finest putters who have ever handled clubs, and that is
+Willie Park, the younger, who says, "One of the secrets of putting is to
+hit the ball, and the ball only--a sclaffy style of putting is fatal;
+and, with the object of making absolutely certain of avoiding it, rather
+aim to strike the globe just the least thing above the ground. The ball
+should be smartly tapped with the putter, the stroke being played
+entirely from the wrists; and it should be neither struck a slow, heavy
+blow, nor shoved, nor should it be jerked."
+
+Most golfers will be with Willie in this matter, and those who have not
+tried already that way of putting, the sole of the club being kept clear
+from the turf when the stroke is being made, might do so to their very
+likely advantage. It is a point that a player of limited experience
+might never think about, and I know many who have been converted from
+bad putters to good ones by it. Some of the leading players of the
+Hoylake school have long been addicted to a slight elaboration or
+variation of this method. As they bring the club on to the ball they
+lift it slightly so that at the moment of impact a peculiar running spin
+is given to the ball, one that is not quite the same thing as is
+imparted by merely topping it. The way appears to help the hole to
+gather the ball when it arrives, but it is a method that needs natural
+aptitude and much practice to make it quite safe in application. And
+then again, right away to the contrary, I have witnessed in recent
+weeks a way of putting by one or two of the best players in the country,
+which is new, and which they declare to be most effective when dealing
+with the small heavy balls that are now in vogue and which are so
+difficult to manage, especially on very keen greens. We have all heard
+of the push shot, generally done with cleeks and the more powerful
+irons--and many of us have tried to play it as Harry Vardon does, and
+the things that I have seen done and described as push shots by ordinary
+amateurs have been very dreadful. But, no matter; the idea of the push
+shot is to hit the ball a kind of downward glancing blow, the club
+coming to ground after impact, the result being that the ball starts off
+quickly and pulls up suddenly. The players to whom I have referred have
+applied this stroke to their putting, coming on to the ball above the
+centre and gently pushing the club through it, and in the circumstances
+I have indicated there can be no doubt they have succeeded. Balls being
+so tricky now, these matters are worth considering.
+
+You would perceive how boldly dogmatic was the writer of the early
+classic on the question of stance. On that point there is just one more
+word to say. The tendency seems to be increasing in these days towards
+holding the feet closely together. It is a stance to which Harry Vardon,
+after all his putting troubles, has nearly settled down, and many of the
+best men on the green, Tom Ball for one, are given to it. But there is
+no law, no recommendation even, only the most timid suggestion to be
+made to any man in this matter. That way which suits him and gives him
+confidence is the best, and one may find men putting marvellously well
+when their stance and attitude seem to be so ungainly and difficult as
+to cause them pain.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The method of holding the club has, at least, as much to do with good
+putting as anything else, and in this matter one may almost dare to
+dogmatise. The majority of players hold their putters with the two hands
+close together but detached from each other, in much the same way as
+they hold their other clubs. All of them have heard of what they call
+the Vardon grip, or the overlapping grip, by which, when the club is
+held, the left thumb is brought into the palm of the right hand, and the
+little finger of that right hand is made generally to ride upon the
+first of the left hand. Many try this grip for their long shots, but few
+persist with it, as they become convinced either that their hands and
+fingers are not strong enough for it, or that before they could master
+the method they would need to suffer too much in loss of the game that
+they already possess. Therefore they renounce the overlapping grip
+entirely. But if they would try it in putting they would experience none
+of the difficulties with which they are troubled when applying it to
+their wooden club shots, no sort of force having to be given to the
+stroke, and almost from the first attempt they would enjoy an advantage.
+It is a matter of the most vital importance in putting that the two
+hands should not interfere with each other to the very slightest extent.
+One of them should have the general management of the putting, and the
+other, if detached from it, should do little save act in a very
+subordinate capacity as a steadying influence. Everybody is agreed upon
+that; it is absolute. But when we have the two hands separate, as with
+the ordinary grip, there is always a danger of the subordinate asserting
+itself too much, or at all events varying in the amount of work that it
+does. It cannot be avoided; it is inevitable. This, we may be sure, is
+the cause of much bad and uncertain putting.
+
+Join the two hands together, as with the overlapping grip, and we have
+them working as one completely, and the risk of undue interference by
+the subordinate vanishes. This is the best hint on putting that all our
+counsellors have to give, and they one and all declare it will do more
+than anything else to raise a man to the high level of excellence of the
+innocent child. Sometimes we see men putting one-handed, and one may
+believe that for medium and short putts this way is more certain than
+the separate hands. Mr. Hilton once putted that way in the Amateur
+International match, and I have seen many other good putters do well
+with it. But it savours of freakishness, and, as a famous professional
+said to the distinguished player who adopted the method, "God did not
+give us two hands for one to be kept in a pocket while the putting was
+being done." The simple truth is that the one-hand way approximates very
+closely to the two-hand overlapping method. It is nearly the same thing,
+the same principle--all the work being done from one point. Upon
+thought, we often come to realise that what appear to be some of the
+most freakish methods of putting have the same fundamental principle at
+their base. Thus, take the case of Sherlock, who putts extremely well
+and consistently. He almost alone, among players of the game, holds his
+two hands wide apart on the handle of the putter, the left one
+uppermost, of course. This looks very strange, and at the first
+consideration it might seem that surely one hand will upset all the good
+work and reckoning that is done by the other. But the simple fact is
+that the left is so far away that it cannot interfere, and that is the
+secret of the quality of this method. When the left is close up to the
+right we cannot prevent it from meddling; we are unconscious of it when
+it is doing so; but get it far away and we have it in subjection, and
+all that it does in Sherlock's case is just to steady things up a little
+while the right hand does the business of the time.
+
+Mr. Walter Travis, the most eminent American, than whose putting in the
+Amateur Championship he won at Sandwich nothing better has ever been
+seen since time and the game began, long since adopted a slight
+variation of this overlapping grip, specially for his putting, which, I
+think, has something to commend it. Instead of letting the little finger
+of the right hand rest on the forefinger of the left, he reverses the
+situation, and puts the forefinger of the left hand on the little one of
+the right, thus leaving the right hand in full possession of the grip,
+both thumbs being down the shaft. In the other way it is the left hand
+that has hold of the club with all its fingers, and it will now be
+remembered that while the left hand is the chief worker in driving and
+playing through the green, the right is the one that most frequently
+does the putting.
+
+Having thus mentioned Mr. Travis, one can hardly refrain from quoting
+some of his instruction in this matter as he once conveyed it to me. "I
+believe," said he, "that putting should always be done with one
+hand--with one hand actively at work, that is. The left should be used
+only for the purpose of swinging the club backwards preparatory to
+making the stroke. When it has done that its work is ended and the right
+hand should then be sole master of the situation, the left being merely
+kept in attachment to it for steadying purposes. When only one hand is
+thus employed the gain in accuracy is very great. Two hands at work on a
+short putt or a long one tend to distraction. When the stroke is being
+made the grip of the right hand should be firm, but not tight, and after
+the impact the club-head should be allowed to pass clean through with an
+easy following stroke. The follow-through should indeed be as long as it
+is possible to make it comfortably, and, with this object in view, at
+the moment of touching the ball the grip of the fingers of the left hand
+should be considerably relaxed, so that the right hand may go on doing
+its work without interruption. Never hit or jerk the ball as so many
+players do. There is nothing that pays so well as the easy
+follow-through stroke."
+
+Yet we find that there is less than ever of that easy follow-through
+being done in these days, and putting may be no better for the fact,
+almost certainly is not. These are days when old maxims are being
+abandoned and new systems are being proclaimed season by season. Jack
+White, a splendid putter and a magnificent heretic, lately declared that
+it is time to get rid of what has been regarded as the most inviolable
+of maxims, "Never up, never in," asserting that the determination to be
+past the hole in putting, if not in it, leads with these lively balls we
+now play with to far too many of them running out of holing distance on
+the other side. His counsel, therefore, is that the ball should be
+coaxed gently up to the hole with as much drag applied to it as can be.
+Then for years past it has been recommended that one of the best ways of
+managing the putting with these speedy balls is to have much loft on the
+putter, and so in that way do something to create the drag; but lately a
+change of opinion began to be made, and I am finding some of the best
+players using putters that are perfectly straight in the face, believing
+that by their agency they can putt more delicately and with a surer
+judgment of strength.
+
+It is a little bewildering. Arnaud Massy, the French player who once
+won the Open Championship, and who is better at the putts of from six to
+ten or twelve feet than any man I know, says that he has come to believe
+that Nature has planted deep down in us a sixth sense, and it is that of
+putting. In the development of that sense lies the way to success. But
+after all such meditations as this, I go back to the remembrance of that
+wonderful little child who could never miss, and then from it all there
+emerges the only real secret of success in putting. The child has a
+quality which we elders do not enjoy, and never shall have it for any
+length of time. He knows not the hardness of the world. Having innocence
+and faith he looks trustingly upon it, and the old world and its four
+and a quarter inch hole is a little ashamed, perhaps. The child has
+Confidence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A
+SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME.
+
+
+If men who play games are not proud of their champions, of what then
+shall they be proud? If we advance the proposition--which is done here
+and now--that no other game or sport that was ever conceived and played
+has produced such remarkable strength and mastery in its champions as
+golf has done, the cynics will find that with the resources of the world
+and history at their disposal this position of ours can be well
+maintained, even though we have less than sixty years of championships
+for our support. And let it be said also at the beginning that we of
+golf declare to win, not with the Morrises or Parks, as might be
+supposed--good men they were too--but with the moderns, and especially
+with our Harry Vardon, our Taylor, our Braid, and the amateurs, John
+Ball, Harold Hilton, and the Frederick Guthrie Tait of immortal and
+beloved memory. I have long since grown accustomed to the mysterious and
+the inexplicable in golf, and pass them by on their fresh occurrences in
+these days as like the commonplace, something for which indeed there may
+be some explanation and a simple one, but one which the gods, with their
+humour and their teasing, are hiding from us. We who in this game have
+fed so long on wonders are now disposed to overlook phenomena. We tire
+of sensations and the extraordinary, and would revert to a smooth
+placidity of plain occurrence. It is in such mood that we often
+contemplate the records of the past, and then we dismiss them quickly
+with the comfortable judgment that the Morrises were themselves, and,
+being fixed on a permanent pinnacle, must not be disturbed. They have
+become a creed. One might imagine little plaster figures of old Tom, his
+left hand in his trousers pocket, thumb outside, and young Tom in
+Glengarry bonnet all complete, to have been placed in some over-zealous
+golfers' homes along with representations of Homer, Julius Caesar,
+Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Cecil Rhodes, and no questions are to be
+asked about them. It may be right to place them there, those early
+champions of the game, but when sometimes steeled to sacrilege and
+careless of all risk, I set myself to analyse the conditions and
+circumstances in which they gained their immortal glory, I can give
+reasons, ordinary worldly reasons, why they gained it; and can thereupon
+pass them as satisfying every reasonable requirement of human champions
+of the first degree. But with the others it is not at all like that.
+Golf being the game it is, the repeated successes of those three great
+players we call the "triumvirate," Taylor, Vardon, and Braid, at a time
+when competition is so enormously severe, and when--this point being of
+towering importance--the luck of the game, always considerable, is,
+through a variety of circumstances, greater than ever, appear to me,
+having seen most of them accomplished, and now looking upon the plain
+printed records of indisputable fact, to have still some elements of
+impossibility. One has a fear that three or four hundred years from now
+the golfers of the period may not believe that these things did happen;
+they may decide that we of this imaginative and progressive age, a
+little fearful perhaps of greater wonders that might be accomplished in
+the future, had prepared a little trick for posterity and had set forth
+false records of what we had done, so absurd that their falsity was
+self-evident, and so we were to be pitied for our simplicity. In our
+humble way, and by stating the records of achievement in the coldest
+way, admitting moreover that even to us of the time they appear
+incredible, we do our best to gain favour and acceptance with our
+descendants. Fifteen Open Championships to the triumvirate, and eight
+Amateur Championships to Mr. John Ball himself. It is indeed impossible;
+but it is one of those things in golf that are to be described in the
+terms that Ben Sayers (who might have been given a championship by the
+fates for services rendered and skill displayed before the era to which
+he chiefly belonged was closed, as men are made lords when governments
+give up) applied to the victory over him by Fred Tait on his own course
+at North Berwick once by something like seven and six--"It's no
+possible, but it's a fact!" All of us know one man--perhaps more than
+one, but we do know one for certain--who nearly all the time that Mr.
+Ball has been winning those championships might have been winning them
+himself, has been almost good enough to do so. But he has won nothing,
+and after all it may not be a matter of much surprise if we consider the
+enormous odds against victory in a championship because of the luck of
+the game, the fact that it is not like running or rowing, billiards or
+chess, where strength and stamina, knowledge and skill, work out almost
+exactly every time, but a game in which skill has this element of luck
+blended so largely with it. But Mr. Ball, Amateur Champion eight times
+over, and the triumvirate as well!--when "the truth stands out as gross
+as black from white," with my eyes I can scarcely see it. These persons
+have forbidden the caprice of chance that was set to worry them, they
+have overthrown the laws of averages, they have annihilated the
+weaknesses of flesh and blood, and they have laughed at fortune and at
+fate which, defeated, have joined up with them. Then clearly they, with
+the collection of champions in general for their garnishment, are to be
+regarded as the sixth wonder of the game.
+
+It is now too late--as it always was too late--to make any fair
+comparison between the great players of our own time and those who were
+members in the early years of the Open Championship. There is not so
+much argument now as to whether Harry Vardon is better than young Tom
+Morris was, though such argument was common only ten or a dozen years
+ago. How may you compare these men? Young Tommy won four championships
+in succession, but there was only a handful of competitors each time,
+and the opposition was feeble almost to nothing in comparison with what
+it became a very few years later. Vardon, Taylor, and Braid have each
+won the championship five times, and many of these victories were gained
+against their own fellow-champions and the strongest opposition
+conceivable. Yet though such as Vardon produce what are in a sense more
+astonishing results in the way of scores, we are reminded that they have
+far smoother courses to play upon and much improved clubs and balls.
+Also they have better rivals to sharpen their game. From this one might
+argue that it would be strange indeed if they were not better than young
+Tommy was, that it is quite inevitable they should be. But our modern
+champions have done more than fulfil the obligations laid upon them.
+They have established an amazing supremacy at a period when golfers are
+reckoned in the hundreds of thousands; young Tom was champion when there
+were the hundreds without the thousands. His championship, at all
+events, did not mean so much. The championships gained by our
+triumvirate are proof beyond all possibility of doubt or question that
+these men are the most exalted geniuses, that they have such a clear
+superiority over all other golfers of their time as is, seeing the
+circumstances of the case and knowing the waywardness of golf, almost
+incredible. The success of the younger Morris proved, as some will hold,
+only that he was quite the best golfer of a few eligible to compete for
+the championship.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, if comparison is fruitless and not properly practicable, this
+speculation as to the merits of the geniuses of nearly fifty years ago
+and now becomes enticing. One would like to reach some conclusion upon
+it, but cannot. It would be fine material for a golfers' debating
+society. Were I to regard myself as advocate for the moderns I should in
+an agreeable and inoffensive way suggest that time has done nothing to
+hurt the fame of young Tommy's skill. When what they call the golf boom
+began and the great game percolated through the mass of ignorant
+English, there was babble all at once about St. Andrews, and men of
+southern towns just discovering that the right hand on the driver should
+be the lower one whispered of the ancient city in a hypocritical manner
+of respect and awe as if it were high up above the blue instead of a
+day's journey up the northern lines from Euston or King's Cross. The
+name of the place was taken in vain, and to this day there are neophytes
+who lisp of "the Mecca of golf," as they say it, and its eleventh and
+seventeenth holes, though they have never been in Fifeshire and maybe
+never will. At the same time and by the same people there was
+established the vogue of young Tommy Morris, as one might call it. It
+was nearly sacrilege in the circumstances, for more people were living
+then than are living now who had known young Tommy, and fervently
+believed he was the best golfer who ever played the game. But what we
+may call the Morrisian traditions were established in this way, and they
+have laid a shoddy veneer on the really sound reputation of the young
+champion that it never needed. So the proposition is advanced that
+through ignorance and affectation and carelessness we posterity are
+being abundantly generous to young Tom and his father--forgetting Allan
+Robertson, such is the effect of championships, who was before them, and
+of whom it was said when he died that they might toll their bells and
+shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest was gone. We
+posterity are of another golfing world completely from that in which
+those early champions of St. Andrews lived and golfed. I have here in my
+room a driver with which old Tom played, and I see that the other day
+some rash fellows, unafraid of ghosts, took out from their receptacles
+some clubs which had belonged to him and others and played a game with
+them. But the handling of the old clubs and the looking on the picture
+of Tom which he once signed for me cannot bring the feeling of his time
+to ours, and I pass it on as a suggestion to our own posterity that our
+judgment in this matter, as it has been made, is nearly worthless.
+
+It has been coldly stated that lies are told by golfers. That allegation
+may be dismissed with no consideration, but it is certain that fancy
+traditions of flimsy origin gather about golfing history and soon
+establish themselves in the most remarkable manner. I know many
+incidents of the past ten or fifteen years, things I myself have
+witnessed, the truth of which has become completely obscured by masses
+of imagined stuff that has gathered on them. To take a good example,
+more than half the golfers in the world will tell you that Lieutenant
+Fred Tait won a championship at Prestwick after wading into water at the
+Alps to play a shot from there in the final; if they will look at the
+records they will find that splendid Tait did not win that championship
+at all, and they should be told that the shot that Mr. Ball made from
+the wet sand in that same bunker was nearly as difficult and, in the
+circumstances, more trying. Again, the victory gained by Mr. Travis at
+Sandwich, so recently as 1904, is now already described in many
+different ways, but one feature common to all of them is that the
+American holed a putt of twenty yards on nearly every green, that his
+driving was childlike in its shortness, and that he was smoking himself
+to death at the time. Still later, the very next year, there was an
+Amateur Championship at Prestwick, and I remember that Mr. Robert
+Maxwell, after a hard struggle against young Barry--who won the
+championship--had to loft over a stymie on the eighteenth green to keep
+the match alive, and then at the nineteenth the student was left with a
+short putt to win that hole and the match. I saw the play in that match
+and saw the putt, and I believe it was one of about a couple of feet. It
+was certainly too much to give in the circumstances, far too much, but
+Mr. Maxwell, great lover of golf as he is, had even by that time begun
+to tire of the strenuousness and the officialdom and the graspingness of
+championship tournaments, and he waved his club in token of presentation
+of the putt to his young opponent and generously shook hands with him.
+The Scottish spectators did not like it at the time, because "oor
+Bobbie" was their best and greatest hope, and it seemed like feeding the
+devil with chocolates to give putts like this to English golfers. By the
+time that we had returned to the club-house, only three hundred yards
+away, it was being said that that putt was three feet long, by the
+morning it had gone up to three feet six, and increasing gradually it
+even touched the five-feet mark within the next few years. At that point
+there was a reaction and, from what I can gather, the putt has settled
+down in history at four feet. It was half as long.
+
+So I think that golf posterities are fickle bodies, and even the best of
+them are not nearly so responsible and accurate in their judgments as is
+believed by those people who trustingly say that they will await the
+verdict of posterity. I remember that M. Anatole France urged that
+posterity was not infallible, because he himself and all human beings
+are posterity in regard to a long succession of works with which they
+are imperfectly acquainted, and he quotes the case of Macbeth whose
+reputation posterity has murdered, though Macbeth himself did no crime
+at all. Macbeth was really an excellent king. He enriched Scotland by
+favouring her commerce and industry. The chronicler depicts him as a
+pacific prince, the king of the towns, the friend of the citizens. The
+clans hated him because he administered justice well. He assassinated
+nobody. And as M. France remarks, we know what legend and genius have
+made of his memory. It is that way reversed with all our golfing
+traditions, and so we must handle them carefully. It is a principle of
+this game that no man can be a good golfer and a bad man, that those who
+are bad at heart have not the human qualities necessary for being
+golfers at all, cannot associate happily with the rest of the community,
+and so they get themselves properly out of it betimes. Hence it happens
+that of no golfer is there anything that is bad to be told. We have no
+Macbeths in this sport of ours, though it embraces some pensive Hamlets,
+and a number of the moderns would be golfing Romeos if their swings were
+finished in the old free style. But if tradition had indeed given us a
+foul Macbeth who improved his lie we should surely purify the
+remembrance of him, believing that his immediate posterity had almost
+certainly judged him wrong.
+
+This case which the advocate has set up against young Tom, with all this
+blame cast on posterity, will seem a weak thing yet to some. If we were
+counsel for the boy, who made a fine and a lovable figure in his day,
+should we bandy with words like that, or put evidence direct and plain
+before the tribunal, the evidence of those who saw? There are still a
+few of them left, and for myself I should not have far to send to gain a
+willing witness. I have a good and valued friend, Mr. Charles Chambers
+of Edinburgh, member of a distinguished golfing family of many
+generations, and a fine player himself, who was in the semi-final of the
+first Amateur Championship. He saw young Tommy at the game, and played
+it with him. And Mr. Chambers, once answering my plea for some of his
+remembrances, said, "As a youngster at St. Andrews, I was a great friend
+of young Tom, the champion, and on a summer evening often accompanied
+him alone, when, with a club and a cleek, he played out as far as the
+second hole. He was, I believe, the greatest golfer the world has ever
+seen, those giants of the present day not excepted. His driving, which I
+remember so well, was of the long, low, wind-cheating style so seldom
+seen now, with great distance and carry. He never struck a ball anywhere
+except on the centre of the club, and this was reflected in the faces of
+his driving-clubs, which had a clear and distinct impression in the
+centre, the wood above and below being clean and fresh as when last
+filed. His putting was perhaps even more deadly, and in ordinary matches
+I recollect he was seldom or never asked to hole out a yard putt. In
+driving from the tee, his style may be described as an absolutely
+correct circular sweep, with great accuracy and follow-through, and
+this applied equally to his iron play. It was his custom to wear a broad
+Glengarry bonnet, which very frequently left his head on the delivery of
+the stroke.... Without doubt he succumbed to his private sorrows and a
+broken heart." That is strong testimony, and the abiding conviction is
+that young Morris was great indeed, but in the nature of things
+comparisons cannot well be made between then and now, and are better
+left undone.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am glad that we have thus condemned posterity, for we strengthen the
+positions of our triumvirate and Mr. Ball at their only point of
+weakness, which is that their successes have been so marvellous as to be
+incredible to those heirs of ours who, not being of this period, will
+not have witnessed them. Posterity may suggest that such persons could
+not have lived, since none of us will hesitate to say that such
+posterity will not itself produce a man to win three championships. Even
+to win one twice is to make a proof of superiority such as in existing
+circumstances seems nearly impossible. Any man, as one might say, may
+win a championship; that would prove nothing save that he is as good a
+golfer as any other, or nearly so; but to win two championships is to
+prove that he is appreciably better than the others, that he is so much
+better as to balance with his skill the chances of the game--the putts
+he missed and the long ones that his opponents holed--that were flung
+against him. During a period of nearly twenty years the success of
+Taylor, Vardon, and Braid has been so complete, so overwhelming, so
+dazzling, that among them they seem almost to have solved the problem of
+perpetual victory. Each of these men is a genius, a great master of the
+game; each of them, had he lived in an age apart from the others, would
+alone have been enough to make a separate era in competitive golf; and
+it is a strange freak of fate that they should have been pitchforked
+into the arena at the same time. It is as if three Ormondes had been in
+the same Derby, or three Graces at the crease, when at their best;
+indeed, it is more wonderful than those things would have been. They
+were born within thirteen months of each other; Vardon and Braid within
+three months. The last-named is the eldest of the group; he was born at
+Earlsferry, in Fifeshire, on 6th February 1870; Harry Vardon was born in
+Jersey on 7th May 1870; and Taylor was born at Northam, in Devonshire,
+within a mile of where Mr. Ball won his eighth championship, on 19th
+March 1871. They are of different race; for Braid is a pure Scot, Taylor
+is pure English, and Vardon, while, of course, we are proud to regard
+him as belonging to us, is really half-French and half-English. They are
+of different build, different temperament, and of very different style
+in golf; but there they are. Among them they have won the Open
+Championship fifteen times, and when one of them has succeeded it has
+generally happened that the other two have been his most dangerous
+rivals. There must be a limit to the period of success as there is to
+human life, and for years people have murmured that these three are not
+like the little brook that purls down the hill, and they cannot go on
+for ever. And yet at the beginning of each new championship an instinct
+settles in the public mind that they cannot be beaten. Considering what
+the Open Championship is, what a fearful strain it exerts on
+temperament, mind, body, and muscle, how a single slip may mean failure,
+and then how many really magnificent golfers are in the lists, some of
+them old champions themselves, this is a strange state of things. I
+recall that when a championship was played at Muirfield in 1906 the
+sceptics were then loud in their prophecies that a "new man" would
+arise, and that the triumvirate would be cast down. And then? James
+Braid was first, John Henry Taylor was second, and Harry Vardon was
+third, though a hundred and eighty other players had done their best to
+beat them! Taylor, the Englishman, although the youngest of the three,
+was the first to score success. He and Vardon both made their initial
+appearances in the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1893, and on that
+occasion the 75 that Taylor did in his first round stood as the lowest
+made in the competition, although he did not win. At his second and
+third attempts in the championship he took first place each time, and on
+the second of these occasions an Englishman's victory was at last
+accomplished at St. Andrews, the Scottish headquarters of the game. He
+won there again in 1900, and is the only Englishman who has ever won the
+Open Championship on this hallowed piece of golfing ground. A year after
+the others began, James Braid entered the lists, and very quickly then
+did these three establish their triple supremacy. An injured hand kept
+Braid out of the great event in 1895, but since then each of the men has
+played in every championship, and among them have won fifteen times out
+of twenty-one. At the "coming of age" of the triumvirate in 1913, when
+it was twenty-one years after Taylor and Vardon started in the event,
+Taylor, the first to score in it, won his fifth and became "all square"
+with his friends. That was a remarkable occurrence. Since 1894, when
+Taylor won his first championship, there have only been five years when
+one or other of the triumvirate has not won the cup. In 1897 Mr. Hilton
+got it; in 1902 Sandy Herd, playing with the rubber-cored ball on its
+introduction, scored; in 1904 Jack White was the winner, both Braid and
+Taylor having a putt to tie with him on the last green; in 1907 Massy,
+the Frenchman, triumphed; and in 1912 the hope of Edward Ray was
+realised. And in each of these years one of the triumvirate was second.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But if each of the triumvirate is a phenomenon and collectively they are
+super-phenomena, in what terms then are we to describe Mr. John Ball,
+and how shall we account for his eight amazing championships? Mr. Harold
+Hilton, as all the world understands very well, is a great master of the
+game, a magnificent golfer who knows it through and through, and a
+tremendous fighting man. There has hardly been anything in all golf's
+history so splendid as his coming again and winning two more Amateur
+Championships when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly
+winning an Open Championship as well. But if after considering the
+professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs
+in their match-play championship, it is John Ball who is the wonder man.
+The luck of the game that was emphasised in the consideration of score
+play is surely greater in the match. At all events, the professionals
+themselves to a man declare that the score play makes the better test,
+and therefore is the fairer. If that is so, there is, inferentially,
+more luck to be conquered by a good man in the amateur event, and Mr.
+Ball has eight times beaten his fields and beaten all the luck against
+him. Twenty-four years after winning his first Amateur Championship at
+Prestwick he wins his eighth at Westward Ho! and, for all the great
+players that the game has yielded, no other man has gained more than
+half those wins, and only Hilton has done that. Surely it is a mystery
+very profound as to how he has won so often. And yet it is less of
+mystery if we accept the proposition that he who plays golf for the sake
+of golf and fears not to be beaten is the most dangerous of opponents.
+Mr. Ball's early championships were won by his own skill and his perfect
+temperament; undoubtedly some of the later ones, which through
+increasing numbers of opponents have or should have been harder to win,
+have been gained because he cared little whether he won or not, and
+because his opponents feared to lose, and feared the more as they felt
+their impending fate when they had the master of Hoylake laid against
+them. To a little extent they have beaten themselves, and Mr. Ball has
+done all the rest. Has there been more than one of his championships in
+recent times that he has keenly desired to win, that being the one he
+gained at St. Andrews in 1907, because he wished to be victor at the
+headquarters where he lost long years before, after a tie with Mr.
+Balfour Melville? At eight o'clock on the morning after he won his
+seventh at Hoylake I saw him in the garden at the back of his house
+giving his chickens their morning meal. It was as if nothing had
+happened. How many other men would have been feeding chickens so early
+in the morning after winning an Amateur Championship? Has he finished
+winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won
+for his seventh the only championship ever played in Devonshire, and he
+has won the event on all the regular amateur championship courses on
+which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been
+something of a _bête noire_ among courses so far as he is concerned.
+Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the
+international match, and then in the championship he went down in a
+surprising way to a youngster of Dornoch. Shall he not add Muirfield to
+his list?
+
+Despite a certain beauty of his style and the ease and elegance with
+which he plays the game, Mr. Ball's golf is strongly individual to
+himself. There are many pronounced mannerisms in it, and they are of a
+kind that if any one tried to copy them, he might find his game being
+injured rather than improved. They are the ways of the genius who cares
+nothing for convention. Few can drive a better ball. At the outset of
+his career he was a long driver. His first big match away from his
+native Hoylake was one against Douglas Rolland. It was a home-and-home
+affair in England and Scotland, and Rolland was greatly celebrated in
+those days for the length he gained with wooden clubs. Yet he outdrove
+Mr. Ball but little in that engagement. He obtains his length not to a
+large extent from run, as most men get it now, but by a ball that starts
+on a beautiful line, makes a very long carry, and leaves it at that,
+with a little pull to finish with. It has seemed that he has had more
+control over his wooden club play than almost any amateur except another
+of fame who was bred in the same great school. An outstanding
+peculiarity of his method is the way in which he grips his club, which
+is done not in the fingers and lightly as by other men, but by a good
+firm grip in the palms of his hands with the fingers facing up. He makes
+small use of the thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand. His
+stance is an open one. His play with his iron clubs again is
+unconventional. Even for his shortest shots he swings his clubs, meaning
+that he makes less of a jerky hit at the ball than others do, and he
+resorts less to cutting the stroke than other great men. But what a
+master of judging of heights and distance he is! To see him just plop
+the ball over a bunker in the way and then watch it run the necessary
+distance afterwards is to understand what marvellous properties of
+control can be invested in such perfect human golfing machinery.
+Another of his peculiarities is that he carries no niblick in his bag,
+and I think he never has carried one. He has certainly not had one in
+any of his recent championships. And among many other of his
+characteristics is that peculiar gait with the bent knees that, because
+of their climbing over the hilly links, golf seems to develop in men
+(Harry Vardon has it), his extreme modesty in manner, and the splendid
+excellence of his sportsmanship. Some one once set forward a curious
+theory that children born in the winter-time are likely to become better
+golfers than others; their temperaments are supposed to be favourably
+affected by the prevailing rigour of the weather conditions! It is,
+anyhow, a curious fact that a very large proportion of our best players
+were born in mid-winter months, and of them all John Ball is the
+greatest, and he, if you please, was born on a day so far removed from
+midsummer as Christmas Eve.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There has been lately a sort of revival of the game of attempting to
+punch another man so very hard that he can stand up no longer to make
+the smallest punch in answer. He has to be battered and pounded until he
+is made practically lifeless for a period of ten seconds, and then the
+other man is given the money. This is what we call the "noble art of
+self-defence," but, obviously, it is nine parts of such defence to
+reduce the other man to such a jellified condition that no more defence
+is needed. When well played it is a good game. Now golf never has been
+called a "noble" game at all. It is "royal" and it is "ancient," and it
+leaves its qualities to speak for themselves, as most eloquently they
+do. The boast has indeed been made for golf that, while in so many other
+English sports something flying or running has to be killed or injured,
+golf never calls for a drop of blood from any living creature. It is
+then inferred that it is a gentle game, as in some ways it really is.
+Also it has been demonstrated that it is a game at which elderly men may
+play and play quite well, as was proved in a recent year when golfers
+who are becoming older than they like to think of won so many of the
+trophies. But the result of this boom in the noble art of squashing
+another man for a prize of a few thousand pounds and the brave words
+that some of the lovers of this sport sometimes use, telling us that
+things like this made English hearts so strong, nearly giving us to
+understand that Sayers and his like had some influence on the fortunes
+of the British Empire, is that a kind of reflection is cast upon some
+other sports for their mildness and their timidity. Girls do not fight
+in rings and nearly kill each other, but girls can play golf and do, and
+they even play with men.
+
+Let us consider the proposition that golf is a game that needs a greater
+and a stronger heart than any other game. It demands fine manliness,
+such determination as strong Englishmen are made of, and courage of the
+best. The strain of a severe golf competition on the men who win, or
+nearly, is enormous. No weakling has ever won success at golf, and never
+will. The truth is that it is such a game that if the charge is made
+that it is a brutal sport we can barely stand for its defence. For there
+is cruelty in golf, cold hurting cruelty in this game. If now you
+hesitate, consider. The difference between the effect of boxing and the
+effect of golf on the human system is that golf hurts more and the pain
+is more enduring, for it is psychological. That may seem like an
+attempted escape from the proposition, because it may be suggested that
+maiden aunts can and do bear such psychological pain at golf, and bear
+it well. But we discuss real golf of the championship kind, and match
+play wherein two good and keen players are really playing against each
+other, parry and thrust as it is in championship golf, with the issue in
+even balance most of the time, not taking sevens and eights and so being
+nearly indifferent to what the other may do until the clerking takes
+place on the putting green and the state of things is calculated.
+
+Golf, as we know, is a game for the emotions. We agree that it plays
+upon them continually, and chiefly through the medium of the supreme
+emotion, hope. While this hope is the most uplifting of emotions, it is
+also, with the strain it makes, by far the most exhausting. Now every
+golfer knows that in the real game if a good stroke is made by one party
+the gain is not only in the extra nearness to the hole that his own ball
+obtains, but also by the "moral effect" the shot has on the other man.
+This other may have been in a good state of hope before; now he receives
+a sudden shock--and it is indeed a shock sometimes when in a second, as
+the result of the other's effort, his hope is reduced to fear or
+complete dejection. Do you think the man who made the shot does not know
+that? He knows it well. There! he knew! The dejected man has foozled,
+and the hole has gone. This bout is ended. There is a rest of a few
+seconds, and then the contestants start again and smash each other on
+the mind, just as they did the other time. Some may suggest that the
+effect of these mental hurts is small, that they draw no blood, and that
+they are not to be compared with a left hook on the jaw which sends a
+boxer toppling. To that there are replies to make. In the first place it
+has to be remembered that a match at golf between two good players (we
+do not now write of habitual foozlers in whom the golfing emotions
+cannot, in the nature of things, be well developed) is taken very
+seriously indeed, and therefore the emotional effect is greater than
+might be supposed by one who does not play. Second, the effect is
+cumulative, and every golfer knows again how intensely depressing is the
+continual fight against a relentless opponent who scores with nearly
+every stroke and never lets one's hope burn bright again. Bang goes
+every shot of his on the sensitive temperament of his foe, and that is
+exactly why temperament has all to do with success at golf. It is the
+man who can stand punishment who wins; no other sort ever has won in
+greater golf, or ever will. And then again, if it is suggested that
+mental pain is after all not such a hard thing to bear with courage as
+pain of body, let us ask which has the longer effect, remembering also
+that, with full respect to boxing people, the golfer is a man of keener
+feelings. In championships how often has a man who has had a punishing
+match in a morning round, one that has gone to the nineteenth hole or
+after before victory has come to him, won again in the afternoon? Not
+frequently. If you had merely with a fist blow knocked that man
+senseless for a little while before his lunch, he might have been
+readier for his golfer opponent in the afternoon. It is notorious that
+some of the finest play in championships has been accomplished by men
+who were enduring much physical suffering at the time. And again, how
+exactly is the effect of the winning putt on the defeated man like that
+of the knock-out blow. His last hope is extinguished with the suddenness
+of vanished consciousness. So this psychological pain is a very
+discomforting thing. The law recognises it, and herein the law is surely
+not an ass. We have the legal cruelty of the divorce court. Husband who
+tells his wife he dislikes her new hat or gown is held to have been
+cruel as though he had smacked her pretty face, or something worse than
+that. He could kiss away a red mark from a dimpled cheek, and surely if
+permitted he would do so, but nothing could change the judgment on the
+hat. And in golf the mental injury is more real than that.
+
+Never was more absurdly untrue suggestion made against this game than
+that it is not like others where men play directly against each other
+and foil each other's shots, that it is a game in which each man plays
+his own ball independent of the other. Each stroke we make has effect on
+the stroke made by the opponent. That effect may be discounted by the
+opponent's own strength and resource, but yet it is produced. In no
+other game does a man play right and hard on to his opponent as in
+match-play golf, for it is a game in which the whole temperamental
+strength of one side is hurled against the strength of the other, and
+the two human natures are pressing bitterly and relentlessly against
+each other from the first moment of the game to the last. It is the
+whole man, mind and body. That is the meaning of the temperamental
+factor in golf, and that is why a great match at golf is great indeed.
+
+Yes, it is a cruel game, one in which the primitive instincts of man are
+given full play, and the difference between golf and fisticuffs is that
+in the one the pain is of the mind and in the other it is of the body.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A climax in our wonderment has been reached, and though a volume could
+be written on the romance of the rubber-cored ball, the seventh of the
+wonders of the game and the most modern, the story after all is known.
+Golf would have gained on its old degree of popularity if there had been
+no such invention and men had continued to play with gutties; but that
+the golf boom as we know it would have been created, that the game
+would have risen to be the enormous thing it is, giving pleasure to
+hundreds of thousands of people all the world over, there is much reason
+to doubt. One night in the early summer of 1898 Mr. Coburn Haskell sat
+at dinner with a magnate of the American rubber industry, at the house
+of the latter in Cleveland, Ohio. They were both golfers, and naturally
+they talked golf during their meal. They agreed that a kindlier ball
+than the harsh and severe gutty was needed, and they thought that surely
+it might come through rubber. Eventually they settled on the idea of
+rubber thread wound under tension to give the necessary hardness, and an
+experimental ball was made accordingly. With the very first shot that
+was made with that first of rubber-cored balls a professional player to
+whom it had been given to try carried a bunker that had never been
+carried before! From that moment the great revolution was begun, the
+most extraordinary that has ever taken place in any game. There were
+set-backs, it was a little slow in starting, but its success was sure.
+In 1902, when Sandy Herd won an Open Championship with the new ball,
+after prejudice had held it back in Britain previously, the gutty was
+done for, and it quickly disappeared from the links.
+
+And oh, the ravings and the riotings of argument there have been about
+that ball since then! And the hundreds of thousands of pounds that have
+had to be spent on courses to make them suit it! Never was there such a
+giant commotion nor such a costly one caused in any sport before. We
+need not argue any more whether it has improved the game or spoiled it.
+These discussions are for the schools. It has anyhow made the game in
+the modern popular sense, and now we are informed that of this little
+white ball, that was first invented at the dinner-table on those Ohio
+summer nights, half a million are used on British courses in one week
+in a busy season, and a million pounds' worth are bought and consumed by
+golfers in a year. Then you may be sure that more than a million
+dollars' worth are driven and putted on the courses of the United
+States. Marvellous little ball! Indeed you are the seventh wonder of
+your game.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A FAMOUS CHAMPIONSHIP AT BROOKLINE, U.S.A., AND AN ACCOUNT OF HOW MR.
+FRANCIS OUIMET WON IT, WITH SOME EXPLANATION OF SEEMING MYSTERIES.
+
+
+Abiding wonders of the past, perplexities of the present, the greatness
+of the game where it is still greatest, have been among recent thoughts;
+and yet one is conscious all the time that something which sure enough
+comes near to being the eighth wonder of it all has lately happened, and
+will for long enough be high in the minds of this community, something
+that will never cease to be discussed and will always be regarded as a
+matter for argument and speculation. Only because it is so very new, so
+utterly modern, so contrary to much of our olden faith, so inharmonious
+with the smooth story that we have learned and liked, has a witness
+hesitated to give it a forward place well won. Yet do we not know that a
+hundred years from now, when so much of golfing history yet unmade will
+have been piled on to the dusty records that we hold, this new wonder
+will still be a theme for club-house talk, and if by then matches are
+played with the people of other planets, will they not wish to know in
+Mars how this strange break came about? Then there shall be as many
+readings and explanations of the mystery of Brookline and of Ouimet as
+there have been of the moods of sad Prince Hamlet. So from the old
+traditions, the famous players, the ancient links, the scene may move to
+new America.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To the Fourth of July there shall now be added the Twentieth of
+September. In the year of nineteen hundred and thirteen it fell upon a
+Saturday, and that day at Brookline, near Boston in Massachusetts, was
+dripping wet. Clouds had run loose for two whole days and nights before,
+unceasingly, and still sent their torrent down. When, dull and
+splashing, the morning broke, with expectation in the air, it seemed
+that this had been planned by fate for a day of wretchedness and misery,
+one that might with convenience afterwards be blotted out from memory
+and considered as a _dies non_. But good Americans will now recall no
+clouds, no rain, no damp, no mud when they remember the Twentieth of
+September. I too, though my feelings then were more of wonder and real
+admiration than of joy which my own patriotism could not sanction, shall
+be glad to remember in time to come that then I was at Brookline and was
+one of only two or three from Britain who saw the amazing thing that was
+done that day, the most remarkable victory ever achieved in any golf
+championship anywhere at any time. It was something to have seen; it is
+a distinction to have the remembrance. On that day Francis Ouimet, a boy
+of twenty, bred to the game on the cow pastures of Massachusetts, played
+Harry Vardon and Edward Ray, great champions of British golf, for the
+championship of the United States--and won. They three had come through
+the great ordeal of a full championship and tied for first place
+together. They played, not against blank possibility as men, knowing not
+the exact nature of their task, have to do in Open Championships where
+the test is play by score and each is against all others, having then
+some fears stilled by sweet hope which is ever the golfer's sustenance,
+but in sight of each other, together, one with another, man against man,
+ball against ball, seeing what was being done, knowing what had to be
+accomplished next. Could there ever again be such a three-ball golf? It
+is one of the compensations of having been so very wet at Brookline on
+that awful day that one knows that for the wonder and the drama of the
+thing it can never happen more, not ever. If such facts could be
+repeated, the wonder would be missing and the drama gone.
+
+An American and two Englishmen. These championships are mainly matters
+for individuals after all; the "international element," of which we read
+so much in newspapers, is not generally so deeply felt as we try to
+think it is. Golf, not being a game of sides as other games are, and, if
+it comes to that, not generally a game in which national peculiarities
+exert an influence, hardly lends itself to international treatment.
+Players who feel internationally before a contest relapse to
+individualism completely when they are pitching to the green and putting
+to the hole. Do not tell me that in the throes of a six-feet putt that
+shall win or lose a day a man thinks of his trusting country and not of
+his tortured hopeful self. It is not possible in the combination of golf
+and human nature, and there is no blame to the men. But on the Twentieth
+of September international feeling in the game of golf did for once rise
+high, and became a very real thing. What of individualism had been
+maintained by Vardon and his companion during that week had nearly
+disappeared on the nineteenth, when the tie was made, and there was
+hardly a trace of it when the curtain went up on the fifth act of the
+amazing drama of Brookline, none at all when it was rolled down again.
+This point is now emphasised because when I write of the wonder of the
+thing I have to show that not only was this Brookline boy, of no
+championship whatever save one of Massachusetts, pitted against two of
+the greatest golfers of the home country of the game, but that, the
+international feeling being now alive and intense, he for America was
+opposed to those two of England, and therefore in a very full degree he
+was playing their better ball. The boy was playing the better ball of
+Vardon and Ray! He beat them! A long time has now elapsed since the
+dripping day when I saw him do it, and wonders have a way of softening
+with age, yet to me now that achievement is as wonderful as it was when
+new, and so it will remain. The American golfers are justified in their
+pride and their exultation upon the result of that event, and there is
+nothing whatever to be said against it. No such feat had ever been
+performed before, or has been since. I shall describe the circumstances
+which led up to this amazing triumph, and what ensued.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Only once before had British players gone across the Atlantic to take
+part in the Open Championship of the United States, and that was in 1900
+when Harry Vardon and J. H. Taylor did so. At that time Taylor was the
+Open Champion, Vardon having finished second to him in that year's
+tournament at St. Andrews. American golf was then comparatively a baby,
+and practically all the opponents of the British pair were players who
+had been born and bred in the home country and had gone out to America
+as professionals there. Good as some of them were, they were no match
+for their visitors, who had the competition comfortably to themselves
+and finished first and second, Vardon becoming champion. Much happened
+in the next thirteen years. Most significant was the breeding of an
+American champion on American soil, a "native born," in J. J. M'Dermott,
+who tied for first place in 1910, but then lost to Alec Smith on playing
+off, and tied again the next year when he won, and again in 1912. About
+the same time two other native players in Tom M'Namara and Michael Brady
+came to the surface from the raw mass of rough golfing material that was
+taking shape under the American sun. Both are good men, and from my
+knowledge of them I like their manner and their style; but M'Dermott,
+despite some serious faults of which he has been made aware, is
+undoubtedly a marvellous golfer for his age. I think he has to be
+considered as the most wonderful prodigy the game has so far known. At
+twenty years of age, when he came over to Muirfield as American champion
+to compete for the great Open Championship, he was even then a most
+accomplished golfer, high in the topmost rank. Not tall in stature but
+well and lithely built for a golfer, he has a full, easy, and graceful
+swing. It is round like most of the American swings--but not so round as
+it used to be--and M'Dermott is often afflicted with what is commonly
+known as the American hook, being a most persistent tendency to pull the
+ball. It is remarkable also that he has been in the habit of using
+wooden clubs of most abnormal length, and it has been a wonder to me how
+he has controlled them as well as he has done. The history of the Open
+Championship, marked with so many crosses for tragedies and the
+blighting of fair hopes, embraces few incidents more pathetic than the
+driving of three balls into the Archerfield woods by M'Dermott in the
+event of 1912 at Muirfield, and his failing to qualify in consequence.
+But he was only twenty then. The first expedition made by a native
+American to this country in quest of Open Championship honours
+consequently failed. In the following year we saw him again at Hoylake,
+and with him his brother natives, M'Namara and Brady, and some of the
+Scoto-Americans also. M'Dermott did the best of the three, and his play
+for nine holes one morning was very nearly perfect. His swing was a
+little more compact than before; it was beautifully timed, and his
+straight-up style of putting with his heels touching and his grip upon
+the end of the shaft was most attractive. He found the conditions on the
+last day too severe for him, as nearly all except Taylor, the champion,
+did; but he made a fine display and became the first real American
+player to get into the prize list of the Open Championship, which he did
+with a score of 315--eight more than Taylor--which made him tie for
+fifth place. M'Dermott undoubtedly excels in temperament.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here was a menace. It was felt that America was making very good in
+golf. And there came vaguely into the minds of British golfers the idea
+that a demonstration of their strength should be made in this new
+country, for satisfaction and for the sake of national pride. Yet, with
+their conservatism, our British golfing people are slow to move in
+matters of this kind. They are content with the game, and perhaps wisely
+so. But there was the feeling that something should be done. With
+initiative demanded, Lord Northcliffe, who had become a keen lover of
+the game, made a characteristic movement unobtrusively, as the result of
+which Harry Vardon and Edward Ray were sent across the Atlantic to test
+the strength of American golfers in their own Open Championship. Vardon
+was then five times Open Champion of the world; Ray was the holder of
+the title. Two other Europeans sailed the seas with the same object in
+their minds, one of them being Wilfrid Reid, the clever little
+professional attached to the Banstead Downs club near London, a man who
+had gained international honours constantly and has much fine golf in
+him, and the other Louis Tellier, the professional of the Société de
+Golf de Paris at La Boulie, Versailles. Four good men; two great
+champions; one the greatest golfer the world has known. They seemed to
+be enough. Their design was to win the American championship.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those who were not at Brookline during the week that followed, and only
+received a result that was amazing and inexplicable, were ready enough,
+perhaps not unnaturally, to suggest that this course of the Country Club
+could not have afforded a proper test, that it was so far different from
+a good British course, so mysteriously American, that the native players
+must have been favoured by it, and the superior skill that the British
+golfers possessed had no opportunity for an outlet. As I say, this was
+not an unreasonable supposition in the light of the amazing events that
+occurred; but it was entirely wrong. There are few courses in America
+that are better than this one, and to this judgment I would add that
+though there are inland courses in England that are superior there are
+not many. Judged upon the best standard of inland courses in Britain I
+would call it thoroughly good.
+
+It has seven holes of over four hundred yards each, one of them being
+five hundred and twenty, and, the total length of the round being 6245
+yards, it was good enough in this respect. It has three short holes,
+well separated, and some of its drive-and-iron-holes are quite
+excellent. The Brookline course differs from many others in America in
+the quick and varied undulations of its land--heaving, rolling, twisting
+everywhere--and thus calling for adaptability of stance, and careful
+reckoning of running after pitching at every shot. By this feature the
+play is made as interesting as it should be, but often is not. Only two
+of the holes on the course are quite flat and plain, and these are
+novelties. They are the first and eighteenth, which take straight lines
+parallel to each other through the great polo field alongside the
+club-house. Polo is a considerable feature of the scheme of the Country
+Club, and its comparatively small territory is not to be interfered with
+for the sake of the golfers who have so much more of Massachusetts for
+their delectation. Yet it is necessary to play through this polo field.
+Consequently we start the round at one end of it and play a hole of 430
+yards right along past the grand stand. Then away we go out into the
+country, over the hills and along the dales, and through the trees and
+cuttings where rocks were blasted, and, after many adventures, return to
+the smooth plain land of the polo field as to the straight run home at
+the end of a steeplechase, and play along positively the plainest
+410-yard hole I have ever seen. The tee is at one end of the polo field,
+with the grand stand in the middle distance on the left. There is not a
+bunker along that field, but there is rough grass on the left of the
+part designated for the fairway, and there is the same with a
+horse-racing track as well on the right. At the far end of the field,
+near to the club-house, the race-track, of course, bends round and comes
+across the line of play. Just on the other side of that track the ground
+rises up steeply for three or four yards, and then up there sloping
+upwards and backwards is the putting green. Thus the race-track becomes
+a hazard to guard the green, and the green is on a high plateau with big
+trees all round it. The hole is there all complete, with hardly a thing
+done to it by man, and it is one of the most remarkable examples I have
+seen of a piece of ready-made golf of the plainest possible description,
+resulting in something fairly good. It is 410 yards long, and if the tee
+shot is a little defective the attempt to reach the green with the
+second is going to be a heartbreaking business. With a good drive that
+second shot, played with a cleek perhaps, or the brassey may be needed,
+has to be uncommonly well judged and true. The margin for error is next
+to nothing. At the first glance at it I thought that this eighteenth
+hole was very stupid, but it is a hole that grows a little upon you, and
+the original impression has been withdrawn from my mind. It was the last
+hope of Vardon and Ray, and it failed them. The fairway at Brookline is
+far better than on the average American course, and if one says that its
+putting greens are among the very best in America, the greatest possible
+compliment is paid to them.
+
+There have been many touches of romance in the history of golf at the
+Country Club, but none more remarkable than that associated with the
+construction of the comparatively new ninth, tenth, and eleventh holes,
+two long ones with a short one between them, which are among the nicest
+holes in all America. For some years after the beginning of this
+century, when golf at Brookline had become a very big thing, these holes
+did not exist, their predecessors being embraced in the other parts of
+the course. But, for the crossing that they involved, those predecessors
+had become dangerous, and it was determined to take in a new tract of
+land, and to make three new holes upon it. It was a tremendous
+undertaking, for "land" was only a kind of courtesy title for the wild
+mixture of forest, rock, and swamp into which a man might sink up to his
+neck, but for which about 25,000 dollars had to be paid, while another
+thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars had to be spent in making it fit
+for golf and preparing the holes, so that these three cost an average of
+about thirteen thousand dollars a hole, or roughly £2500 as we may say
+if we are English. At the ninth as much rock had to be blasted as some
+one afterwards used to make a wall two hundred yards long, and the best
+part of a yard in thickness. The tenth hole is a very delightful short
+one, with the green in a glade far below the tee. They call it "The
+Redan," because Mr. G. Herbert Windeler (long resident in America, but
+English in nationality still, despite his past presidency of the
+U.S.G.A.), who is largely responsible for the golf at Brookline, and
+designed and superintended the construction of these holes, had the
+famous piece of golf at North Berwick in his mind when he planned this
+one, but before the end he departed far from the original conception,
+and all for the good of the hole. When it was being made the place for
+the green needed raising from the swamp, and nearly two thousand loads
+of broken rocks were deposited there; and after soil to a depth of
+eighteen inches had been laid upon the stone foundation a splendid
+putting green was made. With all its variety, this is not a course of
+such intricacy and such mystery as St. Andrews is, to need long weeks of
+study and practice to understand every shot upon it. You may play St.
+Andrews from childhood to old age and yet be puzzled and mistaken
+sometimes, but Brookline is more candid than that, and it is to its
+credit that with all its variety you may be completely acquainted with
+it in a very few days. Let me say then that the suggestion that Mr.
+Ouimet had a distinct advantage in a knowledge of the course obtained in
+his childhood, and maintained thenceforth by frequent practice on the
+course near to which he lived, is quite nonsense. He had no advantage
+whatever. Vardon and Ray had practised there for several days in
+advance, and if they did not know all about it that there was to know it
+was their own fault. They did know, and local knowledge, which counts
+for far less with great golfers than men a little their inferiors, had
+nothing to do with the issue.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now consider the other circumstances, that the proper meaning and
+significance of the result may be understood, and that neither too much
+merit shall be awarded, nor too much blame. There were about a hundred
+and sixty competitors, and I would call the field a strong one, but of
+course not nearly so strong as the field for our Open Championship. Such
+men as two of the triumvirate were missing, and a highly respectable
+company of past champions, while there were no such English amateurs in
+the list as Mr. Graham, Mr. Lassen, and Mr. Michael Scott to make an
+occasional disturbance. But there were other amateurs. Compared to a
+British open championship field it was weak at the top and weak in the
+middle. Everybody who goes to our open championships knows that there,
+for three parts of the trial, there are comparative nobodies bobbing up
+from nowhere and creating all kinds of excitement by breaking the
+records of the courses, and fixing themselves up elegantly at the top of
+the list. There they sit like civilians on an imperial dais, but always
+they topple off before the end. Not one of them has ever remained to the
+finish, so that if the American entry was weak in this respect,
+Americans might argue that it did not matter anyhow since this middle
+part was not the one to count. Yet it always has its effect. But then
+the Americans may also point out that they too had their middle men who
+came to the front and created disturbances, only quitting the heights in
+time to make room for the winner and his attendants. There was young
+M'Donald Smith, and there were Barnes and Hagin, who had come up out of
+the wild west--and one of them, saying it respectfully to his splendid
+golf, looked a cowboy too--and were distinct menaces until the last
+rounds came to be played. Then in estimating the strength of this
+American field remember that M'Dermott, who is undoubtedly high class,
+and was in the prize list at the Open Championship at Hoylake, was not
+nearly a winner here, and remember also that imported players of the
+high quality of Tom Vardon and Robert Andrew were not in it either.
+Altogether it is my judgment that the field was stronger than imagined
+in England, yet not nearly so strong as ours. Following a favourite
+American practice of reducing to percentages every estimate, however
+necessarily indefinite, such as even the comparative charms of wives and
+sweethearts, I would give the strength of a British field the hundred,
+and I would give sixty-five to this of America. I knew that I should
+fall to that percentage system some time, and now I have. For its strong
+variety, and for its flavour of cosmopolitanism, it was an interesting
+entry. The professionals all over the States--and the amateurs, too, for
+that matter--came up to Brookline from north, south, east and west, for
+what they felt was a great occasion, and over the border from Canada
+they came as well. Up from Mexico came Willie Smith, the Willie who was
+teethed in golf at his Carnoustie home, and whom we never shall forget
+as he who broke the record--and holds it with George Duncan still--for
+the old course at St. Andrews in the very last round that was played at
+the beginning of an Open Championship meeting there a few years ago. It
+was really a wonderful field, and its units presented a wealth of
+material for study and contemplation in matters of style and method
+during the first day or two. And yet for all the variety of players I
+doubt whether there was so much difference in ways as we see in a big
+championship at home. The American golfing system is a little plainer, I
+think. Of course it was by far the largest entry that had ever been
+received for the American open event, and this fact necessitated a
+departure to some extent from established American custom, and one which
+we of Britain with unenviable experience of many processes in qualifying
+competitions could not congratulate the Americans on having to make.
+However, the numbers were not so large as to cause such trouble, even
+with a qualifying competition, as we experience in England and Scotland,
+and consequently a two-days' affair worked it smoothly through, the
+field being divided into two sections, and each man playing his two
+rounds off in one day and getting done with it. It was settled that the
+top thirty players in each section, and those who tied for the thirtieth
+place, should pass into the competition proper for the championship,
+which, as here and elsewhere, consists of four rounds of stroke play,
+two on each of two successive days.
+
+The United States Golf Association always manages its championships very
+well indeed with no more red tape than is necessary, but with an
+exactness of method which might serve as a fine lesson to some other
+great golfing countries that I have in mind. In this present case Mr.
+Robert Watson, President for the year of the U. S. G. A., after all his
+splendid work as secretary of the Association, was in charge of all the
+arrangements and as administrator-in-chief was the most energetic man
+during the whole of the week at Brookline. It was fitting that in his
+year of presidency, so well deserved, there should be this ever
+memorable happening to mark the season out from all others. Mr. Herbert
+Jacques, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, and Mr. John Reid, the new secretary
+of the U. S. G. A., were in the nature also of generals of the
+headquarters staff, and they laboured constantly in an upper room late
+at night working out the details of business when other persons on whom
+responsibility was more lightly cast, with cocktails to help, might be
+pondering over the tense problem as to what was going to happen next.
+The general idea of the system was much the same as we have it in
+Britain, as there is hardly much scope for variety in matters of this
+kind.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now--Ouimet. It is easy for the Americans and others to compose anthems
+about him now, but little enough did they know or think of this
+Massachusetts boy until they saw that he was really winning, and then
+the remark that I heard of an ex-American champion to him in the
+dressing-room shortly after it was all over, "Well done, Francis, and
+there are lots more in the country like you!" was not only lacking in
+compliment and taste, but was not true. America is by no means full of
+Ouimets, and never will be. I had met him at Chicago in 1912, and heard
+of him next in a letter that I received just before starting for America
+in the following summer, which gave me particulars of what happened in
+the match in the closing stages of the Massachusetts State Championship
+between my old friend, Mr. John G. Anderson, and Mr. Ouimet, in which it
+was stated that Mr. Ouimet had done the last nine holes in that match as
+follows--yards first and figures after: 260 yards (4), 497 yards (3),
+337 yards (4), 150 yards (2), 394 yards (3), 224 yards (3), 250 yards
+(3), 320 yards (3), 264 yards (3). So he did the last six holes in 17
+strokes, and no wonder that poor John remarked, "I have never played in
+any match in my life where I did the last six holes in three over 3's
+and lost four of them, as I did on this occasion!" Of course Mr. Ouimet
+became State champion, and I determined to have a good look at him as
+soon as I got on the other side of the Atlantic. On the day after my
+arrival in New York I was down at the Garden City Club, the Amateur
+Championship taking place there the following week, and at lunch time
+Mr. Anderson, who was at another table with Ouimet, called me over.
+"Well, Mr. Ouimet, I suppose you have a big championship in your bag
+this season," was just the proper thing to say, and he answered
+something about doing his best, but feeling he might be better at stroke
+play. "Then," said I, "there is the Open Championship to take place in
+your own golfing country," and with that we tackled the chicken. He is a
+nice, open-hearted, modest, sporting golfer, and was only twenty years
+old in the May of his great championship year. Tall, lithe and somewhat
+athletic in figure and movement, he takes excellent care of himself in a
+semi-training sort of way. He abstains from alcohol entirely, and though
+he smokes a few cigarettes when "off duty" he rarely does so while
+playing, having the belief that the use of tobacco has a temporary
+effect on the eyesight, such as is not conducive to accuracy of play. He
+agreed entirely with a suggestion I put to him, in conversation, that
+most golfers make the mistake of playing too much and lose keenness in
+consequence, and he thinks that the American players in general are by
+no means at such a disadvantage as is sometimes imagined. The winter
+rest gives them extra keenness in the spring and summer, and that is
+everything. He does not play at all from November to April, but keeps
+himself fit with skating and ice hockey, while during the season he only
+plays one round three times a week, and two full rounds on Sundays.
+Business considerations--he is engaged at a Boston athletic store--have
+something to do with this system, no doubt, but he thinks it sound. I
+looked at his bag of clubs; there are no freaks in it. It comprises ten
+items, an ivory-faced driver, a brassey, six irons including a jigger
+and mashie niblick, and two putters, one being of the ordinary aluminium
+kind and the other a wry-neck implement, the latter being most used. As
+to his style of golf, its outstanding characteristics are three: it is
+plain, like the style of most American golfers, and free from any
+striking individuality; it is straight; and it is marvellously steady
+and accurate. A marked feature of most of the American players is that
+their swing is very round and flat, and that they get a pronounced hook
+on their ball. Mr. Ouimet's swing is rather more upright than that of
+most of the others, he keeps an exceedingly straight line and has full
+length--as much as Vardon. I said he had no peculiarities, but there is
+just this one, that he grips his club with what is called the
+interlocking grip. This is a way of grasping the club that some
+professionals employed during the early period of general transition
+from the plain grip to the overlapping. Mr. Ouimet's little finger of
+the right hand just goes between the first and second of the left hand,
+while the left thumb goes round the shaft instead of into the palm of
+the right hand. Such a grip may suit a man who uses it, but it can
+hardly have any advantages. I note as a further peculiarity that the
+right forefinger is crooked up away from the shaft, so that the tip of
+the finger only comes to the leather at the side. This has to some
+considerable extent the effect of throwing that finger out of action,
+and as a means of reducing the right hand's power for evil is not to be
+condemned. Many other players have sought some such method of crippling
+the very dangerous hand.
+
+But after all it is not the shots he plays, good as they are, dependable
+as they always seem to be, as the qualities of temperament with which
+they are supported. He has a golfing temperament of very peculiar
+perfection, wanting perhaps in imagination but remarkably serviceable to
+his game. He seems to have the power to eliminate entirely the mental
+oppression of the other ball or balls; he can play his own game nearly
+regardless of what others play against him. From the mere sporting point
+of view he misses something in the way of emotions perhaps, those rare
+emotions which some of us derive when we are fighting hard to keep our
+match alive and at a crisis become hopelessly bunkered; but he gains
+enormously in strokes and successes. When he settles down to his match
+or round, he can concentrate more deeply than any other man I know or
+have heard of. He sees his ball, thinks what he should do with it, and
+has the course and the hole in his mental or optical vision all the
+time, just those and nothing else. The other balls do not exist, and the
+scores that are made against him do not exist either. He has told me
+that in important golf, and indeed in that most mightily important
+play-off against Vardon and Ray, he was wholly unaware until it came to
+the putting what his opponents had done, and generally he had not seen
+their balls after they had driven them from the tee. Vardon and Ray
+pounded away as hard as they could, but their shots had no more effect
+on Ouimet than the patting of an infant's fist would have on the cranium
+of a nigger. He just went on and did better. Andrew Kirkaldy once said
+of Harry Vardon at the beginning of his career that he had the heart of
+an iron ox, and that is like Ouimet's. This championship will always be
+something of a mystery; but in this statement about the Ouimet
+temperament there is the nearest thing to a solution of it that can ever
+be offered. I know that what I say is the simple truth, partly from
+observation, partly from inquiry, and partly from Mr. Ouimet's
+statements to me. He said he was unaware of the presence of the crowd on
+the fourth day when he made the tie until he was in the neighbourhood of
+the seventeenth green.
+
+See how interesting he becomes despite the plainness of his game. When
+such achievements as his of the 20th of September are made they rarely
+suffer from any want of added romance. On the day in question Mr.
+Ouimet, champion as he had become, told me in a talk we had, how he
+began the game when he was about four years of age. He was a French
+Canadian by blood, but his parents had come over the border and their
+little family settled at Brookline close to the sixteenth green of the
+Country Club. His elder brothers played a kind of golf, and he watched
+them and began to practise himself on some pasture land near his home.
+Then he became a caddie at Brookline, played the game more seriously
+than before, with three clubs that a member of the Country Club gave to
+him, and at sixteen years of age won, at the second attempt, the
+championship of his school. They make a feature of school championships
+in America. This story was attractive enough, but the next day, reading
+the American papers, one gathered that there was some of the romance of
+a Joan of Arc about this boy of Brookline. His mother said that when
+Francis was a little boy of six or seven he would cross the road and sit
+for hours fascinated by watching the members of the Country Club at the
+game. Then he wanted to become a caddie, and maternal objections did not
+avail. He became a caddie. His mother also said that he learned much of
+the game then, and would always try to get engaged by the strongest
+players, and he would copy as well as he could their best strokes. He
+passed from the grammar school to the Brookline High School, but his
+mind was more on golf than on his books. The mother used to hear noises
+up in his room at night. Once she was frightened by what she heard, and
+went to his room at midnight fearing that he was sick. She found him
+putting on the floor, and he then confessed that he had often done that
+kind of thing before. On that occasion he had thought while in bed of a
+new grip and wished to try it. He did not care to wait until the
+morning. The parents desired their son to get all advantage from
+education that he could, but after two years at the high school he
+insisted on leaving and was engaged at a Boston store where golf goods
+are dealt in. All that and more was said of him.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a narrative of this kind circumstances and reasonable deductions are
+everything, and shots are next to nothing, for there is little enough to
+be said about a ball in the air or its place of stopping. Only one man
+knows the truth about a golf stroke as it is played, and that is the man
+who plays it. Very often even the most expert observers are quite wrong
+in their inferences and judgments. I have explained most of the
+circumstances already. On the first of the two qualifying days, Mr.
+Ouimet came very near to taking first place in the list, for he had a
+score of 152, and only Harry Vardon beat him, and by one stroke only, as
+the result of a long putt on the last green of all. The weather was fine
+and the greens were fiery on that Tuesday. Next day there was more wind
+and there were indications of a change of weather coming. Autumn gusts
+were breaking the leaves from the tree-tops. That day Ray headed the
+qualifying list with 148, Wilfrid Reid was next to him with 149,
+M'Dermott was 161 and Mr. Travers was 165. This was good business for
+England, even though it yielded nothing but a little temporary prestige.
+Then came Thursday, and in the early morning and up to a little while
+after play began there was much rain, and the greens were considerably
+slowed down. They were, indeed, reduced to a soaking state in time, and
+Tom M'Namara told me that once or twice he had actually, instead of
+putting, to root his ball with a niblick out of the greens, into which
+they had buried themselves on pitching. But Brookline stood the weather
+test very well.
+
+First rounds are seldom eventful; the value of the play done in them
+seems to be discounted by the circumstance that there are three more
+rounds to come. M'Dermott did a 74 in this round, Vardon and Reid 75's,
+Mr. Ouimet 77, and Ray 79, but even M'Dermott was three strokes behind
+the leaders. In the afternoon round Ray recovered brilliantly with a 70,
+Vardon and Reid both did 72's, and Mr. Ouimet 74; and at the end of this
+first proper day Vardon and Reid were at the head of the list with
+aggregates of 147, Ray was next with 149, while Mr. Ouimet was seventh
+with 151. Again the British invaders looked well in their place, and
+that night they were strong favourites for the championship. "America
+has a fight on hands," "Little left but hope," and such like, were the
+headings in newspapers. As I lay in bed at the Country Club that night,
+I heard the rain pour ceaselessly down. It rained all through the night
+and alas! all the next day as well, and the great events of that Friday
+were watched through a heavy downpour. In their third rounds Vardon did
+78, Ray 76, and Mr. Ouimet, who was playing nearly a whole round behind
+the others, and with wonderful steadiness, did a 74: and so it came
+about that with the competition three parts done, all these three were
+at the top with aggregates of 225. Now was the time for the Englishmen's
+efforts if they were to be made. To their own chagrin they could not
+make them when they needed. Ray took 43 to the turn, in his fourth
+round, Vardon, whose putting all the week was distinctly moderate, and
+the chief cause for his inefficiency, took 42, and though both finished
+better, their two 79's were bad and seemed to have cost them the
+championship. Vardon certainly thought they had, and took a very gloomy
+view of things. I spoke to him a little while after he had finished, and
+he said he was sorry and that they could not win then. His putting had
+let him down, he said, as he had been afraid it would, though he felt
+that the rest of his game had never been played better. "There are three
+or four out there who will beat us," said the melancholy Vardon. It
+looked like that, but the American hopes one by one failed to
+materialise. Hagin fell out; Barnes fell out; M'Dermott fell out.
+Goodness! it was going to be a tie between Vardon and Ray after all, and
+these two Englishmen would play off here at Boston for the American
+championship! Hereupon said Englishmen came out to see what was
+happening, and looked happy again. They smiled. Then men came running
+and breathless from distant parts with tidings of Ouimet. He had had a
+worried way to the turn, but had improved afterwards, so rumour said. I
+went along with our British champions to pick him up at the fourteenth
+green, and there when he came along, we found that if he did the last
+four holes in a total of one under par he would tie with the leaders,
+or, in other words, if he did the miraculous and practically impossible
+he might be permitted to have a game next day.
+
+I shall never forget watching that boy play those last four holes; that
+was the real fight for the championship. Their respective lengths and
+par figures are 370 yards (4), 128 yards (3), 360 yards (4), 405 yards
+(4). They were stiff pars, too, you will see, with nothing given away,
+especially as the turf was soaking. At one of those holes he had to gain
+a stroke on par if he were to tie, and the others must be done in par. A
+slip anywhere would surely be fatal. It seemed that that slip was made
+with the second shot at the fifteenth, for he was wide of the green on
+the right and had to pitch from the rough, but he was dead with his
+third and got the 4 after all. At the sixteenth he holed a three yards'
+putt for the 3 and still was level with par. The much-wanted stroke was
+given to him at the next hole, which is a dog-legged thing bending to
+the left, with rough and bunkers to be avoided. He played it with good
+judgment always, and this time, on the green with his second, he holed a
+nine-yards putt for a 3. Thus he was left to get the home hole in 4 to
+tie, and by holing a five-feet putt with not a second's hesitation, just
+as if everything in golf had not seemed to depend upon it, he tied.
+Jupiter!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+According to American golfing law and precedent the tie had to be
+decided by one extra round, all three playing together. I have no fault
+to find with this arrangement; perhaps the result would have been the
+same if two rounds had had to be played. I know, however, that Vardon
+thought it would have been better and proper if each had played
+separately, with a marker. Most people thought that as Ouimet was almost
+playing the better ball of the two Englishmen he could not possibly win.
+Theoretically he was sure to have slept badly overnight and to be in a
+terrible state of nerves in the morning. They might see him top his
+first tee shot and be three strokes to the bad on the first green.
+Really I had no such ideas, and when I saw him hit his first drive as
+well, cleanly and straight as any drive ever need be made, I had no
+doubts about his having slept. Vardon drove the straightest ball and
+then deliberately played short of the muddy race-track in front of the
+green, but Mr. Ouimet boldly took his brassey, went for the carry, and
+just did it. The hole was done in 5 each, and the second in 4 each; but
+at the third Ray, who had driven too much to the right and had a bad
+stance below his ball, only just got to the corner of the green, a long
+way from the pin, with his second, and then took three putts, thus
+dropping a stroke behind the others. At the fourth and fifth, at the
+latter of which Mr. Ouimet put a spoon shot out of bounds through his
+club slipping in his hands, but recovered splendidly with the same club,
+the score remained the same. Then at the sixth, a drive and pitch up a
+hill, Vardon approached to within three yards, and the others to within
+six yards of the pin, Vardon holing his putt and Mr. Ouimet (who decided
+on consideration to concentrate on his 4) and Ray just missing. So
+Vardon was then one stroke better than the American, and the latter
+still one less than Ray who, by a better run up from the edge of the
+green at the seventh, scored over both his opponents. At the eighth
+there was a dramatic episode, for Mr. Ouimet laid a low approach
+stone-dead and holed for a 3, while Ray ran down a twelve yards' putt
+for another 3, Vardon being beaten here though getting a perfect par 4.
+All were level and the excitement and suspense intense. Something was
+expected to happen at the ninth, the longest hole on the course, and a
+great, romantic piece of golf. It is a long, heaving hole carved through
+rock, and partly built on a swamp, and away in the far distance is a
+high plateau green which, seen through the rain and mist, looked like a
+ghostly thing in the clouds. Here Vardon slashed out for length, but
+with a hook sent his ball into the woods. Yet he recovered well, and
+after stress and strain by all three this tortuous hole was done in five
+each. The parties were all level at the turn with 38 strokes each.
+Immediately afterwards Mr. Ouimet went to the front, and was never
+deprived of the lead. The tenth hole is the short one named "The Redan,"
+with a heavily bunkered green low down in a valley below the tee. Each
+tee shot was right, but Vardon and Ray were poor on the green and took
+three putts, while the American was down in one less. Vardon looked
+serious now, and Ray was fidgetty. There were three 4's at the eleventh,
+and then Mr. Ouimet reached the twelfth green with his second, four
+yards from the pin, Vardon and Ray being just off on opposite sides.
+They both took five to hole out. Mr. Ouimet, by boldness, might have
+gained two strokes here, but he was a trifle short with his putt and was
+satisfied with a profit of one. This was followed by Vardon holing a
+three-yard putt and getting a point back, but at the fourteenth there
+were ominous signs of the British game collapsing, for Vardon went into
+the woods again, Ray shot off wildly to the right with his second, and
+they were both well out of it with 5's, like Mr. Ouimet whose brassey
+shot went too low to clear properly a bank in front. Mr. Ouimet told me
+that at this stage he felt he was going to win. Not one of the three had
+been bunkered so far, but at the fifteenth Ray was caught and, needing
+two strokes for recovery, was virtually done for.
+
+The last stage of the struggle lay between Vardon and Mr. Ouimet. Both
+got 3's at the short sixteenth. Vardon was looking anxious and worried,
+for most brilliant play on his own part could not save him now, and he
+could only hope that Mr. Ouimet would come by disaster. Instead of that
+he himself, trying to cut the corner of the dog-legged seventeenth too
+finely in an effort to gain distance, was bunkered. Ray, in wild
+desperation, had hurled himself with terrific force at the ball on the
+tee in an impossible attempt to carry straight over the bunkers and the
+rough in a straight line to the green. As to Mr. Ouimet, he just played
+an easy iron shot to the green dead on the line of the pin and holed a
+six-yard putt for 3 and a gain of two clear strokes. It was really
+finished then, and in the circumstances the playing of the last hole was
+a formality. Mr. Ouimet did it steadily for par 4; Vardon was caught in
+the race track before the green and took 6, and Ray holed a fruitless
+putt for 3. Mr. Ouimet was champion, and there was an end of it. Seeing
+that history was made, let me set down the scores:--
+
+    FIRST HALF
+
+    Ouimet        5  4  4  4  5  4  4  3  5--38
+    Vardon        5  4  4  4  5  3  4  4  5--38
+    Ray           5  4  5  4  5  4  3  3  5--38
+
+    SECOND HALF
+
+    Ouimet        3  4  4  4  5  4  3  3  4--34--72
+    Vardon        4  4  5  3  5  4  3  5  6--39--77
+    Ray           4  4  5  4  5  6  4  5  3--40--78
+
+Mr. Ouimet's score exactly equalled that of the better ball of Vardon
+and Ray.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I shall say no more about what happened immediately afterwards than that
+the American crowd gave a hearty demonstration of the fact that they
+were very pleased indeed. A considerable sum of money was raised by a
+collection for Mr. Ouimet's little caddie, Eddie Lowry, who was a
+wonder of a mite and inspired the new champion throughout the week with
+all sorts of advice. He would tell him in the mornings to take time over
+his putts as it was then only ten o'clock and he had until six at night
+to play; would remind him again at a suitable moment that America was
+expecting great things from him, and, above all, whispered gently to him
+on handing him his club for each shot that he must be careful to keep
+his eye on the ball! It is declared, moreover, that at the beginning of
+the tie round he assured his master that a 72 would that time be
+forthcoming. Little Eddie Lowry had his share of glory.
+
+And now what about it all? How is it to be explained? Vardon and Ray
+generously and properly admitted they were beaten fairly and squarely on
+their merits. They could not say otherwise. I believe that Vardon came
+to the conclusion at the end of his American tour that he played worse
+golf at that championship than anywhere else, but on that final day on
+which everything depended he did not play so badly as he may have
+thought, and his putting was better than usual. I would not like to
+guarantee either Englishman to do much better in the same conditions at
+any time. On the other hand, Mr. Ouimet was blessed with no special
+luck, except that negative kind of luck that kept his ball out of
+trouble always, and made two putts invariably sufficient. His driving
+was as long as Vardon's, and he was the straightest of all, while he
+missed some putts by half-inches. He played a bold game too, and the
+only semblance of timidity was in occasionally being a trifle short with
+long putts, while Vardon and Ray, desperate, but in proper principle,
+were giving the hole every chance and often running past it. Mr. Ouimet
+seemed to general his own game so thoroughly well. Talking to me
+afterwards, he explained completely his policy at every shot in the
+match, and showed himself to be a thinker of the finest strain. He was
+all for running approaches instead of pitched ones that day, because he
+feared the ball embedding itself in the soft turf, and also felt that
+when running it would be more likely to shed dirt that it picked up and
+leave him a clean putt. Everything was considered and well decided, and
+in his argument one could find no flaw. And he insisted that he just
+played his own game and never watched the other balls. "Looking back on
+it all," said he, "I think it was just this way, that Vardon and Ray
+rather expected me to crack, not having the experience for things like
+this as they had, and when the time went on and I did not crack but went
+along with them, I think it had an unfavourable effect on them. That is
+the way I reason it out, because when you expect a man to crack and he
+doesn't, you lose a little of your sureness yourself. I began to feel
+that the championship was coming to me when we were about the fourteenth
+hole, for Ray then seemed to be going, and he was swinging rather wildly
+at the ball." I think that Mr. Ouimet's explanation was tolerably near
+the truth. Some of the secret history of this championship may never be
+written, but I know that Harry Vardon realised when it was too late that
+he had been paying insufficient attention to what Mr. Ouimet was doing,
+and what the possibilities were in that direction. At the beginning he
+felt that the real contest lay between him and Ray, never dreaming that
+Mr. Ouimet could hold out against them. Therefore he concentrated on
+Ray, as it were, and when he had Ray beaten he realised too late that
+there was some one else. It may have made no difference, but a thousand
+times have we had demonstrated to us the capacity of our champions for
+playing "a little bit extra" when it is really needed. Anyhow it was
+Vardon's own mistake, if it was one, and he is very sorry for it.
+
+A consideration of great importance is the way in which this victory was
+confirmed, as it were, by the other events of the week. It does not
+generally happen that the men who distinguish themselves in preliminary
+qualifying competitions go through winners of championships afterwards.
+Men can rarely play their best for six rounds in succession, and, the
+law of averages being at work all the time, they would rather perform
+indifferently in the first test, so long as they qualify, than beat all
+the others. I do not recall a case where the champion would have been
+champion if all six rounds had been counted in, instead of the four of
+the competition proper. But this time at Brookline we had seven rounds
+played, and the astonishing fact is that, if all seven rounds were
+counted in, Mr. Ouimet would still be at the top with a score of 528
+against Ray's 530 and Vardon's 532. I think that this is a point which
+has not been much realised, and it is one of importance in dealing with
+the idea that a fluke victory was achieved. You can hardly have a fluke
+victory in four stroke rounds; much less can you have one in seven. Now
+I would suggest that if Vardon and Ray had dropped behind in the
+scoring, and had occupied other places than they did in the final
+aggregates, there might have been some good support for the fluke
+theory. Their defeat by several people would have needed far more
+explanation, because it would have been clear that, for some reason,
+they were beaten by golfers inferior to themselves. Conditions and
+climate would have become considerations of greater importance. But
+merely the fact that these men finished second and third in such a big
+field indicates that there was little fluke anywhere, for this was a
+marvellous vindication of form in competition, in a game where form is
+so much affected by fortune. And, finally, the fact that Mr. Ouimet beat
+these men in the play-off when he had them both there in sight, playing
+stroke against stroke with him, and not an invisible field without any
+definite menace as in the previous play, was quite enough to stamp him
+as the most thoroughly deserving champion of that week. British golfing
+pride will force the suggestion to many minds that such a thing, proper
+as it was on this occasion, could never happen again; that if the
+championship were replayed in the same conditions Mr. Ouimet would be
+beaten. But of how many champions could it be said that if they had to
+play the event over again a week or a month later, the luck of the game
+being what it is, they would repeat their triumph? Reflecting once more
+that this was but a boy of twenty, and the real greatness of our players
+being what it is, I am more amazed than ever at what has happened. It
+was an American victory and America takes the credit, but, again, the
+United States are by no means full of Ouimets. I look upon him as a
+first-class prodigy, such as the game has never known before, produced
+in the country where such a golfing prodigy was most likely to make his
+appearance. He accomplished what had never been done before, and what I
+feel sure will never be done again, and because it was such an historic
+happening, and there were so few from England there to see it as I did,
+I have told the tale in full. Nobody believes that Mr. Ouimet is as
+great as Harry Vardon and Edward Ray. He could not be. But also I do not
+think that any one else could do what he did at Brookline on that
+occasion. I found, a long time after the occurrence, that many wise
+American golfers, reflecting dispassionately if still proudly upon it,
+gave a certain satisfaction to their reason by suggesting as a final
+explanation that a miracle had happened. That is a good way out of our
+difficulties, and for my own part I accept it, for it is the only
+explanation that will stand all tests. A miracle happened at Brookline
+on that Twentieth of September.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF GOLF IN THE UNITED STATES, AND EXPERIENCES IN
+TRAVELLING THERE, WITH AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CLUB MANAGEMENT.
+
+
+There is little done to solve the mysteries of golf's beginning by
+pressing into the farthest recesses of American golfing history. Only by
+such little twinklings in the darkness of the almost prehistoric period
+of the game do we begin more to suspect that, being such a natural and
+simple thing, an almost inevitable kind of pastime despite its man-made
+intricacies and laws, and all its heartenings and maddenings, it came up
+of itself in different places, when man had reached full intelligence
+and the desire to play properly other games than such as bowls. Those
+Indian braves who wandered and hunted and fought over that magnificent
+land when in its virgin state must have tried to knock something like a
+ball, or a stone, in the direction of a particular mark, and that would
+be a game for them. I remember hearing that several years ago a visitor
+to one of the reservations found several of the red men playing golf of
+a kind, with real clubs and balls. "Purple Cloud" was the champion of
+the braves. Then in the autumn of 1903 another white wanderer looked in
+upon the Indians in the reservation at Montana and reported that he had
+witnessed a very spirited game. Golf, said he, is much better suited to
+the Indian of to-day than his old game of lacrosse. He noticed very few
+subtleties in the game. When the champion, "Spotted Horse," drove off,
+there was a long stretch of clear prairie, with only here and there a
+shrub, so that the game resolved itself into a chase of the ball for a
+couple of miles and a return, the one who did it in the fewest strokes
+being the winner. He saw some really capital drives, several well over
+three hundred yards, he thought. The only thing that was very new and
+characteristic about these red men's golf, so far as he could see, was
+that the spectators "made a most infernal row all the time that the play
+was in progress." When a brave took his stance for a tee shot, it was
+looked upon as the signal for a perfect bedlam of yells and howling,
+which should have disconcerted the player but did not do so. And with my
+own eyes have I seen the modern Indians playing for the American
+championship, and it might be claimed that though laws be made at St.
+Andrews, and interpretations thereof in the council chamber of the white
+men at New York, this after all, in essentials, is a game that is native
+of the soil. Yet the history of such a game down the Indian line must be
+hazy as the history of the braves themselves, and we must leave it now
+with this ample recognition.
+
+But though in names and other matters there is a Scottish flavour in
+some of the records of the earliest American golf, and when it became a
+real and growing thing it was obviously imported, one is sometimes
+inclined to think that the Simpsonian theory of the spontaneous
+generation of golf, or what approximated in essentials to golf, must
+have applied to America as to other countries. A stick, a ball, a mark,
+and there is the principle of golf fully indicated.
+
+In a primitive way also it was played in America in the seventeenth
+century, and, as in the homeland, some of the earliest references to it
+that remain take the form of warnings of the punishments accruing to
+players who departed from such severe restrictions as were imposed. It
+was not proclaimed what advantages would be yielded men who played, as
+is done to-day, but what grievous penalties they should suffer if they
+played it when and where they should not, and alas! the times and places
+that were forbidden appeared to be many in proportion to those when the
+game might be enjoyed by those who liked it. Then as now, and in America
+as in happy England, those who were not of golf were against it, and
+bitterly. There were jealousies then as ever since. There were those
+often-quoted Laws and Ordinances of the New Netherlands of 1659 in
+which, because of a complaint by the burghers of Fort Orange and the
+village of Berwyck about the damage done to their windows and the danger
+to which they were exposed of being wounded by persons who played golf
+along the streets, the golfers were threatened of consequences to come.
+Then clearly the game was played in South Carolina in 1788, for at that
+time an advertisement appeared in a local newspaper thus: "Anniversary
+of the South Carolina Golf Club will be held at Williams's Coffee House
+on Thursday, 29th instant, when members are requested to attend at 2
+o'clock precisely, that the business of the Club may be transacted
+before dinner." Here there is a clear indication of the close connection
+maintained between the playing of the game and the social ceremonies
+about the dinner-table that were held by the golfers on the same day in
+the way that was practised by the early golfers of the Scottish centres
+and of Blackheath. For many years afterwards these meetings of the South
+Carolina Golf Club were held at the club-house on what was known as
+"Harton's Green," which is now in the heart of Charleston. Perhaps this
+was the first golf club-house in America, and if that were so it shared
+the fate of pioneer establishments in many other places where towns have
+widened and gathered in the outlying lands. There is also preserved in
+the archives the form of invitation that was sent to Miss Eliza Johnston
+to attend the ball of the Savannah Golf Club at the Exchange hall in
+that city in December 1811. And then American golf seems to have lapsed
+and slept like Van Winkle in the Catskills until the time of the great
+regeneration came near the end of last century. One does not come now to
+make a history of American golf, but only to indicate that new and
+republican America also has something in the way of golf traditions.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The real beginning of American golf was made, as you may know, out at
+Yonkers up the Hudson, and Mr. John Reid, the elder, is rightly regarded
+as the father of American golf. Such recognition being of long standing
+and his claims being incontestable, he was again publicly and officially
+proclaimed as such at the silver jubilee celebration that was held in
+New York on November 19, 1913. That was twenty-five years from the time
+when the game was really set going in the States. One night I sat over a
+log fire in a club-house in Massachusetts and heard the story of the
+foundation by his father from the lips of Mr. John Reid, the younger,
+secretary of the United States Golf Association. He told me how his
+father and Robert Lockhart, who went to the same school in Scotland,
+came to America together; how Lockhart who, as a buyer of goods, had to
+pay periodical visits to his homeland, talked of the strange game that
+was played there; how Mr. Reid became interested and asked for clubs and
+balls to be brought across the water; how he tried the swings and
+strokes in a field by their house at Yonkers, the son "fielding" for
+the father; how the captain of a steamer was persuaded to bring another
+set of clubs over with him, and how irons were thereafter cast in
+America. Then he told me how other people, few but keen, were attracted
+to this new pastime that the Reids were trying, and how the first little
+club was formed here at Yonkers in November 1888, and called the St.
+Andrews Golf Club. They were as the golfing fathers. I learned how the
+members came to be known as the Apple Tree Gang because of the tree near
+to the first hole on which they hung their coats; how six holes were
+laid out at the beginning on Mr. Reid's land, his house being used as a
+club-house; how he gave a medal which was the first prize ever put up
+for competition in America--and it was for an annual thirty-six holes
+stroke competition--and how it was won for eleven years, three in
+succession, by Mr. George Sands. Those were days of consequence. From
+that little beginning the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, after many
+changes and enlargements, has risen to a place of importance and honour
+in American golf.
+
+These little histories and traditions of American golf do become
+attractive as one probes more deeply into them. It was in Massachusetts
+that the most remarkable thing that has ever taken place in the history
+of the game on the other side of the Atlantic, or anywhere
+perhaps--meaning, of course, the Ouimet triumph--happened lately, and I
+have been much attracted to the story of the beginning of golf in that
+part of the American world, and not less so when I see that the start
+was made such a very little while before the birth of the boy who won
+that great championship at Brookline. American golf and Ouimet have
+grown up together. One finds that in the summer of 1892 a young lady
+from Pau went on a visit to Mr. Arthur Hunnewell, at Wellesley, Mass.,
+and took with her a set of golf clubs and balls. They had been playing
+the game for a long time past at Pau, but it was only just being started
+in other parts of France. After Yonkers it had been reproduced at
+Shinnecock and one or two other places, but so far Massachusetts had not
+known it. The girl showed Mr. Hunnewell how the clubs were used, and
+some relatives of his, owning adjacent estates and being fond of outdoor
+pastimes, watched and were won quickly to the game. On the first of June
+Mr. Hunnewell wrote down in his diary, "F. B. arrived to-day from
+Europe"; and on the fifteenth of September, "We are getting quite
+excited about golf." A fortnight later he wrote that "J. B. is here and
+plays golf all day." I calculate it as a coincidence worth remark that
+twenty-one years afterwards, to the month and to the week, Mr. Ouimet
+won the great championship.
+
+Many of Mr. Hunnewell's friends were invited to come and attempt the
+game at his place, which they did accordingly and fell in love with it.
+He had fashioned a course of seven holes of moderate length over
+undulating lawns and some park-land. The actual holes consisted of
+five-inch flower-pots sunk in the turf, and the hazards were avenues,
+clumps of trees, beds of rhododendrons, an aviary, a greenhouse, and an
+occasional drawing-room window, as it is facetiously remarked by Mr.
+Lawrence Curtis, who became the first secretary of the golf committee of
+the Country Club, and to whose account of these happenings I am indebted
+for my notes upon them. Mr. Curtis, seeing the fascination that the game
+exercised upon all who became acquainted with it, wrote a letter to the
+executive council of the Country Club informing them of it, suggesting
+that it was a pastime that might very well be brought within the scope
+of the club, and that the cost of an experimental course need not
+exceed some fifty dollars. The suggestion was backed by several members
+and the council agreed, the course being laid out in the spring of the
+following year. The home hole was placed on a lawn in front of the
+club-house which was soon discovered to be a very dangerous place for
+it, so that it had to be removed. Almost immediately the game became a
+strong attraction at the Country Club, new members came along in droves
+because of it, and it has flourished ever since. The example of this
+powerful club was followed at the Essex County Club at Manchester, then
+just being begun. Mr. Herbert Leeds, now so closely and honourably
+associated with Myopia, won the Country Club's championship in 1893 with
+a score for eighteen holes of 109, Mr. Curtis being next with 110; and
+that summer a Country Club side won a team tournament that was played at
+Tuxedo against the St. Andrews and Tuxedo Clubs. And afterwards all went
+very well indeed.
+
+And while I write in this way of the grand pioneering work that was done
+in those days when champions of the present time were being born and
+trained, I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Mr. Edward
+Blackwell, in which he told me of his going out to California in 1886
+and staying there for six years. His people had bought some land in
+those western parts, and he and his two brothers went out there to
+convert it from barley to a vineyard. Mr. Blackwell is a very great
+golfer to-day, but considering the gutty ball and circumstances in
+general, he was, relatively to his contemporaries, as great then. Only
+about a week before he sailed for California a match was arranged
+between him and Jack Simpson, who had gained the Open Championship the
+previous year, and Mr. Blackwell won that match at the last of the
+thirty-six holes that were played. Out in California there was plenty
+of hard work to do on the land and good sport with the gun, but, of
+course, there was no golf. Mr. Blackwell's thoughts frequently turned
+towards it, and he missed it very much. He considered the possibilities
+and found that they were practically non-existent, for the country round
+about was too hopelessly rough for laying out any sort of holes. So he
+never saw a golf club and never hit a ball during those six years, but
+for all that he won the King William IV. medal at the autumn meeting of
+the Royal and Ancient Club immediately on his return. Then he went back
+to California and did not see club or ball for another five years. Some
+of us could almost wish he had made some sort of course out there in
+California and become the first golfer of that far west, for he would
+have been so good to have been a pioneer, and golf has flourished there
+exceedingly since then. California sends men to championships. It would
+have given a special piquancy to that fateful amateur championship final
+at Sandwich in 1904 when Mr. Blackwell was his country's last hope
+against America's Mr. Walter Travis, and as it happened he was not quite
+equal to the occasion, for the American captured four holes at the start
+with his amazing putting, and he won by as many at the end.
+
+That was a great day for American golf, a kind of consummation it was,
+and I shall never forget the queer sensation that filled the atmosphere
+on the St. George's course, nor the dumb feeling, not exactly of dismay
+but of incomprehension, there was at the end. As to the first of these
+sensations I believe that nearly everybody felt--without knowing why
+exactly, for comparatively few had noticed his play until he got to the
+fourth or fifth rounds and was appreciated as dangerous--that the
+American player was nearly sure to win, that nothing could stop him from
+winning. It was a conviction. Certainly Mr. Travis's wonderful putting
+had created a very deep impression, but if he had been a British player
+I think the feeling would have arisen that putting like that, which had
+been continued for the best part of a week, would be sure to give out
+before the end. Take the case, for instance, of Mr. Aylmer in the
+championship of 1910 at Hoylake. He had been putting in the most amazing
+manner all the time, and holing them from everywhere, but nobody had any
+confidence in his ability to beat Mr. John Ball in the final, and he
+collapsed utterly. Of course, Mr. Aylmer then had not the tremendous
+fighting power and pertinacity of Mr. Travis in match play, qualities of
+their kind which I have only seen equalled by a successor of his in the
+American championship roll, Mr. Jerome Travers, and to beat Mr. Ball at
+Hoylake is a different matter from beating Mr. Blackwell at Sandwich.
+But then they were saying that Mr. Aylmer could not go much farther even
+when he was only at about the third round, and as for Mr. Ball at
+Hoylake there was a considerable feeling among golfers about that time
+that the old champion could not go on defying the law of averages any
+longer, and that there could be no more championships for him. I confess
+that I rather shared this view, held in a superstitious sort of way, but
+now that Mr. John has clapped another championship on to that Hoylake
+affair, we have given him up. There is no reason why he should not win
+another eight! However, when the Scot and the American teed up that
+fateful morning there was a disposition to be sorry for Mr. Blackwell,
+and a kind of hope that the end might be painless. In the circumstances
+Mr. Blackwell's performance in losing nothing more after losing four of
+the first five holes was as good as it could be. He kept the pump
+working splendidly.
+
+The truth is that he was by no means so gloomy as his friends about his
+prospects, as he told me afterwards. He said he thought he had a good
+chance of winning, and did not believe he would get beaten. He wished,
+however, that the tees had been farther back so that his long driving
+would have given him a better advantage. Two things about his opponent
+impressed him very much, one, of course, being his astonishing putting
+and the other his silence. But then, of course, one does not work one's
+way into a final of a championship for conversational purposes, or for
+debating the merits of the sixth sub-section of one of the rules of
+golf. When the deed was done completely Mr. Blackwell joined the
+converts who departed from the old prejudice and raided Tom Vardon's
+shop for Schenectady putters, with which they practised, and marvelled
+as the sun was setting on the first day that any but a British player
+had won a British golf championship. With that victory the first era in
+modern American golf, not counting the prehistoric times of golf in
+Charleston and the Indians' games, came to an end. America had made
+good. Now she became a power.
+
+The second era lasted nine years and was one in which she gradually came
+to be taken more seriously. She suffered a set-back of sorts when Mr.
+Harold Hilton won the American Amateur Championship at Apawamis in 1911,
+but there were some circumstances attending that victory at the
+thirty-seventh hole which were rather galling to the Americans, and they
+behaved well in saying so little about them. Mr. Hilton ran away with
+the match in the final, as it appeared, and Mr. Fred Herreshoff in the
+afternoon was offered about the most forlorn hope that golfer ever had
+to lighten his way for him. He brightened it up and made it thoroughly
+serviceable, and was distinctly unlucky in being beaten at the extra
+tie hole when Mr. Hilton's bad second shot cannoned off the famous rock
+to the right and went kindly to the putting green instead of getting
+into a hopeless place. It has been said that even if Mr. Hilton's shot
+was lucky, Mr. Herreshoff played the hole so badly that he hardly
+deserved to win it even if he was hardly treated by losing. But it is
+forgotten that it was match play, and that what one man does affects the
+other's game, and Mr. Herreshoff told me once, long after, that the
+American crowd, which is supposed erroneously to be many shots to the
+advantage of an American playing against an Englishman, on that occasion
+misled and upset him. It cheered for Mr. Hilton at the wrong time and
+for the wrong thing, and led to Mr. Herreshoff making a hash of a most
+fateful stroke. This era of American golf came to an end with the
+amazing victory by Mr. Ouimet at Brookline.
+
+The present state of things is very remarkable, and I have found the
+study of it very interesting during two long golfing expeditions through
+the United States, when I have visited many of the chief American clubs,
+met and made friends with men who are at the head of American golf and
+the most distinguished players, and in every way gained a good practical
+knowledge of the amazing progress of the game in this country. The
+Englishman who visits America and is not a golfer suffers a loss that he
+must regret always afterwards. To strangers in general the Americans in
+their own country are kindly and hospitable. That touch of carelessness
+and arrogance which is sometimes noticed in the wandering American when
+he is "doing Europe" is not in evidence among good Americans when they
+are at home, always provided that the Englishman has the good sense and
+manners--which one regrets to say is not always the case--to remember
+that when in the house of his host it is not good taste to praise his
+own for its superiority in divers ways. Pay the American now and then,
+and with proper delicacy, that little compliment that is so very well
+deserved about the magnificence of his achievement in making a country
+like that in such a short space of time, and about the excellence of
+many of his established systems. It is a compliment that can and should
+be paid with the most absolute sincerity. The American has the right to
+be proud of his own country, and we should be proud of the American, for
+that his blood is much the same as ours--trite observations, no doubt,
+but commonly disregarded. Then with all his fancy hustle and his
+tarnation smartness, the American is at bottom rather a sentimental man
+(perhaps it is because he has to be so very businesslike most times that
+he is liable to a sharp reaction at any good chance) and he is touched
+with signs of genuine good feeling towards him and an appreciation of
+what he has done. Thereupon in a softened voice he will tell of his
+weaknesses, and of his appreciation of the greatness of mother England,
+and he will play the host in a more thorough and warm-hearted way than
+any other man on earth will or can. The ordinary non-golfing visitor may
+find out many of these things, and have his own good time in his simple
+way, but even in the freest countries there are often social omissions,
+accidents, and disasters when there is not good common ground for
+meeting and friends in waiting, and it is very possible to go to America
+and fail in the way of holiday. The man who visits as a golfer, enters
+at once into joys of existence and the most friendly companionship. I
+have visited clubs in many parts of the country, and have made good and
+abiding friends among countless golfers, and it is but a poor expression
+of my feelings to say that I am very appreciative and deeply grateful.
+If, therefore, for anything whatever I should criticise the golf of the
+country I hope that American golfers will believe that in my comments
+there is no trace of adverse prejudice.
+
+It is difficult to estimate how many players of this game there are in
+the country at the present time, and whatever figures were fixed upon
+would soon be made inaccurate through the rapid increase that is going
+on all the time--more rapid by far than is the case in Britain. I have
+seen it estimated that there are six or seven hundred clubs in the
+States at the present time, with a total membership of about a hundred
+and fifty thousand. The Americans say that they will double their
+golfing population in the next five years.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is impossible for a person who has not crossed the Atlantic to
+imagine the United States as the country and people really are. I found
+it easier to imagine Italy and Spain and oriental Morocco before ever I
+went to those places, than I did to conceive a picture of the country
+and the life of our own blood relations in this new America. All the
+fraternising with Americans in London and elsewhere, our reading of
+their newspapers and their books, printed in the words of our own
+language, pictures and photographs of the Statue of Liberty in New York
+Harbour, of the sky-scrapers in the background and the Fifth Avenue that
+glitters on a summer's day, all the pictures of Boston and Washington,
+or of the boulevards and business activities of Chicago, will not help
+any one to preconceive those places exactly. The atmosphere and the life
+and the ways of the people are a little beyond the imagination of the
+untravelled western man. In the same way I do not think that British
+golfers who have not been to the United States can understand the
+American's present-day attitude towards the game; certainly those who
+have not been to America should not judge upon it as they are often
+inclined to do. It is good, sound, and in its every aspect it is
+exceedingly interesting.
+
+Wandering through the country I have visited many clubs and courses. If
+we would have much golf in America we must move quickly as the Americans
+do, and think as little of travelling all night as they think, for it
+would be too much waste of time to make the long journeys that have to
+be made by precious daylight. As a rule the golfer at home protests
+against being asked to play anything like his best game after a night in
+a railway train. I remember Mr. H. E. Taylor, who is not possessed of
+the strongest constitution in the world, told me that he had set off
+from Charing Cross one morning in the winter, arrived at Cannes in the
+south of France at breakfast time on the next morning, cleaned himself
+and put on his golfing shoes, and then gone along to the golf course out
+at La Napoule to win a scratch gold medal. Again I recall that Mr.
+Hilton once travelled all night from Hoylake to Muirfield and broke the
+record of the course there on arrival, playing two more rounds the same
+day. However, men like these are exceptions to most rules.
+
+But a golfer may cure himself of more of his weaknesses and
+susceptibilities than he may think he can--all that are imaginary and
+not really of the temperament. A man who hates wind and avoids it would
+learn to play well and bravely in it if he had always to take his golf
+on an exposed part of the eastern coast. The ability or otherwise to
+play in wind is largely a matter of temperament. So it is with the
+journeys. I had either to golf, and golf for me tolerably well, in the
+intervals of scampering from one part of the country to the other, or I
+had to spoil the whole expedition. I managed it somehow.
+
+Arriving in New York for the first time early on a Sunday morning, I
+fixed myself up at my appointed quarters, rang up a golfer on the
+telephone, and then, according to arrangement, proceeded to track a man
+down at his club on the Fifth Avenue with the object of playing in the
+afternoon. I walked into Fifth Avenue from a cross street, and my first
+glimpse of it is one that will not soon be forgotten. It was a glorious
+morning, the sun shining hot and white, and New York, for the only time
+in its hustling week, was comparatively quiet. There was no traffic and
+few people just then in the Fifth Avenue, quite one of the most majestic
+and wonderful thoroughfares in the world despite its plain simplicity.
+But it was not the whiteness, not the glittering cleanliness, not the
+real splendour of this Fifth Avenue with all its newness, that struck
+the first impression on my mind. Upon the moment that this wandering
+British player of the most meditative of games emerged from somewhere
+round about West 36th or 37th, into the big avenue, there whizzed along
+it, right in front, a motor funeral which was doing a fine fifty miles
+an hour clip along the smooth and open thoroughfare. There was just the
+hearse with glass panels, the coffin plainly exhibited inside, and the
+chauffeur on the seat, with another man beside him who might have been a
+mourner. Holding life a little more cheaply in America than we do, they
+grieve a little less for those who lose it, which is not to say that
+they are heartless or unsympathetic, but more practical. This funeral,
+done with petrol instead of horses, was positively going north at the
+rate of fifty miles an hour. It was moving just as fast as I saw any car
+ever go in the United States, and I could not help reflecting that the
+spirit of the good American, viewing the last journey of its separated
+corpus, must feel a certain satisfaction that it was hustlingly done and
+that no time was wasted. _Finis coronat opus!_ Inspired, I played on
+two different courses in New York on the same afternoon.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+English people hear much about railroad travelling being far better in
+the United States than it is in our own country. It is--and it is not.
+The comfort and conveniences of the cars in the daytime are much in
+advance of anything we have. The men's smoking cars, the observation
+cars, the parlour cars, are delightful and enable us thoroughly to enjoy
+the journeys. Although they standardise so many things in America, they
+cease their standardisations when considerations of personal comfort and
+peculiarities have to be considered. It never occurred to me until I
+travelled my first thousand miles in America that it is a hardship that,
+no matter what our girth may be, nor the length of our bodies and legs,
+we must all of us at home, though we pay for our first-class
+accommodation, sit in standardised seats which are all the same and
+attached to each other. In the American railroad car running on a
+long-distance journey there are seats of different sorts, some are high
+and some are low, and they are detached. This makes much difference. In
+the dining-cars the tables and chairs are all loose, and one does not
+have to squeeze into them with the feeling that one is being locked into
+one's place as we do in England. And the dining arrangements on the
+American cars are far superior to what they are elsewhere. But if the
+American system gains by day the British system makes up for much of the
+lost comfort at night, and that is when the American, golfer and
+non-golfer, does most of his long-distance travelling. The Pullman day
+cars are converted into sleepers by the dark-skinned attendants
+(uncommonly good railroad car servants these niggers make), and by an
+almost magical transformation the lounging car is made into a sleeper
+with about two dozen berths, a dozen on each side, half uppers and half
+lowers, and an alley down the middle. The chief difference between the
+upper berths and the lower is that the uppers have to be reached by a
+short stepladder and are not convenient to fat, gouty, or unathletic
+persons, while those who wake early and like to look upon the prairie,
+or what once was that, have a window at the bottom as the people in the
+top have not. The berths are covered in with thick green curtains which
+button together. We may leave our boots outside for the attendant to
+brush in the morning, but our other clothes and traps must go along to
+bed with us, and be stowed away at the bottom of the berth, or in the
+little netting that hangs alongside. And here I must timidly state in
+evidence that there are not separate cars for the sexes; in America all
+go together, and the ladies and the men occupy the same cars. The ladies
+generally go off to bed earlier than the men. Whether they do or not, we
+all climb into our respective berths, fasten up the curtains, and
+undress in the very limited space at our disposal, a process which seems
+to me must be the same as that by which acrobatic performers wriggle
+themselves out of chains and ropes with which their limbs and bodies
+have been tied up fast. After a time we become expert. What is most
+difficult to become accustomed to is the horrible jolting, and the
+painfully sudden stopping of the trains in the middle of the night.
+Their permanent ways are not laid so finely as the magnificent lines
+along our coasts from London to Scotland. Their rails are not fixed in
+chairs laid on the sleepers, but are pinned down straight on to the
+wood. This makes much difference. The cars shake exceedingly. Then the
+drivers at night have to be wary and stop quickly at times, and no
+doubt they do right not to reduce their speed gradually for the sake of
+the men and women who are asleep behind them, but instead to stop with a
+suddenness that could only be improved upon by a collision. However, I
+say again, that we find ourselves accustomed to it all in time.
+
+I shall not forget my first experience of a thousand-mile golfing
+journey from the New York Central Station to Chicago. A few golfers were
+in a party going westward for the championship at Wheaton in Illinois,
+and we discussed the game from the time of starting in the late
+afternoon until we had passed Albany, about ten, when we moved into our
+sleeping quarters. My bag of clubs had to go to bed with me, and they
+lay alongside all the night; there was no room for them underneath. I
+had to sleep with one hand on the bag to prevent them from attacking me
+or going overboard into the avenue, so much did that wretched train
+rattle and shake as it hurtled its way through the darkness, with the
+big bell in the front of the engine jangling mournfully all the time.
+And what a wild, sad note it is that is struck by the bells on these
+American engines, suggestive of the loneliness of the open country
+through which they speed, now and then making a big noise with a sort of
+foghorn. I am much attached to my clubs, and they are the chosen
+favourites of a vast number that go with their master everywhere, and
+are carefully watched and tended, but the intimacy that was sprung upon
+us then was too much, and I invented another arrangement for the next
+travelling night. James Braid, very wise man indeed, tells me that long,
+deep nights of placid slumber are the best things in the world for the
+golfer who would keep steady his hands and nerves and clear his eyes so
+that he may play the best game of which he is capable. But no British
+golfer could sleep at the beginning of his American experiences in such
+circumstances. I was just falling into some sort of a doze in the small
+hours of the morning when the train pulled up sharply at a station which
+I discovered to be Schenectady, where the famous putter that disturbed
+the peace of two nations was born. Next, one realised that we were
+within a mile or two of the Niagara Falls, and so on with jolting and
+banging and sudden stopping all the night. By and by daylight came and
+then we had a long day of travelling through the heart of America to
+Chicago.
+
+Some may suggest that all this about railroad travelling in the country
+where there is more of it than any other has little to do with golf, but
+it has all to do with it, for the thorough golfer in America, whether a
+citizen or British, must needs spend a large part of his time in the
+train, and if he would have the maximum amount of golf, much sleeping
+must be done behind the green curtains in the darkened cars. The
+travelling done by the American golfer, therefore, is a surprising
+thing, but a few months of it is a fine and valuable experience for the
+British golfer afterwards. No longer, since I have been across the
+Atlantic, do I consider it a far way from London to the links of
+Dornoch. St. Andrews and North Berwick have come pleasingly near to me.
+All the world has shrunk, and I feel I have my foot on every course--or
+soon may have.
+
+Though it be a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and these are
+the two great golfing centres of the east and west, it is a fact, as I
+know well, that the golfers in the two places visit each other for a
+weekend's golf almost as frequently and with as little fuss as would be
+the case with golfers in London who go down to Sandwich. They take the
+"Twentieth Century Limited" from New York on Friday afternoon, and on
+Saturday morning they are at Chicago. They flash out on a local train to
+Onwentsia, Midlothian, Glen View, Wheaton, Exmoor, or one of those
+places, play all day, start play again at eight o'clock on Sunday,
+finish their couple of rounds early in the afternoon, catch the fast
+train back to New York, and are at their office on Monday morning as if
+they had spent the week-end pottering about the garden. I am not
+concerned with the question as to whether they are prolonging their
+lives by these acts; nor are they concerned. In the meantime they appear
+to be in the best of health, and are certainly in the highest of
+spirits.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With this talk of journeys we seem in fancy to be in Chicago now, so let
+us consider the leading club of the busy district in the heart of
+America. The course of the Chicago club is at Wheaton, some twenty-five
+miles out on the North Western line, and this is the foremost club of
+the Central States, and west in the sense of being west of the east, for
+all golfing America is divided into two parts, the east and the west,
+Chicago being the capital of and held chiefly to represent the west,
+which holds some close rivalry with the east, where New York is
+headquarters. The west out California way is just the far and other
+west, and is in another world. The Chicago club is exclusive and
+dignified. The most solid men in the city support it, and they see that
+everything is good. It is not an ancient institution, but it has some of
+the characteristics of solidity and strength of age and sound
+experience. Chicago is not an old city, but, as the proud citizens like
+to tell you, about a hundred years ago there was no Chicago at all, but
+just a few wigwams of Indians and some huts and things round about a
+creek. Since then the place has been once burnt down, and yet it is now
+the fourth largest city of the world, while in its tenseness of
+commercial industry it is the foremost of all. If all the ages past in
+Chicago only amount to a hundred years, then one-fifth of all time as
+known to Chicago history, which represents the life of the Chicago Golf
+Club, is comparatively long indeed.
+
+In 1892 a small golf club was started for the first time round about
+Lake Forest, but the promoters had only about sixteen acres of ground.
+In the following year, when the World's Fair was held, a number of
+foreign visitors were in Chicago and asked for golf, as travellers will
+do, though the great golf boom had not yet then set in. Mr. Charles B.
+Macdonald came in with the movement, ground was searched for, and the
+Chicago Golf Club was organised at Belmont, some twenty-two miles out of
+the city. When the Fair was over in the following spring, only about
+twenty members were left to the club, and the outlook did not seem
+splendid. But once begun, in either place or man, golf is a very hard
+thing to kill. The twenty die-hards asked their friends to come and see
+the place and try the game. They did so, and those men of Chicago knew
+at once that they had discovered the real thing. A hundred and thirty
+members were quickly obtained. The inevitable result followed. They
+wanted more and better golf, and they wanted it to belong to them and
+not to be on leased ground, so in 1894 the club met and authorised the
+purchase of two hundred acres at Wheaton, twenty-four miles out from the
+city, a fine course was laid out, a splendid club-house was built, and a
+really great club was established. Here and now we may gain a very fair
+idea of the difference in cost to the player between American golf and
+British. No better club could be selected for the purpose of
+exemplification than this one. It so happened that a few days before I
+arrived there, its club-house was burnt down, with all its contents and
+appurtenances, and from the wreck only a single one of the club-books
+of rules and regulations was rescued. I took possession of it while I
+made some notes upon the terrace of the only part of the building that
+was saved.
+
+The first paragraph in the book, being Section 1 of Article 1 of the
+bye-laws, states that "this club is incorporated under the laws of
+Illinois as Chicago Golf Club, and its corporate seal is a circular disc
+bearing the words, 'Chicago Golf Club,' the figure of a golf player, and
+the motto, 'Far and Sure.'" To become a member of the club the applicant
+must be over eighteen years of age; he must have not more than one
+adverse vote cast against him by the governing body; and he must pay an
+entrance fee of not less than a hundred dollars or £20. The resident (or
+full) membership of the club is limited to 225, and the annual
+subscription is 75 dollars or £15, half of which is payable at the
+beginning of the year and half at midsummer. Now this subscription is
+much higher than that of any golf club in Great Britain, and the fact is
+only partly attributable to the circumstance that everything in America
+is more expensive than it is in England. The higher subscription is
+necessitated because the membership is kept down so low as 225, and that
+is done in order that there may be no overcrowding of the course. In
+England such a club, being situated within thirty miles of a great city
+and having the best course round about, would probably admit at least
+five or six hundred members, with the result that on the fine and busy
+week-end days the course would be hopelessly blocked and there would be
+no pleasure for anybody. This is certainly so in the case of two or
+three of the most popular clubs in the outer London golfing area, and
+one may come to a speedy decision that in this matter the American way
+is by far the better. Ladies who are over sixteen years of age and the
+immediate relatives of a member are permitted to have the privileges of
+the course, subject to the rules of the Green Committee, on payment of
+ten dollars a year. There is another class, "summer members," who are
+not to exceed fifteen in number, and who pay 150 dollars for one summer
+season's play. There is practically no play in the winter, the climatic
+conditions being too severe. The other rules as to membership are much
+the same as those which obtain in the case of British golf clubs.
+
+Among the "house rules," it is stated that the club-house generally will
+remain open until midnight, and the café, which is the British
+equivalent of the smoke-room with bar, until one o'clock in the morning,
+which is a lateness of hour almost unheard of in England, but then it
+has to be remembered that such club-houses in America are mostly
+residential. "Juniors" are not allowed in the café. The warning is given
+that smoking and the lighting of matches in the locker or dressing room
+are absolutely prohibited, and that a fine of ten dollars will be
+imposed on any member violating this rule. Fires in club-houses in
+America being so numerous is the cause of this rule, which is rigorously
+applied. Then it is perceived that no member makes any payment
+whatsoever in cash in the club-house. He signs a check or bill, an
+account of his expenditure is kept, and it is served to him fortnightly.
+Payment must then be made within ten days, failing which the member is
+suspended. Some interesting items are to be found among the ground
+rules. One says that in medal play competitions new holes must be
+assumed to have been made on the morning of a competition, unless
+otherwise stated by the Green Committee; and another that a member
+playing a round, and keeping score other than in club competition must
+allow parties playing pure match-play to pass. The Americans are not
+content with merely requesting a player to replace the divots of turf
+that he cuts up in play. They say: "Divots of turf cut up by players
+must be carefully replaced and pressed down. A fine of one dollar will
+be imposed on any member violating this rule. All members are earnestly
+requested to report any member who violates this rule to the Green
+Committee." Caddies are paid "from the time of their employment until
+the time they are discharged, to be determined by an electric clock, at
+such rate per hour as may be determined by the Green Committee." There
+is nothing that is inexpensive about a club of this class, and let it be
+understood that there are few second-class golf clubs in the States
+where the fees are small. A day's golf at a good club is cheap indeed at
+five dollars. When one goes to stay there for a night or two one finds
+that the statutory price for breakfast is a dollar, for lunch 1.25, and
+for dinner 1.30 upwards. When I returned to England it appeared that
+golf and all pertaining to it was cheap, almost to the gift point.
+
+The course at Wheaton is good, although there are some in America that
+are better. It is plain, its holes sometimes lack strength, but it is
+well tended and its putting greens are quite perfect. Its fairway is not
+perfect, any more than the fairways of other American courses are. The
+climate will hardly permit of their being so. It bakes them up and makes
+them hard, and the inevitable result is little knobs and depressions
+which give cuppy lies, and turf which for all its greenness is not by
+any means comfortable to the feet in comparison with the yieldingness of
+our British turf. The Americans cannot help this; if it were practicable
+to treat every inch of their turf for climatic troubles all through the
+day and night they would perhaps do it. It is practicable to treat their
+putting greens thoroughly, and the result is that, taking them all
+round, they have undoubtedly got the best putting greens in the world.
+I mean, without reservation, that the average of the best courses in
+America is higher than the average of the best in our own country, and I
+say it with some regret that they have a score of courses in the United
+States with greens far superior to those on the old course at St.
+Andrews the last time the Amateur Championship was played there, those
+greens being then not what they used to be. I think much of the credit
+for the high quality of the greens at Wheaton is due to the splendid
+work of David Foulis, the professional and greenkeeper there. Need I say
+that David is a Scot, and a very true Scot too, who still loves his old
+homeland better than any other, and is glad when the wandering golfer
+from it gets his way. Chicago may seem a strange place to visit for
+facts of old golf history, and yet here I added some details to the
+histories of the people and their golfing ways of fifty years and more
+agone, for Foulis has his father living with him out in Illinois, and
+Foulis the elder was at work with old Tom Morris in the great days when
+the Open Championship was young, and stirring are the stories that he
+can tell you, as he did to me in David's shop, of old Tom and Allan
+Robertson, and the other giants of those times, carrying one in mind and
+spirit far away from the land round about the big lake of Michigan to
+the old grey city which was old more than a hundred years ago.
+
+I took away with me as a memento from David Foulis a club that he has
+invented, and which for a special purpose I can commend. It is a kind of
+mashie niblick, David claiming to be the inventor of this type of club,
+but it is different from others in that it has a perfectly straight,
+flat sole and a concave face. I, like others, found that by the use of
+this club I saved some dollars, for it enabled me to pitch the ball from
+a hard lie on to the hard greens and make it stay close to the hole
+when nothing else would serve the purpose. The ordinary mashie niblick
+with curved sole is not perfect for baked and iron-hard courses, as it
+is not easy to get well hold of the ball when taking it cleanly as must
+often be done in such circumstances, and the margin for error is
+painfully small. The flat-soled club is essentially one for taking the
+ball cleanly, and somehow that hollow face does impart extra backspin to
+the ball. It lifts it up and drops it dead as no other club that I have
+handled will of itself ever do.
+
+But let me write that the Americans are not given to fancy and freak
+clubs as some people suppose they are. There is nothing freakish about
+this article of which I write, and for the most part the implements that
+the American players employ are the simplest. And just to complete my
+generalising remarks on American courses, which naturally vary greatly,
+let me say that commonly they are not so severely bunkered as are the
+best of ours, particularly from the tee. They do not demand either such
+long or such straight driving as our best courses do, and I think that
+the Americans realise now that this is the case and that they need
+stiffening up. They are doing that already. There are some very good
+holes at Wheaton, and the short hole at the ninth is about the most
+tantalising water hole I have encountered. It is all water from the
+teeing ground to the foot of a high plateau on which the green is
+situated, and it is about a hundred and ten yards across the pond.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE PERFECT COUNTRY CLUB AND THE GOLFERS' POW-WOW AT ONWENTSIA, WITH A
+GLIMPSE OF THE NATIONAL LINKS.
+
+
+Round Chicago there is now a great belt of golf which is thickening
+rapidly. More hundreds of acres are being claimed for the game
+constantly, and one hears in these parts of the most splendidly equipped
+club-houses being built to replace others at the cost of very many
+thousands of dollars. Activity in the increase of golf is feverish. But
+even here maturity has its charm, as it always must have in golf, and
+the most delightful resorts in Illinois are those which are the oldest.
+Such as Onwentsia, Exmoor, Midlothian, Glen View are excellent.
+
+I am glad I went to Onwentsia. Most British golfers who have never been
+and will never go across the Atlantic have heard something, even if but
+the name, of the Onwentsia club. It seems to suggest American golf, and
+there is a look of some mystery about the name. Onwentsia is by no means
+like the others, and there are good reasons why. Here on a wall of mine
+are two feathers of eagles fastened crosswise; below them an Indian's
+pipe of peace with its silken tassel. They were sent to me across the
+sea from Onwentsia by some members a while after I had been there, and
+they are a reminder not only of happy days but of the characteristics of
+Onwentsia, for the name of the place is an Indian one. Here were the
+redskins before all others, and then the white men and golfers came, and
+still it is almost as if the soil were redolent of the Indian trail. The
+club perpetuates in a manner considered suitable the memory and legend
+of the braves; my eagles' feathers are such as a "Running Driver" or
+"Mighty Mashie" might have worn in their fighting days, and they adorned
+our modern Onwentsians on the day of their Indian feast! Let me explain.
+Lake Forest, where is Onwentsia, is a very charming suburb of Chicago,
+at the side of Lake Michigan. Its name suggests its character; it is
+well wooded, and one of the kind friends that I made there, Mr. Slason
+Thompson, drove me in his car in the dusk of a balmy evening for miles
+through the beautiful public grounds. The Onwentsia Club, as it is
+called, is a close fraternity of the best people of these parts. It is a
+country club in a large sense. It is a hunt club, it is a polo club with
+a splendid ground, it is a tennis club, and it is a golf club, and it
+need hardly be said that the golf is a very strong feature, the
+predominator of the institutions. Now the Onwentsian golfers, zealous
+and good, have their own manners and customs, and, particularly they
+have one custom which has a fame all over America, and it has spread
+even beyond the seas. If it be not sin to mention them together
+Onwentsia has one great day of celebration as the Royal and Ancient Club
+has one. Towards the end of September the Royal and Ancient Club calls
+its members together for the autumn gathering at St. Andrews, and there
+on that occasion, as has been related, many ancient and solemn
+ceremonies of great dignity are performed. The captain "plays himself
+in," guns are fired, in the evening at the banquet new members kiss the
+silver club and swear their loyalty, and much more in that splendid and
+time-honoured way is done. America is true to St. Andrews golf in its
+law, but Lake Forest, far out toward the west, is not the same as
+Fifeshire, and the Onwentsia Club at Lake Forest is not like the Royal
+and Ancient. It is not a question of which is the better; they are
+different, and when I was in Illinois, at any rate, Onwentsia was to me
+a very entertaining place. And I do not say this merely because
+Onwentsia, near to Lake Michigan, is so charmingly situated; because the
+club is such a delightful place, perfect in equipment, with a luxurious
+club-house, and inside it a huge swimming pool and many shower-baths,
+making one sometimes a trifle regretful upon the bareness of our British
+golfing-houses. It is just because when I first reached there the great
+golfing gathering at St. Andrews was nearly due and the golfers at
+Onwentsia were having theirs. When I dined with Mr. Thompson that
+evening at his charming house overlooking the great lake, and we smoked
+cigars on the lawn overhanging it, he told me why on everything that
+concerned the club there was the same sign, the head of an Indian brave
+with the big feather in it, and why they were just going forward to the
+great annual pow-wow. If you would do it properly you should pronounce
+Onwentsia in the soft, crooning Indian way. Murmur it slowly and gently,
+and mount the cadence high upon the second syllable; then, after a
+suspicion of a pause, lower the notes gradually to the end. If you said
+it in the right way an old Iroquois brave would know that you were
+referring to "a country gathering," for that is the meaning of the term.
+In days of old the Iroquois trailed over all these parts where now the
+course is laid. Here were their wigwams; here lingered their squaws with
+the little papoose, while the red men hunted and fought. That is why the
+golfers of Onwentsia have their pow-wow once a year.
+
+The pow-wow is an invitation golf tournament lasting two days, and it is
+open only to those members who are of a certain age or over (it was
+thirty-nine when I was there) and their guests, one guest per member. In
+order to preserve complete the familiar friendliness of the gathering
+and to maintain its traditions undisturbed by new influences, the age
+limit is increased from year to year to keep the new and young men out.
+The call to the pow-wow, which is written anew for every festival, gives
+us the key to the nature of the function, and I quote from one of them:
+
+    On the banks of Skokie water,
+    By the water flecked with golf balls,
+    Stands the wigwam, the Onwentsia,
+    The great wigwam of the Pow-wow.
+    Come ye forth, ye Jol-li-gol-fas,
+    Come ye forth and come ye quickly
+    To Onwentsia, the big wigwam,
+    To Onwentsia, the big Pow-wow,
+    In the Moon of Falling Leaflets,
+    Ere the trees are red with autumn,
+    Come in trains, the Puf-choo-choo-puf;
+    Come in motors, Aw-to-bub-buls;
+    In the 'bus, old Shuh-too-get-thah,
+    To Onwentsia, to the Pow-wow.
+    Here's the bartend, Wil-lin-mix-ah,
+    The head waitress, Goo-too-loo-kat,
+    The great golfer, Hoo-beets-boh-ghee,
+    And the caddy, Skip-an-fetch-it,
+    Waiting all to do you honour.
+    Leave your war club, Tom-ah-haw-kus,
+    Bring the peace sticks, Dri-vah-nib-lix;
+    Leave your toilsome reservations
+    And the dust of smoky cities
+    For the Pow-wow in the wigwam;
+    Bring the peace pipe, Swee-too-suk-kat,
+    Taste the bowl, Hi-baw-laf-tah;
+    Play the game, Roy-al-skoch-wun,
+    All the morning in the sunlight,
+    All the afternoon, till evening
+    Spreads the feast of squab and chicken
+    'Mid the joy of good companions
+    Gathered in the spreading wigwam
+    Of Onwentsia for the Pow-wow.
+
+Lasting for two days, with one great night in between them, it happens
+that the first session of play is conducted in a state of high
+anticipation and with much joyful shaking of hands and exhibitions of
+brotherly attachment, and the second session with a feeling as of a
+slowly receding past. Only those who attend the feast in the big wigwam
+are eligible to play in the numerous competitions to which are attached
+such an abundance of prizes that it is difficult for the golfing brave
+to go empty-handed back to his gentle squaw. A law indeed has had to be
+made that he shall not take more than two of the trophies away with him.
+
+At eight o'clock on the morning of the first day the play begins. There
+is a thirty-six holes medal competition for the Sum-go-fah trophy (the
+"Indian" titles are changed from year to year), and at the end of
+eighteen holes the numerous competitors are grouped into sections of
+eight, according to the place in the returns--first eight, second eight,
+and so on for separate match-play competitions for the Sko-ki-ko-lah
+prizes. The prize for the first eight is the Mis-sa-sko-kih, for the
+second the O-ma-go-li, for the third the Hit-ta-sko-kih, for the fourth
+the Sti-mi-gosh, for the fifth the Bum-put-tah, for the sixth the
+Went-an-mis-tit, for the seventh the Top-an-sli-sah, for the eighth the
+Let-mih-tel-you, and for the ninth the Dub-an-duf-fah. Then there is a
+competition for the Bun-kah-bun-kah prize, which is embraced within the
+Sum-go-fah, being for the best eclectic score made in the two rounds, or
+"choice score" as they prefer to call it in the States. Two-thirds
+handicap is allowed. Likewise there is the Noh-bak-num-bah prize, which
+is by medal play with an age handicap, the handicap being determined by
+the years of the contestant above or below forty. By such play, whether
+it is successful or not, do the braves qualify for the feast, and at
+half-past seven there is the call to the big and happy wigwam. The
+great dining-room is indeed made by fitting and decoration to appear as
+one great wigwam, and there are some of the adjuncts of the life of the
+old Iroquois. The golfing braves stride eagerly, joyfully, chatteringly
+in. Reddened are the golfers' faces; wrapped around them are their
+blankets, from their hair stick big black feathers; long pipes of peace
+are held before them. Then there are strange but toothsome dishes; they
+taste the "Hi-baw-laf-ta-tah"; happiness and contentment increase; there
+are toasts and shouts and whoops. The successors of the Iroquois hold
+their pow-wow well. At the beginning of the morning, when the moon is
+riding through the fleecy heavens of Illinois, softly they steal away,
+and in the distance now and then there may be heard the same lone cry
+that once resounded through the forest when Iroquois were on the trail.
+But at nine in the morning more competitions begin, and are most
+thoroughly attended. There are tournaments for the Bus-tis-tik-sah, the
+Boo-li-bus-tah, the Strok-a-hol-ah, the Heez-noh-mut-sah, the
+Ho-pu-get-it, the Get-sa-loo-kin, the He-za-pee-chah, the
+Wil-lin-loo-sah, the Oh-you-papoose, and other cups. Some of the prizes
+go to the players doing certain holes in the lowest gross score during
+the tournament, the Wil-lin-loo-sah is captured by the man who does the
+four rounds worst of all on the two days, and an Onwentsia medicine
+pouch, the nature of which may be guessed by golfers with little
+difficulty, remembering British practice, is awarded to the brave who
+does a particular hole in one stroke. It is all very remarkable,
+wonderful, interesting, and thoroughly American, and not the ragged
+corner of a paper dollar the worse for it either. Happy Onwentsia!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Glen View Country Club they have a special autumn festival also
+which has a character of its own. The motto of Glen View is "Laigh and
+lang"--low and long--which is a good variation on the monotonous "far
+and sure." And about Glen View there is a Scottish flavour; in manners
+and customs for a very brief season in the golden days of the fall there
+is wafted from the far distant Highlands a breath of Scotland. Here they
+call their festival the "Twa Days," and it is carried through with a
+fine spirit. There are competitions in number and kind to satisfy
+everybody, and the social side of the affair is excellent.
+
+Glen View, again, is not like the others either. I spent some days there
+as the guest of the club, and nowhere have I had a more pleasurable
+time. It came after an exceedingly strenuous, rushing period at other
+places, and towards the end of one of the hottest spells of weather that
+they had known for many summers in those burning parts. Glen View is a
+pretty name, but it is not prettier than the golf course there, which is
+one of the most charming I know. It reminded one in some ways of
+Sudbrook Park in the early summer, always, as I think, one of the most
+delightful inland courses in the south of England; but Glen View, with
+its sleepy streams, is nicer. It may not be up to "championship
+standard" in its architectural features, but it might be made so. Yet if
+such a change would remove much of the character of Glen View, I, in my
+selfishness, knowing that on some future morning I shall again take the
+9.35 from Chicago on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, and
+alight at the station which is called "Golf," hope for my high pleasure
+that there will be none such made. When a club once becomes infatuated
+with the championship idea its contentment and happiness depart, and
+Glen View is best as it is. The holes have character. The greens are
+placed in the most beautiful nooks and corners, great belts of trees
+surround the course, and a stream winds snake-like through the grounds.
+At about every third hole there is a large barrel which is filled every
+morning with fresh spring water, into which a large block of ice is
+placed. When you play in a shade temperature of nearly a hundred
+degrees, as I have done at this place, you appreciate these barrels.
+They have a natty way of naming their holes at Glen View. The first is
+called "The Elm," the second "High Ball," the third "Sleepy Hollow," and
+the next in order are "Polo," "Lover's Lane," "Old Hickory," "The Round
+Up," "Trouble," "Reservoir," "Westward Ho!" "The Grove," "Sunset," "The
+Bridge," "The Roost," "Spookey," "The Orchard," "Log Cabin," and "Sweet
+Home." The course is 6279 yards long, and every one of these yards is a
+pleasure to play along. Visitors do like this place. In one year
+recently there were 3550 of them who paid a dollar a day for the
+privilege of playing. The members of the club pay one hundred dollars a
+year subscription, and nowadays it costs about five hundred dollars for
+admission. Every member must be the possessor of a hundred-dollar share
+in the club, and these shares are now at a premium of about five times
+their par value. At few other places in the golfing world is there such
+a nicely appointed club-house as there is here. One could put two or
+three of the largest dining-rooms that our golf clubs possess into the
+one of Glen View, and the furnishing is finely and tastefully done in a
+Flemish style. Some of the golfing prints with which we are most
+familiar hang upon the walls. Other pictures of value keep them
+company, and there is a large crayon drawing done on the spot by my old
+friend, the late Tom Browne, who once came here with his bag of clubs.
+
+The café at the Glen View club is an interesting institution. The club
+has one of the cleverest cocktail mixers in America, and the printed
+list of available liquid refreshments that is laid upon the tables
+suggests a little consideration. The American golfers, for the most
+part, do not drink very much, and what they do drink has little effect
+upon them, thanks to the heat and much perspiration; but they do like
+novelties and the variety. So on this list--which, mind you, includes no
+wines, which are quoted on a separate sheet--there are scheduled no
+fewer than 147 different kinds of refreshments. There are thirteen "soft
+drinks," eight different lemonade mixtures, eleven sorts of mineral
+waters, thirteen beers and ales, six rye whiskies, seven Bourbon
+whiskies, eleven Scotch and Irish whiskies, thirteen varieties of
+cocktails, two "toddies," three "sours," three "rickies," three
+"cobblers," six "fizzes," two "flips," seven "punches," three "smashes,"
+and thirty-six "miscellaneous." The last is a most interesting section.
+It includes the "Prairie Oyster," the "Millionaire," the "Pousse
+l'Amour," the "Sam Ward," the "Russian Cooler," the "Japanese Cooler,"
+the "Golfer's Delight," the "Angel's Dream," the "Ladies' Puff," and the
+"Glen View High Ball." Nearly all of these cost twenty or twenty-five
+cents each.
+
+One may be most pleasurably lazy at Glen View. The club-house has some
+forty bedrooms, with a fine equipment of shower and other baths, and the
+usual telephone service to all the bedrooms with a complete telephone
+exchange downstairs. The service and comfort are as good as they can be.
+I liked the lounges and the shady verandahs, with rocking-chairs to tip
+one away to a short dream on a hot afternoon of purling brooks on
+English hills and woods in Wales. Yet when I awake I am satisfied. There
+is no hurry here. In the mornings one would hear the men rising at six
+o'clock and splashing themselves about in the bath department, and
+generally becoming very active all at once. Some time later I would join
+them at breakfast, and see them depart very early for their businesses
+at Chicago. When they had gone one could settle down, and there were
+ladies to chatter with or to play Chopin or something else on the piano.
+It is necessary to take things a little easily during the early and hot
+part of the day, because soon in the afternoon the men come back from
+Chicago, and they are all energy and rush as if they had not spent a
+howling morning in the "Pit" or one of the other great business centres.
+One has to fall in with their schemes of activity, which endure until
+the evening meal, taken in an easy way of _en famille_ in the restaurant
+of the club, luscious green corn to begin with and the most appetising
+dishes later, with laughter and gossip always. And later in the evening
+David Noyes and I might sit in the dark on the verandah, and under those
+stars of Illinois speak of the differences between English people and
+the Americans as we respectively saw them. We understood each other and
+could be frank. "The worst of America," said I, "is that it has no soul,
+and the Americans have none either." "Well," said he; "but we have big
+hearts." Agreed. He is a leading broker in the "Pit" at Chicago, the
+great wheat market of the world, and one morning he took me there and I
+met many golfers I knew round about those four screeching masses of men
+who make of this place a babel and such an exhibition of raw fighting
+human nature as, with all its differences, I can only compare with the
+same brilliant and yet ugly show that is made in the rooms of the
+Casino at Monte Carlo. It is raw life on the strain at both places--hot
+seething life. The reposeful Glen View is needed for the people who
+barter there.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Massachusetts is a fine golfing land, and it rose to the heights in
+1913. After gaiety in New York, and amazement at Chicago, you should go
+to Boston. And really they who live there have reason for their pride.
+There is no other town or city in the United States or Canada that has
+anything like such an English flavour as this in the New England. There
+are times when we wander along the great thoroughfare, Washington
+Street, or turn up one of the side avenues like Boylston, that the
+American idea for a moment ceases to press closely upon us, and when we
+pass the old churches, wander through historic chambers Georgian in
+their style, look into the Faneuil Hall, or into the old-fashioned
+market, or go down to the shipping in the docks where our Boston man
+will surely take us, that we may see the place of the "tea party," as
+they call it now, which had vast consequences to the States and England
+when taxes were made and were rejected--then in the New England we feel
+the old one there. And, of course, the wandering Englishman is taken out
+to Bunker Hill as well. Though with all Americans their spirit of
+independence is an obsession, and it seems sometimes that they like to
+think of themselves as a new race of people come up out of nothing or
+from heaven, owing nothing to any other race, yet at Boston I suspect
+they are a trifle glad that they and their city are not like the others,
+but are something more English in their way. There is a difference in
+the atmosphere. A certain ease is possible, a culture is apparent.
+Streets and shops do not look as if they had been cut out by machinery
+at the same time that the streets and shops of a dozen other cities were
+being cut, and all life is not mathematically arranged and standardised.
+If an American university is not at all like either Oxford or Cambridge,
+still Harvard is an influence, and Harvard is at Cambridge, a near
+suburb of Boston. The result of it all is that we feel something of the
+old atmosphere of home and are stimulated. Boston grows upon us very
+rapidly. The father of one of my good American friends, Mr. John G.
+Anderson, who has gone on golfing expeditions with me in England,
+Scotland, France and the United States, is a Scot with a great love for
+his home country, and our rambles round old Boston have been of a
+peculiarly interesting kind. And when in Boston, and the car of a friend
+comes along to the Touraine in the morning, we throw the clubs in the
+back of it, and get up with just that feeling of having a sporting day
+ahead that one develops in the country at home and hardly anywhere else.
+
+There are many courses round about Boston, and there are four of them,
+all quite different from each other, of which I shall have a clear
+recollection always. Two have very special places of their own in
+American golf, one being The Country Club of Brookline already
+described. Massachusetts itself will not be called a "state" like other
+states, but is a "commonwealth," and The Country Club is not the Boston
+Country Club or the Brookline Country Club, but The Country Club, and
+visitors who would be appreciative and make no _faux pas_ are
+recommended to keep the point in mind, the reason being that this one,
+with its charter of incorporation away back in the eighteenth century,
+was the first of all the country clubs in America, and is dignified
+accordingly.
+
+They do blow the place up in America when they determine to make a golf
+course. Forest and rock are of no more hindrance to any idea or scheme
+than a few daisies might be. I was strongly impressed with this view of
+things when I was out one day at the Essex County Club at
+Manchester-by-the-Sea, another of the outer-Boston courses. "Come to
+golf at Essex in the morning; you will see something of the way in which
+we do our golf in America that you have never seen before." Such was the
+substance of an invitation from Mr. George F. Willett, one of the most
+ardent and admirable leaders of the golfing movement in the Eastern
+States. So in the morning golf at Essex, twenty miles out of Boston, was
+the programme of the day, and by half-past ten we were on the first tee
+preparing to drive from an eminence down towards low land in front. The
+terms of the invitation were amply justified. Towards noon, when we
+might be somewhere about the thirteenth or fourteenth hole, a great roar
+and crashing sound came from the other side of the course in the
+locality of the fifth hole, and looking towards it there was to be seen
+a rising cloud of smoke, with masses of earth and splintered rocks being
+hurled high into the air. A moment later and there was another deafening
+bang and more earth, more rocks, and various stumps of trees were shot
+up towards the sky. Bang! bang! bang!--ten times in the space of a few
+seconds was this surprise repeated, and it began to seem that we must be
+on Olympian links and that Jove himself or Hercules was bunkered. "It's
+only Ross's men tinkering away at the new fourth," said my man
+unconcernedly, as he ran down a long putt. A couple of minutes
+afterwards we rounded a bend of the course, and as we did so some wild
+yells were heard and a number of the Italian workmen were seen running
+fast in our direction and then stopping suddenly to hide themselves
+behind trees. Three more big bangs, more smoke, flying earth, flying
+rocks and roots, and then as my partner played his brassey he
+soliloquised that he had added, unintentionally, a touch of slice to the
+stroke and was in the pot on the right. As to the noises, our part of
+the course, I was assured, was perfectly safe. The three explosions were
+made by Ross's Italians at the new fifth. Thirteen of them in five
+minutes was perhaps a little unusual, but they were all over now, and,
+as could be seen, the Italians, with sundry calls to each other, were
+moving back towards the place they had sprinted from. The object of this
+concentration of noise and disturbance in five minutes, it was
+explained, was to give the full body of workmen plenty to do as soon as
+they resumed after their midday meal.
+
+The truth is, that golf at Essex, when I was first there, was undergoing
+a great and most wonderful transformation, regardless of cost,
+regardless of the magnitude and seeming impossibilities of the task,
+regardless of everything, but caused by the insatiable desire of the
+American golfer to have courses that are as good as they can be. To
+satisfy this desire he is everywhere pulling Nature to pieces and
+reconstructing her, doing his work deftly and skilfully, and with a good
+eye for pleasing effect. At the finish you might think that, save for
+the putting greens and bunkers, it was all the simple work of the mother
+of earth herself in her gentler moods, smooth swards for rocks, and
+chaste glades where forests were. This transformation and extension of
+American golf and the way it is being done is most amazing. All the old
+courses are being lengthened and greatly improved, and new ones of
+first-class quality are being made in large numbers. When it is desired
+to make changes and extensions on a British course the work that has to
+be done is not generally of a very formidable character. Some tolerably
+smooth sort of land is frequently available, and alternatives to
+existing holes may be planned. But even so, the question of expense
+seems often to be a fearsome thing, and a year or more of thought and
+yet another year for action are commonly needed. A thousand pounds or
+two thousand seems to be a mighty sum to spend, but for all that we
+think that in the south, at all events, we are doing our golf on a very
+grand scale in these days. And when I think of St. George's Hill and
+Coombe Hill and others of their kind I know we are doing it on a very
+fine scale. But the case of America at present is most specially
+remarkable. In the Eastern States particularly, the courses have had for
+the most part to be carved out of virgin forests. Tens of thousands of
+tons of rocks have had to be blasted, and hundreds of acres of swamps
+drained before the fairways could be laid and sown with grass. Such work
+is having to be done now for the extensions and improvements, and it is
+wonderfully done. The committees appear to take about a week to think
+about it, a day to decide, and then in two or three months, with the
+help of dynamite, tree-fellers, and hundreds of foreign workmen, the new
+scheme is carried through. The cost is not considered till afterwards,
+and then it never worries, but it is enormous. Here at Essex, the chief
+work that was being done was the addition of a total of 175 yards only
+to the fourth and fifth holes, which were to be given new numbers, and
+this little bit of lengthening, with the tree-felling, the splendid
+draining of a swamp, and the use of 400 lbs. of dynamite on the rocks,
+was costing 10,000 dollars or £2000. Some other alterations and new
+constructions were being done, and the course, one of fine undulations,
+well-planned bunkering, magnificent putting greens, and glorious
+scenery, was being brought to perfection. The work was being carried out
+under the direction of Mr. Donald J. Ross, the chief superintendent of
+the club and course, who was once a Dornoch man. He thinks out his
+construction schemes in the grand way, and he is going about America
+blowing hundreds of acres of it up into the air and planting smooth
+courses upon the levelled remains. Shortly before this, they called him
+up to a mountainous place at Dixville Notch, in New Hampshire, to plan a
+new nine-holes course that had to be cut out of solid rock, at a cost of
+£10,000. No golfer had ever been to that place, and the first had yet to
+arrive when the promoters wrote hurriedly to Mr. Ross, not long back
+home, saying: "We are convinced that it will soon be necessary to have a
+longer course, and are very desirous that you will come at once to lay
+one out on Panorama Hill." It will cost £20,000, but that does not
+matter. Golf is demanded everywhere in America, and it must be supplied.
+A little extra space was required for play by the Rhode Island Country
+Club at Narragansett, so, with Ross's help they took forty acres from
+the sea, and are now playing the game where a year previously the waves
+were rolling. Again, this remarkable golf engineer a little while since
+finished his work on the very first course that has been laid out in
+Cuba. I do not know what the future of American golf will be, but its
+present is a bewildering, astonishing thing.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes, but wait until you see Myopia!" I was not glad to leave Essex, but
+I was happy to go from there to the Myopia Hunt Club a few miles distant
+(and may I never forget that glorious ride in Mr. Willett's big car,
+along the winding road fringed with silver birches and autumn-tinted
+foliage, past placid little lakes, through some of the country of
+chastest charm in New England!), for Myopia is America's golfing pride.
+Besides, it is one of the few American courses that have a wide
+international reputation. Remember the astonishment when Andrew
+Kirkaldy, a St. Andrews golfer, if ever there was one, a man believing
+in the old course of Fifeshire as a Mussulman believes in Mecca, came
+back from an American tour and declared to British people that Myopia
+was the best course in the world! So we approach one American golf
+course with wonder and a certain awe. There are other reasons for doing
+so if we only knew them beforehand. Traditions and old dignity are
+strongly attached to it, and this Myopia is such a club for high feeling
+and exclusiveness as would do credit to any institution we have at home,
+golf or otherwise. It is, at the very least, as difficult to become a
+member of Myopia as of the Royal and Ancient. If I dared I would say it
+is more so. Myopia, I am told, will use the black ball with joy when
+there is a candidate at the doors. It might be easier in some
+circumstances for a man to become the President of the United States
+than to become a member of the Myopia Hunt Club. The dignity of Myopia
+exudes from the timbers of its long, quaint club-house. The ceilings are
+low, while the walls are panelled and are really old, for in quite early
+days of New England this, or part of it, was a farm-house.
+
+The name of the club in this case has nothing to do with golf, nor with
+the name of a place, for the place is Hamilton. Myopia is a technical
+term for near-sight. The original members despised the game, and as for
+letting it influence them in their choice of name of the club, such a
+thing is inconceivable. Originally, and for long afterwards, and
+primarily even now, Myopia is a hunt club; it prides itself on being so,
+and when anybody asks one of the old hunting members if they do not
+possess a good golf course there, he might say he supposed they did play
+some game with that name there sometimes. In the early days, I believe
+that many of the members wore coloured glasses for some reasons
+connected with their sight, and it was through this that the name of the
+club was given. Golf was a very late addition, and some of the old
+hunting-men, whom you will see moving about the club-house in real and
+unaffected riding costume as hardly anywhere else in America, feel a
+little sore about it still, and it is even now the fact that the hunting
+section keep to themselves in one part of the club and the golfers to
+themselves in their part, with such as Mr. Herbert Leeds and one or two
+others in both. Mr. Leeds showed me some of the old prints on the walls
+illustrating the race meetings that had taken place there in almost
+prehistoric times, and some mementoes of the early days of the golf
+club, together with the score card of George Duncan's record round on
+the course. I hope you realise that Myopia is not an ordinary golf club;
+I did so within a minute of my arrival there.
+
+The course is not like others in America. It is almost more of the open
+heathland sort of course than any other I have tramped over while in the
+country. It is a little barer, seemingly a little wilder than most of
+the others, and none the worse for that. Its putting-greens are capital,
+and at some of the holes, if not all, I have certainly trodden on turf
+that is better than anything else that my feet have touched on that side
+of the Atlantic. I remember that I nearly shouted with delight to my
+partner when I came upon the first stretch of it--green and soft and
+velvety. But it was not all like that, and in some respects I do think
+that, splendid as the course is, praise of it has been a little
+overdone. Yet on the other hand it is certainly a course that grows on
+the constant player there, and reveals new subtleties to him every time
+of playing. That after all is the test of a great course.
+Architecturally many of the holes are splendid. I do not quite like the
+idea of the man having to drive uphill at the first hole, but the
+tee-shot has most decidedly to be placed--to the left--or the player has
+the most fearful approach that he might ever dream of after the most
+indigestible dinner. The fourth hole is a splendid one of the dog-leg
+kind, a drive and an iron with the green very well bunkered, and some
+very low land to the left which is a constant attraction to the
+weak-minded ball. Then for my own part I liked the tenth very much, for
+a big drive has to be done over some high ground with a bunker away to
+the right that draws hard at sliced balls, while the green is one of the
+nicest and most prettily guarded. I lingered about it for some time in
+an admiring way. The last hole also has infinitely more in it than
+appears at the first glance, for here again a big bunker jutting into
+the edge of the green and to the right is a strong factor, especially
+when the pin is behind it; and if the hero does not place his tee-shot
+to the left, and within a very little space there, too, he will be
+sorry. It is 6335 yards round the course. In the club-house over the
+tea-cups, on the occasion of my first visit, I pondered upon the
+marvellous excellence of Duncan's record round, and paid some most
+sincere compliments to Mr. Leeds for the quality of the golf
+architecture of Myopia, for it is he, after close study of the best
+British models, who has been chiefly responsible for it.
+
+A day and night at the Brae Burn Country Club at West Newton, near
+Boston, left a warm glow lingering in my mind. Here if anywhere in
+America there is country charm and social delight. Nowhere is the idea
+of the complete and happy social community of the country club better
+developed. The course is a fine one, and here also, at the time of my
+first visit, extensive works were being carried out, and some splendid
+new holes over heaving land were in the process of formation. They have
+since been completed and the course has now risen to the highest
+standard. The putting-greens are in the nicest and most beautiful
+places, belts of trees line the fairway at several of the holes; there
+are others in open country, and the short ones are uncommonly good. A
+new one that they were making then, calling for a drive from a height
+down to a pocket-handkerchief kind of green is one that I hope to be
+puzzled at in the play within a few weeks of the moment when I write. I
+had the happiness then to nominate the situation of a new bunker at one
+of the new holes, and sure I am that a momentary vexation will be the
+result when I play that hole, for I, too, in America, have found that I
+develop the American hook, which seems to be in the climate and the
+soil. It was on this course that Harry Vardon in his all-conquering tour
+in America in 1900 sustained his only defeat. Our dinner-party in the
+club-house in the evening is an unforgettable reminiscence. It was a
+good-fellowship golfing party such as this game only can bring about.
+Mr. Harry L. Ayer, Mr. E. A. Wilkie, Mr. George Gilbert, Mr. C. I.
+Travelli, good Anderson and self talked our golf, British and American,
+to the full extent of a good ability. One of the topics was club
+captaincy, and the discussion we had may lead to the creation of the
+office at Brae Burn and elsewhere, for it is a curious thing that the
+American clubs have never thought of creating captains, and this
+community was rather pleased with the idea. It is an office that a golf
+club needs. If the captain is the right man, if he is chosen for his
+past service, for his present strength, and for his tact and quality as
+man and golfer, he can do much for a club, and his appointment is a
+recognition that a club needs for its best and most faithful men.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The country round about New York abounds in interesting golfing places,
+and if inclination were followed there should be descriptions given of
+Nassau, of Apawamis (not forgetting the rock to the right of the first
+green there which an English ball most usefully struck when the
+thirty-seventh hole was being played in the final of the American
+championship, Mr. Fred Herreshoff, finalist, being loser thereby), of
+Garden City, Baltusrol, and many other good golfing places in these
+parts. Garden City is a name familiar to golfers in Britain, because it
+is the place where Mr. Walter J. Travis came from when he won the
+championship at Sandwich. If it lacks some of the boldness of feature of
+some of the later American courses, yet this is a fine testing course,
+thoroughly--and so deeply!--bunkered, and with splendid putting-greens,
+and all the place round about is very pleasant. And now I am very
+anxious to see Piping Rock, as I soon expect to do.
+
+There are good reasons for making a journey by the Pennsylvania railroad
+from New York to Washington. One must pay the visitor's homage to the
+seat of American government and experience the feeling of being at the
+heart of the States, with its magnificent buildings and its historical
+remembrances. It is an intensely interesting place. At the White House
+there is Mr. President Wilson who is a golfer, as ex-President Taft was,
+and remains one of the keenest in the land. Mr. Taft will write
+enthusiastically about the game, and make speeches about it when he
+thinks it proper. "My advice to the middle-aged and older men who have
+never played golf," he says, "is to take it up. It will be a rest and
+recreation from business cares, out of which they will get an immense
+amount of pleasure, and at the same time increase their physical vigour
+and capacity for work as well as improve their health." And he also
+says, "Preceding the election campaign in which I was successful, there
+were many of my sympathisers and supporters who deprecated its becoming
+known that I was addicted to golf, as an evidence of aristocratic
+tendencies and a desire to play only a rich man's game. You know, and I
+know, that there is nothing more democratic than golf, and there is
+nothing which furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint,
+nothing which puts one more on an equality with one's fellows--or, I may
+say, puts one lower than one's fellows--than the game of golf. If there
+is any game that will instil in one's heart a more intense feeling of
+self-abasement and humiliation than the game of golf, I should like to
+know what it is." One who was in office there told me something of his
+enthusiasm for the game. I asked him how often Mr. Taft had played when
+he was there in the golfing season. The answer was that Mr. Taft used to
+play every day, positively every day, and some of those who played with
+him indicated to me what a very thorough and determined golfer he was.
+It might be said of the ex-President that he has spent more time in
+bunkers than most citizens, because he has generally insisted on playing
+out, no matter how many strokes have been needed. He has been playing
+now for sixteen years, and is quite one of the oldest American golfers
+in point of service to the game. Nothing can take away from him the
+distinction of having been the first President of the United States to
+play what they have determined shall be their national game.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had a happy experience when one day I left New York, where it was most
+swelteringly hot, and went up into the Green Mountains of Vermont for
+golf at the Ekwanok Country Club. A friend, Mr. Henry W. Brown of
+Philadelphia, who had played with me at my favourite Brancaster in
+Norfolk once, had heard I was somewhere in America and sent a letter to
+me directed to a chance address, which, being a golfing kind of
+address, found me with little delay. "Come," said Brown, "to
+Manchester-in-the-Mountains in Vermont. You ought to see our quite
+famous Ekwanok course, and I can promise you some fine mountain air,
+good golf, and a hearty welcome. If you will tell me what train you will
+come by, I will meet you with the car at Manchester Station." A moment's
+hesitation dissolved in firm decision and action, which took the form of
+a taxi-cab to the New York Central Station, and the north-bound train
+which left at twenty minutes to one in the afternoon. Then along we went
+by the Hudson river, up which I had sailed from Albany a year before,
+past the Palisades, past Poughkeepsie and the Catskill Mountains,
+through Troy and Albany, and as the daylight waned we were mounting
+upwards through the hills of sweet Vermont. At a quarter to eight the
+train reached Manchester, Brown and his car were waiting there, and we
+sped along the main street to his home.
+
+It seemed that the silver moonlight was shining not upon an earthen road
+but glistening on snow. Little villas like chalets and chateaux of
+Switzerland lined the way and the people living in them could be heard
+in their laughter and song, for the dinner time was just gone by and
+yellow light shone from the windows, making that happy contrast with the
+coldness of the moonshine, that speaks of home and comfort. We passed
+the great hotel where five hundred people are constantly gathered
+together in the summer time from all parts of the States, and indeed
+from places far beyond the States, for there are Britons in numbers
+here, and travellers from Africa and the deep southern lands, making
+such a cosmopolitan gathering of its size for drawing-rooms and bridge
+parties and the usual orderings of social gatherings as is not easily to
+be matched. And there is an amazing vivacity among all these people, for
+two reasons, one being that the American spirit at its best pervades,
+and the other that it is Ekwanok, the heartening, the vigour-making, the
+youth-restoring. In New York and Chicago at the end of the day one is a
+little apt to think of the wear and tear of life and the fading capacity
+of a good constitution; high up in the mountains of Vermont, in the
+shadow of the hills of Equinox, one revels in fresh youth again and has
+no more envy for the lad of twenty. And that again is a reason why
+Ekwanok is not like the other golfing places of America, and another
+following upon it is that this is, so far as I have discovered, the only
+truly golfing holiday resort in all the States, a place to which people
+go for the pleasure of the happy game and for hardly anything else, a
+place that lives and thrives on golf. From far and wide the Americans
+come to it and leave all their work behind, and are happy and leisurely
+as you rarely see them at other times. In Britain we have a very large
+number of resorts that are for holiday golf alone, and more are coming
+all the time, but this is a feature of golf that America in general has
+yet to know. If it comes to that, Manchester-in-the-Mountains is not so
+very high (that is a rather curious association of English
+ideas--Manchester and mountains, dingy streets with the smoke-thickened
+atmosphere of the Lancashire city and the big bold hills of God), but
+here is the mountain scent, enlivening, heartening. The house of my
+host, Breezy Bank as it is called, is set at the foot of one big
+mountain and looks across the green valley, where the golf course lies,
+out toward another--a delightful abode. A log fire burned red on the
+big hearth, a kind hostess gave us welcome, and after a supper that
+embraced fresh green corn (it is the essence of the enjoyment of green
+corn that it should be taken quickly from the growing to the kitchen),
+we talked, over cigars and coffee, golf from one end of the game to the
+other, and right across it, and handled clubs, until bedtime came. Brown
+is keen, and he has sound views on the influence of the game on national
+character.
+
+Next morning, with sunlight and breeze, we went along to the course, so
+near that a ball could have been driven to it from the lawn of Breezy
+Bank, where the master has been known to practise mashie shots by
+moonlight, and I was joined in foursome with Mr. Walter Fairbanks of
+Denver, Colorado, against B. and his son Theodore. What then happened is
+of no consequence; the tale may be told in Colorado but not in England.
+But the course--it is splendid, and reflects an infinity of credit upon
+Mr. James L. Taylor, the first in command, who has for the most part
+designed it, has constantly improved it, and has made it what it is. All
+the holes have abundant character. They are up and down, straight and
+crooked, interesting always, with a good fairway that gives fine lies to
+the ball, and putting-greens of the smoothest sort. We drove first down
+a hill with a slanting hazard that made awful menace to a slice, then up
+again and away out to the far parts, with some very pretty short holes.
+The gem of the collection of eighteen is the seventh, which has been
+called, and with some fitness, the King of American Holes. A great,
+fine, lusty piece of golf it is, 537 yards from the tee to the green,
+and every shot has to be a thoughtful, strong, and well-directed shot,
+with no girl's golf in it anywhere. It is a down drive from the
+high-placed tee, and the land below heaves over in a curious twisted way
+that demands very exact placing of the ball. Then there is a strong and
+straight second to be played over a high ridge in front into which big
+bunkers have been cut. Afterwards there is plain country to a
+well-protected green. It is a great hole, a romantic one, and is well
+remembered. Some of the drive-and-iron holes that follow are splendid
+things, and this course was very well chosen for the Amateur
+Championship Meeting in 1914. When we were leaving it at the end of that
+day, the sun had just gone down behind big Equinox Hill, but presently
+and by surprise he sent a last good-bye. Round the mountain side a
+golden bar of light was cast, and it spread along the olive-coloured
+hill across the shadowed valley like a clean-cut shining stripe or a
+monotinted rainbow. These were the glorious Green Mountains of Vermont!
+We tarried until the sun went right away, and took with it that parting
+beam, and, sighing, we passed along.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have left to the last of these few remembrances, what is in many
+respects the greatest of American courses--the National Golf Links at
+the far end of Long Island. In recent times it has probably been more
+discussed than any other course on earth. A while since a number of very
+wealthy, ambitious, and determined golfers put their heads and their
+money together, and decided on the establishment of something as near
+perfection as they could reach. In pursuit of this idea they have so
+far, as I am informed, spent about two hundred thousand dollars, and are
+in the act of spending many more thousands. They have their reward in a
+magnificent creation, as great in result as in idea, or nearly. All the
+people in the golf world have heard by this time of this National Links,
+and have no doubt wondered upon it, and the extent to which the
+extraordinary scheme that was developed a few years ago has been
+realised. It has been referred to as "the amazing experiment," and "the
+millionaires' dream," and so forth. Undoubtedly in its conception it was
+the grandest golfing scheme ever attempted. It came about in this way.
+America, with all its golf and money and enthusiasm, was without any
+course which might be compared with our first-class seaside links, the
+chief reason for her deficiency being that nowhere on either of her
+seaboards could be discovered a piece of land which was of the real
+British golfing kind. But at last a tract was found nearly at the end of
+Long Island, about ninety miles from New York, which was believed to be
+nearly the right thing. It was taken possession of by a golfing
+syndicate, and they determined there to do their very best. The question
+of expense was not to be considered in the matter. A member of the
+syndicate, Mr. Charles B. Macdonald, an old St. Andrews man, and one of
+wide golfing knowledge and experience, went abroad to study, photograph,
+and make plans of the best holes in Great Britain and on the continent.
+The whole world of golf was laid under tribute to assist in the creation
+of this wonder course. After exhaustive consideration a course was
+decided upon which was to embrace, in a certain reasonable measure,
+features of such eminent holes as the third, eleventh, and seventeenth
+at St. Andrews, the Cardinal and the Alps at Prestwick, the fifth and
+ninth at Brancaster, the Sahara at Sandwich, the Redan at North Berwick,
+and some others. The scheme was modified somewhat as the work
+progressed, but in due course the National Golf Links, a string of
+pearls as it was intended to be, was opened. Many different reports have
+been circulated as to the quality of the course, and the extent to which
+the object has been achieved. It has been described both as a failure
+and as a magnificent success.
+
+I preferred to go there alone and see things for myself without
+explanations and influences. A certain penalty had, however, to be paid
+for this enterprise. I shall not soon forget my journey to the
+Shinnecock Hills out at the end of the Island, nor the journey back
+again. It was on a glorious Sunday morning in October that I went to the
+Pennsylvania station and took train there for Shinnecock, which was a
+three-hours' journey along the line. In getting out at Shinnecock I was
+nearest to the course, but there were no cars waiting there, and the
+tramp that had to be made across country for two or three miles was one
+that might have suited an Indian brave better than it suited me,
+although I have an instinct and a desire always to find things and ways
+out for myself rather than be told and led. It was nearly noon; the sun
+was high, and it was burning fiercely. The so-called path was something
+of a delusion. It was more of a trail through a virgin bush country with
+a tendency to swamp here and there, and occasionallv one was led to a
+cul-de-sac. I could see the National Golf Links a little way ahead all
+the time. There was a big water cistern standing out against the
+sky-line, and there were some smoothly laid out holes, but grapes were
+never more tantalising to any fox than those holes are to the wanderer
+who tries to get there from Shinnecock along a route over which a crow
+might fly, and who determines that he will discover the elusive secrets
+of the National Links, however dearly the expedition may cost him.
+However, the enterprise succeeded, and the journey back from the course
+to the Southampton station was also accomplished despite the prevailing
+difficulties, and, with the sense of something having been attempted and
+done, we rode home on the Pennsylvania, and were back in New York by the
+same night--about the hardest day's golf business I have ever done.
+
+A certain disappointment is inevitably threatened when one visits a
+course of this kind about which one has heard so much beforehand. An
+ideal is established in the mind which cannot possibly be realised, and
+it is the fault of nobody. We do not know exactly what it is that we
+hope to see, but it is something beyond the power of man and Nature to
+achieve. But the National is a great course, a very great course. It is
+charmingly situated, most excellently appointed, and bears evidence of
+the most thorough and intelligent treatment by its constructors. Any
+preliminary disappointment there may have been soon wears away as the
+real excellence of the course and its difficulties are appreciated. Had
+we heard nothing of this copying, and did we not make comparisons
+between new and old in the mind, through which that which is new does
+not often survive, we should glory in the National at the first
+inspection of it. And the fact is, that the comparisons we suggest ought
+never to be made, though I, for one, was not aware of that till
+afterwards. Absolute copying was never intended; only the governing
+features of the British holes, the points that gave the character and
+quality to them, were imitated so far as could be done. That has been
+done very well, and some of the holes are very fine things. Those the
+design of which is based on such gems as the sixth at Brancaster and the
+eleventh at St. Andrews are very well recognisable. I should like to
+write much more about this course; it is a strong temptation. If I
+thought less of it and did not realise its greatness as I do, I should
+yield to the desire, and yielding, might rashly criticise as well as
+praise. But there is an imperative restraint. Upon a moderate course, or
+even a very good one, you may sometimes, if sufficiently self-confident,
+judge in one day's experience. But there are courses which, not because
+they grow upon you as we say, but because they command a higher respect
+at once than is given to others, which do not permit of such
+presumption. I saw the National on one day only, though I hope to see it
+many times again, and to gain courage for comment upon it. Now, with cap
+in hand, I can only signify my respect and full appreciation that here
+is something that is by no means of an ordinary kind, the accomplishment
+of a magnificent enterprise, and no doubt the achievement of a great
+ideal. But I shall say, at any rate, that a links more gloriously
+situated than this one in Peconic Bay, with pretty creeks running into
+the land here and there, and hill views at the back, could hardly be
+imagined. The view as I beheld it from different parts on that peaceful
+sunny Sunday afternoon is one that I never shall forget. It is the ideal
+situation for a national course.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To Mr. Macdonald thus belongs the credit for the initiation of what we
+may call the higher golf in America. In the last few years this movement
+has made strides as long and rapid in the United States as it has done
+in England, and above all other countries in the world America, which is
+so much dependent on her inland golf, having scarcely any other, is the
+country for this movement to be carried to its ultimate legitimate
+point. The day for very plain and purely and obviously artificial
+construction of inland golf courses is gone, the original inland system
+in all its stupidity and its surrender to difficulties has become
+archaic. It has come to be realised in this business that man may
+associate himself with Nature in a magnificent enterprise, and only now
+is it understood that this golf course construction is, or may be, a
+really splendid art. Landscape gardening is a fine thing in the way of
+modelling in earth and with the assistance of trees and plants and
+flowers and the natural forces, while engineering across rivers and
+mountains is grander perhaps; but in each of these the man takes his
+piece of the world from Nature and shovels it and smashes it, and then,
+according to his own fancy and to suit his own needs, he arranges it all
+over again. But in the making of a golf course, while we have indeed to
+see that certain requirements of our own are well suited, knowing how
+particular and hyper-critical we have become, yet we wish to keep to
+plain bold Nature too, and we want our best work to be thoroughly in
+harmony with her originals. I believe that if we could express it
+properly to ourselves, we wish now to make our golf courses look as if
+they were fashioned at the tail-end of things on the evening of the
+sixth day of the creation of the world--just when thoughts had to be
+turning to the rest and happinesses of the seventh. And so the great
+architect now takes a hundred acres or more of plain rough land and
+forest, hills and dales among it, and with magnificent imagination
+shapes it to his fancy. The work he now does will endure in part, if not
+in whole, for ages hence, and so it is deeply responsible. It is a
+splendid art; I do not hesitate to say it is a noble art.
+
+Mr. Colt, with his great thoughts and his splendid skill, has done fine
+work in several parts of the United States. The new courses of the
+Mayfield Country Club, and of the Country Club of Detroit, are splendid
+things. But Mr. Macdonald's creations--for more of them now follow upon
+the original at Southampton--are destined to be leading influences in
+the new American golf course construction. I have had some interesting
+talk with him upon these matters, and am glad to find that he is artist
+and creator enough to have the full strength of his own original
+opinions in this matter, especially as in some ways his ideals differ
+from those commonly accepted in Britain. I have been so much interested
+in his views, and I think that these views are destined to have such an
+enormous influence upon American golf in the future, that I have asked
+him for some brief statement of them, an enunciation of his creed as an
+architect of courses, and he has kindly made it to me in writing, as
+follows:--
+
+"To begin with, I think the tendency to-day is to overdo matters
+somewhat, making courses too long, too difficult, and with too much
+sameness in the construction of two-shot holes. To my mind a course over
+6400 yards becomes tiresome. I would not have more than eight two-shot
+holes, and in constructing them I should not follow the ideas or fancies
+of any one golf architect, but should endeavour to take the best from
+each. While it is the fashion now to decry the construction of a hole
+involving the principles of the Alps or seventeenth at Prestwick, I
+favour two blind holes of that character--one constructed similar to the
+Alps, and another of the punch-bowl variety of hole some fifty yards
+longer than the Alps. It is interesting now to read the 'best hole'
+discussion that took place in 1901. The leading golfers of that time
+were almost unanimous in pronouncing the Alps at Prestwick the best
+two-shot hole in the world. The eleventh at St. Andrews and the Redan at
+North Berwick were almost unanimously picked as the best one-shot holes.
+
+"To my mind there should be four one-shot holes, namely, 130, 160, 190,
+and 220 yards. These holes should be so constructed that a player can
+see from the tee where the flag enters the hole. The shorter the hole
+the smaller should be the green, and the more closely should it be
+bunkered. The most difficult hole in golf to construct interestingly is
+a three-shot hole, of which I would place two in the eighteen, one 520
+yards and the other 540. The putting greens at these holes should be
+spacious.
+
+"This leaves us four drive-and-pitch holes--280, 300, 320, and 340 yards
+in length. These should have relatively small greens and be closely
+bunkered, one or two of them having the putting greens open on one side
+or corner so as to give a powerful, long, courageous driver, who
+successfully accomplishes the long carry, the advantage of a short run
+up to the green. The size and contour of the putting green and the
+bunkering should depend upon the character and length of the hole. The
+principle of the dog's hind leg can be made a feature of several holes
+advantageously. The gradients between the tee and the hole should be
+made use of in bunkering. Whenever it is possible it is best that the
+bunkers should be in view. A number of the holes should be built with
+diagonal bunkers, or bunkers _en echelon_, so constructed that the
+player who takes the longer carry shall have an advantage over the man
+who takes the shorter carry. The hazards for the second shot should be
+so placed and designed as to give a well-placed tee shot every
+advantage--in other words, should make a man play his first stroke in
+relation to the second shot. There should be at least three tees for
+every hole, to take care not only of an adverse or favourable wind, but
+also of the calibre of the player. It is necessary on a first-class golf
+course to have short tees for the poorer players, otherwise they are
+everlastingly in the bunkers. The lengths which I give should be
+measured from the middle of the middle tee to the middle of the putting
+green."
+
+There is so much knowledge and good suggestion in this statement, and
+the matter is of such high consequence, that every player of the game
+should think well upon it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE U. S. G. A., AND THE METHODS OF THE BUSINESS-MAN GOLFER, WITH A
+REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT OF MUNICIPAL GOLF.
+
+
+People in England or Scotland do not quite understand what a splendid
+thing for American golf is the United States Golf Association. It is so
+absolutely necessary for the game in America that I am sure there would
+be little that is like golf there now if there had been no U. S. G. A.,
+with its loyalty and attachment to St. Andrews. There would be few
+Americans coming to play on the links of the homeland of the game, and
+there would be no British golfers wandering happily among the American
+courses. American golf would have become as much like the old game as
+American college football is like the football that is played at Oxford
+and Cambridge, which is to say that it is not at all like it. America is
+not a country small in space like our own happy islands. There it is in
+its millions of miles, new everywhere, and with little communities of
+golfers so far apart as New York and San Francisco, Massachusetts and
+Arizona, and isolated golfers in the loneliest places trying to bring
+others to their pastime for the matches they would have. What should all
+these people, away from all the influences of the home of the game, hot
+with the spirit of freedom, unrestrained by laws and conventionalities,
+eager to do things better than they have been done before--what should
+they care for St. Andrews and traditions, and the preservation of the
+unity of the game? As sure as eagles fly, and stars are bright, they
+would have made it to suit themselves in every community. Here they
+would have abolished the stymie, in another place they would have
+changed the size of the hole, away in Texas they might have permitted
+the introduction of the "mechanical contrivance," and soon there would
+have been a hundred golfs in the States, and not a real one among them.
+Just when this possibility, without being an immediate probability, was
+arising the U. S. G. A. came into existence. It joined all the golfers
+of America together in a republic for the preservation of the unity of
+the game, and for the promotion of its welfare in the spirit that the
+game had been cultivated in the homeland. And being thus given power, it
+has ruled with a strong hand. It has kept American golf in order as
+nothing else could have done, and as a governmental machine, I who have
+made some close examination of it, regard it as perfect, which is not to
+say that we need such a thing in Britain. In America I have had the
+pleasure of the intimate acquaintance of Mr. Robert Watson, Mr. Silas H.
+Strawn, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, Mr. William Fellowes Morgan, Mr. Harry
+L. Ayer, Mr. John Reid, junior, and many others of the leaders of the
+Union, and better men for the direction of such a game as golf, in whose
+hands it is quite safe, there could not be. They hold the right spirit
+of the game, and they are wise men, conservative in their golfing ways.
+Mr. Windeler indeed is an old British golfer like Mr. Macdonald, who was
+one of the original gathering that established the U. S. G. A. In the
+December of 1894 the representatives of five of the leading clubs met
+and framed the constitution of the U. S. G. A., and Mr. Theodore A.
+Havemeyer, of the Newport Club, was chosen president.
+
+The constitution of the U.S.G.A. is an interesting study. There are two
+classes of members, active and allied, and the difference is that the
+active members, who exercise control, are clubs that have been steadied
+by age and experience, and have acquired dignity. The definition in the
+constitution is made thus: "Any regularly organised club in the United
+States, supporting and maintaining a golf course of at least nine holes,
+and whose reputation and general policy are in accord with the best
+traditions and the high ideals of the game, shall be eligible to
+election as an Active Member." Then, as to the Allied Members, it is
+said that--"Any regularly organised club of good reputation in the
+United States shall be eligible to election as an Allied Member." There
+are far more allied members than there are active members, and the
+former are only admitted to the latter when they have thoroughly proved
+their worth. Thus the allied clubs have always an ambition before them,
+and they can only achieve it by conducting their golf on the best and
+oldest plan. At every meeting of the Association each active club is
+entitled to be represented by one voting delegate whose appointment has
+to be certified in advance by his club to the secretary of the
+Association. Allied clubs have no voting privileges, but all members of
+active and allied clubs have the right to attend all meetings of the
+Association, and to participate in the discussion of any question. The
+active clubs pay thirty dollars a year for subscription, and the allied
+clubs pay ten. Article IX. of the Constitution gives the Association its
+power and authority. It says: "The acceptance of membership in the
+Association shall bind each club to uphold all the provisions of the
+Constitution, bye-laws, and other rules of the Association; and to
+accept and enforce all rules and decisions of the Executive Committee
+acting within its jurisdiction. Any club failing in its obligations as
+above set forth may be suspended or expelled by a two-thirds vote of the
+Association, or by a two-thirds vote of all members of the Executive
+Committee; provided such club shall have been given due notice of the
+charge or charges preferred against it, and an opportunity to be heard
+in its own defence. Any club thus suspended or expelled by vote of the
+Executive Committee may appeal from its decision to the delegates at any
+annual or special meeting of the Association."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this about the machinery of American golf, consider the men. There
+are three classes of golfers in the United States, corresponding to some
+extent to similar classes in Britain, but they are rather more sharply
+defined than with us. There is the class that regards the game as a
+sport for competition, almost as a form of athletics, being mainly but
+not exclusively the younger class; there is the business-man class that
+believes in it as the ideal, and indeed the only recreation satisfying
+the needs of the times as a relaxation from the strain of life and work,
+and a means of promoting physical and mental efficiency, such people
+being as with us the largest section and the mainstay in one sense of
+the game; and there is the humbler class who play upon the public
+courses.
+
+I do not believe after the closest observation and most impartial
+consideration that the best American golfers are yet quite so good as
+ours, but in recent years they have been rapidly lessening the gap that
+has existed, their thoroughness, determination, and efficiency are most
+wonderful, and if they had our courses and climate they might become
+better than we are. They think they will anyhow. As it is they are
+handicapped by lack of full-blooded seaside courses, and a climate that
+is by no means ideal for the game; and although by their zeal they have
+to some extent discounted that handicap, I feel that they can only
+neutralise it altogether and go beyond it by the production of the
+occasional genius. The good Americans seem to me mostly to play what we
+could call a plain, straight game. American courses are for the most
+part without any sharp undulations; there is nothing in America like our
+rolling seaside links. Therefore the players are not taught or induced
+to be making allowances for this and that in all the days of their golf
+from their youth upwards, and they have not the sea-coast winds to lead
+them in the same way as we have. So they have good reason to play
+straight to the hole, and never to depart from doing so without the most
+obvious and pressing cause. It follows from this that the American
+players have fewer "scientific" or "fancy" strokes at their disposal,
+and those who have visited this country have been remarked upon for the
+plain simplicity of their iron play. They seem to standardise their
+shots. But assuming that this is their principle or their system, it
+enables them to concentrate keenly and with fine effect on accuracy.
+Delicacy of touch, splendid judgment of distance, and perfection of
+execution are strong characteristics of the American players, who do not
+need to be reminded that there are no bunkers in the air. It is the
+straight game of the Americans with all its accuracy that is paying in
+their matches against us. At the same time I think that the comparative
+weakness of the Americans in wooden club play is a serious handicap to
+them, and their courses need to be tightened up to improve it. That
+"American hook" of theirs is a dangerous thing sometimes, and their
+round flat swings are looked upon by some of our best British
+authorities with much suspicion.
+
+But there is one most important way in which they are scoring over us.
+They are beating us in temperament, concentration, and determination,
+and in the capacity to make the very most of their own game, so that not
+a shot of it is wasted. This means very much. A man may be plus five,
+but of such a temperament and such ways that he habitually wastes two or
+three holes in a match through negligence or slackness. The Americans do
+not waste holes in this way. They waste nothing. The game of which they
+are capable is produced nearly every time at full quality and is made as
+effective as it possibly can be. The utmost pains are taken over every
+stroke; the man blames himself for nothing after it is made. His
+concentration is enormous; he is often inclined to race through the
+green, but his capacity for being slow and meditative, when necessary,
+is great; and most noticeable again is his persistence, which is another
+way of making the most of a game that a man possesses. Of course all
+these remarks are applied to the two classes of players in a very
+general way. There are many exceptions among the Americans and there are
+many among our players, but that they do indicate the tendencies in the
+two countries I am certain. The American game may not be as scientific
+and complete as ours, but its more serious exponents do make the most of
+it as ours do not, and probably the high importance that is attached to
+the numerous first-class tournaments they have over there has something
+to do with it. They believe in competitions more than we do.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This matter of consideration and concentration is one to which every
+player should give closer attention. His success is largely dependent
+upon it. He may think he concentrates enormously as it is, more than on
+anything else, but often he deceives himself. Not one man in ten gets as
+much in effect out of his game as it is capable of. He walks to his ball
+and plays some kind of a shot, with a more or less hazy idea of what it
+is that he wishes to do. When he finds his object has not been
+accomplished he suddenly remembers something, and it is a case of "I
+should have known," or "If I had only thought," or "What a pity I did
+not look." With such people a round of golf is a succession of regrets,
+and it is the simple truth that the majority could do far better with
+their game if they did not waste so much of it by carelessness,
+thoughtlessness, and a sort of distraction which allows their minds to
+wander to other things than the stroke in hand, and sometimes by their
+conversation too. When a man has played a stroke he has quite sufficient
+to occupy his mind for the next minute or two in considering how he
+shall play the next one, and the many features of the case that will be
+presented to him.
+
+It is a remunerative resolution to make at the beginning of the season,
+to think deeply upon all the points of match play, and then exploit the
+art of it with some thoroughness. It is not difficult. All who have
+attended the Amateur Championship meetings and have been close observers
+of what happens there can remember how even players of the very first
+class in this most important of tournaments let themselves get beaten by
+inferior players simply because they do not make the most of their game.
+They forget things, do not think enough, and play strokes carelessly
+because at the time of doing so they seem to feel it does not matter. No
+stroke should ever be played as though it were not the most important of
+the game--as it might turn out to be. The old maxim that if a thing is
+worth doing at all it is worth doing well, applies with tremendous force
+to match-play golf. Many a time when the result of a stroke played
+exactly as intended, is not what was anticipated, through some of the
+circumstances not having been taken into consideration, the mistake that
+was made is obvious then. The man excuses himself by saying that he
+cannot see and think of everything, but nine times out of ten he should
+have seen. The most fatal mistake, however, that many players make in
+the early part of the season when their match-playing qualities have not
+been properly revived, is in their letting matches slip, in not pressing
+home advantages that they gain, and, above all, being too indifferent
+upon the future in the early part of a match, and too careless when they
+get a lead. All this sounds very simple, very obvious, but it often
+takes the best part of a season to drive the lessons home into the minds
+of golfers who are losing matches through their weakness in fighting
+quality.
+
+Now here are one or two samples of points in regard to which the golfer
+constantly neglects to display his cunning and is the loser thereby.
+Assuming that in the general way you can get as much length when it is
+wanted as the other man, always try to make him play the odd to you. You
+do so naturally with your tee shots and many of the others, but are not
+really thinking at the time that you are wanting him to play the odd.
+The man who is playing the odd, even from a very little way behind the
+other, is at a much greater moral disadvantage than is often suspected,
+and if the other man always noticed things as much as he should, he is
+at a greater practical advantage than he realises, for if his opponent
+fails he can see the cause of it, this remark applying especially to
+what happens in the short game. How many putts have gone wrong that
+never need have done had the man who made them watched what happened
+when his adversary putted first! Then, again, on this point of making
+the other man play the odd the case is constantly recurring where both
+men are obliged to play short of some hazard, or to take a particular
+line to a hole which is not the straight one. The man who goes second
+will find it very much to his advantage if he tries to squeeze so
+closely up to the point of danger as to be just nearer to it than the
+other, the latter then having to play the odd and being then more
+inclined to press with it and perhaps to miss it. The man who is playing
+the odd is in a sense taking a shot into the unknown; the other man
+knows everything. That is just the difference. Another stupid mistake
+that many men make is to try experimental or fancy shots, perhaps with
+clubs that are unfamiliar to them, just because the other man has played
+two more. How many thousands of holes have been lost through that! The
+experimental shot fails, the other man makes a good one, the
+experimenter suddenly finds he has to fight for it, and a minute or two
+later is watching his adversary take the honour from the next tee.
+Again, what matches could have been won that were lost if the players
+had only shown half the sense that Mr. Hilton did in the Amateur
+Championship of 1912 at Prestwick, in picking his places for putting, as
+it were, always, whenever possible, running up so that he would have to
+putt uphill instead of down, the former being far the easier kind of
+putting. Nowadays there are inclines on every green and round about the
+hole, and a flat putt is a comparative rarity. But the average man never
+thinks of these inclines until he has to play along them. The time for
+most thinking about them is when making the stroke before, so that the
+putt may be along the easiest line to the hole. This is not a question
+of skill; it is simply one of sense. A man can play short of the hole
+or past it, or to the right or left, and there will be one point from
+which the putting will be easier than the other. It may often happen
+that it would pay better to be four yards past the hole than two short
+of it, for you will not only have had the chance of holing, but the putt
+back may be an uphill one.
+
+But with it all, the habit must be cultivated of thinking as much as
+possible in advance--thinking quickly and acting with decision.
+Questions of the value of practice swings have arisen lately. We have
+seen rather too much of these practice swings in some quarters. We may
+believe in the practice swing--just one or at most two. A man may be an
+experienced golfer, and he may have played a certain stroke nearly a
+million times before, but golf is essentially a game of fears and
+doubts, and apart from just setting the right muscles in a state of
+complete preparation for the task in hand a practice swing gives one a
+little confidence. The shot is shaped; there is nothing to do but repeat
+the stroke that has been made; it can be done. To that extent the
+practice swing may be thoroughly recommended. But some members of the
+young American School go farther than this, and it is questionable
+whether they are wise. For one thing the delicate muscles and the
+nervous system that are concerned with the stroke in hand are easily
+tired, and if the shot is a long one needing power the odds are against
+its being done so well after five practice swings as after one. Show me
+the man who can drive his best and straightest after five practice
+swings on the tee. Then there is the hesitation and doubt that are
+induced. I believe that in most cases these players are really waiting
+for an inspiration. They are not ready for the stroke they have to play.
+Jack White in once confiding to me some of the secrets of his
+successful putting, said that when he went about on the green examining
+the line back and front, he was simply trying to gain time and nothing
+more. "I want to feel that I want to putt," he said, "and while I am
+waiting for that feeling coming on I can hardly stand motionless on the
+green or look up at the sky." It is that way with these Americans; they
+are waiting for an inspiration. But it does not always seem to be
+responsive, and they wait too long. A moment must come when they are as
+ready for the shot as ever they will be in their lives; if they let it
+pass nothing but doubts and hesitations can follow, and that is the
+danger to the player of excessive slowness. He begins to fear his fate
+too much. And also one round of golf played like this makes a fearful
+mental strain, and how often do we see that men who win their morning
+matches by such methods look very tired and lose easily in the
+afternoon.
+
+The case of Mr. Ouimet, who has so suddenly become a great power in
+American golf, has already been considered, and Mr. Walter Travis's high
+position was established long ago. Apart from these two, the new star
+and the old one, and the young professional M'Dermott, there are two
+others who hold a higher place in the opinion of the golfers of their
+own country and ours than any other players do, and those are Mr.
+Charles Evans, junior, of Chicago, and Mr. Jerome D. Travers, foremost
+players of the west and east as they respectively are. In every way Mr.
+Evans is a very delightful golfer. When we saw him at Prestwick in 1911
+he was even then a brilliant player, and one who impressed British
+golfers as no other had ever done since Mr. Travis had won at Sandwich,
+and he had then an advantage which the winner of our championship had
+not--he had his whole golfing life before him. Since that time he has
+undoubtedly improved. He has become physically stronger, experience has
+helped him, and he has greater resource and skill. And despite the fact
+that he has not yet won an American championship, there is this to be
+said for him, that in the sense of accomplishment, in variety of stroke,
+perfection of it, in playing the game as it was meant to be played, as
+we say, he is still, for all his failures, the best amateur golfer in
+the United States at the present time. But Mr. Evans is a man of very
+keen and somewhat too sensitive temperament. He is inclined sometimes to
+fear his fate unduly. Yet whenever we are inclined to judge him a little
+harshly for his temperament, let it be remembered that fortune has dealt
+him some cruel hurts, and that it is not a quality of human man to bear
+himself indifferently to perpetual adversity. When he was the last hope
+of his country at the championship at Sandwich in 1914, and striving
+gallantly, his opponent went to the turn in a record score of 31. To be
+merely sorry for "Chick" in such circumstances is inadequate; along with
+him we smiled at the absurd extent to which his ill-luck spitefully
+pursued him then. Even though it had to be counted, it was unreal. He
+must be a champion some time.
+
+One of the greatest tragedies of his life, so far, was that he suffered
+in the appalling Amateur Championship at Wheaton, Illinois, in
+1912--appalling by reason of the terrible heat that players and all
+others, including my unlucky but still deeply interested self, were
+called upon to bear. It has come to be nearly a settled understanding in
+Britain that the championships must be attended by weather quite
+ridiculously and most uncomfortably unseasonable. Thunderstorms and
+lightning, gales and floods--these are the accompaniments of the great
+golf tournaments of the year in the summer months of May and June, and
+matters seemed to reach a climax in 1913 when the progress of the final
+match of the Amateur Championship at St. Andrews had to be suspended
+because of the terrific storm which flooded the putting greens until
+there were no holes to putt at, and when in the Open Championship at
+Hoylake shortly afterwards Taylor had to play his way to victory through
+a gale against which ordinary people could hardly stand up. Almost does
+it appear that the American climate is disposed to follow the bad
+British example in times of championships, seeing what happened at
+Brookline in the same season; but it was very different at Wheaton in
+the year when Mr. Hilton failed to retain the American Amateur
+Championship he had won the season before at Apawamis, and when Mr.
+Travers beat Mr. Evans in the final by seven and six. Mr. Norman Hunter
+and some others, Americans, were burned out of that championship by a
+temperature which at times was more than a hundred in the shade, and
+while some players conducted their game beneath sunshades that they
+carried, most of them had towels attached to their golf bags for
+body-wiping purposes. There was no escape from the heat anywhere, night
+or day, and no consolation in anything, unless it were that in the city
+of Chicago a few miles distant the people were reported to be even worse
+off than we were, and deaths were numerous. Well did we call that the
+blazing championship, and when I am asked, as is often the case, which
+of all championship experiences I recall most vividly, my remembrances
+of events in Britain, far more numerous as they are, give way to an
+American pair, the hot one at Wheaton in 1912, and the wet one of the
+British debâcle at Brookline a season later. But the sun at its worst
+could not diminish the enormous interest that there was in that Wheaton
+final, for the draw and the play had brought about the ideal match, from
+the spectators' point of view, and even that of the players too, Mr.
+Travers of the east and Mr. Evans of the west, and finely did the
+Americans show their appreciation of what had come to pass by wagering
+incredible numbers of dollars upon it and watching it in thousands. That
+time it was thought that Mr. Evans would win, and he was three up at the
+turn in the morning round, but he lost two of the holes before lunch,
+and I am sure that the reason why he fell such an easy victim to Mr.
+Travers in the afternoon was that he grieved too much for the loss of
+those holes, and feared his fate when he need not have done. I know that
+Mr. Travers in that second round played golf of the most brilliant
+description that nobody could have lived against; but did Mr. Evans
+encourage him to do so? This matter of temperament might seem to be a
+fatal consideration for ever, being one of Nature and seemingly
+unalterable, were it not that we have had cases of fine golfers with
+weak temperaments who, perceiving their desperate state, have resolutely
+and with patience changed those temperaments, or curbed their influence
+as we should more properly say. The best modern instance of such a
+change being made is that of George Duncan, and never fear but that
+"Chick" will soon come to his own as well.
+
+Mr. Jerome Travers is undoubtedly one of the strong men of golf to-day,
+a big piece of golfing individualism. At twenty years of age he won the
+American Amateur Championship, in 1912 I saw him win it for the third
+time, and the following year he won it again at Garden City. In his own
+golfing country he must be one of the hardest men in the world to beat.
+He plays the game that suits him and disregards criticism. He began to
+play when he was nine years old. A year later he laid out a three-holes
+golf course of his own at home--first hole 150 yards, second 180, third
+apparently about the same, back to the starting-point. There were no
+real holes--to hit certain trees was to "hole out." For hour after hour
+this American child would make the circuit of this little course, and
+day after day he would work hard to lower his record for these three
+holes. At thirteen he started playing on a proper nine-holes course at
+Oyster Bay. At fifteen he became attached to the Nassau Country Club,
+and there, chiefly under the guidance of Alexander Smith, to whose
+qualities as tutor he pays high tribute, his game improved. His swing
+was wrong at the beginning. "Shorten your back swing, and take the club
+back with your wrists. Swing easily and keep your eye on the ball." That
+was Smith's advice to him, and he says it served him well. He began to
+place the right hand under instead of over the shaft, and that added
+more power to his stroke, and then he discovered that taking the club
+back with his wrists or starting the club-head back with them, increased
+its speed and gave him greater distance. Then it was practice, practice,
+practice for an hour at a time at every individual stroke in the game.
+He would play the same shot fifty times. He putted for two hours at a
+stretch, placing his ball at varying distances from the hole, trying
+short putts, long ones, uphill and downhill putts, and putts across a
+side-hill green where the ball had to follow a crescent-like course if
+it had to be holed out or laid dead. During the championship at
+Apawamis, when he was playing Mr. Hilton, he had what everybody declared
+to be an impossible putt of twenty feet, downhill over a billowy green,
+and he holed it because he had practised the same sort of putt before.
+In the next championship at Wheaton he did an "impossible" bunker shot
+and laid the ball dead from the foot of the face of the hazard because
+he had practised that shot also. Next to the Schenectady putter
+belonging to Mr. Travis his driving iron is, or should be, the most
+famous club in all America. It is a plain, straight-faced iron with a
+round back, and is heavy, weighing sixteen ounces. It has a long shaft
+and a very rough leather grip, and was forged at St. Andrews. This and
+his other irons are kept permanently rusty. He carries very few
+clubs--five irons, a Schenectady putter, a brassey and a driver, but, as
+Mr. Fred Herreshoff, who turns caddie for him in the finals of
+championships, says, the two latter are for the sake of appearances
+only. He believes in the centre-shafted Schenectady putter, illegal here
+but allowed in America, as in no other. He calls for a very low tee, one
+that is only just high enough to give him a perfect lie, "the duplicate
+of an ideal lie on the turf." He plays his drives off the right foot,
+which is about three inches in advance of the left, the ball being just
+a shade to the right of the left heel, because in that position he finds
+it easier to keep the eye on the ball without effort, and in the strain
+of a hard match or competition every simplifying process like this is
+valuable.
+
+But the most remarkable thing about his preparation for driving is his
+grip, which is unique. He does not employ the overlapper. He likes the
+right hand to be under the shaft; but this is the main point--that the
+first fingers are almost entirely free of the shaft, with the tips
+resting on the leather, curled inside the thumbs. Both thumbs are
+pressed firmly against the sides of the first joints of the second
+fingers, forming a locking device which prevents any possible turning of
+the shaft. He is an utter believer in this detaching of the first
+fingers from the club, and declares he could not play in any other way,
+his theory being that it permits better freedom of the wrists and
+enables him to get greater power into the stroke without deflecting the
+club-head from its proper sweep in the swing to the ball. With his
+driving iron he is a supreme master, and with it alone he has played a
+round of a difficult course in America, Montclair, in 77. When I
+watched him win his third championship I decided that in whatever else
+he might excel he had a finer temperament for match play than almost any
+other player I had seen. Silent, imperturbable, not a trace of feeling
+in his countenance, he seemed to be mercilessly forcing his way to
+victory all the time. Only once since he became established as a
+champion kind of golfer have his nerves ever failed him, and that was on
+an occasion of supreme importance, and yet one when the strain upon
+nerves was not, or should not have been, unduly severe. I saw him lose
+his match to Mr. Palmer at Sandwich in 1914, and there was something
+nearly as mysterious about that occurrence as there was about the
+victory of Mr. Ouimet at Brookline--far more than there was about the
+defeat of the latter at Sandwich by Mr. Tubbs, for then Mr. Ouimet
+simply played a poor but not a timid game. But in the Palmer-Travers
+match the American for the first time for years was afraid. Half way
+round, all the watchers were saying so, saying his nerves were catching
+at his shots. Knowing the man, having seen so much of him in America, I
+could not believe it then; but before the round was ended the truth was
+clear. His nerves had failed, and it was responsibility that had caused
+them to do so. He could not possibly have played so poorly otherwise. It
+was not the real Travers who played that day.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The middle-aged business-man golfer is an important individual in the
+general golfing scheme of things in the United States. He is that
+elsewhere, but he stands out most in America. Well enough does he know
+how the game is good for him. The early American golfers (those of from
+ten to twenty years ago) adopted the game enthusiastically, because it
+answered exactly to certain requirements they had in mind in regard to
+creating and preserving physical fitness. The American business man
+leads a quick life and a hard one and, in recent years particularly, his
+pursuit of this physical fitness has become something of a craze with
+him, for the reason that through it he seeks to bring the human machine
+to the highest point of working efficiency and, at the same time, enable
+the human man to derive more enjoyment and satisfaction from the
+pleasures of life. This is not a vague, subconscious idea in the
+American; it is a clear, definite scheme, adopted by thousands and
+thousands of those who have devoted themselves to the game. Hence their
+generous support and excellent enthusiasm. The country swarms with men,
+two-thirds way through an ordinary lifetime, who have only been playing
+the game for five or six summers and no winters--for in very few places
+in the northern parts of the United States is any play possible between
+the late fall and the spring--and who can play a good six-handicap game,
+British reckoning, for in America they have a system of handicapping
+according to which scratch is the lowest, and their six handicap is
+about equivalent to our two or three. The majority of our middle-aged
+men seem to resign themselves to the idea that in no circumstances can
+they ever become really good players, and they pretend they are
+satisfied to make their way round the links merely for the sake of the
+health and exercise that they obtain from so doing. Perhaps in a sense
+they are wise, but still it is certain that more than half of the joys
+and pleasures of golf are missed by those who never feel any improvement
+being made, who never rise above a steady mediocrity, and who never feel
+the thrills of playing above their ordinary form.
+
+The business-man golfer is seen at his best at the country clubs near
+to the great cities. There is nothing elsewhere which for its healthy,
+honest pleasures and the satisfaction it yields is comparable to the
+American country club and the life that is pursued there. It gives to
+the busy man the ideal relaxation he could not obtain in any other way.
+I spent several days at one of these country clubs, a railroad journey
+of an hour or so from Chicago, and the experience was illuminating. The
+American business-man golfer works in the city for part of the day in
+the summer and spends the rest of his time at the country club, where
+the predominating features of the life are golf, rest, and sociability.
+These country clubs are provided with a large number of bedrooms, and
+are surrounded with cottages, nicely equipped, which generally belong to
+them and are let for periods to the members. The vitality of the man of
+whom we are thinking is enormous. He is out of his bed at the club at
+about six o'clock in the morning, and goes through a process of shower
+baths, with which the establishment is splendidly appointed. By seven
+o'clock he is dressed in the thinnest flannels, and sits down to
+breakfast with thirty or forty other members at 7.15. At this time he is
+jacketless, and all in white. A large glass of iced water is laid before
+him to begin with, and then the half of a grape fruit or a cantaloup,
+with a piece of ice stuck in the middle, is presented as the first
+course. These things, as we get them in America, are very delicious. At
+once an argument begins round the table about the qualities of different
+balls and clubs, and I am closely questioned about the way we do things
+in England. Next, there is oatmeal porridge laid before us, with tea or
+coffee, and the men begin to match themselves for the afternoon round.
+Mr. A says he will play Mr. B for a certain stake, but the latter finds
+he is already engaged to play Mr. C for a higher one. Eventually,
+Messrs. A, B, and C agree to play a three-ball match for still more
+dollars. Such extensive wagering is not the rule, but it is frequent.
+After the porridge, bacon and eggs, calf's liver and bacon, or something
+of that kind, is served with a baked potato, a little more iced water
+may be called for, and there is marmalade with toast and sweet cakes,
+and, then at a quarter to eight, all get aboard the club motor-omnibuses
+and are whizzed away to the railroad station, light jackets very likely
+carried on their arms.
+
+Before nine o'clock they are hard at work in the big city. Some early
+birds were even there by eight o'clock. They work very hard, no dawdling
+of any kind, and by one or two o'clock they have finished for the day
+and are off back to the golf club as fast as they can go. Frequently
+they are back in time to lunch there. Soup, some meat done in American
+fashion, an American salad, blueberry pie, iced water, and a glass of
+cold tea with a lump of ice in it and a piece of lemon, finishing up
+with a large supply of ice cream, and then a big cigar, are what the
+American golfer goes out to play upon. The caddie whom he takes out to
+carry his clubs costs him tenpence an hour--always paid by the hour,
+during which he is in the golfer's service, and not by the round. By
+this time the player is in thinner and lighter clothes than ever, and he
+has been cooled down by more shower baths. His round is played very much
+as it might be done in England. He is very keen on his game. But he
+takes a little more time on the consideration of his stroke when once he
+has reached his ball than we do, and he is most deeply painstaking.
+Towards the end of the match he may develop an idea for playing the
+enemy for a number of dollars a hole for the remainder of the round, and
+when it is all over, everybody is quite satisfied with everything. More
+shower baths, a lounge, and a cigar, and then a long American dinner,
+with vegetables very fancily done, corn cobs, sweet salads, plenty of
+iced water, ice creams, "horses' necks"--ginger ale with lemon and
+ice--and so forth. Long arguments on the verandah upon the respective
+merits of British and American golf, and at ten o'clock this busy golfer
+of the United States gets himself off to bed. He never sits up late. He
+sleeps, of course, with his windows wide open, with a wire netting
+arrangement to keep out the flies and mosquitoes, and as he falls away
+to his slumber he feels that golf is the best of games, that America is
+the chief of countries, and that this is the most agreeable of all
+possible worlds. Here I have been writing in general terms, but I should
+add that each and all of my details are taken from the life, from
+personal experience at one of the best of these country clubs.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are some interesting characters in American golf as everywhere,
+and the very wealthy golfer in the States is often to be considered. Mr.
+John D. Rockefeller, the "Oil King," is, as all of us know, an extremely
+rich man. He is also a business man, if ever there was one. And he is
+extremely fond of golf. His case may have as little to do with the
+matters just discussed as you may think, but I shall present it as I
+found it out. A few years gone Mr. Rockefeller, who has a capacity for
+giving advice of a very shrewd and worldly character, announced his
+intention of retiring from the presidency of the Oil Trust and of
+devoting a fair part of the remainder of his life to playing golf. Since
+then he has discovered that it is easier to make a million dollars than
+to hole a five-yard putt, for the Rockefeller millions now make
+themselves and the putts are as unholeable as ever. His methods of
+playing, and his moralisings on the game, are not like those of any
+other man. Readers must judge for themselves as to whether they have
+anything to learn from them; I think they may have something. Take this
+case for an instance. One day when playing the game he made a very good
+shot on to the green, and, ever ready to draw a moral from the game of
+golf which would apply to the greater game of life, turned to his
+companions and said: "Waste of energy I regard as one of the wanton
+extravagances of this age. Rational conservation of energy and
+temperance in all things are what the American nation must learn to
+appreciate." Mr. Rockefeller is now seventy-five years of age, and he
+was nearly sixty before he first began to play. He became an enthusiast
+at once, and, as with most other men, his golf aggravated him, goaded
+him, tantalised him, and made him ambitious and determined. He began to
+find things out and to invent new ideas as rapidly as any of us have
+ever done. He said the game changed his life. Made him happy. Brought
+back his youth to him. His friends when they played with him declared
+that he was not a cantankerous old man, but a really charming fellow.
+Golf was doing him good. It was making a new man of him, as it does of
+all others. But he did not get on at it as quickly as he thought he
+ought to do. He found that there were rather more things to remember in
+a very short space of time when making his shot than he had ever had to
+remember before, and that for the first time in his life he was liable
+to forgetfulness on the most important occasions. Then he acted on the
+business man's principle of getting others to do things for him. He got
+others to do the remembering. For a time whenever he went to play a
+match he had three caddies attending on him; even now he generally has
+two. He employed them for other purposes than carrying clubs. When he
+was about to make a stroke No. 1 Caddie stepped up to him and said
+respectfully but firmly: "Slow back, Mr. Rockefeller, slow back!" He
+might otherwise have forgotten to take his club slowly back from the
+ball at the start of the swing. This adviser having moved away, Caddie
+No. 2 went forward and said: "Keep your eye on the ball, Mr.
+Rockefeller, keep your eye on the ball!" Then, in turn, Caddie No. 3
+advanced and spoke warningly: "Do not press, Mr. Rockefeller, do not
+press!" So, reminded of the common faults, the Oil King made his stroke
+and did not commit them, but was guilty of several others, and realised
+a little sadly when the ball did not travel as it should that he needed
+a hundred caddies for warning, and not three. Still, there is some good
+sense in this method, and the man who made it a strict rule to say to
+himself always, just before a stroke, what Mr. Rockefeller hired the
+boys to say to him would make fewer bad shots than he does.
+
+Mr. Rockefeller has a very nice course of his own on undulating land at
+Forest Hill, on the edge of Cleveland, Ohio, and there he has parties to
+play with him constantly. He is fond of cycling, and instead of walking
+after his ball when he has struck it, he takes his cycle on to the
+course with him, jumps on to it, and wheels himself along to the place
+from which the next shot must be made. By this means he not only saves
+much time, and gets more golf in an hour than we do, but considers that
+he derives more physical benefit from the combination than he would from
+golf and walking. More than this, he knows exactly how far he has hit
+the ball every time, for he counts the number of turns of the pedals he
+has to make in cycling from point to point, and calculates accordingly.
+He does not lose his temper when he makes a bad shot or a series of
+such, as some have suggested, but he is quite ecstatic when he makes a
+good one; and, despite his seventy-five years, has been known to leap
+high into the air when the result of his efforts has been specially
+good. He is a most thoughtful player, and takes the utmost care always
+to note effects and to try to attach causes to them. "Now gentlemen," he
+has said, "that was really a very good stroke that I made then. You
+observe that I am learning to make better use of my left arm. It was
+that Scotchman who told me of the trick, but somehow I have never been
+able to use it advantageously until now." He has a large number of clubs
+in his bag, including all the most usual implements, while two or three
+have been made according to his own special ideas. One of his caddies
+also carries a large sunshade to hold over him while playing when the
+weather is uncomfortably warm, and it is the duty of this boy also to
+give a hand at pushing the bicycle when the line to the hole is uphill
+and Mr. Rockefeller finds the pedalling too much for him unaided. So you
+see that there is nothing that is conventional about Mr. John D.
+Rockefeller and his golf. You would hardly expect it.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now for the public or municipal golf in America; it is one of the strong
+features of the game in the United States that impressed me most. The
+average player in Britain, where the municipal golf movement is making
+slow headway, may be surprised to know that there is such a thing across
+the Atlantic; let him understand, then, that public golf in America is
+far ahead of public golf in Britain. Some Americans of great golfing
+experience, not confined to their own country, have not hesitated to say
+that they will "make America the greatest golfing country in the world."
+If we disregard such a challenge, there are yet circumstances and
+forces in operation in America of which serious notice must be taken,
+and the first of them is this great movement that is progressing in
+favour of municipal golf. The whole vast country is taking to it. The
+leaders of the people are appreciating the necessity of it and preaching
+it. They say that the times are desperately strenuous, that an antidote
+is needed, an ideal relaxation for body and nerves, a perfect recreation
+and diversion, and that, having tried everything and thought of other
+possibilities, they have come firmly and decisively to the conclusion
+that golf is the only recreation that meets the requirements of the
+times. Therefore they say that it must be provided for everybody, for
+the "common people," and given to them absolutely free with every
+inducement put forward for them to play it. The result is that public
+golf in America is already advanced to such a state as is almost
+incredible to those who have not seen it there. I have seen it. In New
+York, Boston, Chicago, Kansas, Louisville, Milwaukee, Elgin, Toledo, and
+a host of the smaller places, there are good public courses. In the
+large cities there are often two or three. Chicago has now three and a
+fourth was being made when I was there last, a fine long course in the
+Marquette Park. Two of the existing courses are in the Jackson Park, one
+being eighteen holes and the other nine. The third is in Garfield Park.
+The full-sized course in Jackson Park is quite an excellent thing. The
+turf and the putting greens are well tended, the views are pleasant, and
+the play is absolutely free to all who obtain the necessary permit from
+the Parks Commissioners. The regular player may have the use of locker
+and dressing-rooms in the pavilion, and good meals may be obtained at a
+reasonable cost. How shall we wonder then that the Americans take kindly
+to this game and are becoming overwhelmingly enthusiastic at it, or that
+more than a hundred thousand games are played on one single course at
+Jackson Park alone in the course of a year? Though for the best part of
+the winter there is snow on the ground and play is impossible 105,000
+games were played on the long course at Jackson Park during 1912 up to
+the beginning of October, and the news just reaches me that on one day
+at the very beginning of this season of 1914 nearly 900 tickets were
+given out! On a fine morning in the summer there will often be a little
+crowd of players waiting at the first tee for their turn to start at the
+dawn of day, and as many as two hundred have been counted there at seven
+o'clock in the morning. Having finished their game on ordinary mornings
+these people go off to their work, and they "hustle" all the more for
+the shots that they have played and hope to play again before the
+falling of the night. It is the same in the Franklin Park at Boston, in
+Van Cortlandt Park in New York, and everywhere. In this matter these
+Americans have sense. If public golf in England is ever to be a good and
+useful thing we must do as the Americans do, and if we do not the people
+will be the poorer, and we shall be sorry. Corporations must provide
+free golf, and they must be satisfied with the good done to the people,
+and not take the narrow view that the balance-sheet must show a direct
+profit apart from the indirect one that is certain. They must also put
+their courses in central and convenient places where people will be
+attracted to them, and which will not take the greater part of the time
+available to reach them. The game must be played in central parks which
+will then become more useful than they have ever been so far, and for
+the first time will be a real joy to the people who pay for them. I may
+be an enthusiast in golf, but I have gone deeply into this matter and
+studied it in its every bearing, and I know that I am right.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the Americans are gaining in another matter--they are bringing their
+young boys into the game. I have been to preparatory schools where they
+have their own little courses and their school championships. The boys
+like it, the masters encourage it, and the grown-up players admire the
+youngsters' enthusiasm. This is the way that "prodigies" are produced.
+In England we do not encourage the boys to play golf. The head-masters
+of schools say that it is a selfish game and that it is bad for them. I
+wonder how much these principals have thought of the moral qualities
+that must exist in the good golfer who knows how to play a losing match
+and perhaps save it, and how long in real argument before an impartial
+tribunal the contention would hold that it would be better for the young
+boy to stand for hours in the deep field at cricket on a hot summer's
+day than for him to learn to play golf and learn to keep a tight hold of
+himself when the whole scheme of things might seem to be breaking up.
+Cricket and football are great games, and they are splendid things for
+boys, but that golf is inferior to them in what it does for character I
+deny, and if the comparison is pressed the golfers with me can put
+forward an invincible case. Anyhow the fact is there that young America
+is getting golf and young England is not, and that will make a
+difference some time some way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+CANADIAN COURSES, AND A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AT TORONTO, WITH MATTERS
+PERTAINING TO MAKING A NEW BEGINNING.
+
+
+Towards the end of an afternoon in September, rounds being done, I stood
+with Mr. George Lyon (who is a kind of John Ball of the Dominion of
+Canada, having won the championship of his country seven times) on the
+heights where stands the club-house of the Lambton Golf and Country Club
+in Ontario, and we looked across the valley along which the course is
+traced to the woods on the opposite side where there were some fiery
+crimson spots to be seen as if burning amid the mass of foliage that was
+olive or tinting down to brown. They were the maple leaves of Canada,
+the emblem of the new land, of which it is prophesied that it shall be
+the greatest country of the earth. In early days the Canadians dabbled
+with the lacrosse which the Indians played, and some of the invaders,
+too, brought their cricket with them and taught it to others whom they
+found there. Then the people who are near to the borders of the United
+States, and are somewhat impressed with the American ways of doing
+things, have been cultivating an interest in baseball for its
+spectacular properties. Rounders revised is well enough for those who
+are within shouting distance of Buffalo and for places like Toronto, but
+I could never believe that such a game or pastime, whatever its
+merits--and I know that it has many--could suit such a very serious,
+contemplative, cold, and earnest people as the Canadians are. I regard
+the nature of these people, as I have had the opportunity of considering
+it, as more serious and intense than that of any other, and I know only
+one recreation beyond those that are the simplest and most essential, as
+of roaming in the untamed country, fishing, shooting, and hunting, that
+is agreeable to such a nature. They also know it; they have declared for
+a national game.
+
+There is this to be said at the beginning for Canadian golf and its
+courses, that the general atmosphere of the game in this great country,
+rough and often bare and primitive as still it is, seems to be much
+nearer the atmosphere of golf in Britain than that of any other country
+different from us. One misses the sea-coast links, courses are long
+distances apart, fine players are comparatively few, for the men of
+Canada are still so busy and so earnest that they have not even time to
+play, but yet there is a fine chain of the game all the way from St.
+John's to Vancouver. There is more of the peculiarity of British
+sporting instinct in the Canadian than in any other person out of the
+British Isles; he likes what we like, and he likes it in the same way
+and for the same reasons. Except that the coldness, like that of the
+Scot, is sometimes too much exhibited in him, and that even on suitable
+occasions he is reluctant to demonstrate his enthusiasms, so serious he
+is, so deep he looks, I have found him to be a splendid opponent with an
+agreeable persistency, and a most desirable partner in a foursome. Here
+in Canada there are trestle tee-boxes, a few--but only a few--of the
+club-houses are built and equipped in the manner of the Americans,
+betokening an existing prosperity and a provision for that greater one
+which is felt to be as sure as the fruit and the corn of the following
+season; but otherwise golf seems much like what it is at home, and
+especially do we feel like that when we reach the old places where the
+game first took root out there. There is a Canadian Golf Association to
+rule the affairs of the game in the country with a certain subservience
+to home and St. Andrews as the Dominion holds to Westminster, and such a
+ruling authority is necessary in a new and wide country like this where
+so much pioneering is being done, just as it is necessary in the United
+States and in Australia. The chief function of such an authority is to
+keep the game together, hold it compact and maintain it in even
+uniformity with the game elsewhere. There is no blame to the Canadians
+because they have not associated themselves with the subtle and
+insoluble mysteries of the British handicapping system, but have
+followed the American lead in this matter and put their best champions
+at scratch. Otherwise they are full British still, and even if they have
+their doubts upon the wisdom of the edict of St. Andrews which banned
+centre-shafted clubs and the Schenectady putter of American origin, they
+have remained loyal to the law without dissenting as the Americans did.
+So in Canada you may not use the Schenectady. You may putt with it on
+one side of the Niagara Falls but not on the other side.
+
+It is fortunate that a ball cannot be played across the Falls, or over
+those whirling Rapids, or some puzzling international complications
+might arise. The adventures are called to mind of two great scientists,
+the late Professor John Milne, who made such a fine study of earthquakes
+and could feel them in the Isle of Wight when they were taking place in
+Asia, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the eminent Cambridge pathologist,
+when they went to the meeting of the British Association for the
+Advancement of Science when it was held in South Africa. They travelled
+to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, and there they contemplated
+a mighty carry of a hundred and sixty yards over roaring, foaming water.
+The keen golfer is always prepared, for the emergencies of the game are
+constant and attractive, and Mr. Milne produced driver and ball, and,
+with a fine nerve and eyes that were controlled most marvellously,
+delivered a golf ball from one side to the other for the first time
+since the world began. The pathologist admired the achievement and
+emulated it. He also carried the Falls of the Zambezi. It were better
+that these greedy men had left it at that and been well satisfied.
+However, they came to think they might go on with this majestic carry
+continually, and generous Fortune chided them. Crocodiles took the balls
+that they drove into the Zambezi.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us take a look at Lambton. From my room in Toronto I rang up Lyon,
+whom I had met several times in England, and asked him to guess the name
+of the caller; he gave the name without hesitation, though he had no
+more reason to know that I was in Canada than in Tasmania. So quite in a
+matter-of-fact way we met on the following day in a Grand Trunk car
+starting from the Union station, and inquired of each other as to the
+ball that each was using. The journey from Toronto is one of only a few
+minutes, and soon after the stopping of the train the feet may tread on
+some of the nicest golfing turf that is to be found out of England, and
+the reason is palpable, for here are the big bunkers of the proper kind
+made of real yellow sand, which is natural to the place. When they need
+new sand bunkers at Lambton they cut them open and there they are. So
+sandy is the place that sometimes they have a difficulty in making the
+grass grow properly, and one result of these favourable natural
+conditions is that the course is better bunkered than most others on the
+American continent. Tee shots and approaches must be played well, and at
+the very first green the hint is given that the short game must be well
+done. The fourth hole is one of the jewels of Canadian golf. The teeing
+ground is on a height, and below it is a series of descending plateaux
+like giants' steps until the level is reached. When he has made a very
+passable drive the player is called upon with a very proper second to
+carry the Black Creek which guards the green and is coiled like a snake
+about it. The shot must have fair length and it must be very straight as
+well. Normally the hole is 365 yards long, so that in mere distance it
+is not a terrible thing, but when medals are being played for its length
+is stretched out to the four hundred yards. At the sixth the stream
+which they call Humber comes into the reckoning. It is a nice two-shot
+hole, and the seventh is an excellent short one with the inky creek here
+again. With the stump of a tree protruding from the water, large leafy
+growths upon the surface, a general sleepiness and the green in a
+sequestered corner beneath a shading hill, this is quite one of the most
+attractive of water holes. It is a strong hole, too, with fear about it,
+for the carry is one of 165 yards, and I was told that when Miss Rhona
+Adair, now Mrs. Cuthell, several times lady champion, was in these parts
+some years ago she twice did the carry and a third time her ball skimmed
+the water and reached the green after all. This was good work for a
+lady, especially as I rather fancy she must have been using the gutty
+ball at that time.
+
+The greens at Lambton are generally excellent, and they have adopted a
+means for keeping them in good order which, though it has been tried in
+other parts of America, has not to my knowledge been employed elsewhere.
+I have heard objections raised against it, but the results at Lambton
+are uncommonly good. Nearly all the greens here are kept properly
+moistened by a process of sub-irrigation, and are never watered on the
+surface. Below the green there is a deep bed of cinders, and over this
+and about eighteen inches from the grass there is a network of water
+pipes made of a hard porous clay, "weeping clay" they call it, the
+entire under-surface of the greens being covered with them. At the
+corner of each green there is a feed pipe connecting with this network,
+and once a day the water supply is laid on to it and all the pipes under
+the green are loaded. The heat of the sun then slowly draws the water
+through the porous pipes and up to the surface, and the results of the
+process are uniformly good. Lambton is a fine institution altogether.
+There is a short ladies' course as well as the other, a fine toboggan
+chute down the slope in front of the club-house, and the latter is in
+all respects an admirable place, well fitted with baths, bedrooms, and
+public apartments that are elegant and comfortable. This place has
+something to do with Toronto life of to-day. There are seven hundred
+members, and now it costs a new one the equivalent of six hundred
+dollars in his first year. He has to get a hundred-dollar share in the
+club to begin with, and these are at such a premium that he has to pay
+five hundred dollars for one. On one of the walls of the club-house is a
+life-size portrait of the champion of the country in a characteristic
+attitude with his brassey under his arm.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of Toronto is very interesting. The club, which takes the name
+of the city and is one of the oldest in the country, was started in
+1876, and completely reorganised some eighteen years later. The pretty
+little course that it had until lately was on the outskirts of the city,
+with an old and quaint farm-house, which had from time to time been
+enlarged, for a club-house. As to the course, it was quite nice. It was
+very undulating, ravines, gullies, and belts of trees being prominent
+everywhere. The turf was good, and some of the holes were excellent. In
+the club-house there were fine trophies and some old prints, and a plan
+of the old course at St. Andrews, with a photograph of old Tom Morris
+attached to it, signed "From Tom Morris, to the members of the Toronto
+Golf Club, 1896." Everything belonging to this old course was sweetly
+mellow, and one's visit there made a pleasant experience. But it met a
+fate which has been common enough near London but rare elsewhere. The
+speed of Toronto's expansion brought it about, and, owing to the
+encroachments of the builders, the club had to move. I was there at the
+parting, and it was a sad one. Its members, however, being a very
+wealthy and enthusiastic body of gentlemen, determined to make for
+themselves a new home which should be as good as anything that could be
+done, and their ambition was fulfilled. Etobicoke! It is one of the
+wonders of the west, and I was the first wandering British player to set
+his foot upon it.
+
+Etobicoke is several miles out from Toronto, and here with the money
+that the club obtained from the sale of the old course they bought 270
+acres of what was virgin land, being for the most part covered with
+trees at the time. This they had cleared, ploughed, and properly
+prepared, and Mr. Harry Colt came out from England to lay out the
+course. His finished work, as I have seen it, must rank as one of his
+masterpieces. As on so many of the Colt courses there is something of a
+Sunningdale look about the holes, and nearly all are extremely good. A
+very fine short one is the fourth and one with which the architect
+himself was much in love when he had completed the design from the
+natural materials that were at his hand; and the tenth is a wonder of
+its kind, the hindmost tee being on a hilltop from which a glorious view
+of the course is to be had, with Lake Ontario beyond it, while some way
+lower down the slope are second and third tees, making the distance
+shorter. The soil is sandy, the turf is good, and the course must be
+considered to rank as first class absolutely. Mr. W. A. Langton, who
+went over it with me, said he believed they had come into possession of
+what would be the finest golf course in America when it has matured, and
+his judgment may be right.
+
+Many parts of the world were laid under tribute for the making of this
+course at Etobicoke where the club is still called by the good old
+simple name, the Toronto Golf Club. It was designed, as I have said, by
+an English architect, and in order to give a grass to the course that
+would stand the rigours of the climate better than the ordinary grasses
+with which courses in North America are generally sown, seeds were
+obtained from Finland. Then nearly all the rough work of construction
+was done by Bulgarians and Roumanians, these immigrants being splendid
+for work of this kind. They were paid at the rate of about seven
+shillings a day, and they lived in huts which they made on the ground
+and saved the greater part of the money that they earned. A little over
+£16,000 or 80,000 dollars were paid for the land, and about the same
+amount was spent on its preparation and completion as a course; while
+£20,000 or 100,000 dollars were spent on the building and equipment of a
+splendid club-house, embracing the utmost comfort and convenience, with
+about fifty bedrooms. This is a members' club, and the club has all the
+members and money that it needs, and it is not a speculative enterprise
+in any way whatever. But British golfers must surely pause with wonder
+when they hear of a place like Toronto spending £50,000 on a new golf
+course! Such is the enthusiasm of the Canadian for the game, that while
+this enterprise was afoot a six-holes course was being constructed
+alongside it, at a cost of £10,000, for a gentleman who intended to
+build a house near by to which he might ask his friends.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One pleasant day when staying at Montreal I went out to Dixie, a few
+stations along the Grand Trunk line, where there is the course of the
+Royal Montreal Club, to be regarded now as the oldest properly
+established club in the Dominion. This one alone has that title of Royal
+which Queen Victoria gave it permission to use in 1884. In its early
+days the course was in Mount Royal Park, overlooking Montreal. Out here
+at Dixie a certain flavour of the old spirit and good strong sporting
+simplicity of the game are tasted. The course is somewhat flat and
+parky, and big banks of bunkers stretch across the fairway, making the
+general style of the architecture very much of the Victorian, but the
+undulations and unevennesses of the banks and hollows are redeeming
+features. Some of the holes are good and the putting greens are
+excellent, but generally the course suffers from the absence of testing
+second shots. There is a magnificent view up the river from the seventh
+tee. A house agent might honestly declare that the club-house is
+commodious and comfortable. It was made before it was the fashion to
+erect palaces on golf courses, and sheet-iron bulks largely in its
+composition; yet it is cosy enough inside, and contains many relics of
+peculiar interest. In a glass case there are some ancient clubs with
+which members played in the early days, and a leather belt for which
+they competed, the names of the winners being written on the inside.
+
+There are many other courses in Montreal and round about it. There is
+the Beaconsfield Club with its place situated some way up the river,
+reached by the G. T. R. at Point Claire. The part of Fletcher's Fields
+in Mount Royal Park, on which the Royal Montreal Club first played, is
+now in the occupation of the Metropolitan Club, and is only about five
+minutes' ride by car from the centre of the city. On the eastern slope
+of Mount Royal is the course of the Outremont Club, which, at the time
+of my visit, was about to go forward to a new and great enterprise;
+while on a plateau at the western end of Mount Royal are the nine holes
+of the West Mount Club, most charmingly situated, with fine views of the
+city and the river.
+
+At Ottawa there is a course which ranks high among the very best on the
+continent. It is different in character from that at Dixie, for here
+there are ravines and gullies, and the land is strongly undulating
+everywhere. The bunkers and other hazards are natural, the putting
+greens are smooth, and the subsoil is of sandy loam. It is on the other
+side of the Ottawa River, beyond Hull, and owing to its being exposed to
+a broad reach of the stream it is seldom that there is not much wind
+blowing across it. And there are courses all the way from east to west
+of this wonderful, blossoming Canada. We find that wherever we wander in
+the Dominion we are not much distant from a golf club. Even when on a
+day I sailed across Lake Ontario and made the Gorge Valley trip to the
+Niagara Falls there was golf near by had it been wanted. Winnipeg,
+Edmonton, Calgary, round and about the Rockies, and up them
+too--everywhere the game is played. I was told that when the course at
+St. John, New Brunswick, was started in 1897, Mr. H. H. Hansard, who
+made the opening stroke, holed from the tee in one. Holes in one have
+been done in many curious circumstances, but surely this is one of the
+most interesting of all. Compare the excellent beginning of St. John
+with what happened the other day when a new course was being started
+here at home. I am sorry to say that the municipal dignitary upon whom
+the chief responsibility was cast missed the ball the first time, and
+also the second, but contrived to move it from the tee at the third
+attempt.
+
+A note has just reached me from a friend in the Dominion saying that out
+on the Gulf of Georgia, on the coast of Vancouver, they are reaching
+forward to a golf ideal. They have planned and started there a new town,
+which they have called Qualicum, of which the golf course is the central
+feature. They have laid out a fine one along the shore, one that has
+splendid natural qualities, and they are doing their best to make it
+understood that here is a golf city if ever there was one, for they have
+christened the streets and roads by such names as St. Andrews Road,
+Berwick Road, Portrush Road, Rye Road, Sandwich Road, and Dollymount
+Road; and there are others with the names of Hoylake, Sunningdale, and
+all the rest of our British best.
+
+Friends whom I consulted in the matter declared there was no golf in
+Quebec, little but French people, French talk, and French games of two
+generations back, the Canadian French not yet having adopted the sport
+to which so many of the Parisians have attached themselves with great
+earnestness. I was barely satisfied with such denials, and when, after
+another night on the C. P. R., I found myself on a glorious Sunday
+morning on those famous heights of Quebec, whence the view is one of the
+most magnificent in the world, I set about investigating the matter all
+alone. I can hardly say why, but somehow I strongly suspected the Plains
+of Abraham, the big, bare piece of land on the heights overlooking the
+St. Lawrence, on which Wolfe and Montcalm, more than a century and a
+half ago, fought that great fight, and died. I have always found it as a
+most remarkable thing that where great battles have been waged, and big
+encampments made, golf courses in a great number of cases have been laid
+out there later. Sure enough, then, the game was here on the Plains of
+Abraham. I had just been looking upon the pillar with the simple
+inscription, "Here died Wolfe victorious," and had walked for the length
+of two or three good drives towards the citadel end of the plain,
+called, I think, the Cove Fields, when putting greens came to view, with
+sticks not two feet long and bits of red rag attached to them in the
+holes. The greens and the teeing grounds were rough as could be, and
+there were no proper bunkers on the course, but plenty of trouble for
+all that, the ground being coarse and stony. The public could roam about
+the place just as it pleased, and did so, and there did not seem to be
+anything to prevent any one from playing the game on this course. It
+looked just like public golf on common land, and though it is a far cry
+from Blackheath to Quebec, there is something in the nature and
+character of this golfing ground at the historic Canadian port to remind
+one of England's oldest and crudest course. I discovered afterwards that
+the Quebec Golf Club, a club without a club-house, had acquired the
+rights to play on it; that this club is one of comparatively early
+origin; that its members are clearly primitive in their tastes, but
+sincere and earnest; and I am led to the belief that the course has
+another point of similarity with Blackheath, being the oldest now in
+existence on the American continent. It is said that a daughter of old
+Tom Morris, who married a Mr. Hunter and went to America, was largely
+responsible for the beginning of golf at Quebec. Men and boys were
+playing on it on this beautiful Sunday morning when the bells in
+countless steeples of Quebec and at St. Levis on the other side of the
+St. Lawrence were ringing their music through the stillest air. I sat
+down on the edge of the course overlooking the precipitous depths to the
+river, far down below, where the smoke from a warship at anchor came
+lazily from the funnels, and looked for long enough to gain an undying
+impression of one of the grandest panoramas in the world, seen at its
+most peaceful and its best. Nature had a grand inspiration when she made
+Quebec as now we find her.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This marvellous country is a rare place for making the new beginning.
+Everything is so raw, so suggestive, so encouraging to earnest failures
+who would, like Omar, if they could, conspire with fate, shatter the
+existing scheme of things and "remould it nearer to the heart's desire."
+Canada is indeed a fine place for hope for the future. I met several men
+in the country who told me, that on leaving England and Scotland, they
+had perforce, with all the hard work before them, to give up the game
+for a long period; while another reason was, that those having been much
+earlier days, there were fewer courses there. So years after, when the
+fortunes had been made, they came back to golf again, and they were
+making another new beginning, and felt a certain gladness as they
+remembered some of the faults and the torments of the old game with all
+its vast imperfections. In everything they would start over again as if
+it were all quite new, and they knew nothing about it. Generally they
+have made successes of their second golfing lives on earth in this way,
+but yet they have found that they needed to act warily and be on their
+guard always against old enemies, for golf poisons are marvellously
+subtle and enduring things; and it has been found that when once a man
+contracts a habit that is bad it will last for ever, whether he plays
+the game continually or not, and the worse the habit the more incurable
+it is. The best that can be done is the application of a system of
+subjection, by which the disease is kept under, and does not pain or
+hinder. But men who have fallen into bad and hopeless complications with
+their golf, and found that it never could be improved any more, have
+tried to begin it all over again as left handers--the most drastic
+change--and even that has failed. They have then realised that the only
+way to die happy is to give up the game for a matter of half a
+generation and start again, with the determination to keep the head
+still, to begin the back-swing with the wrists, and not to start
+pivoting on the left toe as soon as the driving is begun, as if it were
+necessary to do this thing, as so many of the teachers have suggested,
+to the ruin of their pupils, for the unsteadiness it has produced. One
+learns to do this pivoting after an hour's practice at the game, and can
+pivot well when nothing else can be done at golf. But it takes years and
+years sometimes to get rid of such a stupid custom. The left heel must
+rise, but let it rise as little as may be, and of its own accord. Its
+rising should be always a result of something, and not a cause of
+something else.
+
+What is needed at a beginning, or a fresh start in any golfing life, is
+a thorough grasp of essential principles. Considering the subject the
+whole way through, we may feel that there are really only two essential
+and compulsory principles applicable to all cases, instead of two
+hundred or more as the bewildered player is often led to imagine. These
+two are, first, that the eye must be kept upon the ball until it has
+left the club; and, second, that in addition to the still head there
+must be one fixed and practically motionless centre in the human system
+while the stroke is being made. It is neglect, generally accidental, of
+one or both of these principles that causes most of the bad shots that
+are made. Let us remember that. Never, or hardly ever, should we neglect
+these principles, and if we do not our handicap is almost sure to come
+down, not only because so many bad shots will be avoided, but because
+the exactness, certainty, and quality of all the strokes will be
+steadily improved as they cannot be when hampered by neglect of the
+principles. The eye makes the connection between the captain in the
+brain and the engineers of the physical system. It is the speaking-tube
+or the telegraph apparatus. There can be no union without it. But, as we
+all know, it is not such an easy thing to keep the eye on the ball as it
+ought to be kept on it, and the more anxious the player the more liable
+is he to err in this matter. As to the fixed centre--somewhere in the
+interior of the waist--we should reflect that the golfing swings, when
+carried out properly, consist of the action and movements of thousands
+of different muscles, operating in different ways, different directions,
+and at different times. Perfect harmony and correlation among them all
+is necessary if the general result is to be smooth and exact. Make no
+mistake about it, the golfing swing, with all its complications and the
+acute precision that is necessary for its good and proper effect, is one
+of the most wonderful things of which the physical system is capable.
+When I reflect upon it I think it is marvellous that the human man can
+make it as he does. To obtain harmony among all these thousands of
+movements there must be one centre from which they are all regulated. If
+we think it out we see that this is so, and then we appreciate the
+importance of what is too baldly described as keeping the body still, as
+we have perhaps never done before. As a point of truth, the body as a
+whole cannot be kept still, but there must be one centre that must be
+fixed from the moment that the club addresses the ball until the latter
+has left its place after impact. The captain in the brain, the eye, and
+the fixed head and centre are the great trinity who manage the whole
+concern. Only one man who has neglected this law has ever raised himself
+to eminence in golf, and that man is Edward Ray, who has done it by mere
+physical strength. When the fixed centre is held secure a great host of
+evils which constantly cause failure are avoided--swaying of the body,
+collapse of the legs, improper foot work, dropping of the right
+shoulder, falling forward, and more of such a kind of fatal faults.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the biggest dictionary that I can find neither the word "futurism"
+nor "cubist" is given a place, and yet these words, meaning certain
+movements, are probably on the tongues of art folks with much frequency
+in these times. In the same way the word "subconsciousism" and
+"subconsciousist" are not in this or any other dictionary; but they may
+yet be coined and made legitimate to fill certain vacancies, and they
+represent definite golfing systems. The principle of subconsciousism in
+essence, then, is that of showing a visionary picture to the mind for a
+moment, banishing it, and, in a certain measure, forgetting all about
+it, and then going on with the game as if the incident had been closed.
+But the mind retains its record more or less vaguely always; and the
+picture thrown on the mental screen makes an impression there which
+stays; and that impression is an influence upon the succeeding physical
+actions. Subconsciously the player does something--it may be little or
+much--to imitate the movements in the mental picture that he saw. He
+cannot avoid it; the influence upon him cannot be wholly resisted. If,
+as it were, he saturates his mind with impressions of this kind, of the
+strokes he would like to play, of the way he would like to play them, he
+will gradually and almost surely begin to play them just like that. It
+has been recognised for ages that the best golf is that which is played
+entirely subconsciously, that is to say without conscious effort, and
+without thinking in detail of the stroke that has to be played. When a
+man is "on his game" he has none of this thinking to do, and does none.
+There seems to be only one way of playing the shot, and that way is
+unavoidable to him and quite natural. He does not need to shuffle about
+to find his proper stance, and he is not anxious about any part of his
+swing. The moment a clear consciousness of detailed action asserts
+itself, and the man does think about the movements of his swing, and
+does shuffle about for his stance, he goes off his game, and the
+stronger the consciousness the more he goes off. These points are
+disputed by nobody. A little while since a new writer on the game
+declared that the golfer at the beginning of his swing thought of the
+advice of one professional; half way up he thought of the suggestion of
+another; at the top he remembered the recommendation of a third man; and
+coming down, the hint of a fourth flung itself into a mind that must
+have been working with amazing rapidity in the most difficult
+circumstances. What the result of such strokes is was not suggested;
+but if any number of golfers carried out their scheme of swinging in
+this way we should know exactly why it is that so much bad golf is
+played. As a matter of truth nobody has ever been able to mix up his
+plans in such a manner; but the statement suggests the extreme of
+consciousness, and fear with it also. With subconsciousness there is no
+fear, no hesitation, and no doubt.
+
+Now we can show how our subconsciousism, when unaided and not encouraged
+(there is nearly but not quite a contradiction in terms here), has had
+its effect upon the player hitherto. If a man watches the play of any
+golfer much better than himself, say a first-class professional, very
+closely for some time he takes a little of that man's style into his own
+system without knowing it, and, it may be, without making any conscious
+effort to imitate it. He is much more likely to succeed in this way than
+by making any deliberate attempt to copy. Again, you will often find
+players telling you, that after a week of watching a championship
+meeting, and without having paid attention to any player in particular,
+certainly without attempting to imitate any one, they find on resuming
+their own game that a new influence is upon it; that in particular they
+address the ball in a more businesslike way, with more confidence; that
+their swing is less flabby, and that they play their iron shots with
+much greater sense of wrist, and with more firmness. This has been
+noticed over and over again, and it is a most interesting result of the
+influence of impressions involuntarily recorded on the mind. Consider
+another way in which the impression acts. A player may be removed from
+the game through illness or some other reason for a time, and during
+that period he works some of the problems of golf out in his mind, and
+constantly pictures a new and particular way of playing a stroke that
+has troubled him. When he returns to the links he plays the stroke like
+that without any effort to do so, or perhaps without even thinking of
+it. Another remarkable example of subconsciousism was afforded to me
+recently by a good golfer, who said that to develop a certain stroke
+which he had found beyond his best efforts--conscious efforts--he had
+three enlarged photographs made of that stroke as executed properly by a
+first-class man, one showing the beginning, the other the top of the
+swing, and the third the finish. He had these pictures placed alongside
+each other on one of the walls of his room, and there they were all the
+time, not to be avoided. He made no effort to study them, but his mind
+simply absorbed them, and then subconsciously he found the stroke coming
+to him until in the end he played it just like that. In these matters
+subconsciousism is shown to be at work without being understood or at
+all suspected.
+
+Having this valuable agency at command the next thing is to apply it,
+and make it of more thorough practical effect without permitting it to
+change to interfering and dangerous consciousness. In the cases that
+have already been cited certain methods are plainly suggested. Here is
+another which has, as I know, proved amazingly effective at times. The
+player, we may say, is not driving as well as he should, or in the way
+he would like to do. At the moment of taking his place on the
+teeing-ground he runs through his mind, as it were, a cinematographic
+picture of his favourite model player doing the drive. He sees, in
+imagination, the man taking his stance, swinging the club back, down on
+to the ball again, and finishing. He just sees it once, and bothers
+about it no more. Then he sets about his own drive without any further
+reference to the mental picture that his mind has absorbed. The mind
+does the rest. The drive may not be made in the ideal way that was
+imagined. It may be done in the old way. It may even be foozled. But
+there has been an influence at work, and if that influence is always
+employed in the same way the good result will come in time, always
+provided--and this is important--that the model is one that is suitable
+to the player, and can be copied by him. It would be useless for a man
+who is far past forty, very fat and very short, with no athletic quality
+in him at all, to take Harry Vardon and his graceful lithesome swing for
+his mental cinema show.
+
+Another way in which practical subconsciousism may be made exceedingly
+valuable is by imagining a place to which the ball has to be delivered
+without looking at it when it ought not to be looked at, as when a very
+short running or pitching approach has to be made. The very best of men
+often find it impossible to keep the eye fixed on the ball until the
+stroke is done. A little while since there was the case of one of the
+finest amateur golfers of the time flopping his ball into the bunker
+guarding the green of the first hole at Sandwich from the bank thereof,
+when, if he had played an easy shot and kept his eye at rest, he would
+almost certainly have avoided this trouble, and then won the St.
+George's Cup for which he was playing. I remember an exactly similar
+case in the final of the Amateur Championship of 1908, at Sandwich, when
+Mr. Lassen, who did win, knocked his ball into the big bunker in front
+of the old tenth green there from the top of the cliff overlooking it.
+What is needed in such cases, or in like cases when presented to
+inferior players, is something to keep the mind's eye contented, and it
+has been found to serve if a picture of the hole is flashed into the
+mind just before the stroke is made. This is what is certainly done,
+though unintentionally, when putting. The man does keep his eye on the
+ball when making his stroke this time; but yet it is most desirable that
+his mind should retain a very clear and exact impression of the place
+where the hole is, the distance of it, and the features of the green in
+between. In other games that may be compared with golf, the player has
+his eye on the object at the moment of striking; in billiards the very
+last glance is given at the object ball, and the eye is on it at the
+moment the stroke is made. That is because the player is sure of his way
+of striking, as in putting he is not. If you try a method of putting
+which was once attempted by some players, but was severely and properly
+discountenanced by the authorities, of lying down on the green and
+putting with the end of the club, billiard fashion, you will find that
+then the eye is on the hole when the stroke is made. In golf, the
+player's eye being wanted for the ball, a last look is given at the
+hole, and the picture of it is kept on the mind when the stroke is being
+made, and it influences the application of strength more than the player
+often realises.
+
+This application of strength is always done subconsciously, and here
+again there is a part of professional teaching which does not recognise
+the fact when it ought to do. The teachers tell us that to strike the
+ball a certain distance with an iron, the club chosen should be swung
+back to a certain point, that to get twenty yards more it should be
+swung upwards so many more inches or degrees, for a farther distance so
+much more swing should be made, and so on, throwing the onus of swinging
+the proper distance on to the conscious effort of the player. By a
+moment's thought it will be realised that players do not consciously
+regulate the lengths of their swings in this way, that they could not do
+so, and that any deliberate stopping of their swing at a certain
+carefully calculated point would be ruinous to the stroke in hand. What
+is done is, that an estimate of the distance to which the ball has to
+travel is made; this is taken into the mind, and the mind, having much
+experience, influences the swing so that it is quite subconsciously made
+of the proper length, or at all events the length that the mind
+suggested. In this way the swing is certainly made short for short
+shots, and longer as the greater distance is needed; but it is wrong to
+suggest that the matter is carefully and consciously arranged by the
+player. The truth is that not one player in a thousand could tell you,
+when about to make a swing with an iron club, exactly how far he intends
+to swing, or having made the shot successfully, how far he did swing.
+His mind subconsciously arranged the whole affair.
+
+An interesting case was quoted to me some time since of the success a
+man achieved in lofting over stymies, and the reason why. This person
+never seemed to miss. He related that he found previously that his
+failures were due to looking at the other ball too much when in the act
+of making the stroke. He then found that he succeeded frequently when he
+did not look at either that ball or his own but at the hole itself.
+Doing this enabled him to carry his club through, failure to do which is
+the chief cause of missing these shots. But he did not altogether
+believe in this system, which seemed dangerous, and he compromised by
+keeping his eye fixed on his own ball, but at the same time imagining
+the hole and seeing mentally his ball dropping into it. Since then his
+success has been wonderful. In much the same way and by the same
+principle it will be found that the best way in the world to encourage a
+good follow-through, and to stop jerky hitting with wooden clubs, is to
+look at the ball properly and yet imagine it a couple of inches farther
+on.
+
+The principles of this subconsciousism suggest one earnest
+recommendation to the player who is bent on making a change in a faulty
+or ineffectual style, and it is that such change is better brought about
+gradually and in the way of a coaxing influence rather than by a quick
+drastic alteration. Thus the player whose swing is too upright and who
+wants to obtain a flatter one, or he who desires to change from a long
+swing to a short one, or the other way about; or again he who would
+bring the ball more over to the right foot (one of the most difficult of
+all changes to make for a player accustomed to have it nearly opposite
+the left toe, but a desirable one in these days when the rubber-cored
+ball shows no disinclination to rise as the gutty did); all these
+players would do better to make their changes slowly and gradually and
+by way of subconscious influence. If the ball is moved three inches to
+the right all at once the entire swing is upset and the whole driving
+arrangement is likely to go to pieces. But when done in the other way
+the gradual change is not noticed, and when the ball gets to the desired
+position it would be as difficult to play it from the old one, as the
+new one would have been, if assumed suddenly. It is sometimes said of
+golf that the most exasperating part of the whole thing is, that the
+more you try to succeed in it the more you fail. There is more truth in
+that sad reflection than may have been fancied, and a fine moral in it
+too. To "try" in this case means to make conscious effort.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, in this teaching about subconsciousism we are merely going
+back again to Nature, to simplicity, and to an original idea that there
+is undeveloped golf in all of us just because all the movements of the
+game are so natural, and natural because they are so true and
+rhythmical. In everything Nature encourages always the best in a man,
+and she likes most the graceful movement, the perfect poise, the equal
+balance. The easier, the more natural, and the more rhythmical our
+movements are in golf the more successful will be the efforts always.
+The undeveloped golf is always in the system, and with fair
+encouragement or a hint that is sufficiently obvious the instinct will
+surely lead a young subject to its cultivation on good lines. Man when
+old becomes awkward and contrary, and so the aggravations of the game
+arise.
+
+I have always maintained that if we placed a young boy who had never
+seen or heard of golf on a desert island and left him there with means
+for his subsistence for a few years, together with a set of golf clubs
+and a few boxes of balls, the people who might be wrecked on those
+lonely shores thereafter would find him playing a good scratch game and
+in want of nothing but a caddie, for which part the arriving boatswain
+might be indicated. But these wrecked miserables, with their shiverings
+and their grumblings, would jar unpleasantly upon the happy peace of
+this purely natural golfing youth, in all the ecstasy of the discovery
+of his own world. Probably he would wish the others--all except the
+boatswain--to leave him there when a white sail of relief was seen upon
+the horizon. A pretty speculation arises instantly. Suppose at the same
+time we had placed upon another desert island four thousand miles away
+another raw child, innocent of the simplest, vaguest thought of what
+golf is or could be, and left him also with clubs and balls and
+directions for obtaining fresh meat and fresh water when the human
+desires in food were felt. He would surely take to the game in the same
+way as the other boy did, practise it and probe into its mysteries with
+just the same enthusiasm, would become a good scratch player also, and
+would probably make use of the same simple expression of condemnation
+when a shipload of people uncivilised to golf were wrecked that way. But
+here is the point: this second scratch desert-island boy would probably
+be just as good as the first scratch desert-island boy, no better and no
+worse, and if they were to play for the Championship of the Most Lonely
+Islands, nothing is more likely than that their excellent match would
+have to go to the thirty-seventh hole or beyond it. They would, being
+good material to begin with, attain approximately equal results so far
+as playing the holes in a certain number of strokes is concerned, and
+each youth's system would be perfect for himself, but between the two
+there would be the very widest differences, and the basic principles
+that were common to the games of both players would be so encrusted with
+masses of individual detail and coloured with temperamental attitude
+that they would be scarcely discernible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+GOLF DE PARIS, AND SOME REMARKABLE EVENTS AT VERSAILLES AND CHANTILLY,
+WITH NEW THEORIES BY HIGH AUTHORITIES.
+
+
+In front of the red brick club-house of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club at
+Hoylake, a citadel which by its tower and clock commemorates the great
+achievements of Hoylake's famous son, John Ball, there was assembled
+late in the afternoon of Friday, the 21st of June 1907 (being the
+forty-seventh year of the Open Championship), a large gathering of
+golfing persons who by their speech and demeanour suggested some of the
+vivid unrealities of a stage crowd near the footlights. They had a
+self-conscious and somewhat artificial bearing towards each other. They
+muttered and beckoned. They gave the impression of being a little uneasy
+and nervous. Friends among them who essayed to conduct a conversation
+found themselves at a loss for appropriate comments upon what had
+happened and made remarks which had no clear or relevant meaning.
+Professor Paterson, wearing the red rosette, came from the house and
+stood before the little table bearing a silver cup which had been held
+by the line of champions all the way from the time of Morris, the
+younger, and a familiar friendly figure in chequered garments moved
+about in a manner of official preparation. What had happened had indeed
+been dramatic; but the drama had had the living circumstance of full
+reality. We could not discuss constructions and readings, and suggest
+other endings. Here was the one gross fact, that Arnaud Massy, a Basque,
+the professional attached to the leading club of Paris, a strong bonily
+built man with no British blood in his being, had just made himself the
+possessor for the year of that historic championship cup, which hitherto
+had never been taken out of the United Kingdom. This was something which
+the gathering did with difficulty absorb into their golfing minds. They
+were good sportsmen, and they cheered because they knew that this Massy
+was a fine fellow and a good champion; but it was all a little
+dream-like, and there was a spell that needed to be broken.
+
+Massy, the victor, with a big smiling face came forward. The gold medal
+was delivered to him. There was a little silence, a few muttered
+incoherent words, and then this splendid Massy threw up his hands into
+the air and shouted out with a full blast from his lusty lungs, "Vive
+l'entente cordiale!" The tensity was broken; the people cheered easily,
+naturally, and whole heartedly; they accepted Massy as the true and
+proper successor to James Braid in the Open Championship, and wished him
+thoroughly well--even though he were a Frenchman or a Basque. He had
+done the right thing.
+
+This foreign player (never forgetting that he was trained to the game at
+Biarritz, which in golf is mostly British, though it lies under the laws
+of France) was brought to England and Scotland by Sir Everard Hambro,
+and was improved in golf at North Berwick with Ben Sayers assisting him.
+He well deserved to win that championship, and it should not be
+overlooked that, so to say, he has confirmed his victory by making a tie
+for the championship again since then. He is the only man outside the
+great triumvirate who has done so much as twice to reach the top of the
+list in modern times. He was well on his own very good game. There was a
+crispness about his play with his wooden clubs that indicated the man
+who for the time being had full confidence and could hit his hardest.
+And Massy's putting, especially in the case of the most difficult and
+fateful of all putts, those of from five to nine feet--putts for the
+missing of which there is the fullest excuse, for whose holing there is
+enormous gain--had been splendid for a long time before and was most
+excellent then. At those putts of the kind I remark upon I do not think
+that Massy in accuracy or confidence has his equal in the world. He
+strokes the ball into the hole as though it were the simplest thing to
+do; easily and gracefully he putts it in. In other ways he makes a fine
+figure of a golfer. Military training in France has given him a stiffer,
+straighter build than most great golfers have, for this game tends a
+little to a crouching gait and posture. Massy marches from the tee to
+the ball that has gone before with a quick, regular step of the
+right-left-right military way, and when he comes up with the ball he
+does a right wheel round, presents his club, and plays his second with a
+quickness and lack of hesitation in which he is second only to George
+Duncan. Particularly in putting is Massy a man of inspirations and quick
+impulse. And I must not now forget that there is in the world a charming
+little lady who is called Mlle. Hoylake Massy, which is her proper name.
+Providence is disposed often to be kind and generous to the strong and
+those who have well deserved, and that week Mme. Massy gave to the man
+who was even then making himself the champion a sweet little daughter.
+Having won the championship, the next question was one of christenings,
+and, said Massy to his wife, "Voila! Surely she shall be called our
+little Hoylake!" Which she was accordingly, Mme. Massy, rejoicing in her
+husband's success, like the good, happy little woman of Scotland that
+she is, having cordially agreed.
+
+And in France there were rejoicings among the golfers. My friend, M.
+Pierre Deschamps, fine and keen sportsman (and the "father of golf in
+France," as we call him for the grand work he has done in establishing
+the game so well at La Boulie, where he is president of the Société de
+Golf de Paris, and encouraging it with all his heart and energy
+elsewhere in his country), rose and made a remarkable declaration that
+golf was to be the "national game of France." The national game of
+France, our Scottish golf of English development, started, as some still
+will have it, in Holland, played in some sort of way as _jeu de mail_
+even in France, practised in Pekin, called the "national game" also, as
+I have heard it, in America--now it was to be naturalised and made the
+"national game of France!" Ubiquitous golf indeed! M. Deschamps, whose
+words are careful if they are quick, as befits one who is in the
+diplomatic service of his country, sat down and wrote an essay on golf
+in general, and Massy's success in particular, and, addressing the new
+champion as if he were before him, said: "Et maintenant à vous la
+parole, mon cher Massy; continuez votre brillante carrière, jouissez de
+votre belle gloire dont nous sommes tous fiers, comme Golfeurs et comme
+Français; à cette heure, où tant de links s'ouvrent chez nous, pour
+répondre aux besoins d'enthousiastes sportsmen, puissent d'autres
+professionels de notre race suivre votre example, unique encore dans les
+fastes du 'Royal and Ancient Game,' et contribuer à faire de ce sport un
+jeu national dans notre beau pays de France!" That was written. In
+victory you may be magnanimous, and M. Deschamps at this time would
+graciously waive all questions of origins and growths; he must have felt
+that then it mattered little that a kind of golf called _chole_ had been
+played ages back by the people of the north, and that it was possible
+the Scots had copied from them. It was enough that Arnaud Massy was "le
+Champion du monde."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Disregarding all those doubts about the _jeu de mail_ and the game of
+_chole_, and considering only the real thing as we know it, taking its
+time from the stone temple by the Fifeshire sea, it was away back in
+1856 that the game was first played on the soil of France, and that was
+in the south by the Pyrenees at Pau. Yet at that time only the wintering
+British were concerned. Forty years went on before the French themselves
+made a fair beginning with the game. In 1896 the Société de Golf de
+Paris was established, and it has been a splendid success. To-day in
+prestige and influence it stands for the headquarters of the game in the
+country, though since it was begun there have sprung up many clubs of
+great pretensions, with good courses, nice club-houses, distinguished
+memberships, and unlimited francs. Yet La Boulie holds her queenship
+still. Excellent golfing places have been made at Chantilly, Le Pecq,
+Compiègne, Fontainebleau. Out on the north-west coast at such resorts as
+Le Touquet, Dieppe, Deauville and Wimereux by Boulogne the game is
+established. Long years back I played at pretty open Wimereux when there
+was but a nine-holes course there, and not the excellent one of eighteen
+that has now been made. Shall it not be considered as a happy token that
+golf links are commonly found on old battlefields and at places where
+armies have encamped? Sometimes this is just because the soldiers play
+the game when they are abroad; sometimes it is because entrenchments are
+bunkers all prepared; but oftenest it is just coincidence. Whatever it
+be or why, it is the fact that there is golf where armies and battles
+have been in Egypt, in South Africa, in the United States and Canada,
+and at many places. Where there was the fury of flying shells there is
+now only the peaceful hum of the rubber ball. One recalled when first at
+Wimereux that here the great Napoleon had encamped with his grand army,
+the same as was to cross the Channel to defiant isles and make a
+conquest of them. But playing neither the first hole nor the last do we
+need any reminder of what great Bonaparte wished to do, for by us there
+towers aloft the monument that he had erected to that successful
+invasion of Albion that never did take place. Hereabouts is indicated
+the place where the master-general in full satisfaction with the
+progress of things, and in remembrance of great achievements,
+distributed his military favours. And here all along are deep
+grass-covered trenches, and larger, rounder, shallow pits that once
+might have been kitchens or stables. All these that now are bunkers and
+hazards are where Napoleon camped and waited. And on a fine day our
+white-cliffed Albion is in full view. Sometimes there may even be a sigh
+as one reflects that the Corsican little dreamt of what should be done
+with his camping land when a hundred years were gone, that those
+sportsmen of Britishers would be playing their game about there, taking
+their divots and holing their putts, and striving for golden tokens
+given for competition by the mayor and municipality of adjacent
+Boulogne! It was not for no reason that Arnaud Massy called aloud "Vive
+l'entente cordiale!" In the heart of the country there have been more
+golf clubs and courses formed, and they are supported now mostly by the
+French. At Rouen and Rheims the game may now be enjoyed. It is
+spreading. M. Deschamps may yet be soundly justified. And indeed when we
+take our clubs to Paris we feel that he should, and heartily do
+wandering players echo the cry of Massy, who by his victory signalised
+the fact that French golf had grown from babyhood to the strength of
+independence, and was now to be considered as an entity. There is a
+subtle sweetness about a golfing expedition in Paris that there is about
+a little holiday for the game at no other place. One is not here
+suggesting that it is better for golf and other matters to go to Paris
+than elsewhere, only that it is quite different, intensely enjoyable,
+and easily convenient. We breakfast in comfort in London, read the
+newspaper afterwards, go through the pack of clubs to see that the
+roll-call is rightly answered, and with time enough for everything move
+along to Victoria. Had we dawdled less we might have gone much earlier
+from Charing Cross. We meet quite casually other golfers in our
+compartment on the South-Eastern, and inquire with no astonishment as to
+which of the Parisian courses will be scarred by their irons before
+their trip is done. From Dover or Folkestone we have a quick and
+comfortable crossing; we discover some people who are bound for Le
+Touquet and tell us of the excellent changes there, and then on the
+comfortable railway of the Nord we are swung happily into the heart of
+France, and are in the capital before the sun has set on a summer's day,
+and with time yet to go out to La Boulie, which is by Versailles, or
+Chantilly, and stretch our English arms and legs in preparation for
+matches of the morrow. We are at home as golfers without delay.
+
+What one feels about golfing in Paris now is that while there is always
+that elevation of the spirits, that sense of extra life, that little
+superfineness of feeling that are induced by a sojourn in the capital by
+those who feel themselves somewhat akin to her, and there is a certain
+subtle difference in the golfing ways and systems, such as we not merely
+find but wish for, golf at Paris and the world over is really very much
+the same--the same not merely in the playing of the shots as in the
+general scheme of things, the going and the coming, the _tout ensemble_.
+We settle ourselves comfortably in a big hotel in the Rue de
+Castiglione, and next morning we fling away the sheets before eight as
+alive as any Parisian _ouvrier_. The _café complet_ disposed of, the
+next question is that of clubs and balls. If it is a fine day and there
+is time for the walking, we may stride through the corner of the gardens
+of the Tuileries, across the corresponding corner of the Place de la
+Concorde, over the bridge and into the station to the left by the side
+of the Seine and down the steps to the platform, where there always
+awaits us at the most convenient time what is in essence largely a
+golfers' train. Our golfing people are in full evidence. You cannot
+mistake their kind in a train of France any more than you can when they
+journey from Charing Cross to Walton Heath. They pervade. So on to the
+other end of the journey at Versailles, and there the carriages await
+us, and the brake for those who like it, and we are bowled and rattled
+along through that place which has seen much of the makings and undoings
+of France, and on to La Boulie, where we hasten to the first tee,
+fearful of any waiting. Or, alternatively, we take a taxi-cab that is
+outside the hotel in Paris, and let loose through the Parisian streets
+with it, across the Place Vendôme, past the Opera, away along to the
+Gare du Nord with our inimitable Parisian taxi-man hurtling round the
+corners with all the fury of a charioteer in the races of ancient Rome,
+making us reflect that it is well there will be a rest of an hour
+before being called upon to do the first putting at Chantilly. So we
+perceive that the going and the coming are very much what they might be
+in England, with just that difference that gives a piquancy, while,
+after a day on the course, it is found to be quite excellent to have the
+gaiety of Paris at one's disposal. Those who have tried it generally
+agree that golf de Paris makes the finest change of the game, the most
+exhilarating that may be had by the player of the south of England, who
+is not too far removed from Charing Cross or one of the ports. It may be
+444 miles from our metropolis to St. Andrews, and 383 to North Berwick,
+but it is only 259 to Paris, and despite the sea the journey lasts a
+much shorter time than the dash to the north by the fastest trains. We
+do not compare the golf of Paris with the golf of our historic and
+beloved seats of the game, but the courses of France, as inland courses,
+are good, and we think again of the virtues of the change complete, of
+the _tout ensemble_. Good things have come out of France in the days of
+long ago and in recent times; golf that is nearly of the best order
+rises in it now, and when we see Mr. Edward Blackwell and some others of
+the great men of the auld grey city who are most particular about all
+golfing things playing themselves on the slopes of La Boulie, over the
+plains of Chantilly, and through the forest of Fontainebleau, we know
+that things are moving tolerably well.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Upon our initiation at La Boulie, our curiosity is stirred and attention
+is attracted to many things. Perhaps M. Deschamps, or such a good
+sportsman as the Baron de Bellet--whose son, M. François de Bellet, has
+won the Amateur Championship of France, while Mlle. de Bellet is the
+best of the lady players in the country--would conduct a guest about the
+place and show him many things that would interest him, and many more
+that as a golfer he would most honestly admire. La Boulie is not a great
+course despite all the championships that have been played upon it, but
+the Société de Golf de Paris, which has a membership of 750 at a
+subscription of about £10, is quite a great institution. Yet, let me
+hasten to say that in the first remark I was judging La Boulie on the
+highest inland standard, and even then the judgment must be qualified by
+the statement that if not great in the best sense La Boulie is good and
+is quite interesting. At one time it suffered much from the nature of
+its soil and turf, but greenkeeping science, the francs of France, and
+the loving and most assiduous care of M. Deschamps, have changed much if
+not all of that. In the summer time it is quite one of the most
+beautiful courses I can think of with its wealth of trees, in which the
+nightingales sing soon after the golfers have done, and its majestic
+undulations, which come so near to being mountainous that herein, with
+so much climbing to be done and so many uphill and downhill shots, is
+one of the greatest faults of the course. But everything is well done at
+La Boulie, and human ingenuity and thoroughness are well applied. M.
+Deschamps is a fine humanitarian, and exerts himself constantly for the
+welfare of the caddies, who are as good for their business as any
+caddies in the world. It was a happy idea on his part to have these boys
+trained under a semi-military system as he has them now. They are all
+housed in a building near to the first tee under the care of the club;
+they have to observe regulations of duty and life which are good for
+them, and they are dressed in a boy-scout khaki uniform with touches of
+red to brighten it, and the principles of boy-scoutism are worked into
+their young lives. This is excellent, and indeed it is the truth that
+already we have a little to learn in golf from France. By the way, one
+of the curious laws of the country--curious as it seems to us, though
+soundly sensible--is that boys are not allowed, when under about fifteen
+years of age, to carry more than a certain weight in the way of work,
+and this prohibits caddies from carrying a bag of clubs of more than
+fair extent. As a matter of detail you will find that the weight
+quantity allowed works out to something like ten clubs of an average
+mixture, but happily for some good friends of mine there is no weighing
+at the first tee and no officers of the Republic there to see it done.
+They threaten to arrest us at St. Andrews if we play the game with iron
+clubs only, and they have the power through bye-laws ratified by
+Government to do so and send us to prison. Is it possible that a
+wandering player in happy France should be lodged in a modern Bastille
+for that on one eager day he defied ill omen and the law by carrying
+thirteen clubs in his bag, as both James Braid and Edward Ray have done
+when winning championships, the weight limit being exceeded and all the
+unhappiest consequences following? M. Deschamps took the initiative in
+founding the Golf Union of France, which is based completely on the
+American system and is likely to be a strong force in the golf of the
+future.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To the best of my knowledge they have only one plus-handicap amateur in
+France, being M. François de Bellet, who is rated at plus 1 at two or
+three clubs, but I have examined the handicap books at different places
+and find that there are a few scratch men, and that the number of
+players who have single figure handicaps is quite good in proportion to
+the whole, and is increasing. The fears we had that the French
+temperament was not good for the game prove to be unfounded; while the
+French enthusiasm is equal to anything that we know. There are cases of
+golf fever in France that are every degree as bad--or as good--as those
+we find here at home.
+
+One muggy winter morning, when a friend and I teed up at the beginning
+of the round at La Boulie, we could with difficulty see the flag on the
+first green, short as was the hole. We surmised that we might be the
+only players; but, no, many holes ahead, having started early, was a
+match going on between a baron of France and one of his rivals. The
+baron was taking the game with exceeding seriousness, and the
+information was given to me that he played two rounds on the course
+every day of his life. "Saturdays and Sundays?" I asked my caddie.
+"Toujours!" was the answer. "Even if it rains?" I pursued. "Toujours!"
+the boy answered with emphasis. "Or snows or is foggy?" I persisted, and
+then the carrier of clubs replied a little impatiently and with
+finality, "Toujours!" intending to convey that in all circumstances
+whatsoever the indefatigable baron played his two rounds a day, and
+independent witnesses confirmed the statement of the boy. This surely is
+the French counterpart of what is considered to be the finest case of
+golf enthusiasm that Britain has produced, being that of old Alexander
+M'Kellar who played on Bruntsfield Links in the brave days of old and
+was known for his ardour as "the Cock o' the Green." He also would play
+always; when snow covered the course he begged and implored some one to
+become his opponent in a match, and if nobody obliged he would go out
+alone and wander the whole way round, playing his ball from flag to
+flag, the greens and holes being hidden. At night he would sometimes
+play at the short holes by the dim glimmer of a lamp, and golf by
+moonlight was his frequent experience. Once upon a time his suffering
+wife thought to shame him by taking to the links his dinner and his
+nightcap; but he was too busy to attend to her. M'Kellar is long since
+dead, but something of his soul survives in England--and in France. And
+there are old and experienced golfers in France. There are Parisians who
+are members of the Royal and Ancient Club of St. Andrews, and I have met
+others who could argue most deeply with me upon the peculiarities and
+merits of many British courses from Sandwich and Sunningdale to Montrose
+and Cruden Bay. I took tea at Fontainebleau with M. le Comte de
+Puyfontaine, who exercises a kind of governorship over the course, and
+he told me that he learned his golf twenty-three years ago at a place
+near Lancaster, and that since then he has played in many parts of the
+United States and elsewhere.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have endeavoured to make the point that the French are worthy and
+thorough, that the Parisian golf and golfers must be taken seriously,
+and that it is a pleasure to go among them with our clubs. Their courses
+are nearly good enough for anything, and they are all different from
+each other in type and characteristics. Fontainebleau is cut out of the
+forest, and silver birches line the fairway, while some of the great
+boulders which are peculiar to the place stand out as landmarks near the
+putting greens--but not so near as to be useful to the erratic player.
+Holes of all kinds are at Fontainebleau, and some of them make pretty
+puzzles in the playing. The teeing ground for the third is high up on a
+hill and the view is charming, but that may be of less account than the
+circumstance that the carry is farther than it looks, and the hole is a
+long one. The fifth is a catchy dog-leg hole, which the caddies of
+Fontainebleau do not call a _jambe du chien_, as you might expect them,
+but a "doc-lac." Soon the game will be Gallicised completely. The ninth,
+being a drive and a peculiar pitch, is a strange hole which worries the
+pair of us exceedingly. It looks one of the simplest things, but there
+is an inner green and an outer one, as one might say, and the former is
+on a high plateau. There is a secret about it which we did not discover
+in three full days. The tenth is a fine long hole, with a guard to the
+green that might have been brought up from the Inferno, and so on to the
+end in great variety. I like Fontainebleau. Chantilly has less character
+but more length. It is a better test of wooden club play, but not of
+pretty work with the irons in approaching. Yet it is well bunkered, the
+fairway is smooth and dry, as it is at Fontainebleau, all through the
+winter, and the putting greens are most excellent, fast and true. If
+most parts of the course are a little flat, there is a great ravine
+about the middle of it which gives a touch of the romantic and helps to
+the enjoyment. The turf at La Boulie does not winter so well as it does
+at the other places, though the club has spent many thousands of francs
+in applying real sea-sand to it for its improvement; but in the spring,
+the summer, and the autumn, golf here at Versailles is a fine pleasure.
+Yet some will say that, much as I tempt them, they would not after all
+go to France for golf, that indeed they could never confess to others
+that they had been to Fontainebleau and Versailles and Chantilly for
+their game. But why may they not take their game and their historical
+views and reflections on the same days, as they may do better in France
+than elsewhere; though when we play at St. Andrews or at Sandwich, where
+Queen Bess visited, and Westward Ho! we wonder again how strangely this
+royal and ancient game does attach itself and cling to the old places of
+celebrity, and especially those whose fame was made for them by kings.
+It is curious. The keen golfer is a man of thought and sense. We play on
+a morning at Fontainebleau, and in the afternoon we wander through the
+rich galleries of the wonderful palace where many kings of France held
+magnificent court, a place where the great Napoleon loved to rest a
+while between campaigns. There are relics of the Emperor in many
+chambers; and it was at the chief entrance here that he bade his last
+good-bye to the old guard and went lonely away, an emperor no more. The
+wonders and the glories of Versailles are known even to those who have
+never crossed the Channel; Chantilly has had its great romances of
+history also. The old castle was put up in the ninth century; here the
+Condes lived in fine state, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries the place was very famous. The good French have endeavoured to
+make their courses suit their places. Sometimes we seem to look even on
+these playgrounds for a touch of art, a little delicacy, a fineness and
+a high quality, and we think in just that way of the golf de Paris when
+the train of the Nord runs us homewards again.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The seaside golf in the northern and north-western parts of France is
+coming to be an important thing in the general scheme. Personal
+association and its seniority above all except Dieppe have led me
+already to mention Wimereux, but the golf of Wimereux is not the queen
+of the game of northern seaside France. In all honesty we must crown the
+slightly younger Le Touquet, on the other side of Boulogne, with that
+distinction. Here you may have one of the most charming changes of the
+game, and the most wholesome, delightful rearrangement of your general
+daily living system. Go to Etaples from Boulogne, then spin in the car
+through that splendid forest, skimming by Paris Plage and its casinos
+and evidences of lightness of life, and so through to Touquet, where
+there is a course for golf that is most excellent in every respect,
+lengths and character of holes, sandy nature of soil, quality of putting
+greens--everything. Some of the holes are a little tricky; but the
+course in general has been enormously improved in recent times, and it
+well deserves the championship dignity that has now been accorded to it.
+The girl caddies there are the best of their kind. I remember a little
+Marie for such an intuition regarding clubs to be used as I remember no
+other assistant: and after playing for a day through these avenues of
+fir trees with the great banks of silver sand in the distance, shutting
+off the sea, then dawdling among the coloured lights at Paris Plage
+listening to the music after dinner, and in the night sleeping in an
+upper room near to the links, and hearing at the last moment of
+consciousness the wind music floating in from the surrounding trees, one
+feels that this is almost an enchanted land, with the spirits of
+happiness and pleasure controlling a joyful cosmos.
+
+Dieppe is good, and it is quite different. Here the golf is some
+seventeen years of age, the whole system of things is well matured and
+settled, and the golfing season goes along with a fine swing from the
+beginning to the end. It was Willie Park who first laid out this course,
+but it has been much altered and lengthened since then, and now there is
+a fine club-house and all that a player might wish for, and especially
+one who likes to contend in competitions. There is something for such
+challengers to do all the time; I know few other golfing places where
+there are so many competitions in August and September, and yet they are
+no nuisance to the people who say they hate such things. At Etretat the
+game has been making excellent progress lately; at Deauville by
+Trouville, where you bathe always except when you do not golf or sleep
+or eat, it has been long established, and the course there has recently
+been raised very high in quality; and at Cabourg and Havre, in the same
+region, there are courses also. There are at Etretat thirteen holes, and
+yet you may play a lucky round, and I am reminded that in the long ago,
+when golf near the sands of Picardy was first being thought of, a wise
+man of Cabourg sent for an English course architect, and, displaying to
+his view one nice field, said, "Voila! Make me a hole! Two if possible!"
+But they know much better now than that, and Cabourg has its full
+eighteen. To golf, to lie down and sleep, to splash and tumble in the
+sea, to seem to do so much and yet to do so little except make a few
+drives and miss some putts--it is all a very happy holiday that you may
+enjoy at these places.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The championships of France, which began in a small and gentle way, have
+lately risen to be very important events, and they gain a most
+wonderfully cosmopolitan entry. In 1913, which was the greatest year for
+championships in general that the game has ever known--Taylor winning
+his fifth Open at Hoylake, Mr. Hilton his fourth Amateur, Mr. Travers
+his fourth American Amateur, Ouimet beating Vardon and Ray in the
+American Open--the championships of France did indeed rise to the first
+class, and in both events, the Amateur at La Boulie and the Open which
+was held for the first time at Chantilly--and the first for it to be
+taken away from the mother course at Versailles--produced some most
+exciting business. I have never seen a more extraordinary final in its
+way than that in the amateur event at La Boulie on this occasion, when
+Mr. E. A. Lassen came to grips with Lord Charles Hope--and such grips
+they were! I was led to describe it at the time as a dramatic affair of
+four periods and a spasm, and that is just what it was. Lord Charles
+Hope, though not physically strong, has acquired a fine game, and in the
+first period of this thirty-six holes match we witnessed him playing
+some quite beautiful golf and exercising the most complete
+self-possession and steadiness, gradually piling up a big lead of holes
+upon his more experienced opponent, who has been once Amateur Champion
+of Britain and a finalist another time, and seeming to make himself a
+certain winner. The duration of this period was one whole round, and at
+the end of it Lord Charles had five good holes to his advantage. The
+second was a period of peace, in which we watched Lord Charles keeping a
+tight hold on his most valuable gains, while Mr. Lassen, if losing
+nothing more, was gaining nothing when it was absolutely necessary he
+should be gaining quickly if he was not to be the loser of the day. Time
+was flying and holes were being done with, and fewer of them being left
+for play and recovery. This period terminated at the turn in the second
+round, with Lord Charles Hope still four to the good and "still
+winning." The third period lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth holes
+in this round, and in it the man who had seemed to be very well beaten
+threw a new life into his game, tightened it up, made it exact, certain,
+and aggressive, while at the same time his opponent seemed to collapse
+entirely, his driving becoming soft and uncertain and his short game
+nervous. The Yorkshire player won four of these five holes and at the
+fourteenth he was level with his man. Never was there a more
+extraordinary illustration of the truth that no match is lost until it
+is won; to some extent it recalled that amazing championship at Hoylake,
+when Mr. Sidney Fry so nearly gained the title after being at one time,
+as it appeared, hopelessly beaten by Mr. Charles Hutchings. Now it was
+surely Mr. Lassen's match; but in the crisis Lord Charles Hope came
+again and fought every inch of the way home. In this period every hole
+was halved to the end of the round, so that after the statutory
+thirty-six had been played the state of things was as at the beginning
+of the day. No business had been done, and each man might be said to
+have had his tail up quite as much as the other. The spasm followed. The
+thirty-seventh had to be played. Mr. Lassen teed up his ball, said to
+himself that he must keep it to the left as there was the dread
+out-of-bounds on the right that had been a constant trouble to him,
+swung, struck, and to his dismay saw the little white ball bearing
+slowly but surely to the right after all. It did not reach the trees,
+but, almost as bad, it fell into the big deep bunker out that way, and
+made recovery difficult. Lord Charles Hope seized his advantage. A good
+ball shot straight down the middle of the fairway, and the hole and the
+match were his. An extraordinary game indeed that was.
+
+In the Open Championship at Chantilly there was an entry that was nearly
+good enough for a championship on British soil. Vardon and Ray, out
+across the Atlantic, were missing, but otherwise the class was as
+numerous and good as need be, and there were a few of the best British
+amateurs. George Duncan won, as he had won the "News of the World"
+tournament the week before, and so made it clear that he had come into
+his own at last. These two were his first really big victories in
+classic open events, and they were brilliantly and indeed easily gained.
+But it was not Duncan's victory, so well deserved as it was, that makes
+this championship at Chantilly worth a place in golfing history. It was
+something else that very nearly happened. Among the competitors was an
+amateur in Mr. H. D. Gillies, who at different times in recent seasons
+has shown an immense capacity. At St. Andrews in the Amateur
+Championship only a few months before he had made a brilliant display.
+Now, here, he did a thing which to the best of my belief and after a
+searching of all the records had never been done before, and that was in
+an open championship competition of the first order, decided by four
+rounds of stroke play and with the best players of the world arrayed
+against him, he as an amateur led the whole field for three consecutive
+rounds. Mr. Ouimet in America did not lead for three rounds, no amateur
+had led for three rounds in any open championship before, and it is not
+often that any professional has done so either. Mr. Gillies has enormous
+powers for concentration and effort, and, as one might say, he can
+strain himself at the game until he nearly drops. In his third round he
+had a wicked piece of bad luck which cost him two most valuable
+shots--not the sort of bad luck that one gets through finding a
+specially nasty place in a bunker, but the much worse variety which is
+the result of a grave error in course construction. After one of the
+finest drives one might wish to see, at a hole just after the turn he
+found his ball lying on a road which had to be treated as a hazard, and
+from here he was bunkered. He knew that Duncan was pressing him hard,
+and that he had not a stroke to spare. Still by an enormous effort he
+kept his lead, and at the end of the third round it looked as if it
+would still be a lead of two strokes, when alas! on the home green he
+lost a stroke in putting. Instead of having a lead of two over the
+terrible George for the last round he had now a lead of only one. There
+is not much difference between one and two--it may all be accounted for
+by the very smallest of putts--but in a case of this kind the moral
+effect is very great. You see, when you lead by two strokes you realise
+that you can afford to lose one of them and still be leading, but when
+you only have an advantage of one there is the cold truth that you
+cannot afford to lose anything at all or the lead will go--the lead that
+Mr. Gillies had held all the time. One may be sure that he felt this,
+for coming off that home green some one said to him quietly, "You still
+lead, Gillies," and he turned with a little melancholy and responded,
+"Yes, but one stroke is not much to lead Duncan by, is it?" The effect
+was visible at the first tee in the afternoon. He knew the
+responsibility. He took an infinity of pains, far too much. He addressed
+his ball until he was sick of looking at it any more, and then he topped
+it into the bunker in front of him. Good-bye, Open Championship of
+France! But there it was, a brilliant achievement for all that, and if
+he had won, as once he seemed likely to do, no man could have done
+justice to the golf history of that year with amateurs Ouimet and
+Gillies as Open Champions.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Surely Mr. Gillies is one of the most interesting studies in the game at
+the present time. Born in New Zealand, he became a boat-race Blue at
+Cambridge, and is the only one who has won a high position in
+first-class golf. Now he is a surgeon in Upper Wimpole Street, already
+with a high reputation as a specialist in matters affecting throat,
+ears, and other organs of the head. He is evidently a man of immense
+will-power, with a most enviable capacity for concentration and for
+obliterating from his mind completely what is not essential to the
+business of the moment. He will work at his profession continuously for
+a week or a month and only just remember golf, and then he will suddenly
+appear in a great competition, perhaps a championship, and be a golfer
+and nothing else whatever. That is as it should be, as it is always
+supposed to be in golf, but few men can exchange themselves to this
+extent. When he won the St. George's Cup at Sandwich he had not touched
+a club for ages, but somebody insisted on motoring him down there for
+the occasion. He had no idea of going to Chantilly, but was at Wimereux
+when an entry form was sent along to him there, and he said to Mrs.
+Gillies, "Let us go and watch the professionals," but they watched him
+instead. He is always going to courses he has not seen, and when he has
+not been playing golf for a long time, and then doing wonders on them.
+Tall and athletic in build, in demeanour he is solemn, and I have heard
+it said that his attitude at times somewhat suggests that he is about to
+put his opponent on the operating table--which in a sense he often does.
+He belongs to the hard thinking and slow playing school. Although he has
+a keen temperament, and is a man who at his best plays largely from
+inspiration, yet he is much of what we call a mechanical golfer, and is
+very measured and deliberative in his movements. He has studied and
+satisfied himself about what are the essential principles of this
+mysterious game, and he applies them to the best of his intense ability.
+He keeps himself steadier on his feet than almost any other player I can
+recall. Those who have had the necessities of pivoting on toes drilled
+into them from their first day at golf should make close observation of
+the Gillies way and see how well that way pays. He swings his club
+backwards but a little way and very slowly, but finishes the swing at
+great length. As is often the case with players of his attitude towards
+the game, his iron strokes are plain and they can be depended on.
+
+But the most interesting feature of his system and his principles is the
+remarkable steadiness with which he holds his head during the making of
+his stroke. We understand very well that of all principles this is the
+most imperative, and that he who disobeys it is completely lost. When we
+have foozled we know well that the presumptive cause was a little
+movement of that most restless and anxious head. We know also that head
+movement disturbs the general balance, and induces body movement, and
+have not troubled to consider why. A reason seems vaguely obvious, but
+Mr. Gillies knows more about matters of the head than other people, and
+from his surgical knowledge he has come by one of the most interesting
+theories that have been propounded in connection with this game and
+believes in it absolutely, which is one reason why he has decided that,
+when driving, whatever happens his own head shall be absolutely
+motionless. This is not a matter for a layman to explain or guess at,
+and so I have gone to Mr. Gillies himself and begged from him his
+theory. He says to me, then, that he has always felt that keeping the
+eye on the ball is certainly the key to the situation, but in recent
+times he has realised that the importance of so doing is really in
+keeping still the delicate balancing organs of the head when executing
+the shot. These organs or semicircular canals are intimately connected
+with the eye, and also give one the sense of position. The least
+movement of the head upsets the fluid in these canals, so that the sense
+of position is more or less lost, according to the amount of movement.
+Without the sense of position the stroke is almost sure to fail. "I take
+it," he says, "that your visual memory is good enough to remember the
+position of the ball, if you shut your eyes just before hitting it; but
+if you move the head at the moment you cannot hit the ball correctly.
+Swaying the head in putting, as Tom Ball does, is probably not very
+disturbing owing to the movement being so slow that the fluid in the
+canals does not get jerked. At the same time I can understand him
+requiring a great deal of practice to perfect the sway." To the layman
+this theory is very remarkable, and it is impressive for two reasons,
+one being that it is backed by expert scientific knowledge, and the
+other that it is emphasised by successful application.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And if Mr. Gillies is one of the most interesting figures that have
+arisen in amateur golf in recent times, most certainly George Duncan is
+the most interesting of the newer professionals. Here is an artist at
+the game if you will, the greatest genius of golf that has come up since
+Harry Vardon rose to fame. I am convinced that in the new period that is
+beginning with the inevitable decline, to some extent at all events, of
+the old triumvirate, George Duncan will be far and away the most
+conspicuous figure. He is a great golfer, and is in every way admirably
+fitted for supremacy. A more fascinating player to watch and study and
+think about afterwards has never driven a ball from the tee.
+
+When he first came out it was declared that he was the fastest golfer
+who had ever lived. It was said that he walked up to his ball and hit it
+away before anybody had time to realise that he had taken his stance. He
+was likened unto hurricanes, lightning, and racehorses. I remember that
+Mr. Robert Maxwell, being once partnered with him, in an Open
+Championship I think, remarked afterwards that it was the most violent
+and disturbing experience of fast golf he had ever known. All this was
+true. Duncan never seemed to find it necessary to think as we do, and
+not merely we with all our doubts and hesitations, but those far better
+than we are, men who have won championships. He dispensed with all
+alternatives, those fatal alternatives that ruin our own game. We often
+fail because there are not only so many ways of doing the same thing in
+golf, but because we try to think of too many of them when we have a
+stroke to play and change from one to another and then to a third, until
+our increasing indecision can be no longer tolerated and some sort of
+shot has to be played. Analyse your own emotions and experiences, and
+you will discover that this vacillation has been the cause of many
+disastrous failures. But George Duncan never suffered in this way. He is
+a man of lightning decision, of peculiarly sound and valuable
+inspiration, and he is one who, having once decided, does not swerve
+from his determination no matter what may be the allurements in the way
+of alternatives. Duncan does not know the alternative. He has no use for
+it. He does not recognise it. He believes that first thoughts in golf
+are best, and he abides by them. He decides and he acts. And he does all
+such thinking as is necessary for his decision while he is walking from
+the place where he played his last stroke to the place from which he
+will play his next, so that when he reaches his ball there is nothing to
+do but get to business without any waste of time. All these were
+features of the early Duncan just as they are of the present one, and
+they have been developed and perfected during the ten or dozen years
+that he has been out in the professional world.
+
+But the Duncan of the early period had a fault of temperament in that he
+would go wild. He would at the moment of crisis lose his head, think of
+impossibilities and try to do them. He would lose his grip of his game.
+Elation and despondency would alternate too quickly in his mind. He
+would be careless; he would forget consequences. Who that ever saw it
+will ever forget the way in which he let the Open Championship at St.
+Andrews in 1910 slip from his grasp in that terrible last round? He had
+done rounds of 73, 77, and 71, the third being then and still the record
+of the course. Another 77 would have given him the Championship. Instead
+of that he did an 83. The next year at Sandwich he did very much the
+same sort of thing in his third round. It has seemed that in each of the
+last four or five years he was good enough to win the Championship, and
+that it was largely his own fault that he did not do so. That is why we
+used to say of him that ambition should be made of sterner stuff, that
+these weaknesses of his temperament were inexcusable and must be stamped
+out.
+
+Duncan has cured that fault of temperament now. He has stamped it out.
+The other day when he and I were discussing his predecessor in the same
+flesh, he said, "All that is past and done with. It is gone behind me.
+There is no more of it. I am quick still. I shall always be quick
+because that is I, Duncan, my nature. I cannot be anything else. And why
+should I not be quick? Are there not too many slow golfers in the world?
+But for the rest of it I am steady now. I feel hold of myself and the
+game. I do not forget." Championships should come quickly to him now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+RIVIERA GOLF, AND WHAT MIGHT BE LEARNED FROM LADIES, WITH A
+CONSIDERATION OF THE OVERLAPPING GRIP.
+
+
+One who will only play on summer days is a little less than half a
+golfer after all. Golf at the full demands resource, good heart, some
+courage, and a settled nerve, and it is of its principle that in the
+matter of places, times, and weather the game shall be taken as it is
+found. Hence the real golfer should not only tolerate the play in the
+bad seasons when there are howling winds and drenching rains, and much
+of life seems damp and sad, but he might be expected even to feel some
+occasional satisfaction in it. One who can hold himself up to the big
+wind and drive a ball that whistles through it to the full drive length,
+then play a good second and all with fine allowance and good wind work
+with his irons, so that the game works out well enough for any day, is
+one whose contentment is a state to be envied. Rarely does one feel the
+thrills of the golfing life better than when playing well in a lashing
+wind, with clothes that soak and stick; the sense of mastery is
+magnificent. Yet of such luxuries of winter golf one may sometimes tire.
+The strong would be gentle again; and sunshine comes well after storms
+and leaden skies. Swearing in December that this winter shall see us
+stay at home the season through, playing on our east coast links
+throughout, January finds us hesitate, and in February, if we wait till
+then, there is a journey being made away through France to the sweetness
+of life by the blue Mediterranean Sea. It is an unforgettable change. We
+have spoken wrongly when sometimes after, at the end of a winter season,
+we have declared we tired of it. Never.
+
+We have returned to London weary at the end of a January day from
+Sunningdale or Walton Heath, or it may have been just back along on the
+underground from the Mid-Surrey course at Richmond, which seems as well
+in winter as any, and much better than most others. But London is murky
+and dirty. It is cold, it is windy, there is a drizzling rain, and the
+streets are very dirty. It will be three-quarters of an hour before we
+may be seated at the dinner table. Oh, we become a little tired of this!
+Troubles never come singly, and probably on such a day a match or
+matches have been lost. Those who are not of the community do not
+understand what worries make up the full agony of this game, and that is
+why the loss of two matches was considered by the gentle lady with her
+friend at tea to be the cause complete of the horrid din as of breaking
+furniture in the hall, the barely-stifled awful words, the yelping and
+limping of the little dog that suggested some sudden and unexpected
+injury, and the general impression that was conveyed throughout the
+household of havoc and disaster. "It is nothing," said gentle Fanny of
+the perfect understanding as, with her toes in pink satin on the fender,
+she poured another cup for Mrs. Larcombe. "Really, it is only George,
+who, I can tell, has lost _both_ his matches, dear!"
+
+But it was not the matches only. It was the waiting lone and weary for
+Marmaduke at the beginning of the day; it was the lame excuse of
+Marmaduke for his tardiness; it was the aggravating manner of the man
+throughout and the stupidity of the caddie; it was the stickiness of the
+greens; it was something wrong with the fateful golfer's lunch that made
+it all worse in the afternoon; the slicing that was more frequent and
+farther into the rough; the pitch shots that were topped still more; and
+the putts that ever lipped and stayed outside. It was the luck that went
+viler all the time, the cruelty of circumstance, the misery of it all;
+and after the twin defeat the sad discovery and reflection that if one
+little thing--perhaps only the pressure of a finger--had been remembered
+about some big things that were wrongly done, it might all have been
+avoided. It is realised again that of all the sad thoughts the saddest
+is: "It might have been." It is then that the agony of golf is
+experienced; it is then that the golfer is not happy. And it is then, on
+the retreat to town, that one may seem to hear the Mediterranean call,
+and see a vision of a sun glistening on a flowered and song-laden land
+where golf is played. Take the chance, unhappy man; make the change then
+if you can.
+
+The strongest emotions often arise from the widest and most sudden
+contrasts. Our beautiful English summer comes to us too slowly and
+gradually through the vicissitudes of spring for the fullest delight.
+One may step out from the mist and drizzle of a London street into the
+greater darkness of a theatre, and it is all blank and gloom and
+nothingness, but there is a quick expectancy. A few moments, and there
+is the tinkling of a bell, the curtain is rolled up, and there is a
+blaze of light with a pretty picture, perhaps, of summer with a full
+suggestion of Arcadia. Music and song, love and gladness, and younger
+again is the heart in years. Thus for a while the load is lightened. It
+is like that when one wanders to the Riviera for golf in the depth of
+England's winter. We leave London when it rains and is cold and heavily
+depressing; the spirit is weary from the trials of the season. Charing
+Cross--the Channel--Paris, hardly less gloomy than her sister
+Londres,--the plunge into the rumbling darkness of the fast train on the
+P. L. M.--sleep and dreams. And in the morning the bell rings and the
+curtain of the new and sunny world rolls up, and it is glorious summer.
+Nothing in the way of change of scene is quite so good as this. Those
+who do not know the Riviera may try to imagine it, but in the clearest
+vision they cannot approach the grand reality of this sudden change.
+Marseilles--Toulon--Hyères--Costebelle; and there is the sunshine, the
+flowers, and the game. A rest of a day, quiet slumber through the night,
+and in the morning drowsily one hears a beat, beat, beat upon the
+window-panes, and, not being then awake to Hyères, or Costebelle, it
+seems perhaps but the dismal tapping of the London rain. But later it is
+discovered to be the tapping of the leaves and rosebuds on the glass.
+Breakfast on the terrace, the contenting cigar whose smoke rises
+wreathingly through a still atmosphere upwards to the blue, and then an
+effort to lift oneself from a summer languor. Clubs in possession again,
+a walk for a little way along a rose-fringed road, and then a plunge
+through a coppice along a broken stony path that thousands of golfers
+have trod before. Through a field of narcissi, through the planted
+violets, past a little vineyard on to the plain below--there the golf
+course is. Then play the game all day, and mount to the hotel again when
+the afternoon is nearly spent. But in the earlier afternoon at
+Costebelle I would rather climb back through the little wood after my
+single round, enjoy this perfect illusion of summer, and read and rest
+in laziness. Tints of lemon and citron come into the sky when the sun
+falls to its setting. Out beyond the plain is the sea and then the Iles
+de Hyères, or the Iles d'Or as they have been called, because the sun
+will shine upon them when it has left the mainland for the
+day--Porquerolles, Portcros, Titan, Bagaud, and Roubaud--a
+pearly-coloured group. You may make a short journey to them, to the blue
+Mediterranean which is so very blue. There is the delicate blue of the
+sapphire, and the richer blue of the turquoise. There is the wide blue
+of the Italian skies, and a wonderful blue in some women's eyes. But
+there is no blue that is so deep, so glorious, so soulful as that of the
+Mediterranean Sea, as in fancy I see it now. We gaze upon it and are
+content. All is so peaceful and pleasant. Over the hills comes a booming
+sound; it must be naval gunnery at Toulon. Grim realities of life and
+strife press even into this sweet scene. Yet they are French guns, and
+they are not meant for England either. I love Costebelle. For the simple
+sunny happiness of the life that is led there it is incomparable.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this happiness in scene and sun, be sure, is the greater part of the
+golf on the French and Italian Riviera. There is often much doubt by
+those who have not been there upon the quality of Riviera golf. It
+varies. It once was poor; it was bad. It is now much improved, and it is
+improving still as the demand for it has quickened, as the people of
+southern France who depend so much upon their British visitors have come
+to realise the full meaning of "the golf boom" and the education and
+bettered tastes of the golfing people who leave Britain in the winter
+time. It is now, as golf of the inland kind, quite tolerably good, which
+is to say that in degree it might rank fairly well up in the second
+class of British inland golf. It is no better than that; it is
+sometimes not so good. Climatic difficulties on the Riviera are somewhat
+desperate. In the summer there is a continuous baking heat, and this is
+followed by days of warmth and nights of frost, and in such confusion of
+temperatures the golf courses have to be grown afresh for every season.
+Until recent times the putting greens needed to be newly sown and
+cultivated for every winter season, and I believe that it was at Nice
+that Mr. Hay-Gordon, secretary of courage and discernment as he is,
+first gave battle to the destructive climate and determined he would
+hold his putting greens--which at Nice are better than at almost any
+other place in southern Europe--right through the suns of summer and
+keep them on from one season to another. At Nice, again, thanks to gold,
+and thought, and enterprise, they have what the guardians of other
+Riviera courses do much envy, a magnificent supply of water, and this is
+lavished upon the turf through the dry time when the golfers are back at
+their homelands. The experiment of Nice, which was a fateful one, proved
+successful, and since then it has been copied by other clubs out that
+way, and greens are kept on and are much the better for it. In the old
+days it was a painful thing, as I remember it, to tread upon those
+tender new-born blades of grass, thin and scarce they were, and unfit
+for such usage as golfers give. It is far better now. Then also the
+construction of the courses has been much improved; but it must be
+remembered again that conditions and circumstances do not encourage or
+even agree with ideas of length and bunkering as we of Britain entertain
+them. Yet these things do not matter. We need no six thousand yards and
+no bottle-neck approaches when we wander southwards to the sun. Life
+shall be taken simply then; the press of existence shall be relieved,
+the game shall be made a little gentler than at other times, the nerves
+shall not be unduly tried. So we discover that there is a virtue in what
+is little more than five thousand yards, a generous amplitude of short
+holes, and enough to satisfy of those that can be done with a driver and
+an iron of sorts. In a mood of ease and languor, when even strong men
+who like the game find joy in a mixed foursome, we come to admire the
+Riviera system; and we may find men at nights hard in argument upon the
+points and delicacies of the fifth hole or the fifteenth, the
+aggravations of the sixth and the sixteenth, when they would disdain to
+think of such like in their golfing life at home. That comes of the
+influence of the sun; it soothes and satisfies, and it makes
+contentment.
+
+Then there is this good thing to be said for the Riviera golfing way,
+that it yields a very full variety, and it might well be advertised that
+it embraces something to suit all tastes. Not only does it vary in the
+kind of course, but in the way of life that is attached to it. The
+manner of living at Hyères and Costebelle is more of the English country
+kind and more sporting healthily open-air, with less of the flummery of
+fashion, than it is at other Riviera places, not meaning by that that
+there is not enough of good music and social entertainment for evening
+hours. The sea is a distance off, and there is next to nothing of
+promenading. Here we live well and are happy, and the sun is very warm.
+R. L. S. lived at "La Solitude" at Hyères, and he loved it. The golf in
+some respects is as good as elsewhere on the littoral; in some ways it
+is even a little better. There is the course of Hyères flanking one side
+of the quaint old town, and there is Costebelle with the chief hotel on
+the hillside on the other, and its golf course on the plain below.
+Hyères is a gentle course, pretty, smooth and nice, and much improved
+in recent times. The turf is good for southern France, and some of the
+holes are remembered, as where we play through an avenue of trees with
+silver bark. Golf is younger at Costebelle and it is quite different,
+but if one were led to make comparisons, as from which we shall refrain,
+it might be said that often youth is no harmful thing. Golf architecture
+had already advanced to a science when this course was first made, the
+first planning being done by Willie Park, and such as Mr. John Low have
+advised upon its improvement since, while M. Peyron has lavished much
+money and attention upon it too. Even if there are still some rawnesses
+apparent, golf at Costebelle comes near to being the real thing. Then it
+is a good point in favour of this end of the Riviera that here we have
+the golf almost at the door of our hotel as it is scarcely to be had at
+any other place. It is something to walk down to the first tee, and
+pluck a rose by the wayside as we go.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That of Cannes is a pretty course. The Grand Duke Michael has done much
+for it and here he is a king. Society is high at Cannes, the people come
+along to La Napoule, six or seven miles from the town, in their
+motor-cars in a long procession, and it is the proper place for the
+luncheon party and such social entertainments as go well with a
+verandah, sunshine, and the flowers. One would go to the golf club at La
+Napoule even though one did not golf; many do--perhaps too many. Those
+who eat and chatter, kiss hands and smile, but never take a divot are
+losers of something that is heartening. A river runs through this
+golfing land, and twice we cross it by a famous ferry worked by hands
+upon a rope that is stretched across the stream. On one side of the
+river there are twelve holes laid and on the other there are six; but
+the six may be considered to be better than the twelve for the pleasure
+that they yield. First we play three of the batch of twelve, and then we
+are floated to the precious six. Here there are big sand bunkers of a
+natural kind, and they are nicely placed. The fairway is tolerably good,
+and there are putting greens in pretty places.
+
+If this were all it would be good; but the course of Cannes gains a
+splendid charm from its magnificent situation which cannot be ignored.
+There is a promise of beauties to come when we approach the club-house
+by that long avenue of golden mimosa; later there are glimpses of almost
+heavenly scenes. If the golf at these continental places is gentler than
+at home, such things as scenery may count for a little more. I have
+never had full sympathy with the suggestion that the golfer cares
+nothing for scenery or sparkling air except when he is off his game and
+then falls back upon them for compensation. There is not only hypocrisy
+in this, but in suggesting the player to be scarcely above the savage it
+is unfair to a healthy taste that has had some training in appreciation
+of natural beauties. One does not dwell upon cloud effects nor let the
+mind loose upon a panorama when the strokes are being done and there is
+a man to beat, but sunlight and sweet scenes have always their strong
+effect subconsciously, and it would be a pity if they had not. I shall
+not place the course of Cannes at La Napoule in that warring and jealous
+company, many clubs strong they are, each of which claims that it is the
+most beautifully situated in the world. I have played upon three or four
+of such courses, and indeed their claims have appeared to be strong. It
+is enough that Cannes is very beautiful. It will be well if there are a
+few moments for waiting caused by a slow-going match in front when your
+ball has been placed on its little pinnacle of sand on the fourth teeing
+ground, for spread out in the distance there is a glorious panorama of
+the snow-capped Maritime Alps, on whose last spur there lies glistening
+white in the sunshine the little town of Grasse where sweet perfumes are
+distilled and where, as they say, twelve tons of roses are crushed to
+make a quart of essence. Grasse rests on that hillside like a linen
+sheet dropped there by the gods. When we have done this hole and face
+about, there are the pearly-tinted Esterels ahead. Hereabouts the holes
+are chiefly laid out through avenues of fir trees, and here and there,
+especially when one is approaching the eighth green, the picture is one
+that bears some suggestion of an Italian charm. Elsewhere in the round
+the Mediterranean is presented, as once when we look across the bay in
+which Cannes is placed to Cap d' Antibes at the opposite corner from La
+Napoule. By comparison some of the concluding holes are a little dull in
+looks; but when we play them in the afternoon the sun is setting behind
+the Esterels in front, and then there is indeed a sunset to be seen.
+
+Again, the course of the Nice club is at Cagnes some miles out from the
+town. It is different from the others of the Riviera, and it has its
+special advantages. I recall an example of one of them which was the
+more impressive since it was made on the occasion of my first visit to
+the course. That was years ago, and we had been held up at Nice for five
+days and five nights by continuous and heavy rain during the whole of
+that long time, and it was in February too. Such a spell of Riviera wet
+seems almost incredible, but it happened, the oldest inhabitants, for
+the credit of their country, declaring that such a thing had never been
+before since the world as they knew it had begun. When this kind of
+thing happens on the Riviera there is only one thing to do, and that is
+go to the casinos; and it was bad for us in every way that this rain
+came down like that even if it was good for the Casino Municipal and
+the others at Nice and for M. Blanc at the adjacent Monte Carlo. When
+the five days and five nights had been endured, when the heart had grown
+sick of what happened at the tables, when our thoughts had turned to
+Sicily and Egypt--for during this period of the flood I had made one
+voyage (we should call it a voyage though the journey was done by
+motor-car along that glorious Grand Corniche) to the Riviera of Italy,
+and there at Bordighera and San Remo (and what a pretty little course it
+is at Arma di Taggia) found it to be raining still--the sun came out
+again and the question of golf arose to life. But surely, it seemed,
+golf would be impossible for some time; courses would need to dry.
+However, we argued that a stroke with a driving mashie is better than no
+play, and so we took the car at the Place Masséna and soon were out at
+Cagnes, and there we played on a course that was as dry as any course
+need ever be though the rain had been pelting down to within three or
+four hours before. In one or two hollow places there were little pools
+of casual water, but otherwise the state of things was such that we
+might sit upon the grass when the opposition was badly bunkered and
+needed time for his recovery. Others knew that Nice recovers quickly,
+for when we were out in the middle of the course we espied some figures
+a couple of long holes away, and about the attitude of one of them there
+was something strangely familiar. There was a manner of walking on the
+course not so much stiff as small and quite precise, and there was a
+club being carried vertically, head high up as if it were a gun and the
+carrier were one of a line of infantry. I can recall only one man who
+sometimes walks with his club like this--not that there is anything
+against it--and, knowing him, I still regret that opponent had not
+courage to accept a wager of anything from five francs to fifty that I
+could name the man at that distance of seven hundred yards, having no
+knowledge that he I had in mind was on the Riviera at all. It was Mr.
+Arthur Balfour, ex-Prime Minister, who, chafing for lack of golf after
+his own five days' shutting up, had motored over from Cannes at the
+moment that the rain held up.
+
+There is a certain plainness about many of the holes at Nice, but others
+are interesting. The first is appetising, the eighth is a mashie shot
+over a belt of trees, and the ninth is one of the longest I know, quoted
+on the cards at 605 yards and stretching away to the west, parallel with
+the sea-shore, and quite close to it so that a highly extravagant slice
+might deliver one's ball to the Mediterranean. However, we get there
+very quickly, and the hole is not so long as figures make it seem, for
+there is much run on the ball at Cagnes. One of the prettiest holes
+follows this one. The sociabilities here are excellent, and Nice itself,
+being rather a place of tumultuous excitement and very much within the
+Monte Carlo zone and influence, you may find it a beneficial thing in
+many ways to get out to the golf club as frequently as you can.
+
+In recent times they have effected a great improvement to the course at
+St. Raphael, and up at La Turbie, overlooking Monte Carlo, and in one of
+the finest situations conceivable, they have made a new one with
+considerable luxury of appointment. The climatic difficulties which they
+had to encounter here, at a height of nearly two thousand feet, were
+such that they had not dreamt of, much less reckoned upon, and for a
+time an appreciable portion of the money was being lost on the greens
+that was being gained through the reds and blacks in the casino down
+below, the two organisations not being without association with each
+other. The construction of this course stands out as one of the great
+engineering feats of golf. The top of the mountain on which it was
+determined that it should be made was a bare rocky waste. There was not
+even the necessary soil to grow the grass on. It was determined to take
+up the soil from a neighbouring valley, and three hundred men were
+employed to do the work. There was no railway, no horse or mule traction
+would get the stuff properly up that hillside, and so it was carried in
+baskets on the backs of those three hundred men. Next, rocks were
+blasted, the soil was spread, seeds were sown, and a result was awaited
+with anxiety. Then came down some tremendous rains, and down the
+hillside that soil was washed away, and most of the carrying up had to
+be done all over again. But labour and perseverance conquered, and at
+last the grass was made to grow, and the plain truth is that here now
+they have a course that for the Riviera is quite passably good, and most
+extraordinarily beautiful in its situation, the Alps being in the
+picture on three sides of it, and the Mediterranean down below on the
+fourth. On a fine day Corsica can just be seen. Now it is clearly
+indicated that the man who would demonstrate a perfect alliance with
+happy fortune must accomplish a grand double event. He should break the
+bank at Monte Carlo in the morning, and he should hole in one at La
+Turbie in the afternoon.
+
+This course and that of Sospel are a new and separate feature of Riviera
+golf. Formerly the whole strength of the golf of the littoral lay at its
+western end, and it was down near to the level of the sea. Now Monte
+Carlo and Sospel, chiefly Sospel, have moved the balance a little nearer
+to the east. Sospel is agreeable; and here again the construction of the
+course and its improvement to its present good state stand for a great
+triumph of skill and perseverance. Sospel is some thirteen miles behind
+Mentone in a valley of the Alpes Maritimes, and it is a quaint old
+place. If one never golfed at all, the journey there with all its
+thrills and excitements, and the picturesque little town that is at the
+end of it, are well worth a day of the time of any man. That journey may
+be made by motor-car, or now by tram, and one may safely say that there
+is no other golfing journey of its kind that can compare with it. As to
+the course, it possesses turf which is as good as anything to be found
+in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, and though the round is only a
+trifle over five thousand yards, and there is no hole of so much as four
+hundred, it is nice golf for all that, and the wooden club is needed
+frequently for the second shots.
+
+Here and there by this Mediterranean sea new courses are being made.
+They have one at Grasse. There will be others soon. The truth is that
+dawdling on the Riviera has gone quite out of fashion, and it has come
+to be understood at last that this wine-like air and the golden sunshine
+are better than the dim light and dank atmosphere of the gaming rooms. A
+few persons who go to the Riviera in the winter seem to be nervously
+afraid of giving up much of their time to golf. I have heard them say to
+themselves and others: "Is not the golf of London better than anything
+by the Mediterranean, and why then do we pay hundreds of francs to come
+here merely to play golf, and almost forget that we are in the south of
+France?" You will not forget that you are by the blue sea to the south
+of Europe. Not only is the glory of this part of the world in winter
+better understood and better appreciated by those who golf than by those
+who don't, but by far the most is made of their time by the players of
+the game. I do not see what is the use of going to the Riviera unless
+one golfs.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may seem a strange reflection, but it is the truth, that when at the
+Riviera for any length of time in the winter, and especially when at
+such a place as Hyères, one is inclined more to a thorough overhauling
+of one's game, a study of its weaknesses and a determination upon
+certain improvements, than at any other time. A good explanation is,
+however, possible. At holiday time like this one has the play
+continually. One is detached from all the workaday considerations of
+life at home. And then again one is thrown among new golfing friends
+from all parts of the world, people of infinite golfing variety and all
+charged with their own new ideas. We see every kind of style and every
+degree of skill, and if much of the style is bad and the skill is often
+deficient, there is something always to be learned or suggested. And it
+has been found as a matter of practical experience that at such places
+the majority of people fall to thinking of their ways of driving, often
+because their driving at the beginning out there is very bad, and that
+in turn is often due to the difficulty at first of sighting the ball
+properly in the pellucid atmosphere. But the whole system of driving is
+overhauled, and one would dare to suggest that proportionately to the
+number of players involved there are more conversions made from the
+plain grip to the overlapping on the Riviera in the season than anywhere
+else. Only this very morning as I write--a bitter cold morning when I
+shiver in proximity to an east coast links, and sigh for the passing of
+a few days more when the Channel shall be crossed and a glad journey
+south made on the P. L. M.--a letter comes up to me from a friend at
+Hyères demanding that all possible information printed and otherwise
+shall be transmitted on the subject of the grip, for there is a drastic
+revolution to be made in the case of one anxious golfer! In this matter,
+one of the most important in all practical golf as it surely is, there
+is a suggestion of great value to be made.
+
+The advantages of this grip as they are being discovered by more
+converts than ever before, are greater driving power owing to wrist work
+being easier, and also the fact that the left arm and hand pull the club
+through better and drive the ball as it ought to be driven, the
+overlapping reducing the right hand to a low subjection. No matter how
+good and careful the player may be, he who uses the two-V grip is
+certain sometimes to be in trouble with his right hand, which will
+constantly attempt to establish a lordship over the left, which when
+done is fatal to the good swing and the straight ball. Straight driving
+along a good, low trajectory, getting a ball with plenty of run on it,
+might almost be said to be characteristic of the overlappers, who are
+certainly off their drive less frequently than their brethren. These
+being the advantages of overlapping, how is it to be gained by those who
+have all along been addicted to the plain two-V way of gripping, and now
+find it impossible after many trials to convert themselves, these trials
+having been made in the most obvious way by hard practice on the teeing
+ground and with a brassey through the green? This is a good question to
+ask, but the answer is too often disappointing. Those who have started
+their golfing lives as old-fashioned two-V men seem fated to remain as
+such. As it happens, I believe I have come by the simplest and most
+effectual way of making the conversion; at all events, it is one that
+has never failed, though it has been tried in very many cases. It is
+simplicity itself. Nearly every man who tries to adopt this grip does so
+with his driver. It is natural, because it is for the driving that he
+most wants the grip, and he never thinks about it for anything else. In
+these experiments, however, he feels in constant danger of missing the
+ball--and sometimes does miss it--is most extremely uncomfortable,
+entirely lacking in confidence, and sooner or later comes to the
+conclusion that the overlapping grip, whatever its merits, is not for
+him. The sure and certain way is to begin with the putter, which is easy
+and also valuable, because the experience of the best players is that
+the overlapping grip improves one's putting at least as much as it does
+one's driving. You may become accustomed enough to this way of gripping
+the putter on the first day to try it in the most important match or
+competition. After two or three weeks of this way of putting, let the
+grip be tried for short running-up approaches, which will be
+satisfactorily accomplished after a very little practice, and then,
+after another week or two, let it be used for short lofted shots. The
+crisis comes when a swing of such length has to be made that the head of
+the club has to be raised more than elbow-high. A difficulty will be
+experienced at this stage, but it will soon be overcome, and when it is
+the way to overlapping with the driver is opened. Within a week the man
+is a complete and happy convert.
+
+On the general question of grips and gripping, which is high in the
+minds of golfers preparing for their season's campaign and setting their
+bags in order, one does feel that points of detail are not generally
+considered as they should be. In many cases the grip has really more to
+do with the effectiveness of a club than the head thereof, and yet
+perhaps not more than one golfer in four is properly suited. In general
+the grips are too short, too thick, and their thickness is too uniform.
+A very thick grip tends to take weight from the head, to spoil the feel
+and balance of the club, and to reduce the sense of control over it,
+but thickness in moderation is good for weak hands and fingers. Thin
+grips throw the weight into the head, give extra control, and improve
+the feel, but in excess need strong hands and fingers. The professionals
+nearly all use quite thin grips, their hands and fingers being very
+strong. But remember that the right hand and its fingers are stronger
+than the others, and also that that hand has less work to do in
+gripping, while as it is mainly concerned with steadying and guiding it
+is best suited by thinness of grip. Clearly, then, the grip should be
+thicker for the left hand than for the right, should, in fact, taper.
+This morsel of theory is overwhelmingly justified in practice, and that
+is what we mean when we say that most grips are too uniform in
+thickness, for they are nearly as thick for the right hand as for the
+left, and end suddenly with a kind of step just beyond the place where
+the right forefinger is applied. For hands of moderate strength let the
+circumference at the top for the left hand be 2-11/16 in. in diameter,
+and at the place where the right forefinger holds on let it be 2-1/2 in.
+From this point let it taper off gradually for about 4 in. until the
+leather has nothing underneath it, and then half an inch of wrapping on
+the bare stick brings the grip, as it were, to fade away into nothing.
+The full length of a grip of this kind may be about 12-1/2 in., and the
+tapering conduces greatly to the improved feel of the club and to a look
+that somehow makes for confidence. In the case of iron clubs the length
+and the decreased thickness towards the bottom are very good when taking
+a short grip of the club.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Matters appertaining to ladies' golf also come more prominently before
+the average male player of the game when he is on the Riviera with the
+sun than they do at other times. He sees more of it for the reason that
+his home exclusiveness cannot be tolerated there, and he sees much to
+make him think, even though the best lady players of the game do not
+often go that way. After watching a ladies' championship for the first
+time I left the place with some deep reflections. The idea that men have
+anything whatever to learn from ladies in regard to golf may seem
+preposterous, but it is not so. There may be a thousand times as many
+good men golfers as there are lady golfers who are as good, but there
+are just a few of the latter who are very good indeed, far better than
+they are generally supposed to be, and their style and methods are very
+well worth studying. When great events are stirring in golf the leading
+Scottish newspapers regularly print leading articles upon them, of so
+much general importance are they considered. After the ladies'
+championship in question, I read a leading article in a Glasgow daily
+newspaper, and it said that it was evident that if Miss Ravenscroft and
+Miss Cecil Leitch were to enter for the Amateur Championship and were to
+maintain their best Turnberry form the result would be disconcerting to
+those who hold that the scratch man can give the equally competent woman
+golfer half a stroke or thereabouts. With this I agree. The game of
+girls who can drive 250 yards, who can win 330-yard holes in threes to
+other girls' fours, who can do nine holes in 37, and so forth, needs to
+be taken quite seriously. The real importance of the matter is just
+this, that the best of these girls have arrived at a result which is
+superior to that attained by the average man golfer, and they have
+reached it by a system and a method which are practised by comparatively
+few male players. Their golfing principles and styles are quite
+different. Is there nothing we can copy from them? Surely.
+
+Now we hear very much about 300-yard drives, which one is half given to
+understand have become the regular thing with the most modern balls; but
+we know, as a matter of fact, that the average man does not drive
+anything like this distance, and that he would give a part of his income
+to be able to drive as far as some of the very best girls do at the
+championships. They achieve their distance not at all by hard hitting,
+for they hit quite gently, but by long, free swinging, perfect timing,
+and especially by full following through, that is to say, they swing in
+just the same way as it was necessary for the best men players to swing
+in the days of the gutty ball. They finish their swings with the club
+head and shaft right round their backs and their hands well up; I saw
+some of them who made nearly as perfect models of the golf swing as
+Harry Vardon does in the picture made of him by Mr. George Beldam and in
+the statuette by Mr. Hal Ludlow. Their style was most excellent and it
+was a fine thing to see. Necessity has caused it. These girls have not
+the strength of arm, wrist, and fingers to get a good length in the same
+way that men get, or try to get it now; the rubber-cored ball has not
+made the game so easy for them that they can dispense with an inch of
+the fullest swing that they can make. They seem to use their wrists but
+little, and all their movements are as smooth and harmonious as they can
+be. In this way they drive many yards farther than the average man
+golfer does. In the Amateur Championship you will not see one man in
+three drive the ball in this way now. Short swinging, imperfect
+following through, and a jerky, snappy kind of hitting have become
+almost general now that the balls can be so easily driven by the
+exercise of mere wrist power. The result is that good style in driving
+has become very rare among men. From the point of view of results
+obtained this is well enough for men who play in championships; they
+drive much farther than the best girls do, though I do not think that
+they are generally so straight. But the average golfer, consciously or
+unconsciously, copies his superiors, and most of them have now no style
+and do not know the sensuous pleasure that is obtained from a full
+swing, a clean hit, and the complete finish which seems to give a thrill
+to every nerve in the system. Then, if these men with all their jerks
+and wrist strain still do not get that length to which they may think
+they are entitled--as most of them do not--would it not be worth while
+to go back to the old way of better style and practise most assiduously
+at the full swing until they get it right? The very best girls show
+evidence of fine schooling in this matter. They hit the ball with
+marvellous cleanness. In a large proportion of cases the advice to male
+players in these days to swing short and hit hard is sound so far as
+mere results are concerned. But all men are not so strong in the forearm
+as they may think, and they do not get the length they seek, while
+another thing to remember is that the long complete swing when once
+mastered is less frequently thrown out of gear than the short one, which
+is a very difficult thing to keep in order.
+
+Then there is something to notice also in the preliminaries to the drive
+as the really good girls go through them. Not all players suspect what a
+deep influence the preliminary waggling of the club has on the
+subsequent swing. The influence is enormous, and the way that the
+majority of male players waggle is one that directly encourages jerky
+hitting. You will find that they tighten their wrists as they lay the
+club to the ball and move the head of the club back in two or three
+short, quick movements, rarely letting the head go forward over the
+ball. This is strongly conducive to a fast back-swing, a fast on-swing,
+and no follow through. It makes for the hard hit pure and simple. Now
+many girls who get long balls by big swings keep their wrists very loose
+in the waggling and allow the head of the club to swing easily backwards
+and forwards like a pendulum two or three times, four or five feet in
+front of and behind the ball each time, so that when the real swing is
+entered upon it is almost a continuation of the waggle and is made at
+much the same pace. This is a direct encouragement to the long swing,
+long follow through, and smooth rhythm of the entire movement. Between
+the man's waggle and his swing when done in the manner described there
+is no sort of connection whatever, and the driving is always much the
+poorer for the fact.
+
+Again, in the putting the ladies' play is full of morals for men. I do
+not hesitate to say, after an immense amount of observation, that the
+putting of many of the girls at their championship is quite as good as
+most of that we see in the men's Amateur Championship. They are deadly
+with the short putts up to two yards, and they hole the long ones with
+astonishing frequency. They come to their conclusions speedily as to
+what is the proper thing to do, and, having done so, they make their
+strokes with no further hesitation. We see very little tedious and
+laborious examination of the line, and, we may be sure, that they are
+the gainers for it. In the men's Amateur Championship the wearisome ways
+of some of the competitors are notorious. They study the line
+meditatively from north, south, east, and west, convince themselves of
+the existence of influences which do not in reality exist at all, next
+they hang over the ball with their putter addressed to it until one
+suspects them of having fallen into a cataleptic state, and then they
+miss the putt. The girls putt with a great confidence and accuracy. Of
+course these eulogiums refer only to the best of the lady golfers;
+between them and the others there is a very big gap, and it would be
+ridiculous to pretend that the average championship girl is yet within
+miles, as it were, of the corresponding man. But she has ways that the
+average man might often copy to advantage. Miss Cecil Leitch, who is
+surely the finest mistress of golfing method and style that her sex has
+ever yielded to the game, and is splendidly worthy of the championship
+that at last, after much waiting, she won at Hunstanton in the summer of
+1914, comes as near to being a perfect model as any one I can think of.
+She has graced a masculine way in golf with some feminine delicacy, and
+there is art, there is science, and there is rhythm in all her golfing
+movements. And she is splendidly accurate. Her iron play is a thing to
+be admired, and one might say of her as one cannot of all players who
+have been many years at the game, whatever may have been their success,
+that she is indeed a golfer.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And whoever is the champion of any particular period may be interested
+to know that at no time and place is he ever so much appreciated as away
+from his own country during the time when it is so wet and cold at home
+that people play comparatively little--less perhaps than they should do.
+As masters indeed they are properly regarded, and most dissectingly
+discussed are the champions when their disciples are abroad; and it is a
+good thing too, for if there must be influences on the game of humble
+players, let them come from the heights. In this matter many of us have
+always regarded John Henry Taylor as quite one of the best of models,
+despite what any one may say about a lack of beauty in his style.
+Taylor, five times champion, is indeed a very great master of this game,
+and he has special advantages as a model in that first he is deeply
+practical and can explain everything he does correctly (I know some of
+the greatest players who explain, but incorrectly, that is, they do not
+even know what they do themselves), can reason, and is almost, as one
+might say, a medium between the inspired play of Vardon and the
+mechanical way of Braid. He is one of the most thoroughly practical
+golfers who have ever played, and perhaps he has taught more other
+golfers than any one who has ever lived. I believe that to be the case.
+Taylor plays his wooden clubs with a round swing, and to-day some great
+authorities are disposed to condemn that style of swing utterly and
+declare that only the upright one is the real thing. But what about
+Hoylake in 1913? Then Taylor won his fifth championship, and he did it
+chiefly, as I believe, by his magnificent driving, done in such
+circumstances of terrible weather as would have made it next to
+impossible for any ordinarily good player to drive at all. Above
+everything, Taylor's golf is effective, and it is effectiveness we want.
+
+Once he explained in an interesting way how he viewed his own driving
+and how he gained the power that he does with his comparatively short
+swing. He is what we may call an open-stancer, and he insists that
+stance and character of swing must be adapted to each other in a special
+way, that for the open stance only a round-the-body swing is suitable,
+and that when a man plays an upright sort of swing with a square stance
+his right elbow must inevitably leave his side, and that is one of the
+worst and most frequent faults in driving, though one often little
+suspected or appreciated. If he stood square, says the champion, he
+feels he would lose direction; if his swing were upright he thinks he
+would lose distance, and if his right elbow were allowed to leave his
+side, then he is sure he would lose power; and direction, distance, and
+power are the three essentials of good driving. So he is all for the
+open stance and flat swing, and one of its chief merits and necessities
+is that in the back-swing the wrists do not permit the head of the club
+to move outwards and backwards in the line of flight behind the ball as
+it has been preached they should do, but begin to circle the club round
+at once, and by this means the right elbow is kept to the side. The
+importance of this elbow movement is very great. It might be safe to say
+that more than half the golfers of to-day do it wrongly and suffer
+accordingly. Taylor urges, of course, that the initial turn of the
+wrists at the very beginning of the swing is extremely important; and
+then as to the arm movement, he emphasises that the right elbow should
+be kept close to the side and should move round the side irrespective of
+any movement of the body. That makes for a smooth flat swing, and a
+sense of enormous gain in power is certainly the result. He says that he
+feels a gain of half as much power again by this movement in comparison
+with an upright swing. The initial wrist movement induces it. He warns
+those who think of trying to flatten their swing, and so gain some of
+the power which he certainly has, against allowing excessive body
+movement to which they will be very liable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ABOUT THE PYRENEES, AND THE CHARMS OF GOLF AT BIARRITZ AND PAU, WITH
+POSSIBILITIES FOR GREAT ADVENTURE.
+
+
+It is not a bad thing to be at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris on a night in
+early February, seeing a porter attach to one's baggage a scarlet label
+with the words "Pyrenees--_Côte d'Argent_" printed diagonally across it
+on a bright yellow band. It indicates a journey southwards to the sun,
+to a corner of the Bay of Biscay where there are Biarritz and St.
+Jean-de-Luz and Pau, and the Pyrenees queening over all. Golf was played
+in these parts some ages back; indeed it was here that the foundations
+of continental winter golf were laid long before any stir was made
+elsewhere. It is not always warm at Biarritz; often it is windy;
+sometimes it is very cold; but generally it is genial and pleasant,
+constantly sunny, and there is something about the place that conduces
+to a strong and healthy sporting feeling. It is a matter of taste. I am
+not here to write down that from the golfing point of view it is either
+better or worse than the Riviera. They are not the same. They have bad
+holes at each, and some good ones at both. Biarritz, which is one of the
+most popular golfing winter resorts in existence and retains its great
+popularity in spite of its rivals (really when I was there lately in the
+month of February they told me they had already taken £700 in fees that
+month, though there was then still a week to go), has some holes which,
+as we think upon them at home in England, seem quite shockingly bad.
+They are not so much bad as nearly improper. And yet when we are at
+Biarritz we do love these holes, as do the great players without
+exception, and as lief would we suggest the filling up of the Cardinal
+bunker at Prestwick and the flattening of that range of Himalayas at the
+same glorious golfing place as touch an inch of the face of the Cliff
+hole at Biarritz. The course has the gravest faults, but it is very
+enjoyable to play upon in February, and in the winds that blow there one
+needs to be playing uncommonly well to get round in figures reasonably
+low. On the other hand, the golf at Nivelle by St. Jean-de-Luz and Pau
+is among the winter's best in Europe. There is indeed much difference
+between the coast of silver and the coast of blue, and the contrast
+comes out strongly in the golf. There is less of music and flowers and
+softness of life, less languor at Biarritz than at Cannes and Nice and
+other Riviera places. The games are everything, and the easy strolls and
+the social dalliances are much less. In the morning we seldom see the
+young ladies in fine costumes bought in Paris. They flit fast about the
+streets and along up the Avenue Edouard VII. in short skirts and the
+simplest _semi-négligé_ dress, each with a brightly coloured
+jersey-jacket of a very distinctive colour--a brick red, a sulphur
+yellow, a cobalt blue, something that does not hide itself. Every one is
+keen and openly admits it. And the golf club beyond the lighthouse is a
+great institution, and it is splendidly governed by Mr. W. M. Corrie,
+the honorary secretary.
+
+Biarritz golf is distinctly peculiar. The course is a short one; it
+offers a generous continental supply of holes that can be reached with a
+good shot from the tee (but they must be good and well-directed shots,
+for the guards of the greens are exacting), and the turf and putting
+greens are as good as one has any right to expect them to be in the
+south of France. These are generalities. Now the course, like the old
+Gaul of Caesar, is in three parts. We begin the play and go on for some
+seven holes on a flat tableland; then we plunge down over the cliffs to
+the level of the sea, come up again to the tableland at the thirteenth
+hole, and so finish on the level. One may leave the first part of the
+play out of consideration. It is neat, but one often feels the desire to
+be "getting down below," where there is better sport and much scope for
+skill and enterprise. At last we come to a teeing ground on the edge of
+the steep white cliff which is some hundred and thirty feet in height.
+It is a drive-and-iron hole that is before us, and quite a pretty thing,
+a hole that for feature and natural beauty it would not be easy to
+improve upon. To a part of the underland, where the drive must be
+placed, has been given the name of "Chambre d'Amour," and tales for
+sorrow and weeping are told of it, of lovers being caught by the tide
+and dying there. The green is away in a corner of the course, tucked up
+in the shadow of a towering lighthouse, and the bounding waves of Biscay
+come rolling almost to its very edge. If we are not convinced that it is
+technically perfect, this is at all events a charming hole, one of the
+most picturesque we can find in France, At the lighthouse we turn about,
+play some plainer things along the level of the sea, and then come to a
+piece of golf which is famous all over the world. The ascent to the
+higher surface has to be made at the thirteenth, and it is done at what
+is known to every one as the Cliff hole.
+
+Nearly all who have never even seen it have heard of the Cliff hole of
+Biarritz, have studied pictures of it, and speculated upon its peculiar
+difficulties. No hole on the continent of Europe has nearly such a
+reputation; indeed, it is perhaps the only one with a special celebrity.
+I have been asked questions about it in America. I have seen and played
+it, examined it thoroughly, and thought it out. It is a queer thing,
+quite different from any other hole I know. It needs such a shot to play
+it properly as is not demanded elsewhere. And yet it requires absolute
+skill, the proper shot must be played and played thoroughly well, and it
+is practically impossible to fluke it. Why, then, should this not be
+reckoned a good golfing hole? The circumstances are these: The teeing
+ground is on the lower level, and it is only some fifty yards from the
+base of the cliff. The ground in between is rough and stony. The cliff
+here is about forty yards in height, and, if not vertical in the face,
+bulges outwards frowningly at the top, while a thin stream of water
+trickling down at one side seems to add a little more to the
+fearsomeness of the thing. At the top edge of the cliff there is grassy
+ground sloping quickly upwards for about a dozen yards until a line of
+wire is reached, and there the green begins. The fact that the green
+(which is tolerably large and in two parts, an upper and a lower) then
+slopes downwards away from the player does not make matters easier.
+Beyond it is another precipice, but wire netting is there to save the
+ball from this, and there is some wooden palisading to keep it out of
+trouble on the left. Then there is a local rule saying that if the ball
+reaches the top of the cliff, but does not pass the wire, it must be
+teed again, with loss of distance only, the man not being allowed to
+play it from the tee side of the wire. (He would do so at peril of
+toppling over the cliff!) But all these things do not make this awful
+hole much easier in the play. One day I sat on the edge of the cliff and
+watched the people playing it, and the ball that reached the green and
+stayed there was a rarity. It can be done. Braid and Taylor and Vardon
+would do it all the time, and it is no trick shot that is wanted. You
+might hit hard at the ground in front of the wire and make the ball
+trickle on, but that would call for more than human accuracy. Or you
+might sky your ball up to the heavens and let it fall straight down on
+to the green, and that would be superb. But champion Taylor would take
+his mashie and play, perhaps, some fifteen yards above the cliff with
+all the cut that he could put upon the ball, and then he would be
+putting for a two. A difficult hole follows, but after that the work is
+easier.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a pair of prism glasses looking Spainwards to the left, we may just
+discern the quaint and quiet little town of St. Jean-de-Luz. It is one
+of the best of the winter places for golf, for health and sunshine, and
+no nonsense. The little town is thoroughly Basque, and the player in his
+hours away from the game will have a good satisfaction in wandering
+about it and peering into such places as the old thirteenth-century
+church which is a perfect specimen of the religious architecture of the
+Basques, and such a thing in churches as you would not see elsewhere. It
+was here that Louis XIV. came for his wedding two and a half centuries
+back. And in this locality we have three courses to play upon--three!
+There is the old one of St. Barbe, which is a nine-holes affair, and has
+one hole--the third--called the "Chasm," which is a very strong piece of
+golf, for the drive is over a deep fissure in the rocks, with the sea
+running in below. St. Barbe is the second oldest course in France--Pau
+being the oldest--and there are some fears, perhaps exaggerated, that it
+may not be in existence for many years more. Another of the three is the
+course of the St. Jean-de-Luz club at Châlet du Lac, and this also is
+one of nine holes. Until a little while since there were twelve, but
+then three were captured by the terrible builders, who seem to oppress
+the golfers all over the world; but the club received some compensation
+in having a new and neat little club-house erected for them at the
+landlord's expense. And here also they make the claim that "the scenery
+surrounding the course is probably the finest to be obtained from any
+course in Europe." Certainly it is very good. The nine holes are very
+tolerable in golfing quality. Here and there the driving must be very
+straight. A pull, for instance, at the third, will deliver the unhappy
+ball to the Bay of Biscay, and the sea will bang it about the rocks for
+a long time after. At the fifth, again, one must respect the ocean when
+approaching. Generally, however, the holes are somewhat easy, and do not
+worry so much as to hinder appreciation of the surrounding views, which
+are indeed magnificent. Out one way is the grand panorama of the
+snow-topped Pyrenees, and the light and colour effects upon them change
+at nearly every hour throughout the day. Below is the pretty harbour and
+town of St. Jean-de-Luz. Away to the west is the great expanse of the
+Atlantic, framed here at the course with a wildly rocky coast, and up
+along to the north is a rough fringe of shore, the innermost corner of
+the Bay of Biscay, which leads the eyes out to the most distant point,
+where a cluster of buildings gleams in the sunlight, and the tall, white
+lighthouse beyond them indicates that the place is Biarritz.
+
+But Nivelle, the course that rises up from the bank of the broad river
+of that name, is the chief course of the group and quite a wonder of
+golfing France. When I first saw it and inquired upon its origin I felt
+that here was something which was undoubtedly among the best in Europe,
+and yet only five or six years ago all the land, except a small piece
+which is occupied by two of the eighteen holes, was bare soil on which
+cabbages, turnips, and other edibles were being grown. Listen to the
+story of the creation of Nivelle. One day Mr. Frank Jacobs, the
+secretary of the St. Jean-de-Luz Club, and a Spanish doctor, went
+exploring the country round, and they hastened to Count O'Byrne to tell
+him that there was ground on the banks of the stream Nivelle which
+looked to have the possibilities of such a full-sized golf course as was
+needed then. He agreed with them. They were men of keen discernment; for
+even then while a little of that land was pasture the rest was under
+cabbages and other growths. It was ascertained that a hundred and sixty
+acres could be bought for six thousand pounds, but such a sum of money
+was not at hand. Count O'Byrne told the local hotel-keepers the truth
+that unless there was a first-class golf course there St. Jean-de-Luz
+would lose in the race for winter popularity, and he asked them to
+guarantee the money in the first place, a company to relieve them
+afterwards. They did so accordingly, and the land was secured; but the
+farmers could not be turned off at once, and some time was lost thereby.
+When they came to make the course they followed an interesting and, as
+we would think, an extraordinary procedure. The farmers, recovering from
+their grief and resentment, gave up to the incoming golfers a priceless
+secret. They said that if they would leave the bare land alone to look
+after itself it would from its own sources grow for them the most
+beautiful grass for their purposes that they could ever dream of on the
+happiest summer's night. So the Count and his comrades gathered their
+men about them, the land was raked and smoothed out, and then they
+borrowed the town roller, being the heaviest thing of the kind in the
+district, to flatten it down. And so they left it and waited. Sure
+enough up came the tender blades of grass, and in a season there was a
+thick coating there, fine, beautiful turf, and I can answer for it that
+it is nice to the touch of the feet and excellent for the game. The
+climate in these parts is most times a little moist and better for the
+production and preservation of golfing turf than that of the Riviera.
+The hotel-keepers were soon relieved of the full responsibility by a
+company floated for ten thousand pounds, the capital afterwards being
+increased to twelve thousand, but they were so much enamoured of the
+project, believed in it so utterly, that they and the tradesmen took up
+as many shares as they could get. But some great personal driving force
+was needed, and it was found. A Dundee gentleman, a keen golfer and a
+great lover of this sweet spot in France, Mr. W. R. Sharp, came forward
+and increased his commanding interest in the club and the course, and he
+has done wonders for them. That he is president of the club is a good
+thing for the club. Now there is a charming club-house; Arnaud Massy,
+once open champion, has a pretty villa for himself close by, some
+hundred and forty golfers are playing on the course at the busy
+time--and play goes on all through the year--and only four years after
+the course was opened the company was able to pay a dividend. So I say
+that this is a miracle of golf.
+
+Of course, the story is not complete at this. Fine turf and a prosperous
+club do not necessarily make good holes. But St. Jean-de-Luz has holes
+as good as most in Europe. They would even be good on a first-class
+inland course in Britain. They are, thanks to the broad undulations of
+the land, good in character. The round is opened with a fine two-shotter
+of a full four hundred yards, with an incline against the player from
+the tee. The drive must be properly placed, and that is the case nearly
+all the way round. The second is a pretty short hole; the third presents
+a fearsome drive across a yawning quarry; at the fourth the return over
+it is made in the progress to the longest hole, one of five hundred and
+fifty yards, and so on to the end, some of the middle holes being very
+good, the seventeenth a fine full one-shot hole, and a good drive and
+iron of three hundred and eighty yards downhill to terminate. The view
+from the seventeenth and eighteenth tees, the town of St. Jean-de-Luz
+shining in the sun, the Nivelle pressing itself into it, and the pretty
+harbour white-flaked with the waves, is peaceful and pleasant, and it
+gives that sense of "going home" which one always likes to have when
+playing the last holes of a round.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The game itself is not everything in the golfing life; it attaches other
+occupations and diversions as necessities to itself which are all added
+to the sum of "a day's golf" and make of it a thing of adventure and
+time packed with variety of deed and thought. There is the meeting and
+the parting; the lunch time and--everything! Chiefly there is the
+journey, and has it been properly considered how golf and the car have
+been linked together for a magnificent combination of sporting joy? In
+the remembrances of every player there must be happy and stirring
+episodes of motoring to and from the game. I have hundreds of them,
+apart from all those countless pretty spins on the outskirts of London
+town. Motoring for golf is an entirely different thing from motoring for
+nothing.
+
+The golf-motoring out from Paris to Fontainebleau and the other places
+round the capital of France is unforgettable, and always will there be
+clear cut in my mind the details of an expedition I once made to this
+Nivelle, St. Jean-de-Luz, at a time when lounging golfless in the north
+of Spain. It is not frequently that we go crossing frontiers in
+motor-cars and having our clubs examined with wonderment and irritating
+inquiry by officers of the _douane_ twice in the day, going and
+returning, for just two rounds of the best of games. Nor is it a common
+thing that in one day English golfers should speed along in a German car
+from Spain to France and from France back again to Spain to play on a
+splendid course with French and Scottish opponents--a considerable
+mixture, if you like. I was idling at San Sebastian when the aforesaid
+Mr. Sharp, with such thought and kindness as golfers display towards
+each other, gave greeting and said, "Come to Nivelle again for a day of
+play." But how? It was thirty miles away, and those trains, with changes
+at Irun and Bayonne, would be most fearfully slow. "Bother the trains!"
+said Sharp, "what are motors for, and particularly what may be my own
+car for? Say the time when you will have risen and bathed and taken your
+_café complet_, and it will have gone over to San Sebastian by then." So
+it came about that it was waiting at the door of my hotel at eight
+o'clock in the morning. Coats were buttoned up, pipes were lighted, and
+when the first quarter was being chimed from the church steeples we were
+already doing our thirty to forty miles an hour through the hilly
+suburbs of San Sebastian. There are such hills in Spain and France
+between San Sebastian and St. Jean-de-Luz as you can hardly think of;
+but the speed dial showed that we flashed up some of them at thirty and
+darted down the other side at sixty-five. Great hills to the left with
+jagged skylines and strange formations as go by such names as "Camel's
+back"; and such sweet vales with mountains framing them over on the
+right! Hereabouts is some of the prettiest scenery of Spain, and I hope
+not to forget how on that glorious morning the mists of the new day
+dissolved in the warming sunlight, and the opalescent gossamer that had
+clung about those peaks of Spain gave place to strong blues and greys,
+and then to shimmering rose. At Irun, on the Spanish side of the
+frontier, the car's papers had to be shown, then we bowled over the
+dividing river, and at Hendaye the Frenchmen asked their questions and
+did their looking into things. Then up a steep hill for the last, and in
+a few minutes we were gliding down into St. Jean-de-Luz, all of this
+heartening business done within the hour. At the end of the day, two
+rounds done, when the sun was setting, I was swung again over those
+Spanish tracks, and just when the light had completely failed and a few
+spots of rain came beating upon the glass the sixty horses in the Benz
+had done their duty. I opened the casement of my room at the Maria
+Christina; soft sounds from the sea floated in, and soothed one to a
+pensive mood.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of the golf of Pau is curious. Here, so far away from Britain,
+far from Paris, four hours even from the coast at Biarritz, inland and
+hugging closely to the Pyrenees, we have positively one of the oldest
+golf clubs in the whole world. At the beginning there was Blackheath,
+and then there were the Edinburgh Burgess, the Honourable Company, the
+Royal and Ancient, Aberdeen, and two or three other clubs. Golf, growing
+up, made its first leap across the seas to Calcutta in 1829, and
+seventeen years afterwards it settled in Bombay. It first landed in
+Europe in 1856, and was definitely and thoroughly established at Pau,
+and has remained there flourishing ever since. This circumstance is the
+more curious when we reflect that at that time there was no golf about
+London except at Blackheath. The Royal Wimbledon and the London Scottish
+Clubs were then unborn. Such great institutions now as the Royal
+Liverpool Club at Hoylake and the Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! were
+undreamt of, and a boy child might have been born to a golfer at Pau and
+grown almost to middle age before the Royal St. George's Club at
+Sandwich was begun. Scots, of course, were at the bottom of all this
+pioneering work. The early Blackheath golfers were Scots; they carried
+the game to Westward Ho!; they fostered it in India, and some of them
+went off with it to Pau, where they liked to spend the winter in the
+warm sunshine and in air which for sweet softness is almost
+incomparable. Over the fireplace in the smoking-room of the club-house
+is a picture of three of the founders of the club, who were still living
+in 1890--Colonel Hutchinson, Major Pontifex, and Archbishop Sapte.
+Another of those founders was Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Lloyd-Anstruther.
+Thus it happens that the charm of age and long settlement hang upon the
+golf of Pau as they do upon no other golf club in Europe. Here, as not
+elsewhere, you feel impressed upon you the dignity of golf, realise that
+it is not a thing of to-day or of yesterday, and there are almost the
+same deep pleasure and elevation of spirit and feeling when you come to
+such a place after wandering among newnesses elsewhere as there are in
+abiding for a while at St. Andrews or North Berwick in October, the
+crowds then being gone away, after a course of southern golf of the most
+recent preparation.
+
+The club-house at Pau is of the kind you would expect to discover at a
+good club of long and honourable standing up-country in England. The
+attributes of age and tradition are to be found within it. On a wall is
+a painting twelve feet long depicting the leading golfers of Pau in
+1884, assembled on the course, and it was done by that Major Hopkins who
+did such work, now celebrated, concerning the earliest golfers at
+Westward Ho! gathered by their iron hut. In this picture of Pau there
+are some eminent golfers shown, such as Colonel Kennard, not long since
+dead, who was field-marshal of the Royal Blackheath Club; but the artist
+leads the eye to the gaunt figure of Sir Victor Brooke, a tam-o'-shanter
+on his head, addressing the ball on the tee in the way of a determined
+man. Sir Victor, for four or five years captain of the club, was the
+lion of the golf of Pau in those days, and when a match book, now lying
+musty in a corner, was started his was the first entry that was made in
+it. The course is beautifully situated on the Billère plain, a mile or
+so to the west of the middle of the town; and in the unusual absence of
+a friendly car it is a pleasant walk through a shaded avenue of lofty
+beeches in the splendid Parc du Château.
+
+One is a little puzzled to estimate the quality of this course, being
+faced with a kind of semi-official printed statement that "Pau is
+undoubtedly the best course on the continent" which to some degree is
+intimidating. The turf, grown on a dark, sandy soil, is excellent, and
+more than fifty years of play upon it have given it the firmness and
+crispness that we miss elsewhere. The holes are of good length, well
+arranged, and not easy. Yet pancake was never flatter than the central
+part of the course, and with the very dullest and plainest kind of
+mid-Victorian bunkering--three low, straight grassy banks in line with
+each other right across the fairway--the golf hereabouts is less good to
+the eye, at all events, than it is to the spirit in the play. The first
+hole, a long one, with a road running diagonally across near the green,
+close to which there is a little cottage, somehow by its surroundings
+recalls memories of old "Mrs. Forman's" at ancient Musselburgh, and the
+second is a short hole of quality. From the fourth tee the line of the
+course bends round to the right, and for half a dozen holes we are away
+from that central part; there are ups and downs in the land that give
+more colour to the golf, and here and there are clumps of bushes that
+need consideration. All the time we are close to the bank of the River
+Gave, and at length, near to a point where a wild stream plunges into
+it, we cross to a spit of land between them and play a few holes there.
+They are nice holes. The ground heaves and rolls, and there must be good
+calculation and accuracy in approaching. Another stream runs through
+this isolated part of the course, and the green of the fourteenth hole
+closes to a point where two running waters nearly meet and there is a
+rutty road alongside. It is a pretty green, the situation is cunning and
+delightful, and that fourteenth hole is one of the best in France. Not a
+doubt about it--Pau is very good in parts. But we turn up a note on the
+golf in a little guide to Pau, and read: "Owing to the nature of the
+soil and their admirable preservation, the links at Pau compare
+favourably with the course at St. Andrews, in Scotland, where the
+conditions are almost ideal." O, Pau!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now Pau is one of those places where the golf, excellent and admired, is
+not domineering, as one might say. You take it, you enjoy it, and yet
+you live in an easy contentment after your game without raving about it.
+It is a delightful little of a most happy and contenting whole. That is
+because Pau of all places on this planet makes one feel rested,
+contented, peacefully, languorously happy, and that is a most blessed
+state at which to arrive after a long season's course of tubes and
+taxi-cabs, noises and disturbances, crushes and crashes, late nights
+and far too early mornings, and, yes--for they also come with the burden
+of the Londoner--heavily bunkered five-hundred-yard-holes near our
+excellent London town. The air is famous for its sweet soothing
+properties. It wraps itself round your tired limbs, it steals into your
+nervy senses, and it comforts you. Pau lets you quietly down, rests you,
+gives you sleep, stills those jagged nerves that twitched so much in
+town. Every one says so, and it is true. One morning I gossiped on the
+course with Mr. Charles Hutchings, the wonderful man who won the Amateur
+Championship at Hoylake in 1902, and who has known what nerves are
+since. He told me he has now been wintering at Pau for the last twenty
+years, and it is the only place that is any good to him. "Before I come
+to Pau, and even when I am at Biarritz," said he, "my nerves are like
+this"--and he slowly passed his right hand up along his left arm from
+the hand to the shoulder--"and when I am at Pau they are like this," he
+added, and he smoothed the arm back again from the shoulder to the
+fingers. It was as if he had been stroking a cat the wrong way and the
+right one--that was the idea. Biarritz, so very bracing, certainly makes
+you jumpy, and many of us have played far better at Pau than at
+Biarritz; in fact, we find that at Pau we can hit the ball as cleanly
+and with as much confidence as anywhere.
+
+That reflection leads us when gazing abstractedly upon those Pyrenees,
+which are so good for thought, to consider the effect of climate upon
+one's game. Undoubtedly the effect is great, and yet it is neither
+appreciated nor properly considered. After working hard for a spell in
+town we say we will go for a weekend's golf, and, when we can, we choose
+a highly bracing place, because we believe it is good for us and "bucks
+us up." But do you remember how often the golf that we play at such
+places is so extremely disappointing? The "bucking up" seems to have
+failed. Take Deal, for example. There is hardly a course in the world
+that I like and admire as much as this; but that strong air of Deal
+upsets the game of nearly every man at the beginning. Pau is supposed to
+be a little relaxing, but, except for the fact that we do not eat so
+much as at Biarritz, we hardly notice it. It soothes us, quietens us
+down, reduces our boiler and engine arrangements to low pressure, and
+_voila!_ our game comes on, and it does so because the question of
+playing well or ill by a man who knows the game is nearly always a
+question of the steadiness of his nerves, and there are fine shades of
+this steadiness that we do not always realise. That is why we play well
+at Pau, and it makes us think sometimes that the relaxing places have
+not had full credit for their golfing quality hitherto.
+
+There is a general conspiracy among all things at Pau to rest and soothe
+the tired man. There are the bells. How can they affect the golf? you
+ask. See, then. We know of the fame in song of "The Bells of Lynn" and
+those of Aberdovey too; but it seems to me that the bells of Pau should
+have an equal celebrity. They are excellent. Alongside the hotel at
+which I stay at Pau a fine church steeple towers up, and there is in it
+a splendid belfry with skilful ringers to use it. Sometimes their
+performances wake us before our proper time in the morning, which is the
+first effect. Then on some days and nights the ringers practise a kind
+of bell music, which holds one spellbound. It begins slowly and quietly
+with a few hesitating notes in the bass. Soon there is an answering echo
+in the treble, and then it all gradually increases in time and volume
+until in three or four minutes a veritable torrent of stormy music is
+crashing out from the tower and flinging itself out to the Pyrenees.
+And then it is as if the crisis passes, the bell music dies away again,
+and at the end there is but the thin little tinkle of a treble bell
+sounding lonely in the night. There are other fine belfries in the town;
+but, more than that, there are little churches all along the hill that
+frames our course on its northern side, and these have good bells as
+well, and they all chime the hours and the quarters--and all at
+different times! When one set of chiming begins just as you reach the
+green, you know that listening for the others will so much distract you
+that three or four putts may be needed, while the other man, being very
+phlegmatic, is down in two for a win again. There is one of these
+churches with its bells which has cost me many holes; its chime for the
+quarters is exactly the first four notes of the good old tune, "Home to
+Our Mountains." It strikes once for the quarter, twice for the half,
+three times for the three-quarters, and four times for the full hour,
+and, with the other two quick notes of the line missing, it always seems
+incomplete, and always irritates. If I am just about to swing when these
+bells begin to chime I see a catastrophe before me.
+
+If there were no Pyrenees there would be no golf at Pau; I doubt if
+there would be Pau. Those glorious hills, beyond which are the castles
+and gold of Spain, make an almost matchless view, and they are so
+strong, so insistent, that they seem to dominate us in every
+consideration. If you should tell me that mountains that are more than
+twenty miles away can have nothing to do with the golfer's life and
+game, I ask you to go to Pau and be surprised. Those far-away hills give
+us rest, and they calm us to those moods of reflection to which, as
+golfers, we are so well inclined. From the window of my favourite room
+at Pau, I look right out on to the majestic chain, and have the best
+view of it that is to be had. Below is the Boulevard des Pyrénées, more
+than a mile in length. Beyond there is a valley, and beyond that the
+Pyrenees rise up to one long wonderful white-topped line. Looked at in
+this way they seem so very near, and yet their nearest point is more
+than a dozen miles away, and there are peaks four thousand feet in
+height which seem within easy walking range, and yet are distant forty
+miles. From one end to the other we look out upon a length of some
+thirty miles of these peaks, and indeed the effect is most enchanting.
+This is the view that I get at its very best from my little window high
+above the boulevard, and it is the view that brings scores of thousands
+of pounds of English money to be spent in the winter and the spring at
+Pau. It is a view that never palls, for it is never the same. To our
+eyes those great Pyrenees are always changing--kaleidoscopic in variety
+of shapes and colours. There are mysteries of the light and atmosphere
+about them which make for perpetual curiosity and wonderment. In the
+morning when we rise our first thought is as to what the Pyrenees will
+look like to-day, and gazing out from our little window we see them all
+done up afresh in new colours and shapes by Nature. They change as the
+hours pass, and then one is curious to know what new surprise the sunset
+will have in store. Sometimes in the morning they stand out bold in
+black and white, just as if they were plain and simple Pyrenees. In the
+middle of the chain two great points of peaks rise up from all the rest,
+and they are in the straight line out from the lofty window where I sit.
+They are the Grand Pic and the Petit Pic du Midi d'Ossau, and they are
+the pet favourites of all of us who gaze out southwards to the range
+beyond which the Spaniards dwell. The greater peak curls over a little
+at the top towards the lesser one, that seems always to be snuggling up
+close to it, and they look to us always to be like a lover hill and his
+timid lady. Another morning all these mountains will be of a sapphire
+blue. Next day they may be rosy red. But the best effects are those of a
+phantom kind. Now and then those Pyrenees seem to have gone away to a
+hundred miles beyond, and we see them rather dimly, but still with their
+outlines well defined. They look like ghost mountains, and in
+imagination we can peer through them to a nothingness beyond. Yet more
+curious, there are mornings, fine and bright in Pau, with everything
+shining in the sunlight, when there are no Pyrenees at all! There is
+that little low range of hills in front, with the chalets and the
+chateaux all plainly to be seen, and the light seems as good as ever it
+was in southern France; but the Pyrenees, where have they gone? Not a
+trace of them is left, and we are lonely, disconsolate. It is as if a
+jealous Providence had wrapped them up in the night and carried them off
+to another land where their eternal solitude would not be hindered by
+the touring man and woman. But they come back again by night, and their
+gradual reappearance is a thing for happy contemplation. Yet for the
+greater glory and richness of colour the evening sunset effects are the
+best of all. Then from the corner at the right the setting sun shines
+along the hidden valley between the little hills and mountains beyond,
+and it is as if in that unseen place below, millions of fierce lights
+had been set burning and shining up the Pyrenees as rows of hidden
+electric bulbs are sometimes used to throw a soft, weird glow upon a
+ceiling and cause it to be reflected back again beneath. Then the
+Pyrenees are as an ethereal vision; their base is like a golden band and
+their tops like filmy gossamer, so that these seem to us to be not
+mountains of the world at all, but high hills of heaven itself. And away
+in the west the sun sets in a burning Indian red, and the thin crescent
+of a new moon, with an attendant star, rises in the firmament. It is
+this that I look upon from my own crow's nest at Pau when my tramping of
+the day is done.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day at Pau a voice was raised in our little party and it said, "Let
+us get up closer to those splendid Pyrenees"; but another said, "Where
+should we get our golf?" It was answered that there was golf everywhere,
+and there must be some right alongside those white-capped peaks.
+Argelès! We remembered. It was advertised and well recommended as a good
+course, "open all the year round," and laid in the most delightful
+situation, the Pyrenees going up from its very edge. The prospect
+sounded well. We decided at night that on the morrow we would proceed
+with our bags of clubs to Argelès, and the porter at our hotel gave full
+directions for getting there, which made it seem a very simple business.
+It appeared that it was about thirty miles from Pau to Lourdes, and with
+the journey two-thirds done we were to change trains there. But, short
+as the distance was, it was to take us two hours. Our train would start
+at twenty minutes to nine in the morning. The match of the day, with
+four golfers implicated, was accordingly made overnight, and
+anticipation of the joys of Argelès became keen. All this was well, but
+when three of us had slept and were mightily refreshed, certain hitches
+and accidents began to happen. The fourth party to our contract still
+slumbered heavily at a quarter-past eight, and being then reminded, by
+sundry taps, of the prevailing circumstances, he muttered indistinctly
+that he was not to be tempted from his situation by the opportunity of
+playing two rounds on any course in Paradise. So we left him snoring,
+piglike, there, and we were only three.
+
+We got to Lourdes and descended from the train. Troubles arose
+forthwith. The station-master blandly observed, and as it seemed with a
+hardly hidden smile (how is it that non-golfers of all classes always do
+seem to be made happy upon the contemplation of a golfer being suddenly
+robbed of his game?), that there was no train from there to Argelès
+until the afternoon, the service which the hotel porter had in mind not
+beginning until three days later. By the same token the return train
+which we reckoned on was non-existent, and he expressed doubts about our
+sleeping that night at Pau if we persisted in what he could not help
+regarding as a very mad enterprise born of too much enthusiasm. We
+thanked him, and went out into the streets of Lourdes to see what could
+be done. Truly, we were only ten miles from Argelès, even if the road
+was through the mountains. And it was a fine day.
+
+Suddenly, and as it seemed from nowhere, up came carriages from all
+parts of the compass, each drawn by a pair of horses, the coachmen all
+loudly soliciting the favour of driving us to Argelès, which they
+explained was fifteen miles away--a deliberate exaggeration. The first
+man to whip up to us asked for twenty francs for the single journey, and
+the others were amazed at his impudence. Another offered to take us for
+fifteen, and a third cabby came down at once to twelve. Then they all
+did so, and the market seemed to settle at that price, a great gathering
+of coachmen surrounding us and expatiating on the superior merits of
+their various horses and the comfort of their vehicles. It was a great
+spectacle, this golfers' carriage market at Lourdes! At last the first
+man to make an offer to us, suddenly, in a mood of desperation, came
+down to ten francs, and we closed with him, not so much because of the
+saving of an odd franc or two, but because his pair of bays certainly
+did seem to have more fast trotting in them than any of the others. It
+was such a glorious journey down the valley of Argelès as golfers seldom
+make, huge, rocky, snow-capped mountains rising up from either side of
+the winding road. Leaving Lourdes there were two high hills on the left,
+one surmounted with a single cross and the other with three crosses of
+"Calvary" standing out clearly against the sky. Then, later, from the
+bottom of the valley a stumpy hill suddenly rose up in the middle, an
+old keep of mediaeval times on the top of it, and after that the great
+peak of the Viscos, with the pass to Gavernie on one side of it and that
+to Cauterets on the other were presented. Soon afterwards we rattled
+down the little main street of Argelès, and lunched at the chief hotel.
+There was then a ten minutes' drive to the course, and our coachman--a
+local fellow, and not the one who drove us from Lourdes--stopped at
+various cottages on the way and shouted out inquiries as to whether
+Adolphe or Marie or Jeanne was at home. He was getting caddies for us,
+as he explained there would be none otherwise. Eventually from different
+places we picked up three--two little girls and a boy--who hung on to
+the back of the vehicle and proceeded with us to the appointed place.
+The course has great possibilities, but as yet they are thinly
+developed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE GAME IN ITALY, AND THE QUALITY OF THE COURSE AT ROME, WITH A SHORT
+CONSIDERATION OF THE VALUE OF STYLE.
+
+
+The other day, when we sat on the deck of a little steamer plying on the
+lake of Como, contented in warm spring sunshine with a sublime panorama
+of blue water and white-topped Alps, I was led to recall some of the few
+remarks which a shrewd and pungent commentator on life and men, the late
+Henry Labouchere, had made about our game, and, as he was not himself a
+golfer, and not the most tolerant of men despite his certain breadth of
+mind, it may be guessed that they were not complimentary to the game. We
+had left Varenna, and the little ship was paying its dutiful respects to
+Bellagio and Menaggio and such like places of an Italian fairyland.
+Hereabouts, as I remembered, Mr. Labouchere had lived in the proper
+season, and it came about some seven years back that a golf course--and
+a nice course too--was established near by, and the local hotel-keeper,
+in proper enterprise, ran a conveyance each day regularly at a certain
+time from his door to the club-house. Radical as he was--if he really
+was--Mr. Labouchere disliked this disturbance of the old peace and
+harmony of his lakeland retreat, and affected to see something vulgar in
+it. This wit and cynic, who once, answering an inquiry, said that he
+liked a certain lady of his acquaintance well enough but would not mind
+if she dropped down dead in front of him on the carpet, certainly wished
+that golf had never grown into the human scheme of things, and he
+complained loudly of its invasion here. He suggested that Italy was now
+passing to the dogs. Had he lived a little longer he would surely have
+played at Menaggio, and we could have assured him then that golf in
+Italy was long before his time, and would certainly be of good help to
+the country for long after. It is one of the curious facts of golfing
+history that the game was played in Italy before any golf club, except
+one, was definitely established in Scotland, the only exception being
+the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, and lo! it was played there by a
+Scot, and a Scot so good as the bonnie Prince Charlie himself. When I
+first went to the Villa Borghese in Rome, I remembered, on approaching
+it through the park, that when Lord Elcho went there in 1738 he found
+the Prince playing in the gardens. Many courses now exist in different
+parts of this beautiful Italy, and the country has begun to take its
+place in the great forward movement in European golf. It has begun
+slowly; but now, as I have seen it, does really advance.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little fable is quickly told. A wise father had sent his son, for the
+good of his mind, to Rome, and when the boy returned he asked him what
+he thought of the city that is called eternal. Harold then answered, "I
+think, sir, that the lies at Rome are very good." Do not judge Harold
+harshly upon this answer, as you may be inclined to do. He might have
+come to know less of Rome had he not discovered that the lies on the
+Campagna were so good, and that the legions of mighty Caesar which were
+exercised there had left no enduring marks of their galloping behind
+them. He might not have gained so many good Roman friends to tell him
+helpfully of the wonders of the city. And if golf is a little thing, and
+the contemplation of Rome is so enthralling, yet, be it murmured, the
+golf of Rome is one of the wonders of the golfing world. I have found it
+so. As it was to me, so it will prove a revelation to all golfers who go
+to Rome and have as yet no knowledge of the course that is there. For
+the full-bodied character of the holes, caused by natural land
+formations, and for their variety and interest, I do not hesitate to say
+that there is no course on the continent of Europe which is better, and
+I support this statement with another, that while I can hardly recall
+any hole where a bad shot will go unpunished or a good one without
+reward, yet in the whole round there is not a single artificial bunker.
+Nature has seen to all the tests and difficulties. Of what other course
+can this be said? Golf at Rome was begun in 1898, and ever since then
+there have been some fine golfing men working to what they were sure
+would be a successful end, chief among them being Mr. R. C. R. Young,
+who in the capacity of honorary secretary has been largely responsible
+for the general management of the club. Lately the round has been
+extended from nine holes to eighteen, Mr. Young and Doig, the
+professional, having done the planning of the new holes, and with this
+the golf of Rome enters upon a new era. The club flourishes, the golfing
+community, partly Roman, partly British, and partly American, is
+zealous, and the people there have come to believe that even the most
+serious, studious, and high-minded folk who go to Rome to steep
+themselves in living history of the past need for their refreshment some
+antidote to ruins. "St. Peter's, and the Colosseum, the Forum and the
+baths of Caracalla," said one of them to me, "will bring the foreigners
+to Rome, but only golf will keep them there!" Count this for weakness
+in man, and for his utter modernity if you like; but it is the truth.
+Consequently the golf of Rome is entering upon a new forward movement. I
+think that when the public in distant places comes to realise that the
+golf of Rome is half as good as it really is, thousands and thousands
+more will go to Rome than do so now, to play upon the Campagna, and
+during the time to gather to their souls a scent of the glory of the
+ancient mistress of the world. I have a vision of Rome becoming a
+headquarters of continental golf in the near future.
+
+On a morning after some days among the ruins--such a glorious morning,
+with the Italian sun burning gold amid a heavenly blue--two noble Romans
+came in their chariot for a barbarian wanderer at his hotel at half-past
+nine. They were not real Romans, but Augustus could have played their
+part of host no better, and a forty-horse-power car moved us towards the
+Campagna more speedily than the best of chariots. Away we went by the
+foot of the Equilinus, down the Via Emanuele Filiberto, through the gate
+of St. John Lateran in the Aurelian wall, and then straight on. In a few
+minutes we were at Acqua Santa and inside the club-house. Of all the
+club-houses in the world, this is surely one of the most curious and
+interesting. It is an old farm-house, skilfully adapted to its purpose,
+and we shall be sorry if in the course of time and a grand extension of
+the golf at Rome it is given up for anything more palatial and
+conventional. Here in an upper room we take the necessary nourishment in
+a simple way, and among other liquid refreshments there is the real
+_acqua santa_ itself, a pleasantly bitter and quite delicious water that
+is drawn from a spring by a farm-house at a corner of the course. In
+days gone by the water was considered, perhaps not without good reason,
+to have splendid curative properties, and popes of Rome came to it and
+blessed it accordingly. I believe that one of them derived some healing
+benefit from it. And now, as we think of popes and cardinals, we recall
+that one of the latter, Cardinal Merry del Val, had some kind of a
+course in his private grounds, and so far he has been the only cardinal
+golfer. Once before he died a scheme was afoot for a visit by him to the
+course at Acqua Santa. In a good and sensible and honest way the golf
+club of Rome is already a considerable social centre. Perhaps some day
+the King of Italy--already patron of the club--will join himself to the
+majority of kings and become a golfer too. A leading member of the
+famous historical family of Colonna, Don Prospero Colonna, is president,
+and a number of the most eminent people of Rome are among the members.
+Princes and princesses, counts and countesses, ambassadors of nearly all
+countries, and American millionaires may be found playing the game
+regularly at Acqua Santa. The keenest golfer of them all is Dr. Wayman
+Cushman, who is handicapped at plus 4, an American who spends half his
+year in Maine and the other half in Rome, where he plays golf nearly
+every day. The Americans are strong in the golf of Rome, and some of the
+young Italians are showing excellent form. There is one of them, Don
+Francesca Ruspoli, educated in England and son of a Roman father and
+American mother, of whom great golfing things are expected.
+
+Really this is an excellent course; but the full merit of it will hardly
+be appreciated in the first round or the second, for the wonderful views
+and the special points of interest in them will constantly interfere
+with concentration on the strokes and thought upon the scheme for
+reaching the putting green. Standing upon the first teeing ground and
+pondering for a moment upon the carry to be made across the little
+valley in front, the panorama begins at once to suggest its superior
+claims. Leftwards are the Apennines, opalescent in the morning mist,
+capped with snow upon their peaks. There are the Alban Hills, where the
+shepherds were born who followed Romulus on the Palatine, and at the end
+of the range is Monte Cavo, on the top of which are the ruins of the
+temple of the god of the Latin races, living in the Latium, the ground
+between the mountains and the sea. On the wine-yielding bosom of these
+shining hills there lies sparkling white in the morning sun the village
+of Frascati. There are the Sabine Hills with Tivoli, and away in another
+direction there is Mount Soracte, well said to look out there like a
+wave in a stormy sea. Up into our middle distance on the left-hand side,
+on the fringe of the course, are the splendid ruins of the Claudian
+aqueduct which stretch right across the Campagna, one lonely pile coming
+close up to our sixteenth green alongside which the Via Appia Nuova
+stretches, with two famous umbrella pines helping on the scene.
+
+There is so much for a beginning, and more views press upon us as we
+advance along the course. The play is opened with a good hole of drive
+and iron length, the second brings us back again with a drive and a
+pitch, and then away we go to the left with one of the cunningest
+seconds to be played across twin streams, making this third hole of Rome
+one of the most exacting in the way of approach that is to be found in
+Italy or even in the whole of Europe. When we come to the sixth we play
+up to the summit of a high tableland, and as we ascend the hill we pluck
+from the turf some of the freshest, prettiest crocuses that have ever
+grown, the course being as nearly thick with them in March as North
+Berwick is with daisies in the month of May. And from these heights what
+a view again over towards the city of Rome! Out along that way there is
+the tomb of Cecilia Metella, Crassus' wife, and away on the boundary
+there is the church of St. John Lateran and the great dome of St.
+Peter's. If golf is a royal and ancient game, here is a setting for it.
+Near to the eighth hole we turned aside to the ruins of an ancient Roman
+villa, and Santino, my little Italian caddie, with finger excavation,
+gathered some morsels of polished marble which may have touched the feet
+of Roman ladies in those great days of old. The line of the tenth comes
+close to one of those deep-cut streams that flow to feed the hungry
+Tiber, and in some ways this hole reminds us of the fourth at Prestwick
+where the Pow Burn insinuates itself close to the golfer's way. At our
+backs when we stand on the eleventh tee is a cave that might serve for
+robbers but which really makes an excellent shelter, and it was related
+that a few weeks before my time in Rome three ambassadors, being the
+British, the American, and the Austrian, were seen to sit in there and
+shelter. And who then shall say that, if "only a game," golf has no
+possibilities and powers in such high crafts as diplomacy? The twelfth
+is an excellent hole, and so are they all. The sixteenth takes us
+winding round a big bend between a hill and a stream and then faces us
+full to the putting green, which has the Claudian ruins for a
+background. The play concludes with a seventeenth which has a putting
+green very shrewdly placed, and an eighteenth where the second shot is
+played through a little valley, these ending holes abounding in golfing
+beauty and character.
+
+There is to be said of this course, and in the most sober and
+well-considered judgment by one who has seen golf in many lands, that
+there is scarcely an inland course anywhere that seems more naturally
+adapted to the game. Each hole has strong character of its own; I could
+remember them all after but a single round. Some time soon they will
+make an attempt at Acqua Santa to carry their putting greens on from one
+season to the next, and then they will get a thickness and trueness and
+quality that greens can gain in no other way. The golfers of Rome are
+keen, and they have energy and enterprise. A great future awaits this
+club and course, and I believe that when more money is spent on it, as
+will be soon, it will be in nearly every thinkable way the most
+attractive course on the Continent. The mood that gathers about one when
+in Rome tends to taking the game rather more seriously and thoughtfully
+than at the Mediterranean resorts; it becomes a real recreation, the
+refreshing change. The club's nearness and convenience to the city are
+very good. It is but a few minutes' journey by either train or tram from
+the heart of Rome to the club-house, near which there is a special
+golfers' railway station.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A Franciscan friar was the first to point out to me the situation of the
+nine holes of Florence--nine plain fair holes, though they have nothing
+of architectural beauty in them, not a trace of feeling, nothing of the
+mediaeval glow of spirit that separates this city from all others in the
+world, hardly a touch of imagination in their two or three thousand
+yards. Yet they serve their modern purpose well. For six days and six
+nights the rain had poured down upon the dripping Firenze from
+inexhaustible clouds; the saucer in which the city is laid emptied its
+floods into the Arno until, dirtier and more turbulent than usual, the
+big stream tumbled itself violently through the bridges. We wandered
+through the Uffizi Galleries and the Pitti Palace and the Bargello of
+courtyard fame. There is nothing in the world like sweet Florence, and
+it is a hopeless soul that feels no spark of artistic fire crackle for
+at least one inspiring moment when the glories of this city that was
+born and lived to the human expression of beauty are contemplated. But
+an incessant rain provokes a bold defiance; there almost seemed to be a
+weakness in such constant shelter, and I remembered a suggestion that
+was sent to me from a far distance--"Go up to Fiesole if you can." So in
+the car I went to Fiesole. We went out of the town and by San Gervasio,
+and wound past San Domenico, and twisted our way up the hill until, with
+five miles done, or it may have been a little more, the old Etruscan
+town, with the fragment of an ancient wall, was reached. At the very
+summit, where once a Roman castle stood, there is the Franciscan
+monastery. A brother in his umbrian gown looked meditatively outwards
+from the porch, and he was gracious and friendly when I told him I would
+like to go inside. From a loggia within we looked out upon one of the
+finest panoramic views of its kind. The rain had ceased. Grass was seen
+upon the Etruscan hills, tentacles of the Apennines came clear again
+through dissolving mists, and a golden light flamed up in the western
+sky. And in its peaceful hollow there lay Florence, the palace of art, a
+mediaeval jewel glistening there like a mosaic in white and terra cotta,
+with its great duomo in many-coloured marbles lording it over the
+lowlier piles. Florence! Sweeping the valley with a glance, the monk
+turned towards the north-east and, leaning upon a wall, he pointed with
+his right hand and said, "Pisa!" Over there was the city of the leaning
+tower and the baptistery with the amazing echo. But in the nearer
+distance there was a square patch of vivid green, and I traced its
+situation along there by the course of the Arno, by the Cascine, and
+other landmarks, and made nearly sure of what it was. The thought was
+incongruous at the time, nearly inexcusable, but yet there is little in
+golf that is vulgar after all, and it could not be denied that there was
+the golf course out that way. By some careful questions I gained
+confirmation from the friar. I told him I looked for a place, a special
+place, whose locality I described precisely. And he held out his hand
+again. The golf course was nearly in the line of Pisa.
+
+While so many things in Florence are four or five hundred years old at
+least, the golf course is only fifteen. Still, fifteen years makes a
+good maturity in these times, and Italy, if its courses are few, has
+some distinctions among them. Many continental courses depend for their
+attraction on their setting. Those of Florence and Rome have the most
+perfect setting conceivable, but while the course of Rome could live on
+its merits had there been no Rome, the course of Florence never could.
+Yet the city helps it out, and, though poor be the holes, here we have
+indeed one of the most enthusiastic little golf communities one might
+ever wish to mix among. The club is captained by Mr. J. W. Spalding,
+head of the great athletic business firm, who has ceased to live in
+America and lives now wholly in Florence, which he would hardly do were
+it not for this golf course, on which he plays nearly every day. Mr.
+Spalding is a fine example of the keen and determined golfer. A few
+years ago, in a terrible motor-car smash in Italy, he lost completely
+the sight of one eye. As soon as the surgeons and the doctors let him
+loose again he hurried to his favourite course at Florence and--think of
+it!--at once he won the scratch gold medal. He is a scratch man now, and
+plays as well as ever.
+
+These and many other things I learned on the day after the monk had
+pointed out to me the direction of the nine holes of Florence, when I
+went along to San Donato to make a closer view of them, to drive and
+putt at them. The golfers of Florence are a good company, managed with
+zeal by Signor Mavrogordato, in the capacity of honorary secretary. They
+are as keen and interested in their game as if they were at Sandwich,
+and they have a miniature club-house situated on a spot of land that has
+a cemented water-filled moat all round it, those who would enter having
+to pass over a little rustic bridge. The holes are plain with artificial
+cross bunkers, and the architecture is of what might be called the low
+Victorian school. One of the features of the course is a couple of tall
+trees that stand up in the middle with thin straight trunks parallel to
+each other, looking for all the world like Rugby football goal-posts.
+One great advantage that this course has is that it is splendidly
+convenient to the city. Take a tram-car No. 17 labelled "Cascine" from
+one particular corner of the cathedral square, say "Golf" to the
+conductor, pay him a penny for the fare, and the rest is inevitable. In
+a quarter of an hour you will be deposited at a junction in the roads by
+the barrier of Ponte alle Mosse, and two minutes' walk from there takes
+you to the iron gates which give admission to the course.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is the beautiful bay at Naples, and Pompeii, and a short voyage on
+the steamboat to the sweet isle of Capri; but golf has not yet come to
+Naples, though it will do so soon. When we travelled down there from
+Rome we were aboard a train that was taken by many of the Naples members
+of the Italian Parliament who were going home for the week-end--the
+"deputies' train" they often call that six o'clock from Rome. They had
+been having a fearful week of it, wrangling about their recent Libyan
+war and the cost of it, and their nerves were in rather a jagged state.
+I fell into conversation with one of them, and he said that he wished
+he were a golfer, as from all that he had heard and understood it was
+the real and only thing for the soothing of a deputy after such
+scrimmaging and scratching as they had been having in the Chamber that
+weary week. He asked questions about our Parliamentary golfers, and was
+informed about Mr. Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and all the
+others. I told this honourable member for Naples that nearly all our
+Parliamentarians played the greatest game of all, and that the Mother of
+Parliaments was all the better for it. He was impressed. He said there
+should be golf at Naples by the time I went there again--even if it was
+set there for the benefit of the tired members only!
+
+Above all things, Venice is a place for reflection, and when we are
+there we think of all things we have seen and done in Italy, and shape
+exactly the impressions that have been made. One time there were two or
+three of us in a gondola. The crescent of a seven days' moon hung among
+the stars in the Venetian night. The gentle regular plash that was made
+by Giovanni Cerchieri, our gondolier (and be it said that his gondola is
+the blackest and smartest and most finely dignified of all that glide on
+the Grand Canal), as he swung backwards and forwards to his work behind
+us, with a sigh or a murmur that might have swollen to a real boat-song
+had we encouraged it, was nearly the only sound on the still waters. And
+in this Venetian night, an hour after the coffee, we were in the mood of
+men who feel that they are soon to return to the cold hard facts of
+life. The rest of Venice might go to glory; we, soothed amid such ease
+and comfort as might have satisfied a doge, turned our thoughts to the
+links of home. There was nothing incongruous in the association of ideas
+and facts. Venice we found to be splendid for meditation, and any place
+with such a quality, like the top of a mountain, or the side of a
+purling stream, is a fine one for golfing consideration and conjecture.
+One man would talk of art, of pictures, and of sculpture; another would
+stupidly keep to golf. And then a compromise was suggested, when it was
+said that a question had once been asked as to whether there was such a
+thing as style in golf!
+
+Any thoughtful player who ever had any doubt upon this matter--but, of
+course, no thoughtful player ever could--would have it dispelled if he
+went to Italy even though he never played a game, did not take his
+clubs, and never saw a golf course there. It were indeed better for his
+education in this matter that he should not play when on Italian ground,
+for one would not expect to find on the courses there the best examples
+of golfing style. The fact of style in golf would come home to him when
+he wandered through the galleries and looked upon all the magnificent
+sculptures that are among the matchless treasures of the country, though
+there is no study of a golfing swing among them. I do not see how any
+player of the game who is thoughtful and contemplative can go to Italy
+and fail to be enormously impressed with the lessons that are silently
+delivered from the sculpture in the galleries and museums of Rome,
+Florence, and other cities. In hundreds of pieces here we see the
+suggestion of beauty put forward in every movement and exercise of the
+human body, and particularly when the frame is being brought to some
+considerable physical effort, when the limbs are being placed upon the
+strain, are grace and rhythm and style exhibited to us, and with them
+there is the suggestion always of the extreme of power. There is
+indicated the close relationship between exact and graceful poise,
+perfect balance, and supreme controlled and concentrated force. The very
+utmost efficiency is always suggested in all this artistic balance. As
+the art is better and more appealing, so the suggestion of power is
+increased and the marble almost seems to break with life.
+
+Considered in this way, what a fine thing is the "David" of Bernini in
+the Borghese Gallery! But for our golfing suggestion some of the
+discobolus models serve us better. Without ever having attempted to
+throw a discus, one may very well understand that success at such an
+exercise depends almost wholly upon perfect balance and accurate
+concentration of force and true rhythmical movement, and in the models
+in the Vatican and the National Museums in Rome and elsewhere we see how
+it might be done. The discobolus of Myron, reconstructed as it has been,
+and with the head made to face in the wrong direction, so they say, is a
+magnificent thing. In the National Gallery of Rome they have made a
+reconstruction from a fragment of another, and they have made the figure
+to look sideways and half upwards to the discus held at arm's length
+behind him ready for the throw, whereas in the Myron the face is to the
+front and the eyes are down. (Though one may know nothing at all about
+the ways in which the discs were really thrown, or what is the best way
+to throw them, one is hardly convinced of the desirability of disturbing
+the head in the back-swing of the arm and letting the eyes follow the
+object in the hand. Surely concentration would be impeded and balance
+suffer.) But in these images we see the intensity of the relation
+between style and power, and we realise that if there were no style in
+golf there ought to be, and the next moment, that of all modern games
+golf is a game of style and nothing else. Perhaps you may play it
+without style, but then it is not the same thing, and it can never be so
+thoroughly effective and precise. Unconsciously, perhaps, James Braid
+had style in his mind when he said that at the top of the swing the
+golfer should feel like a spring coiled up to its fullest tension,
+straining for the release. That is just what the discobolus suggests,
+and the golfer gets the fullest enjoyment from the game, the supreme
+physical thrills, when he feels this high tension for a moment and then
+its even, smooth, and quick escape, and he cannot feel it so when he has
+no style and all his movements and positions have not been made in
+perfect harmony. Some may say that the actions of the discobolus were
+probably not so very fine as the sculptors have made them out to be, and
+that much of the shape is merely artist's fancy, but probably they are
+fairly true to life. If they are not, one cannot contemplate them for
+more than a few moments without feeling that life ought to be true to
+them. The golfer in the suggestion of grace and power, as in the models
+that have been cut of Harry Vardon at the top and end of his driving
+swing, reaches some way towards the discobolus.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN
+MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES.
+
+
+"When we were in Madrid----" I have sometimes begun in conversation, and
+then invariably from one or more in the company there has been a quick
+interruption with--"But there can be no golf in Madrid! You do not go to
+Spain for golf!" But one who knows may answer that there is as good
+reason to go there for it as to most other places out of Britain, that
+in different parts of Spain there is fair golf to be had, that in Madrid
+there is a new course which is excellent and embraces some of the
+prettiest holes we would ever wish to play after passing by the
+Pyrenees, and that I have found there Spanish gentlemen to play with who
+have been among the happiest and most agreeable companions and opponents
+I have encountered. In a reflection upon my own experiences I dare to
+say that I would recommend a doubtful stranger to go to Spain only if he
+is a golfer, for by the agency of the game will the life and facts of
+the country be best presented to him, and mysteries be explained. The
+magic passport of golf is indispensable in all such circumstances. The
+truth is that it was golf that led me to Spain on my second visit to the
+country, and I had then one of the most interesting and instructive
+holidays I have had in my travelling life, during which I had the
+opportunity of seeing something of the inside of Spanish life and
+government, of discovering truth about the forces that work in the
+regeneration of this old country, for really an awakening is taking
+place, and one dares to say the firm establishment of golf is a symbol
+of it. I had some interesting conversations with the Count Romanones,
+who was then the Prime Minister, with his brother, who is the Duke of
+Tovar, a man of broad sympathies who takes a leading part in many social
+movements of high importance in Madrid, and with other persons of much
+importance. These talks, with the open sight of all that was passing in
+Madrid, made a deep impression.
+
+"You are a golfer, and we of Spain may give you some good golf to play!"
+said the Prime Minister cordially when by invitation I called upon him
+at his palace in the Paseo de la Castellana. He is a man of forcible
+appearance and manner. The face is thin, and its lines of character are
+strong--cold and strong. The aquiline features have something of
+Spanish--no Italian--fierceness about them, and the Count makes a
+piercing look which is considered discomforting to nervous strangers.
+But he is a very attractive companion in talk; his verve, his vivacity
+are wonderful. When discussing a subject in which he is interested his
+whole being becomes aflame; eyes sparkle and features quiver; he beats
+his fingers in the palms of his hands; he leans over towards you and
+gesticulates like an artist in enthusiasm. A man of hot nervous energy,
+one of keen purpose and determination is this statesman of Spain. He
+suggested that the new sports of his country were symbolic of her great
+awakening, of which he said he would talk to me that I might tell others
+what Spain is now and what she would be. "Europe does not understand my
+country," he remarked, "True, there has been little occasion to
+understand her. But a change occurs. Spain at this moment is passing
+through a most remarkable process of transition. You are right in a
+suggestion you have made to me; unsuccessful wars do not cause
+interminable loss and disasters. The war with the United States was not
+all bad for Spain. We may have lost Cuba, but the development that has
+taken place since then in our country at home, in its agriculture and
+its mining, and again in its healthy natural feeling, has been enormous,
+and is a good substitute for many islands." And then he went on in a
+deeply interesting conversation to tell me of the great awakening of
+Spain indicated in many different ways, and of all her political,
+social, and other ambitions.
+
+The Duke of Tovar, who is also coming to take an interest in the golf of
+Spain, smoked his cigar on a divan in his palace, and a Moorish boy
+brought coffee to us. The Duke travels much, and brings things and
+people back with him. I see that he has been an ambassador-extraordinary
+to the Pope of Rome and has received the most gracious papal thanks. A
+little of a statesman, he is much of an artist, and a marble bust of
+Alfonso _rex_, his own sculpture, casts a shadow beside us. In
+innumerable ways this Spanish nobleman associates himself with the life
+of the people, goes among them, attends their meetings, and he began
+telling me that one of the secrets of the new Spain was the important
+fact of the nobles taking to business, becoming the promoters and
+managers of industrial companies, as they were. He told me of dukes who
+were doing things. One of the new movements, in which he has assisted to
+his utmost and thoroughly believes in, is the boy scout movement, which
+has caught on like wildfire in Madrid. Three thousand Spanish boys were
+enrolled within a few weeks of the establishment of the system in the
+city, and the Duke became a president of a section. All class
+distinctions are avoided in this matter. "My son is going with the son
+of the porter," said the Duke of Tovar. And he most certainly believed
+in golf for the people, and would tell me stories of its beginning and
+its development.
+
+As to Madrid, never was such a quick transformation accomplished in any
+city of the world, save when 'Frisco perished and was made again, as is
+being done here in the city on the plateau of Castile. The Spaniards
+having decided on the regeneration of their country and on persuading
+foreigners to come to it, have determined they must have a capital
+befitting a first-class power. The result is that Madrid is being torn
+to pieces and rebuilt. Everywhere there is a fever of building raging.
+Think of it: but three years ago and there was not a single first-class
+hotel in Madrid; now there are two fine ones. The Alcala, where the
+Madrileños stroll and mount up the hill to the Puerta del Sol, the great
+bare square where the idlers lounge, where the bull-fighting papers are
+sold, where there are many offices for the sale of lottery tickets,
+where there are cafés and yellow tramcars (run by Belgian companies, if
+you please!) and much life but no gaiety until very late at night, is
+soon to be deposed from being chief street of Madrid, for they are
+making a new ideal street, very wide and one mile long, which is cut
+straight through the heart of the city and is to be called the Gran Via
+when it is done. Millions and millions of pesetas' worth of property
+have been demolished to allow for the straightness of this street, which
+is to ask for comparison with a part of the Fifth Avenue across the
+water. Thirty-seven millions of pesetas were lately voted by the
+Municipal Council for the removal of the cobble stones of Madrid, their
+places to be taken by asphalte and wood. The cobbles of Madrid are
+picturesque; they make good harmony with those antique watchmen who seem
+to have been reincarnated from our own eighteenth-century London,
+walking the slumberous streets at night, lanterns in their hands and
+jangling bunches of giant keys suspended from their girdles, their
+business being to open the outside doors of blocks of flats for
+late-returning occupiers who in an unthinking languorous way of Spain
+would carry no keys, but leave the affair of their homecoming to the
+fortune of the night, the vigilance of the watchman, and the blessing of
+Providence. But the cobbles are not convenient. They are seldom
+repaired, and even in such a spacious public place as the Prado, which
+is a kind of Hyde Park Corner, there are sometimes deep holes which fill
+with water when it rains and make such pools as ducks might like and
+dogs would drink, but which take a leg of mine some way upwards to the
+knee when the night is dark. There was an old Madrid of which trills of
+love and passion have been sung. Fevered lovers sang to ladies whose
+lips were red, and whose skin was dark, as their hearts were
+gay--voluptuous women. Guitars and flowers; blood and life. That Madrid
+has nearly passed away. A few steep and narrow streets and some dirty
+open spaces, with little of the delicate charm of age to recommend them,
+are most of what is left of it in a quarter near to the royal palace.
+The city of later times, the Madrid of to-day, is already and quickly
+giving way to a third Madrid which will soon be made.
+
+In this that I have written I may seem to neglect my theme, and yet the
+state of Spain does most closely concern the strange case of golf in the
+country. Here is an answer to interrupters who are quick to say that one
+does not go to Madrid for golf. When Spain was all romance and colour,
+all dirt and laziness, it was no place for games like this. Bicycles
+were not popular then because they had to be pedalled ceaselessly, or
+the riders would fall: they, being as symbols of action, did not permit
+of lounging or a little slumber. In the days of the first and second
+Madrids, athletics could not be contemplated; the corrida was supreme
+and solitary for Spanish "sport." Now there is an athletic movement.
+There are many football clubs; there is a national cup competition and
+the King has given the cup. Still the corrida flourishes, but it is
+threatened. In the new movement for the third Madrid there are social
+clubs such as we have in London. There is an inclination for strong,
+healthy sport, and the King encourages it with all his royal might and
+influence. Don Alfonso has been the good leader of the royal game in
+Spain. The main point is that golf in these days is a token of a
+healthier disposition and a new progress, and it is a strong influence
+upon character. In the old Spain such a sport as this was quite
+impossible; now it grows, and, to me as one who has considered the birth
+and rise of golf in many countries, the case of Spain is deeply
+interesting. When I went there I remembered what some of the thoughtful
+and candid Americans had said about this game exerting a needed and
+subtle influence upon their own national character. It is such
+influences that are needed in Spain, and I shall go again among the
+Madrileños to see this one in the working. Already they have courses,
+nice and tolerable, in Barcelona, Bilbao, and many other provincial
+places. When I went to San Sebastian, one of the most beautiful and
+fully equipped seaside resorts in the whole world, the municipal
+authorities assured me that they felt a fear that the bull-fights were
+becoming a doubtful attraction to foreign visitors, and they were giving
+their attention to the establishment of a municipal golf course. It
+will be the first municipal golf course on the continent of Europe.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let me plunge to my revelation and state that Madrid, in New Castile,
+land of the toreador, country where so much of the Middle Ages does yet
+survive, where games till lately have been almost unknown, this Madrid
+comes now to be possessed of such a first-class course as might be the
+envy of many a British seaside resort. While I lingered in the city
+Señor Fabricio de Potestad, one of the most active members of the
+general committee of the Madrid Golf Club, and of its green committee
+too, was a kind counsellor and guide. Just as might happen at home,
+while at breakfast at the Ritz there came to me notice that the car was
+waiting. Señor de Potestad, his clubs and mine inside the car, had the
+golfer's expectancy upon a genial Spanish countenance, rubbed hands, and
+declared it was a fine day for the game. We sped away from the Prado,
+and considered handicaps and odds as golfers must. But first we went for
+object lessons in the progress of Spanish golf. Three or four miles out
+we reached the hippodrome where some nine years back the game was born.
+Don Alfonso had been learning golf in England; he had striven with it in
+a left-handed way while he wooed a British princess in the Isle of
+Wight, and he gave a Spanish decoration then to the professional who
+showed him how to hold his hands and where to put his feet. Then nine
+simple stupid little holes were laid out in this hippodrome, and there
+they still remain as relics of the earliest age in the golf history of
+this country, the uncultured time when the ball was missed, the days
+when a hole in nine might have been considered good and a seven enough
+to make the soul of a great grandee quiver with a new found joy. Three
+Spaniards stood forward with the King as the pioneers of Spanish golf,
+and still they are among its leaders. There was a great sportsman, the
+Duke of Alva, president of the club; there was the Marquis de Santa
+Cruz, and there was the Señor Pedro Caro, perhaps the only Spanish
+golfer of early times besides Don Alfonso himself who learned his
+strokes and swings in England, where he was schooled, and who with the
+Count de la Cimera and the Count Cuevas de Vera, cousin of my guide, is
+one of the three best players of Spain. Two of them are Spanish scratch,
+and the Count de la Cimera lately achieved the distinction of being the
+first of his land to rise to the eminence of plus one. Thus you may
+perceive that the golf of Spain is helped by the best people, and that
+is not because it is fashionable, and it is not only because the King
+has shown a liking for it, but because the Spaniards have found in it a
+quick fascination, an awakening pastime, such a strong diversion from
+the often heavy life of their country as they had not imagined. Had you
+seen, as I did, the Duke of Aliaga bunkered one afternoon before a high
+steep cliff in front of the eighteenth green on the second oldest course
+of Madrid; had you seen him pensive as he felt the extraneous sorrows of
+a Spanish nobleman of riches and high station; had you seen the gleam of
+gladness in two Spanish eyes when the ball was heaved somehow to the top
+in one (the gods may know how he managed it; but we said to him that it
+was a splendid shot, and I do believe it was!) you would not doubt that
+golf was meant for Spain as these people declare it was--"the thing of
+all others that we needed," so they say.
+
+This second oldest course, the "old course" as they begin to call it
+now, marks the transition period of Spanish golf. It is not the
+primeval course of the hippodrome, but one which was made in 1907 at a
+place apart and a little farther along the road. The land is worth a
+million and three-quarters of pesetas now when Madrid has become so much
+bigger than it was, and the course falls within the city zone; and as
+the players became educated they yearned for something better, and they
+moved again. But fond memories will cling for long enough to this old
+course of Spain; with a little help from fancy one may look upon it even
+now as a kind of old Blackheath of Spanish golf. There is a small
+club-house with dining-room, dressing-rooms and all complete, in quite
+the English way, on a spot of rising ground, and from the verandah we
+may look over a part of the course, with a short hole to begin with and
+some curious bunkering here and there, with a highly modern attempt to
+adopt the system of humps-and-hollows bunkering that has been so well
+established on inland courses at home. Somehow one gathers the
+impression that the Spaniards have been striving all the time towards
+some kind of indistinct ideal, realising that the sport they had
+discovered was a great one and trying to improve their practice of it.
+And I recall that it was J. H. Taylor, the old designer, the old
+constructor, the quintuple champion, who was pioneer in the planning of
+courses in Madrid, and he laid out this one of eighteen holes very well
+for the early Spanish golfers.
+
+One of the curiosities of the course is the putting green at the
+eleventh hole, which is quite round and is surrounded by an evenly
+shaped earthen rampart. On seeing it for the first time the average
+Englishman observes to the Spaniard who is with him, "How like a
+bull-ring!" The remark is justifiable and it seems appropriate; but the
+Spanish gentleman has heard it many times. Playing the bull-ring hole is
+a satisfying experience, most exceedingly contenting. We play what we
+shall consider a perfect approach shot to our Plaza de Toros hole. The
+ball is pitched into the ring just over the near side of the barricade.
+A big bound and it is by the hole side, a smaller skip and it is away to
+the other side of the circle, and then there is one nervous little jump
+up towards that enclosing height. The perplexed ball seems in our fancy
+to claw up the steep slope, which is about four or five feet high; it
+nearly reaches the top. We, the player, feel a little pitter-patter in
+the heart. Is that little white bull of a ball of ours going to get over
+the fence and spoil the thing? It should not; we pitched him as nicely
+as human skill could ever pitch. He is vicious; but he is spent. The gay
+life which he had at the beginning of the stroke is flickering out. He
+cannot escape. Our cuadrilla of one, the little Spanish lad with the bag
+of clubs, advances and hands the putter, taking back the mashie which
+has done its business. The ball comes trickling back from the bank--back
+and back, and it comes on to within some seven or eight feet of the side
+of the hole. Then it falters and stops, done for. Meanwhile there is
+another white bull of a ball only four feet away; this also had come
+back from the bank, but a little more. I, as an espada, take my steel
+putter for the finishing touch. I see the line, I have the momentary
+hesitation, the nerves are tightened, and then I make the stroke, and
+happily it is a good one. The ball has gone down. In truth both balls go
+down, and "Four, señor!" and "Four--a half, _amigo_!" and the play to
+the eleventh hole of old Madrid is done. Even if there is a slope to the
+hole and there is the bull-ring rampart round it, we say that a four at
+this piece of golf is good. We also argue out that bull-ring with our
+consciences. I have seen nothing like it. It was clearly the object of
+those who made it to pen the ball up towards the hole, to make the golf
+a little easier, for it was found to be hard enough (as you and I have
+found it hard enough at home) to catch the ball and keep it and lead it
+to its hole. This hole, the rampart, seems to be a concession to the
+frail humanity of man. Conscience murmurs chidingly, "You know, you
+English golfer, that you should never have been so near to that Spanish
+pin! You should have been bunkered, my friend, perhaps badly bunkered,
+beyond the green!" But being in Spain, and doing as Spaniards do, we are
+a little independent, have a freedom of idea, and with some peevishness
+of manner, an arrogance, a way as of telling conscience to attend its
+other business and get back to London--where in some places they do
+place bunkers and hills upon the greens to keep the golfer, as it seems,
+from holing out at all--I retort, "I played a good shot anyhow; I only
+just pitched over the bull-ring fence; I pitched the ball up high and
+let it drop straight down, and cut every leg from it that it ever had.
+No man could do better with the ground so hard. It was right that the
+ball should come back."
+
+I shall hope that with their attachment to a new love that is so
+beautiful and good, the Spaniards will not give up their old course here
+that has served them faithfully and brought on their game. Besides, it
+is a course that is pretty in its situation. Away beyond, many miles
+away, are those snow-topped Guadarrama Mountains, fine rough things.
+Though it was March, and untruths are told about the wickedness of the
+Spanish climate, we lunched with Señora Elena de Potestad in the open
+outside the club-house in warm sunshine glistening on a pretty scene.
+Señora Elena is quite the best lady golfer of Spain; but writing the
+truth as she told it, the charming wife of my friend is not Spanish, but
+is a Russian lady from Khieff. I suspect her of being the best Russian
+lady golfer and the best Spanish too; it is curious. She has done the
+first nine holes here at Madrid in something less than bogey. Next to
+her on the championship list is the Marquesa de Alamoncid de los Oteros,
+six strokes behind. Queen Victoria sometimes plays, and I have seen that
+extremely popular lady of Spain, the Infanta Isabella, golfing here with
+the professional and a maid of honour. The game is doing well with the
+ladies of the peninsula; they like it. I had a gentle argument with the
+Señora Elena, who seemed a little doubtful whether golf were quite a
+ladies' game, for all her own skill and love for it. She pleaded the
+other feminine occupations and interests, even the distractions, and the
+difficulty of surrendering to the tyranny of golf. In her view it seemed
+to be of the ladies' life a thing apart, while we have known it to be a
+man's complete existence.
+
+As our speedy car skimmed the road on the way back to Madrid that night,
+Señor Fabricio would talk of the good influence of the game, and the
+special benefits that it might and did confer upon his hopeful
+countrymen. "Twelve years ago," he reflected, "I might meet all my
+friends at the corrida. All were for the bull fight--and the ladies too.
+But now--if I went myself, as I do not--I should see none. They are all
+for golf. At my club in Madrid we say one to another about the time of
+lunch, 'Do you go to golf this afternoon?' It used to be, 'I suppose you
+go to the corrida, eh?'" One thinks and wonders.
+
+I took tea in the lounge at the Ritz, and gossiped with a man who had
+just come along from Portugal and told me of some exciting times they
+had been having there. They had decided on having more golf, and were
+about to make a municipal matter of it near Lisbon. Hitherto, as I knew,
+they had had only one golf course in the whole country, and that was at
+a place called Espinho, some eleven miles out from Oporto, and it was
+said that bulls intended for the fights were fed up there and did their
+roaming exercise on this course. It is not a comfortable idea. The new
+course is out at Belem on the banks of the Tagus near to Lisbon, and
+this is the exact place at which Vasco de Gama landed on returning from
+his greatest voyage of discovery. It is an eighteen-holes course; it has
+been well planned; and much money is being spent on it. The Portuguese
+having started a new form of government and begun a new national
+life--as they hope--have come quickly to the conclusion that they need
+golf and much of it, for already a second course for Lisbon is being
+arranged, and there are to be others in different parts of the country.
+If King Manoel goes back, he will be prepared for them, for he has
+cultivated a fair game at Richmond.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening we went to stroll among the cafés of Madrid, and
+presently peered into the old parts of the city, where life is simple
+and strong, where the humbler Madrileños resort, and there are dancing
+entertainments of a strange kind. On a little stage there is some
+jingling music worked out from a bad piano, and a troupe of girls with
+some gypsies among them will make a dance that, for all its art and all
+its naïveté, is somewhat coarse. Other girls will sit round them in a
+semicircle and keep up a kind of barbarous wail, occasionally bursting
+into a mock shout of approval. A song will follow, and a chorus with it,
+and by and by the entertainers will descend and drink wine with the
+people in the café, and all this will continue until the night is very
+late. But out in the Puerta del Sol the lights are bright and there is
+more gaiety than there has ever been. So we wandering golfers, reckless
+of the game of the day that follows (after all we are to give a bagful
+of strokes to these Spaniards and can beat them yet--but not always, one
+remembers), turn in to one of the music halls which have three shows a
+night, the third beginning at midnight, and we see La Argentinita dance,
+see the rumba done. Then down the Alcala and over the Prado home. We
+shall insist that this is a part of our golf in old Madrid; it is not
+the conventional golfing holiday, as I try to show. Another day we will
+run out for many miles to El Escorial (thanking the Duke of Tovar for
+the offer of his car) and ruminate in this most sombre architectural
+creation of the great Philip--palace, monastery and tomb in one--and
+another day out to Toledo, a grand dead city of a long past of many
+phases and eras, a mummified city it seems to be, with halls and places
+that look sometimes as if they had but just been left by the rich grand
+caballeros of the time when Spain was great. You can nearly see their
+ghosts, gay in satins and crimson silks, leaning over flowered
+balconies, singing, kissing, laughing, and always living.
+
+I dislike the corrida. It is horrible. Its time has gone. I had enough
+of it once when south at Algeciras. But a Spanish golfing companion said
+that it was a very special day, and for the experience, and as a matter
+of being guest, I should go. There were eight bulls done instead of six,
+and horses in proportion, and a county councillor of Madrid took us
+behind all the scenes, into the hospital, into the matador's chapel, and
+explained everything. He was a courteous gentleman. He said they would
+have golf in Madrid, that the corrida would leave in time, but for the
+present the people must have the corrida. It takes time to make great
+changes, he said, even in Madrid--where it does take more time for
+movements than anywhere else. But the point of this reference is the
+harsh contrast that is indicated--our peaceful game of golf in which
+nothing is killed, no blood spilled, nobody hurt, and yet, as we think,
+the greatest, fullest sport of all, stirring the emotions better than
+any corrida in Madrid or Barcelona, and this awful feast of blood and
+death. I have seen golf in many places, but never in one where its
+setting seemed so utterly impossible as here. And yet golf in Madrid is
+strengthening, and by ever so little the corrida, so they tell me, is
+weakening. That the game can begin and can hold and grow in such a place
+is surely the utmost testimony of its power. Games like golf have some
+work to do in Spain. It is because of such considerations, because of
+the extraordinary environment in which this peaceful, excellent sport is
+set, that I have found golf in Madrid such a remarkable and interesting
+study, and have dwelt upon it and provoked the contrasts when I might.
+
+See contrast now again, yet more wonderful. The next morning broke
+bright and blue, and Señor Fabricio was round betimes in the Prado with
+his car. We were to go to the new course that day. We sped away on the
+Corunna road for some four or five miles from Madrid, and then turned up
+towards the higher land. All this was King's land; El Pardo it is
+called. Here is the new golf course of Madrid, which takes the place in
+the Spanish golfers' hearts and plans of the other one of which I have
+already written, that with the bull-ring hole. This of El Pardo is part
+of a great new sporting establishment, embracing a magnificent polo
+ground, tennis courts, and all the advantages and appurtenances of a
+thorough country club in the manner of those which began in America and
+have since been copied in England, and more recently at Saint-Cloud near
+Paris.
+
+Considered in some ways 1 am a little disposed to count this new golf
+course of Madrid as the eighth or ninth wonder of the whole golfing
+world, just as the Spaniards themselves set up a claim for El Escorial
+to be ranked as the eighth of the world at large. There are sound
+reasons for the nomination. I have shown that it might well have been
+held that the Spanish people's character and dispositions were a soil in
+which no good game might grow, and yet that it was being urged and
+proved that there was a great process of regeneration going on and that
+golf indeed had been given a very good start. Now we come to the
+astonishing climax for the time being in this little story of contrasts.
+Here, if you please, at El Pardo on the estates of Don Alfonso is just
+one of the nicest, best, and most interesting courses for golf on which
+the excellent game might ever be played. It is quite new and it is most
+thoroughly up to date. It is a course of which good clubs in Britain
+might be exceedingly proud. You and I would be glad to play there nearly
+always, and we should have little fault to find. When I was there it was
+only just being finished. Its history is a nice romance. The golfers of
+Spain had risen to that state when they felt they needed something
+better for the improvement and the enjoyment of their play than the
+rough primitive course with the bull-ring hole which had ceased to
+satisfy their needs and tastes. They were restive. Came Don Alfonso to
+their comfort and their happiness. At El Pardo was the ideal golfing
+land--wide undulating sweeps of lovely country, majestic undulations,
+grand environment, with the splendid Guadarramas in full view. It was a
+scene sublime. The land was wooded, trees would have to be felled, the
+ploughshare would have heavy work to do; but that is how courses are
+made to-day. Not in Don Alfonso's power was it to give the ground
+outright, but he passed it to the golfers for a nominal rent of a
+thousand pesetas a year, which, being converted to English reckoning,
+would be some £37. There was land for the polo and the tennis hard by.
+Estimates were procured, and it was discovered that to do the work of
+felling and ploughing, sowing and construction, building and finishing,
+a sum of just about twenty-two thousand pounds in English money would be
+needed, and most of the money would go to England too. Then with zest
+the golfers and other sportsmen of Madrid came forward, each one
+subscribed according to his means and ability, and in a very little
+while all that great fund of money was obtained, and it was in the bank
+before the work was started. That was a splendid achievement; the golf
+of Madrid deserves to prosper now.
+
+It was determined that with such a beginning everything should be done
+most thoroughly afterwards. Thousands of trees had to be cut down, the
+ground cleared, ploughed, and raked, and the putting greens sown. On
+hardly any course in any country has the work of construction been done
+more thoroughly. Then Mr. Harry Colt was brought from England to design
+the holes, and he gave of some of his most cunning, most artistic work,
+having a fine field for his quick imagination. The result is eighteen
+holes as good and rich as Spanish holes need be. Some of the short ones
+are as good short holes as I have seen. One with the green on a hog's
+back, the seventh, is a most appetising thing. At the third there is a
+quick slope on the left of the green and the approach is one of those
+twisty things that are a strong feature of the Coltian style of
+architecture, demanding a skill and calculation from the player that
+many bunkers would not exact. There is a dog-leg hole for the fifth that
+leads to a green partly framed in a corner of trees. Parts of Spain are
+treeless, the great plain above which Madrid is placed, the long lone
+sweep of land that you look down upon from the palace, down to the
+Manzanares and beyond to a far horizon, is one of the most desolate
+countries that my eyes have seen. But here at El Pardo there are trees
+enough. Chestnuts and cork are everywhere, and the course has a look of
+our sweet Sunningdale at home. Harrows, rakes, and spades have done
+their work most wondrous well, and the nicest gradients have been given
+to the putting greens. But there is something even more remarkable still
+that has been done. Make it as you would, tend it as you might, but if
+Nature were to be depended upon the loveliest course in all Spain would
+have to perish, for the climate forbids. So the climate had to be
+foiled. Water was needed, water everywhere, water always, always. The
+Madrid golfers, wise beyond all British example, determined they would
+have their water at the very beginning of things. Some way distant there
+was a river or canal, and it was tapped for their supply. Great cemented
+aqueducts were built to carry it across valleys; it was piped through
+hills. The water in abundance was brought up here to the course; and it
+was laid on to every teeing ground and putting green and to the entire
+fairway so that everywhere, always, the water should be poured on, the
+fine grass that grows should be kept always green, and the turf, which
+is of full sandy kind, should be always golf-like and moist. That was a
+splendid achievement. I enjoyed the round of the new course, delighted
+in a pretty valley hole towards the end, and admired the enterprise of
+the Spanish golfers exceedingly. They have golf in Madrid. As the
+express climbed with me upwards back to France I reflected again on
+these wild contrasts, and the struggle for light by Spain.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As a pursuit golf differs from all others in that there is no
+exclusively right way and no utterly wrong way of doing anything
+connected with it. Those engaged with it are constantly, to use their
+own expression, finding out what they are "doing wrong," and then with
+great eagerness and activity and newly revived hope are setting forth to
+repair their errors and place their game upon a new foundation. Yet
+despite this eternal discovery of faults and remedies, only a little is
+ever found out of the full truth that is hidden somewhere, by even the
+very best of players, and herein lies the consolation of the humbler
+people in that, if they know little, their superiors, being champions,
+know only a little more compared with all that there is to be known.
+Thus upon every disappointment an encouragement ensues. If these points
+are considered it will appear that there are deep truths in them, while
+at the same time they convey morals and point the way to a betterment of
+one's game. And the most important point is that there is no one
+exclusively correct way of doing anything, and this, with all the
+circumstances surrounding the proposition, leads us inevitably to the
+conclusion that this is no game for narrow-minded and conventional
+people, who would always do as others do, and have not the will to
+exercise their own convictions which, along with their admiration for
+some of the tenets of the political party to which they do not belong,
+are stifled in their consciences and put away. Golf is indeed a game for
+extensive individualism, for the free exercise of convictions and for
+continual groping along unknown channels of investigation in search of
+the truth. Those who do not investigate and explore in this way miss a
+full three-fourths of the intellectual joy of this pastime. And the
+investigators must have the courage to reject things of information that
+are offered to them, even when conveyed with the very highest
+testimonials for their efficacy from the best champions of home and
+foreign countries, while at the same time they should have the will to
+put into exercise even the most fantastic scheme of their own
+imagination.
+
+All dogmatic teaching in golf is wrong. There are two or three essential
+principles as we have called them--the keeping of the still head, the
+fixed centre in the body, the eye on the ball, and such like--which must
+be obeyed under the certain penalty of failure, because these might be
+said to be the laws of Nature as applied to golf, and have nothing to do
+with the eccentricities of human method. But, these being properly
+respected, there are innumerable ways of building upon them structures
+of golf which, in the goodness of results in the matter of getting
+threes and fours and winning the holes, are much the same at the finish.
+One of the structures may be precise, another may be plain, a third may
+be ornate, and a fourth may be rough and vulgar. Yet in efficiency and
+in results they may be just the same, and in most cases the man is led
+to his style of golf building largely by his own temperamental case. So
+long as the essential principles are observed in each case, being the
+same always but kept hidden in the recesses of the building, many things
+may be done that the books do not teach. The books are valuable to the
+utmost for their suggestions and for bringing the player back to his
+base, as it were, when he has wandered too far in his explorations,
+piled theory on theory and got his game into the most hopeless tangle.
+For corrective purposes they are in this way quite essential. They stand
+for the conventions and for the middle ways; they enable us to make a
+fresh start. And the golfer is always making fresh starts. What is the
+cherished belief of to-day is abandoned next week, the discovery just
+made and looked upon as solving the last problem that keeps the handicap
+man away from scratch, is found later to be a temporary convenience only
+and to be dependent on something else in the system of a highly fleeting
+and uncertain kind. These beginnings, this starting over again with
+increased hope, add always to the pleasure.
+
+What players need to remember above all things is that the games of no
+two men are quite alike, any more than the men themselves are quite
+alike, and that among the very best the widest dissimilarities exist,
+that the best game that any man can possibly play is not one copied from
+others, but that game which is his very own, the one built up on his
+physical, intellectual, and mental peculiarities. Every man has a game
+of his own somewhere which is quite different from any other, and that
+game, when he can play it, will be more effective than any other that he
+could play. What he has to do, therefore, is to find out that game in
+all its peculiarities, and this is what the explorer and investigator is
+constantly trying to achieve. He is finding out the mysteries not of the
+game in general, as he sometimes imagines, but of his own game, and the
+more he discovers the better is he as a golfer. Surely there is proof
+enough of the absolute soundness of this proposition in the fact that
+the discoveries as they are made, meaning not those which are found
+later to be worthless, but those which become established in the
+permanent system and are invaluable, are often absolutely opposite to
+those made in another case and which become permanent in the same way.
+Why, even the champions differ more widely than any others--yet one
+remembers that this should not be a matter of surprise, but something
+that by this argument is quite inevitable. The champions have been
+marvellously successful in the mining of their own golfing seams, and
+that is the chief reason why they are champions. And all this helps to
+make golf the game it is--the eternal finding out, the progress, with
+its occasional set-backs, towards the discovery, the completion of the
+golfing self. I have only met one man in my life who has golfed and
+never found anything out, and that was Mr. John Burns, the Minister of
+State, who assured me that once in the old days of the Tooting Bec
+course he was persuaded by a number of political persons to go with them
+to play the game there one day. He had never handled a golf club in his
+life, but having some practical knowledge of cricket, felt that golf
+could not offer any serious hindrance to him. Consequently he agreed to
+take his part in a foursome, and in the progress of this match usually
+drove the best ball, with the result that his side was well victorious.
+There seemed nothing in his game that needed improvement. Herein we
+observe Mr. Burns displayed many of the qualities of the highest
+statesmanship, but he rose majestically in his determination that from
+that day he would never play golf again, much as he liked it, and he
+never has. He has these three distinctions--that he has played golf once
+and once only in his life; that being a golfer, as all are who are once
+initiated, he has never lost a match; and that he has never found
+anything out. I shall hope to be present at the second game he plays,
+the resolution having broken down, and then we shall see discoveries
+made.
+
+But once again, "Golfer, know thyself" is the supreme moral drawn from
+the experiences of the players who have golfed and studied most. Every
+golfer worth the name has found out hundreds of things and hopes to find
+many more; some of them are quite different from any of the other things
+that have been found out; he has his own private collection, and in it
+almost any person might find something that might with a little
+alteration be added to his own. So I remember that when we came up out
+of Spain, where the golfers are in that happy state that they have at
+this present stage almost more to discover than any other golfers in the
+world, a new spring season was beginning in the homeland of the game and
+all players were looking over their stock of knowledge and seeing what
+they had found out in the most recent times. It occurred to me then to
+send out a demand to a number of good players whom I knew for their
+enthusiasm, for their individualism and their strength of mind, and for
+their conscientious investigations, and ask them what they had lately
+discovered in an original kind of way which had beyond question
+materially improved their game. The answers were enlightening, and some
+of them, which I may quote, are worth pondering upon. One of the best
+players of my acquaintance sent to say that he had made a discovery,
+which, applied as a resolution, had done him more good than any other
+half-dozen he had ever thought of. The essence of the new idea was that
+on the teeing ground especially, and when approaching his ball through
+the green, he would see to it that the stepping of the feet, the
+movements of the arms, hands--everything involving action--should be as
+slow and deliberate as possible, even the very speech itself, for the
+reason that this slow sureness created an irresistible tendency in the
+golfing action that was to follow, the back-swing was then slow and
+deliberate, and the whole movement was harmonious and precise. The
+probable value of this idea is suggested by the fact that the man who is
+slow and deliberate in his waggling--not meaning one who prolongs it
+unduly or does it in a hesitating way--generally does his swinging
+better. Another player said the best discovery he had ever made was the
+idea of imagining his weight during upswinging to be on his left foot
+without really throwing it there, at the same time holding his legs a
+little more stiffly than had been his wont and keeping his heels on the
+ground as long as he could. By these things, which could all be grasped
+in the one general idea of making himself conscious of his legs all the
+time, he has come by a firmness and steadiness of system that have added
+enormously to his driving capacity; in fact, it has converted him from
+being a man who could not drive at all to a very good driver indeed.
+
+I remember that once I was watching Taylor teaching a scratch man and
+giving him hints for curing some considerable cutting and slicing to
+which he was addicted. The champion turned round to us and said that one
+of them was the best tip he had ever suggested in his life. It is the
+simplest thing. In addressing the ball he would have the patient turn
+over the face of the driver until that face is positively hanging over
+from the top, pointing to the turf, at such a fearsome angle--no limit
+to it--as to make it seem impossible to do anything but smother the ball
+when coming down on to it. The back-swing has to be begun with the face
+in this threatening situation. The truth is that the nervous fear that
+it inspires is the secret of the success of the method. The man believes
+that if he comes down on to the ball like that there will be a horrible
+disaster, and all the time in the down-swing he is subconsciously
+(another to that long list of most important subconscious movements)
+making corrections and allowances, and his wrists are doing a twist to
+get the club right by the time of impact. It is this wrist action, with
+the left hand managing it, that is wanted, and the arm action that it
+induces. The club reaches the ball properly, and the ball goes off
+without a slice. If sometimes it is smothered it does not matter; the
+cure will take effect in time. But, you say, you do not want to go on
+for ever addressing the ball in this seemingly grotesque way. No; but,
+again subconsciously, when the ball is being hit and driven properly and
+the arm and wrist action become natural, there is a sure tendency
+towards a settling down to normal ways, and without the man bothering
+about it any more the club will gradually get itself straight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE SUPERIORITY OF BRITISH LINKS, AND A MASTERPIECE OF KENT, WITH SOME
+SYSTEMS AND MORALS FOR HOLIDAY GOLF.
+
+
+The chief and essential difference between golf in Britain and all other
+places in the world, as everybody feels on coming home to it after
+wanderings with clubs abroad, is that here in the home of the game it is
+"the real thing" as nowhere else. Climate, soil, history and sentiment,
+and the temperament of the people have combined to make golf here a
+thing that foreign people who have never seen and enjoyed it cannot
+imagine. It is not only that its excellence is so great, but its variety
+so infinite; and perhaps it is because of that excellence and variety
+that, human nature being in such a constant state of discontent, our
+people in these days are so much concerned with problems of architecture
+and the attainment of ideals which vary much with individuals and cause
+incessant wrangling. It is when we are far away that we think most of
+the magnificence of the courses on the western seaboard of
+Scotland--Prestwick, Troon, and Turnberry among them, with Machrihanish
+and Islay in more lonesome parts--of the wealth of golf in that East
+Lothian district that is so amazingly crowded with fine links, of the
+splendid strength of such as Hoylake and others in Cheshire and
+Lancashire, of our own east coast with such jewels as Brancaster set in
+it, of that marvellous trinity of courses on the Kentish seaboard, which
+as a golfing land has surely not its match in the world--Sandwich, Deal,
+and Prince's, in the group--of Littlestone and Rye along the southern
+coast, and then in the west such a glorious golfing ground as Westward
+Ho! And there is Wales with its pretty and excellent Porthcawl,
+Ashburnham, and many more, and Ireland also with its great Dublin
+courses, Portmarnock and Dollymount, and then sweet Newcastle in county
+Down, and bold Portrush.
+
+Indeed there are no others like the British courses, and it is always a
+tremendous speculation with any golfer of experience as to which he
+likes the best. When he comes to make it he has to separate in his mind
+the feelings of admiration and those of affection, for it commonly
+happens, if the judgment is reasonably good, that one may have the
+utmost admiration for some particular course, for its unimpeachable
+architecture based so well on perfect theory and the attempt always to
+make the punishment fit the crime and award stern justice, and yet not
+greatly delight to play upon it because in a way that sometimes he can
+hardly understand it does not give him his utmost pleasure. Here again
+the inexplicable emotions settle it. But in that matter of "justice"
+which seems so much to be the ideal of new architects, there comes the
+reflection in the ordinary golfer's mind sometimes as to whether golf,
+not really being a game of justice now, would be better if it were one,
+whether with so much that is unfair and tantalising removed from it the
+game would be half so good. Surely in no fine sport is there always
+exact justice done, and if it be made an ideal is it not possible that
+the nearer such ideal is approached the poorer may become the sport, not
+perhaps in regular proportion but in approximate effect? Golf is a game
+of Nature after all, and Nature in some ways does not always stick to
+justice. One may ponder upon what Anatole France once said about this
+justice. "In the vulgar sense," he wrote, "it is the most melancholy of
+virtues. Nobody desires it. Faith opposes it by grace and Nature by
+love. It is enough for a man to call himself just for him to inspire a
+genuine repulsion. Justice is held in horror by things animate and
+inanimate. In the social order it is only a machine, indispensable
+doubtless, and for that reason respectable, but beyond question cruel
+since it has no other function than to punish, and because it sets
+jailers and executioners at work." And perhaps it may be said that golf
+has little enough in principle to do with justice either; and we have
+seen into what perplexities the good authorities of St. Andrews have
+fallen by their vain endeavour to make a code of laws that would settle
+the just dues of every golfer in every circumstance. Nature in her
+variety has contrived to beat them all continually. Perhaps it may be
+the same with the construction of courses, but the end of all golfers'
+endeavour, however much it may be criticised, is the good of the game,
+and it is generally achieved.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those who in the most dispassionate frame of mind have considered
+carefully all the points that should count the most and detached
+themselves as well as they might from their private and inexplicable
+preference have generally come to the conclusion that there are three
+courses in this great golfing country of ours that are somewhat better
+than all the rest in their golfing quality. One of them is old St.
+Andrews, another of them is middle-aged Westward Ho! and the third is
+the youthful Prince's at Sandwich. Considered as the perfect course,
+weighing point against point, a jury of the best critics might have
+difficulty in coming to any other decision than that architecturally,
+for the real magnificence of its golfing value, the great creation of
+Mr. Mallaby-Deeley on the golfing land by Pegwell Bay is supreme. Here
+ten years ago there was nothing but a barren waste of sandhills, just as
+they had been, as it seemed, since the very beginning of
+things--lonesome, useless, forgotten. Then it was realised that what was
+good for nothing else was best of all for golf. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley saw
+it and understood, and now hereabouts the land is comparatively
+priceless so much is it coveted by the golfers, who also now understand
+as they see. Other great courses have been the productions of a long
+period of time, improvements continually on an original structure of the
+crudest kind. Westward Ho! was not made in a season, nor in many
+seasons. Only recently some of its most delightful touches have been
+added to it. St. Andrews was the work of generations. But Prince's,
+though it has been appreciably changed from its original design, was
+like one great flash of inspiration, and as such is surely the most
+amazing achievement in the architecture of golf. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley in
+other ways has shown himself to be a man of immense imagination; but was
+it ever better illustrated than in his making of Prince's? Our
+admiration for the course may be not the less but greater because we
+cannot play her properly. For my own humble part I love most the
+championship course of the Royal Cinque Ports club at Deal near by. Here
+there are charm and variety, and holes of the most splendid character.
+If some find fault with them, what does it matter when they are so good
+to play? The Royal St. George's course at Sandwich, again, is a most
+beautiful thing; surely there is no other which gives such an infinite
+pleasure to a greater number of capable players. But for sheer golfing
+quality, Prince's truly is the queen of all.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have asked Mr. Mallaby-Deeley to tell me what his ideals are in this
+matter, and in response he has made a statement of such interest and
+value that it should be given at its length. He said that, premising
+that for purposes of consideration we should regard "ideal links" as
+having reference only to the sequence of holes, both as to ranges of
+length, difficulty, and beauty of design, he submitted that the making
+of such an ideal course, given suitable ground, depended then on three
+things only, being knowledge, time, and money. St. Andrews and his own
+Prince's come nearest to this ideal, but the former fails in that it is
+too straight in and out, and also because one can pull all the way out
+and all the way home again without falling into any trouble, the truth
+being that the more one pulls the greater the possibility of safety in
+doing so. Some say that if you do thus pull you cannot reach the greens,
+but in these days that is not so. We have seen them reach those greens
+after the most exaggerated pulling. Then he thinks that the set of St.
+Andrews in the matter of prevailing winds is far from ideal, for so
+often the wind is at one's back all the way out and against the player
+all the way coming home, or the other way about. Again, no one can deny,
+he says, that St. Andrews has three if not four very ordinary and
+commonplace holes. Prince's, as now laid out, has in general opinion not
+a single commonplace or uninteresting hole in the whole course, but it
+has had the advantage of being laid out many years after St. Andrews,
+and after the introduction of the rubber ball. A course comes nearer to
+the ideal as its holes are placed to every variety of wind. In the early
+days of Prince's at Sandwich the disadvantage of an in and out course
+were soon discovered and an enormous amount of money was spent in
+altering it to its present form, in which, with the single exception of
+St. George's, it is the best in existence, the old course at Sandwich
+being ideal in this respect. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, looking upon his
+Prince's in the supercritical way of a pleased but still insistent
+creator, can see only one blemish in it, and that is that the two short
+holes, being the third and the fifth--though the fifth is longer than
+the third--come too close together. Any two holes on a course may
+separately be extremely good, but coming together lack something of
+perfection because of the repetition that instantly arises. He would
+have the pin visible for every approach shot on his ideal links, and the
+only exception he would make would be in the case of a full second shot
+with a long carry over a high bunker to the end of it, for this to his
+mind is a most interesting shot. Such an one, he points out, is that
+presented at the sixteenth hole at Littlestone, and he would be
+surprised to know that any one would ever think of altering that hole in
+order to enable a player in the distance to see the pin. He also would
+not agree to placing a bunker immediately at the back of the green,
+which punishes the man who dares to be up and encourages "pawkiness."
+
+The visible pin is imperative at short holes; he will admit no
+exceptions. But all who have been to Prince's have been most impressed
+with the beauty and golfing perfection of the dog-legged holes there, a
+couple of which are presented at the beginning of the round, immediately
+introducing the stranger to some of the best delights of this course. He
+would have dog-leg holes of both shapes in his round, those bending to
+the right to worry the slicer, and those angled towards the left to help
+the long driver who greatly dares. The first hole at Hoylake and the
+second and eleventh at Prince's are dog-leg holes that he likes best.
+But, he will tell you, by far the most vital matters to consider in
+making any course with pretensions to being ideal are the position of
+the greens and the bunkering through the course and near the hole, and,
+though it is a consideration that is too often overlooked, it is nearly
+as important to bear in mind from which quarter the prevailing wind
+blows. He believes every shot from the tee to the hole ought to be of
+equal importance, but in the case of the majority of the courses this is
+not so. Despite the fact that on the tee the man has everything in his
+favour, a perfect stance and a teed-up ball, he is given more space to
+play into and a greater margin for inaccuracy than in the case of any
+other shot. This, says the architect, is wrong. Surely it should be as
+necessary on the ideal course to place the tee shot as any other. He has
+turned the subject of ribbon bunkers very thoroughly over in his mind.
+In a general way, he does not like them because of the varying winds. He
+says, "_Tutiores ibis in medias vias_," is a safe and golden rule of
+life, and it applies equally to ribbon bunkers which while they make
+some holes mar many more. Most frequently on account of wind and other
+things this form of hazard fails as a fair guard to the green for a hole
+that is meant for two full shots. It is then wrongly placed, and would
+generally be improved by the substitution of ear bunkers to catch sliced
+and pulled shots thereto. The push shot is one of the most difficult in
+the game to play, but it is one of the prettiest and most satisfactory
+in accomplishment; but the ribbon bunker is often unfair to the man who
+plays it. Yet the absence of such ribbon bunkers does not prevent the
+man who likes to play his high mashie shots from still playing them.
+Thus the absence of this form of bunker is fair to all, while if placed
+very near the green its presence penalises the push-shot player.
+But many a tee shot would be tame if it were not for the ribbon
+bunkers some way ahead. In epitome he says to the student of
+architecture--"Bunker your course so that every bad shot is punished;
+place your bunkers so that every shot must be played and played well;
+make the length of your holes such that if a shot is foozled it costs
+you a stroke; guard your greens right and left, and even to the very
+edge and into the green itself, if necessary, but this must of course
+depend on the length of shot to be played; and at one-shot holes make
+the green a very fort of surrounding bunkers, and guard the tee shot. Do
+not leave it open as at the famous short hole at St. Andrews, a much
+overrated hole. But above all things, make your bunkers fair; don't make
+them impossible to get out of except by playing back."
+
+As to the lengths of the holes on his ideal course he would have about
+twelve two-shot holes varying from 380 to 440 yards, and there should be
+three one-shot holes of about 165, 180, and 200 yards respectively.
+There would be two or three drive-and-iron holes of about 350 yards
+each, but a drive-and-iron hole should be so constructed that if the
+drive is missed it will be impossible for the man who missed it to sail
+on the green with his next. There is a good example of this in the
+fifteenth at Prince's, for although this hole is only a drive and an
+iron the penalty for missing the drive is that it takes the player two
+more shots to reach the green because of the nature of the ground in
+front of the tee. And then he would have it a condition that the last
+three holes should average about 400 to 420 yards each, and the
+seventeenth and eighteenth should be made specially testing ones. This
+is the ideal course, and, being such, it is not a place for foozlers.
+But if it is properly and fairly constructed it will be easier and
+pleasanter to play on than a course which is made difficult by the
+simple method of making it unfair, for example by putting bunkers in the
+wrong places, by cutting the hole in a ridiculous position on the
+green, by punishing the man who is "up" (a new-fangled and absurd idea
+of course construction) by placing the hole immediately in front of a
+bunker at the back of the green, and by leaving the approach to the
+green from a long shot rough or broken, and so unfair. It is easy to
+make any course difficult, and so conducive to high scoring, by making
+it unfair. This induces pawky play because the punishment for bold play
+may be too severe. He is also of opinion (and there is a constantly
+growing tendency to agree with him) that there is too much premium on
+putting, and that it plays far too important a part in the game,
+especially among first-class players and in first-class matches. He
+thinks the hole should be six and a half inches instead of four and a
+quarter. Under present conditions a putt missed by half an inch bears
+the same punishment (although the rest of the hole through the green may
+have been played faultlessly) as a hopelessly bad shot by one's opponent
+through the green.
+
+Prince's supports its creator's arguments very well indeed, and one
+enormous fascination of it lies in the fact that it is always suggesting
+to you, always inviting you, always tempting you to do the more daring
+thing, and hinting that, even though you failed, the suffering might not
+be too much. In that, it seems to me, lies the chief charm of this
+masterpiece of architecture.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So when we come home from other lands, let us think of golfing holidays
+in our own, and moralise from old experience. It is an aggravating
+circumstance that while there is hardly anything in the way of change
+and holiday that is so splendid as a golfing holiday, there is hardly
+any kind that is so easily spoiled. The golfer is not dependent on the
+weather, only to a small extent on his friends, he seldom knows limits
+of time or space, yet he fails oftener in his pursuit of the perfect
+happiness of a summer vacation than do the unsophisticated people who
+kill the time of August and September in other ways, and that happens
+because of the very fascination of the thing, and the enthusiasm and
+excess to which it leads him on. In our working days limits are imposed
+upon us; when we are loose and unrestricted all system and wise
+restraint fly to pieces. It is not only that we often play too much on
+holidays, but that during play and in the intervals between those spells
+of action the imagination is at work too fast and makes riot upon
+settled methods which have raised the game of the individual to some
+more or less agreeable sort of quality. Excess and experiment are the
+two evils that shatter so many golfing holidays, and yet the
+contradictions of golf are such that we find there is something good to
+be said both for excess and for experiment. But be all this as it may,
+it is not until a man has gone through twenty golfing holiday campaigns
+that he fully realises he has an education to serve in this matter, and
+after twenty more he is able to start out on the forty-first in the
+strong confidence that from the days and weeks before him he will
+extract the full available supply of rich golfing delight. These remarks
+do not well apply to the person of the thick phlegmatic temperament who
+plays now with the same set of clubs that he started with ten years or
+more agone, the which have not had their shafts varnished, nor their
+grips attended since the time of their first swinging. This man is
+without imagination, without feeling, and, with no blessing upon him, we
+may let him wander away to play wherever he will, knowing that he will
+always derive some great satisfaction from his pursuit and gain
+mightily in health. He is not like most of us; he is as the man without
+any religion; he is very material. He eats, he plays, he rests, he
+sleeps. And he does very well in it all; and yet we of the majority who
+think always, ponder deeply, worry exceedingly and are wracked with
+doubts and conflicting theories, disappointed ever in fruitless
+experiments, do not envy him. The material person does not go down into
+the depths where we grieve and are in pain (how often do we go and
+grieve!), but neither does he ascend to the heights of pleasure that are
+scaled by successful experiment, by the sudden discovery of some
+wonderful secret that seems to have unlocked the gates of the higher
+golf and rendered us immune from failure for evermore. (Never mind what
+happens in the morning!) We may suffer the depths for those hot moments
+of life on the summits.
+
+This preamble is needed for warning. Golf is the great game of emotions,
+and at holiday times those emotions are quickened, strung up and, flying
+loose in riot, play the devil with our game. I am sorry to believe that
+many young men who come back to their homelands from the golfing holiday
+grounds in October do so with inward sighs and stifled sobs. They tell
+us that they have had the most glorious time; they may foolishly give an
+account of a round said to have been done in 74, and of many of the
+longest holes that cost them only four strokes apiece, and we forgive
+them for their words which we know are false, realising the pain of
+their case and that their dissembling is in a small manner for the good
+of the game. Their emotions have led them astray; they have been weak
+and foolish; they have done the wrong things and they have left undone
+all those which were recommended to them as right. They have played
+three rounds a day, and they have bought new drivers and putters. And
+some of them have actually changed their stances and had an inch cut off
+a favourite shaft! Truly their emotions have led them wrong. Player! if
+you would pass the placid holiday, kill those emotions and cast them
+off. You may then take a golfing holiday from which you will derive that
+magnificent material comfort and refreshment that your butcher and baker
+do when they walk upon the promenade at Margate and, well fed, sleep at
+times on the sunlit sands. You will really believe on your return to
+labour in the town, that you have had a splendid time, but soon you will
+cease to talk of it for you will find that there is very little to
+remember. Time was passed; that was all. The man whose emotions played
+old Harry with him does not forget. He has something indeed to remember,
+for he lived very much in his month of play. So you will see that in the
+scheme of golfing things as jointly ordained by Nature and kind
+Providence, with the petty meddling of the man himself, there are
+different processes of holiday, and each in its way is the best. As in
+so many other affairs of golf there are contradictions abounding. But
+let us, after such philosophy, move to some definite considerations, and
+consider life and facts as they are presented to us.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One of the doctors' papers was well laughed at a little while since for
+suggesting that, on account of the nerve strain that it makes, golf is
+not an ideal game for everybody, especially busy folks with few hours
+and days for recreation. To quote: "If he takes his failures to play a
+good game to heart, it is doubtful whether his health gains very much.
+He has had, it is true, the advantage of a change of scene and
+occupation, and has lived for a while in a healthier atmosphere, and,
+if he had only been satisfied with his game, all these things would have
+conspired to send him back to his work cheered and braced up. But he may
+play very badly and become unduly worried thereat. A game that is
+calculated to increase an irritability which has arisen out of a trying
+week's work can hardly be said to be recreative, at all events to the
+mind." The medical writer concluded impressively: "The game of golf, if
+it does not go smoothly, presents so many points of analogy with the
+tiresome eventualities of life that there can be little doubt that
+persons of an irritable, gloomy, and worrying disposition would be
+better if they did not seek their recreation on the links." The common
+people sometimes look upon these pronouncements from the columns of the
+professional paper as being like the essence of the wisdom and knowledge
+of the whole of Harley Street. I remember, however, that when this was
+published the golfers ridiculed and condemned it, and agreed to take
+more golf and less medicine. It is not my function to advocate the
+playing of less golf than is played, much less the stoppage of any of
+it, but I dare to suggest that there was a germ of truth in what the
+medical paper said. There are kinds of players who should take their
+golf with restraint and caution, especially at holiday times. The truth
+is that a vast proportion of golfing holidays are completely ruined
+through a bad plan of campaign, or over-doing it, or both--commonly
+both. We would say nothing to a doubter now about the selection of his
+friends for his party; he should know that it is a matter demanding the
+extremest care. A golfing holiday _à deux_ may expose all the least
+beautiful parts of each man's character, and those who are not such
+friends that they can comfortably bear each other's infirmities might do
+better even to go on their golfing way lonely and without a partner.
+There is much to be said for the freedom of this latter holiday
+existence, and odd indeed would be the golfing place where there were
+not many games for the solitary stranger to play.
+
+The night before the opening of the campaign, the eve of the journey
+outwards, is a trying time to many men. I think of those who take loving
+interest in their clubs, and have many of them, including a first-class
+reserve, and perhaps a second-class reserve also, to the original set
+that is in full commission. The man who has only seven clubs in the
+world, and seems to take a pride in telling you that he has had them all
+since the beginning of his golf, is in no difficulty. But with others
+the trouble is how many clubs to take, and how many to dare to leave
+behind. After the first selection it is seen that about five or six
+drivers are put in the list, very many irons, and a large assortment of
+putters. All the ex-favourites are to be tried over again and
+experiments to be made with a number of others. It is found then that
+too many clubs have been selected; but after the most painful and
+difficult weeding out there may still be some twenty left, and these are
+taken. It is a mistake. From the day of arrival at the holiday place the
+man is in doubt as to what he will play with, and he mixes up his game
+into a bad state of confusion through using different clubs almost every
+day. It is a good rule, to which every golfer subscribes after twenty
+campaigns, if not before, to take away the regular clubs as used every
+day at home, not one less and only two more, being a spare driver and an
+extra putter. In that way happiness and contentment lie. I would leave
+out the driver did I not know the case of a man who so much grieved for
+one he had left behind that he travelled three hundred miles back home
+to get it!
+
+The little truth that there was in the indictment against the game by
+the doctors' paper is that it is possible for some men, many of them, to
+have too much of it, when it becomes bad for the men and bad for their
+game, and holidays are rendered failures. There was a time when really
+good golf could only be had at the seaside, or very far away from the
+great centres of work and business. That is no longer the case, and the
+situation is that the golf we are having all the time at home is hard
+and strenuous, demanding great ability and thought. The golfing holiday,
+then, might very well be made an easy one on a links where the holes are
+simple, and--remembering another scare that was made by a doctors' paper
+some time later--I believe that there is as happy golf to be had up on
+the hills, and in the lonely country places, as on the margin of any
+sunny sea.
+
+But it is the excess of golf that is played on holidays that spoils
+everything in the case of the man of a somewhat nervous temperament, and
+one who may not be as strong and beefy as the John Bull of the pictures.
+Too many of these people seem to think that, as they have gone away for
+golf, they should have as much of it as they can get, and play to excess
+accordingly. Three rounds! Three rounds! One of the reasons why some men
+play so much--as they put it to themselves--is that they wish to improve
+their game, and they conceive that the holiday time is the best of all
+in which to achieve that end. But experience shows that very seldom
+indeed is a man's game improved at such a time; very frequently it is
+injured, and that through the excess. When so much of it is played,
+weariness, though half unconsciously, is induced, proper pains are not
+taken at every stroke, carelessness becomes constant; then, with
+deterioration, too many experiments are tried, and worst of all, that
+terrible, and for the time being incurable, disease of staleness sets
+in, and there is then an end to all happiness and enjoyment. There is
+hardly any cure for staleness except complete abstention for a time. It
+needs some strength of mind to carry out such a resolve, but he who
+severely limits his golf at holiday times enjoys it the more, and he and
+his health and his game are the better for it. A holiday system based on
+wise restrictions is a splendid thing. Men of long experience have tried
+many of them, and the best of all is this: Play two rounds on the first
+day of the week, one on the second, two again on the third, one on the
+fourth, two on the fifth, one on the sixth, and take a whole holiday
+from the game on the seventh day. That is not too much nor too little.
+Another point for remembrance is that on the days that are warm and long
+the old convention of one round before lunch and another afterwards is
+not a good one for the best and most enjoyable employment of the day.
+Much better is it to play in the morning, rest pleasantly--sleep,
+perhaps--in the afternoon, and play again in the cool of the evening,
+when golf is the best of all--always provided your course is not laid
+out in a straight line from east to west and back, for playing full
+against a setting sun is a very tantalising thing.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mention has been made of staleness. In our minds there is awakened an
+unhappy thought with which something had better be done for good
+contentment's sake ere we pass along to the pleasant consideration of
+this holiday golf. Staleness is the canker that kills many of these
+expeditions that are planned with the happiest promise. It is a dread
+golfing disease that rages on the links almost like an epidemic during
+August and September. It spoils the game and happiness of every player
+whom it attacks, and sometimes it cuts holidays short. It is nearly safe
+to assume that when on holiday one golfer in every half-dozen is
+afflicted with it, and some of the others are in danger. It consists in
+the absolute incapacity of the player to produce a game that is within
+very many strokes of his real form; in truth the game of a good man may
+fall to the twenty-handicap level or lower, and each new effort on his
+part to raise it up again only results in a worsening of the case. There
+is no certain cure except isolation from the game and long rest. A
+trouble that has the power, then, to ruin the golfing holiday, and often
+does, must be considered very seriously.
+
+Here is the progress of a case for the details of which I can personally
+vouch. I was a sympathetic witness of it. The man was playing well at
+the beginning of the holiday season and went for a month to a fine east
+coast links where there was no town, no village, and no society but that
+of golfers, and nothing to do but golf, which was what he desired. For a
+week he played well, doing two rounds every day, and sometimes three.
+The weather was hot. At the beginning of the second week there were
+signs of a failing game. His first anxiety soon increased; he changed
+his ball, then began to make alterations in his stances and swings, and
+at the end of the second week was all foozles, and getting worse. Soon
+afterwards it was obvious that the cause of the whole thing was
+staleness. The man tried the heroic remedy of loafing about his
+quarters, golfless, for a couple of days, reading novels and pretending
+to play bowls against himself. He also studied the stones in the old
+graveyard near by. On the third day he went back to the links very
+hopeful, but the case was as bad as before, and, desperate, he gave his
+game a three days' rest after that. This also failed. Neither of the
+resting spells was long enough. This being a man of keen nervous
+temperament, who took his game very seriously and was very miserable, he
+did the wisest thing by giving up his holiday and going home to work in
+London.
+
+The primary cause of staleness is excess of play, resulting in
+exhaustion of nervous and physical energy, which in turn produces
+carelessness, decreases the capacity for taking the infinite pains that
+are necessary to the game, and--important--brings about a failure in the
+subconscious working arrangement between the mind and the physical
+system that has everything to do with the proper accomplishment of the
+various strokes. The movements of every golfing swing, as we have
+agreed, are extremely complicated; they consist of hundreds of little
+movements amalgamated into one great system, and while one is conscious
+of the system, it is impossible for the parts of it to be anything but
+subconsciously done, and they are made perfect by training and practice,
+and by getting the brain and the physical construction to work together
+exactly and with harmony. When staleness comes on, this working
+arrangement breaks down and the player attempts the hopeless task of
+trying to do consciously what can only be done the other way. I believe
+that this is the true explanation of staleness.
+
+_Note 1._--The exhaustion of the nervous and physical energy is often
+unsuspected, and is covered up by the enthusiasm for the game. _Note
+2._--Excess of play does not mean only a frequent playing of three
+rounds a day. Two rounds every day, as a regular thing, may be excess in
+many cases. Much depends on the individual. A man of highly-strung
+temperament will become stale much more quickly than a beefy, phlegmatic
+person, who is commonly immune. _Note 3._--Staleness is very much more
+easily induced, and develops more quickly and dangerously, in hot
+weather than at other times, because the tax on the nervous energy and
+the eyesight is so much greater then.
+
+Now here are the common symptoms and the results of staleness. Almost
+the first real sign of it is swaying of the body. This is very slight at
+first, and is rarely suspected; but it brings about a general collapse
+of the swing and the entire golfing apparatus. A very hopeless sort of
+tap is given to the ball on the tee, and it is driven perhaps only a
+hundred and fifty yards. As everything seems to have been done properly,
+the player is mystified, begins to experiment, and then worse troubles
+come on. Shakiness of the legs, and much exaggerated knee and foot work,
+often resulting in collapse of the right leg and the player getting up
+on his toes, make up the next symptom; and another one that is a common
+accompaniment of the beginning of staleness is falling or lurching
+forward as the club is brought down on to the ball. Anything like a
+proper swing is, in such circumstances, impossible. Bad timing begins
+immediately; then there is overswinging and too fast swinging; and, of
+course, the moving of the head and the taking of the eye from the ball,
+those two faults that never miss an opportunity of coming in to add to
+the woes of the worried golfer.
+
+What must the stale golfer do for his salvation and happiness? In the
+first place, if he has had this thing before, he should be on his guard
+against it and catch it in time. If taken at the very beginning an early
+cure is quite practicable. The golf should be stopped at once for a few
+days, and a rest and change, as complete as possible, taken. Then the
+game should be resumed warily--one round a day. In addition to this,
+some men will insist on having alterations made in their clubs. They
+deceive themselves. One of the greatest champions of all times once, in
+intimate conversation, laid down a rule to me with great seriousness,
+and it is one never to be forgotten. He said: "Never make a change in
+your regular clubs, and never buy a new one, unless it is a putter, when
+you are playing badly. Only make changes when you are playing at your
+very best. You may then play even better, knowing so well what you
+want." Yet, warn them as much as you may, many men will make extensive
+changes when they are stale and desperate. One plea to them then--the
+change having failed, go back to the old clubs before changing again.
+Never get far from your base, or you will be lost in doubt and
+confusion. Let it be the same with methods as with clubs. If a new way
+fails, let the sick man go back to the old one before experimenting
+again. He should remember that that old one has served him well, and the
+possibilities are that he will have to stand by it after all. Then the
+stale golfer should try to encourage himself; he should try a new set of
+opponents, play with men of longer handicap than himself, who normally
+would never outdrive him, and so on. A change of links often works
+wonders, but if the staleness has gone very far, and it matters little,
+it is often wise to give up the golfing part of the holiday if one is in
+progress. We have seen the advice given to play through a period of
+staleness. This is a heroic measure, but it would not succeed in one in
+six cases, and the suffering would be too great for the ordinary mortal.
+We tell him to take few clubs away with him, and to be faithful to them,
+and they will serve him well. And we tell him when his golf is ill not
+to fly to the dangerous stimulant of a new club. And yet, where is the
+man who does come back from his holiday without a new one in his bag,
+one fond relic of those days that were so tightly packed with golf? We
+bring them back with us, the names of their nativity upon them, as
+hunters and explorers bring trophies from distant lands. Mutely they
+testify for us. Sometimes when the holiday is done they are added, for
+their merit and fine service, to the clubs in commission in the bag;
+oftener they fall into the reserve; frequently they are given a purely
+honorary office and sent off with a title to the golfer's own private
+House of Lords as magnificent relics.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A diary should be kept during the golfing holiday; indeed it should be
+kept at all times. More such are made than the golfing world realises,
+because they are often, to the uttermost degree, secret and private, and
+that not merely for the reason that some diarists place themselves in
+the confessional when they make their entries, but because, alas! they
+are conscious of serving their own vanity by exaggeration of their best
+achievements. It may be kept for one of two distinct reasons, or for
+both of them, though the latter is not generally done. The two different
+objects are entertainment and instruction. For the former, the small
+things that are sold in shops will do. You write down, each time you
+have been playing, where the game was had, who the other man was, and
+what you beat him by; or the extent of the disaster if it was the other
+way about. In the column devoted to "Conditions" you exaggerate the
+force of the wind; and under "Remarks" you say you were driving and
+putting splendidly when you won. If you lost, the space is left blank.
+This record is in its own way valuable, because at a future time it will
+refresh the memory concerning great golfing days of the past, and thus
+furnish a real enjoyment. When a game of golf is played, and finished,
+it is not done with. It is lodged in a great store of remembrance, with
+full particulars attached to it, ripening with time, so that the
+player's memories are among the best happenings of his golfing
+possessions. All of us know that this is so, and it is as a kind of
+catalogue that the little diaries serve their purpose well.
+
+The diary of analysis or instruction is a very different thing. The
+object is to make a serial record of ideas and successful experiments,
+faults and tendencies--most particularly tendencies--in order that on
+periodical examination of it the player may derive useful lessons and
+improve his game. One should get a good exercise book, bound nicely and
+strongly, with morocco corners, and just enter up one's performances on
+the plain paper according to any system that one may choose, giving
+prominence to a line at the top of each entry, naming the day, the
+place, and the man. I have seen diaries kept in this way, and they have
+been very serviceable. But the man who is starting anything of this kind
+must come to a definite agreement with himself to be absolutely honest
+and sincere; and he must also be very introspective, and have keen
+discernment for his own faults and constant observation for all that he
+does at every stroke. Otherwise it were better that he merely kept the
+diary of glorious remembrances.
+
+Let him, if he keeps a diary of fact, hold it secret from all the world;
+but every night after his play put down in it the plain, real truth
+about what happened; and let him see to it, after much thought upon
+recent events, that he does properly know the truth. This point is
+emphasised because men may be short with their putts, say on sixteen of
+eighteen greens in one round, and yet not notice the frequency of the
+same fault; or they may be pulling or cutting their putts all the time
+and be oblivious, in the same way, to the circumstance. Or they may be
+pitching their approaches too short of the greens, or slicing most of
+their drives. The point is that the golfer's memory for his own
+misdeeds is an exceedingly short one, and he rarely gets them tabulated
+and analysed as he should. If he made an analysis of his play at the end
+of the day, stated the truth about it in the book, and then examined
+that book carefully once a week, he would learn something about the
+causes that were preventing him from getting on in the game, and the
+next step would suggest itself. Some would say that the making of
+personal statistics in this way would be a very troublesome matter, and
+they would be certain to tire of it soon. It is not so much a nuisance
+as might be imagined; it becomes interesting, and it helps one's game.
+
+But if you are doubtful about this idea, do keep a diary of sorts
+anyhow, for it is such a pity to let the golf that has been played die
+out of memory. You may gather a notion of the value and interest of what
+might be called played golf by reading through the match-book of another
+man, like that of the late F. G. Tait, which is included in the
+delightful and pathetic memoir that Mr. John Low wrote about him. Tait,
+model of golfers, always filed the facts about his matches, but briefly.
+Not many words were wasted in the "Remarks" column; what was said there
+was the plain truth. Often it was "F. G. T. in great form," but the
+recorder knew how to denounce himself. It does one good to read through
+this diary of one who was soldier, hero, golfer, and darling of the
+game.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But not every man departs on a golfing holiday for a strenuous time of
+continuous match-play with keen rivals who might be fine companions, and
+who would keep him up at night with bridge, after a day's work on the
+links was done. All sorts and conditions of men are included in this
+comprehensive golfing world of ours; and some have most contemplative
+moods, love solitude, and, alone with themselves and the game, probe
+deeply into its mysteries and into their own weaknesses. It is to the
+credit of the pastime that it accommodates itself most splendidly to
+every disposition and mood and manner; and men of a lonely way have gone
+solus on their holidays, and held themselves solus all the time, and
+have come back again, well refreshed and satisfied. They have often
+enough had fewer disappointments than the others. They have practised
+extensively, and they have improved themselves as golfers. Practice is
+indeed a feature of many golfing holidays. Here at such times we have
+the full game at our disposal and nothing but the game, and now, if
+ever, we can make ourselves to be better golfers. That is how we reason.
+It is a matter to be considered carefully.
+
+Practice fails in most cases because the golfers concerned do not
+concentrate upon their efforts with that keenness, thoroughness, and
+determination they exhibit when playing a real match. The game is not
+the same to them; they do not try so hard, however much, as one might
+say, they try to try, and the result is there is such an excess of
+looseness, carelessness, about their methods, that bad habits are born;
+and these persons then had really better not be practising at all, for
+thus they do harm to their game. This is one reason why one-club
+practice is better in small quantities than in large ones. It is not
+sufficiently interesting when kept up. What we should do, therefore, is
+to make the practice interesting, and fortunately the circumstances of
+the game afford wide scope for doing so. There is no other game that is
+half so good in this way. Golf to many people's minds is not merely a
+game to be played with others and against them; it is a study, a subject
+for meditative research and exultant discovery. If others should regard
+such terms as immoderate, golfers anyhow know they are fairly employed.
+The essential difference that the presence of a man as opponent makes is
+that a real game, hard and according to the law, has then to be played,
+and there can be a winning or a losing of it.
+
+Well then, it is our business, in order to make solitary practice
+interesting and valuable, to create a game for ourselves. It is easily
+done, and there are some wise men who say that they would rather play
+their solitary game, going round the links alone with all their clubs or
+nearly, than they would play a match with a stranger who happened not to
+turn out to be the right kind of golfing man. Many who start systems of
+solitary competitive play against themselves in this way fail with them,
+did they but know it, because they are not honest with themselves.
+Having become very badly bunkered, and having taken three for recovery,
+they must not call it one because they should have got out in one, had
+they played the shot just right; nor, having missed a foot putt, must
+they consider it as holed because if they had tried their uttermost they
+could have holed it. We must see that it is of the essence of solus
+play, and making it valuable, that the man should try his best and
+should know and feel that he has no second attempt at the same stroke,
+just as he has none in the real game when others are there. If he
+permits himself second drives and putts, all the strokes are done
+without the sense of responsibility, and the player then were better
+indoors writing letters to his friends to come and match themselves
+against him. Therefore let the first and the most inexorable rule in
+one's solitary golf be that the shot once made must count, no matter
+what its quality. What may be permitted--and this does not operate as an
+exception to the rule--is that when a shot has been badly done another
+ball may be played from the same place. One may learn something in this
+way, but always must it be understood that the first ball must count;
+and it is a good maxim that there should be no attempted repetition of a
+successful stroke, for if it were done well again the man would be no
+better off in mind or skill, and if it failed there would be an
+unnecessary disappointment and uncertainty.
+
+Now, to consider ways of competing against oneself that will make
+interesting the lonely game, and lift it to value too, every man of
+thought might quite well devise some suitable system for himself; but we
+may tell him of some that have been successful with many players, and of
+a good principle to embrace in any new one, which is never to make the
+test or competition too severe. I believe that golfers are improved more
+by coaxing and flattery than by harsh measures and heavy defeats. It is
+often said that the best way to improve is to play against better
+players than ourselves, but there are limitations to that advice which
+are not always sufficiently emphasised. The superior party ought not to
+be too much superior, the different points of the game of the two men
+should not be very widely contrasted, and the better player should be
+giving to the inferior one so much allowance that the latter ought to
+win as often as he loses, never letting it be forgotten that, when
+handicaps are right and three-fourths of the difference is allowed, the
+odds are really always in favour of the better player, as has been
+proved over and over again. Even when a man is of long experience and
+has been fashioned by nature in the heroic mould, it is impossible to
+play his very best golf, and be improving on it, unless he "has his
+pecker up." The pecker properly set makes happiness and confidence, and
+it is only when such moods are engendered that the man is led on to
+higher things, perceives the absence of limitation to his prospects of
+improvement, and likens himself to the chrysalis of a Vardon or a Braid.
+Above everything else, as we have agreed so often before, golf is a game
+of hope. Crush the hope by setting the man a task that is beyond him and
+you take away the joy of the game and kill the happy prospects. The
+golfer who is winning will win again and play better.
+
+In these observations there have been some principles for practice laid
+down that are seldom emphasised, but are of the most vital importance.
+To make exact systems to suit them is, after all, a simple affair. Now
+many men play round after round, counting their strokes, as if they were
+playing in a medal competition, and comparing results at the finish,
+always trying to break their own records. They may gain some benefit
+from this play, but it often fails in interest, and consequently in
+value, for the same reason that medal competitions do--because of the
+continual occurrence of the one, or it may be two, very bad holes. The
+percentage of cards that are turned from good to bad merely by one
+disastrous hole must be very high, and when a man is playing a practice
+round and does a nine at the second hole, it is difficult for him to
+treat the remainder very seriously or be keen about them. The remedy is
+simple. Let this system of playing and comparisons be that his aggregate
+shall always be for sixteen or seventeen holes only, leaving the worst
+to be eliminated. There is nothing unfair in doing so. The one bad hole
+is frequently more the result of accident than of inability. At the
+beginning of a system of practice play three holes may be dropped
+regularly from the reckoning, then a week later two, the week after that
+one only. Comparisons of form are more accurate and reliable when the
+worst hole is eliminated, than when all eighteen are totted up. Then the
+man may play the bogey game; but instead of opposing the set bogey of
+the course and complicating the business with handicap strokes, let him
+make a bogey of his own of such a kind that it represents not the
+scratch man's proper game but his, so that when he is playing well he
+ought to beat it, and it should be a tolerable match. In constructing
+such a bogey, he might make allowance for his own special likes and
+dislikes in regard to particular holes. Again, I have known men to
+derive pleasure and improvement from a system of practice against the
+ordinary bogey by which they merely reckoned the number of holes at
+which they equalled or beat the phantom's figures, disregarding the
+losses. There is a little difference between this and the ordinary
+reckoning, and it is in the direction of encouragement if the player is
+coming on.
+
+And then there is the interesting system that was first set forth by a
+most eminent player who has been amateur champion more than once, by
+which the practiser wins half-crowns for his good play and loses them on
+his off days. He plays against bogey on terms that give him an equal
+chance. Then he establishes a money-box with two sections in it, one
+being for bogey and the other for himself, and into each section he
+deposits four half-crowns, which is very little to pay for all the
+enjoyment he is about to gain. When bogey beats him one of the
+half-crowns is lifted out of the man's section into the ghost's, but
+when flesh and blood prevail the coin comes back. The course of practice
+is ended when one side or the other has got all the half-crowns. If
+bogey has them there is something wrong with the game of the man, and he
+had better start another series; but when the man is triumphant he may
+depart for a holiday exultingly and spend the money on it, in the doing
+of which he will probably win some more, his form being so much bettered
+by his lonely practice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE OLD DIGNITY OF LONDON GOLF, AND ITS NEW IMPORTANCE, WITH A WORD FOR
+THE CHARM OF INLAND COURSES.
+
+
+Perhaps in the middle ages of the game some rare old conservative of a
+player at one of the great Scottish seats of golf was told by another
+that a gentleman had just arrived by the coach from London and would
+like a match in the morning, and it is distinctly possible, if he was
+the excellent man we picture him, that he ejaculated, "And where, sir,
+is London?" The manner would have been Johnsonian, if not the sentiment.
+Should any one now be disposed to regard such lack of knowledge--though
+I think you would find it was only what might be called judicial golfing
+ignorance--or narrowness, or whatever it was, as merely stupid or a
+little culpable, he may hesitate. The pride of dignity, arising from
+conscious strength and superiority, was a fine thing among the Scottish
+golfers, and certainly was to be admired. That spirit, that sturdy
+consciousness of personal value, have helped to the making of a British
+empire. And sometimes a golfer would wander in the north and be
+discovered by the players there to have a wooden club with a brass sole,
+and thereupon he might be good-humouredly mocked for being the
+Blackheath golfer that he was, since it was on the famous course by
+London that the brassey was first used. Since then London has given
+other good things to golf, including many courses that are unequalled
+among their kind and a number of players of high championship rank. And
+sometimes there is more golf played in a day within twenty-five miles of
+Charing Cross than there is in the whole of Scotland in a week, and much
+of it is very good golf. But this is not a place for comparisons, and
+particularly it is not meant for one in which the English gratitude to
+Scottish benefactors for the gift of this remarkable game is to be
+lessened from the full. It is only suggested that London golf is now a
+thing of great account. That is coming to be understood; but one doubts
+if the Londoners properly realise that the game in the metropolis has
+rich history and traditions which make a match for those of nearly any
+other place. Except that the great players of the game of different ages
+were so little acquainted with it, Blackheath has golfing land as
+historic as any, and the Royal Blackheath Club, with its origin in 1608,
+is the oldest in the world. That is London. Some time since there was a
+fashion for open-air shows of pageantry, and if the golfers had then
+been so disposed they could have put forward a pageant of London golf
+that would have embraced most picturesque and impressive tableaux. There
+is King James the First of England and the Sixth of Scotland, keen
+golfer indeed, playing the game at Blackheath in the company of some of
+his nobles when the court was at Greenwich, and there is a charming
+scene to be imagined in which the monarch gives his royal sanction and
+authority to the Society of Golfers that is established at this place in
+1608, as it is well believed to have been, and in varying forms to have
+maintained its existence ever since, being to-day the Royal Blackheath
+Golf Club, and highly respected. I think we should regard this King
+James as being the very first of our London golfers, and he makes a
+fine figure of a player for the distinction, keen enough in all
+conscience. Five years before the reputed beginning of the Society at
+Blackheath he appointed William Mayne to be the royal clubmaker, and a
+few years later gave one named Melvill a monopoly of ball-making at four
+shillings a time. Altogether this makes a good scene of golf.
+
+Here in the earliest days the course of Blackheath consisted of but five
+holes, which was then considered the proper number, and was the same as
+the Honourable Company had at Leith. Later there were seven holes
+arranged, and though they are played in a different order, those seven
+remain much the same to-day. It is to the discredit of London golfers as
+a body, those golfers who make the most reverential pilgrimages to
+northern shrines, that they have not, to the extent of one in a hundred,
+ever been to the scene of the old Blackheath golf, or played a game
+there on this hallowed ground, as they may at their will. It is the
+story again of the prophet in his own country, the same failing as that
+by which the majority of Londoners might be condemned for never having
+visited the Tower of London. I believe I have met more golfers in
+America who have been to Blackheath than I have met in England, for I
+have encountered several who told me they had not cared to sail back
+home until they had made the short journey down from Charing Cross to
+the famous common.
+
+Apart from the sense of history and the sentiment of pilgrimage,
+Blackheath, as a practical golfing proposition still surviving, should
+interest every golfer intensely. Surely it is one of the most
+interesting courses, one causing the deepest reflections, and one which,
+even by play upon it, might have some good effect on a man's game. For
+it is a chastening course, is our old Blackheath; one that makes
+humility if course ever did, and one that gives us the best contentment
+with our modern lot. Men who have played at Blackheath do not so
+constantly complain of the weak effort of their greenkeeper, and his
+governing committee, at their most favoured club. A little while since
+the cry was raised that golf had become too easy--too easy! It was said
+that the improving of the fairways and the smoothing of the putting
+greens had taken all its early viciousness from the game. Conditions
+have certainly changed, but when champions tell me that this maddening
+game from time to time brings their nerves to the state of piano wires,
+it may be reckoned as sufficiently difficult for the ordinary mortal.
+But Blackheath is extraordinary and most educative. It is certainly hard
+enough, though the modern bunker scientists have done nothing with it,
+and in the ordinary sense it has no bunkers. New theories of bunkering
+and the changing necessities of new kinds of balls trouble the
+Blackheath golfers not at all, for the course belongs to London and not
+to themselves, and they cannot do any engineering work upon it, as is
+being accomplished continually on other courses. Of the seven holes that
+are played the shortest is 170 yards, there is another of 230, a third
+of 335, another of 380, another of 410, a sixth of 500, and the longest
+is 540. The two very long holes come together, and though they are
+virtually bunkerless you may be assured that they take an uncommon
+amount of playing, and that he who gets them in five strokes each is
+skilful and fortunate too. Here, as nowhere else, is one made to feel
+that inferior shots bring their own punishment with them without any
+artificial hazards.
+
+The common is quite flat, but it is intersected by various roads and
+paths, and the greens are generally near to these walking ways. Variety
+is given by the great gravel pits which are here, as they have been for
+ages, although they are now smoothed and grassed over, and the biggest
+of them has to be played through at both the long holes. What is known
+as "Whitfield's Mount," a little clump of enclosed trees, is almost the
+only relief from the bareness and flatness of this golfing common. The
+lies are better than they used to be, but however kindly they may think
+of them at Blackheath--and we must respect them for doing so--they are
+not good. How could they be? The common is open for the children of
+London, or any other place, to play upon, and for the grown-ups to
+lounge about or walk over, which in abundance they do. It is primarily a
+public common and only secondarily a golf course, and the vast majority
+of those who walk upon it know nothing of the great game, except what
+they occasionally see as they pass along. The golfers have no rights.
+They have the greens, as they are called for compliment, smoothed a
+little and made in some way to resemble greens; and there are holes of
+sorts but not generally with flags in them, and there are no teeing
+boxes. The fairway is as hard as might be expected, and consists for the
+most part of bare places and tufts. There is no smoothness and evenness
+of proper golfing turf about it. But one does not say this in an
+unappreciative way. Not for a million balls or a permanent increase of
+drive would we have Blackheath anything but what it is, for if it were
+changed the charm would be gone.
+
+Let us go there and try the game. We must decide in advance that, like
+Vardon, Braid, and Taylor we can play our real game before any gallery
+in the world, and let our nerves and self-confidence be braced
+accordingly, for those who play at Blackheath must undergo great
+ordeals. A number of children, usually accompanied by a small dog,
+discover us soon after our appearance on the course, and gather close
+while our stroke is being made, very close. There is a little boy,
+perhaps, one or two little girls, the baby, and the dog. We consider
+most the baby at Blackheath. The boy, occasionally relieved by the elder
+girl, is the spokesman of the party, and in tones indicative of complete
+sympathy with the objects of the expedition, which are to strike the
+ball and project it in the direction of the holes, he explains to the
+remainder what is about to be done, what is done, and how we fail to do
+what was intended. He corrects himself whenever he finds his information
+to have been wrong. Willie having told little Liza something about the
+performance that is pending, the child inquires about what will happen
+if the gentleman does not hit the ball, and the gentleman, hearing,
+develops fear. At this moment the dog, which has been lingering quietly
+within a yard of the ball, shows signs of becoming restive, and is
+inclined to smell at it. Finally it favours only a disconsolate bark.
+Somehow we despatch that ball at last, and then Willie, Nell, Liza,
+baby, Towser, and selves move on some way towards the hole, but not so
+far as we should have done, because the ball happened to strike a
+lamp-post; and on the way Liza desires to know if a golf ball would kill
+anybody if it hit them, and wishes Willie to buy one some day. And a
+human sweetness there is in these little Blackheath urchins after all!
+This early innocence is a sublime and splendid thing, and when in like
+circumstances you would scowl, you gentlemen from London, remember, if
+you please, that Liza called you one, and she thinks you are.
+
+And the caddies! At Blackheath they have the most wonderful of all
+caddies. The ways and manners and the character of the St. Andrews and
+Musselburgh caddies are inferior. These Blackheath fellows are not like
+the usual thing. They lean against the wall of the club-house and offer
+their services to the stranger, declaring that it is a nice day for the
+game, when a storm is gathering over the common. Generally the caddie
+is given to laziness; they are a shiftless company. But see, though the
+Blackheath caddie looks as indolent as any to begin with, he is in truth
+one of the most active fellows within a hundred miles of Charing Cross,
+as you very soon discover, after beginning the round with him. The old
+red flag of traction-engine law obtains at Blackheath still. The golfer
+is a dangerous person, death lurks in his flying ball, and so a man with
+a scarlet banner must walk before the player to warn all people that he
+is coming on. But we make the caddie do the ordinary work of carrying,
+and teeing up, and red-flagging also, and he contrives in effect to be
+in two places at the same time. He tees the ball, lays down the driver
+by the side of it, and then runs ahead with a coloured handkerchief,
+which is the red flag, and he waves it while on the run and the golfer
+follows. So the caddie, leaving near the ball the club that is needed,
+goes on again, and is always a shot ahead. Reaching the green he stands
+by the hole until the golfer comes near enough to see it, and then the
+man hurries away to the next tee, sets everything in a state of
+preparation (and he carries a supply of sand in his pocket), and at once
+is off again to the distance of a drive before the player has holed out.
+The weakness of this system is that the caddie, by force of
+circumstances, can know little or nothing of the progress of the match,
+he is not one of the party, and he cares nothing at all about our good
+shots. He lacks the sympathy of the real caddie, but he is marvellously
+efficient all the same. If it is true, as we always say, that golf is
+the same all over the world, I would suggest that if there is a place
+where it is not the same it is at Blackheath, and that is why every one
+should go there, and it should cease to be the fact that more London
+golfers have been to Fifeshire than have been to play upon that historic
+course.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Take a glimpse into the rich past of Blackheath golf. Look into the old
+bet-book of the club and see some entries there, and do not forget that
+all bets were made on the understanding that all members of the club had
+a share in the gains of the winner no matter whether the bets were made
+in cash or kind. On Saturday, July 9 1791, "Mr. Pitcaithly bets Captain
+Fairfull one gallon of claret that he drives the Short Hole in three
+strokes, six times in ten--to be played for the first time he comes to
+Blackheath--after the annual day. Lost and paid by Mr. Pitcaithly, the
+10th September." A little while later "Mr. Christie bets Mr. Barnes one
+gallon of claret that he drives from the Thorn Tree beyond the College
+Hole in three strokes, five times in ten, to be decided next Saturday."
+Mr. Christie in due course performed his driving feat and won his bet.
+Then "Captain Welladvice, having left the company without permission of
+the chair, has forfeited one gallon claret"; and "Mr. Turner bets Mr.
+Walker one gallon claret that he plays him on Wednesday, the 12th inst.,
+four rounds of the green, and that Mr. Walker does not gain a hole of
+him." Again, "Mr. Longlands bets Mr. Win. Innes, Sen., that he will play
+him for a gallon of claret, giving Mr. Innes one stroke in each hole.
+Four rounds on the green. Out and in holes to be played." One may well
+understand that all the good claret that was thus available from these
+gallant bets, together with what was bought and paid for in the ordinary
+course, had a heartening effect upon those old golfers, with the result
+that in the fine fancies that floated in the dining-hall of the "Green
+Man" after dinner, drives seemed all endowed with unusual length, and
+direction was always good. Again it is recorded that on an evening of
+June "Captain MacMillan bets a gallon with Mr. Jameson that Captain
+Macara in five strokes drives farther by fifteen yards than any other
+gentleman Mr. Jameson may name of the Golf Society now present, to be
+determined next Saturday"; and no sooner had Captain MacMillan
+registered his bet than there came along Mr. Callender, who "bets Mr.
+Hamilton one gallon that Mr. R. Mackenzie drives in five strokes farther
+than Mr. H., to commence at the Assembly Hole and go on five strokes
+running." Then Mr. Innes gets into a sporting mood, and he "bets Mr.
+Wilson a gallon (a guinea) that he beats him, allowing Mr. Innes the tee
+stroke with his wooden club, and after with his irons. Out and in--four
+rounds." All these were in the latter days of the eighteenth century,
+and all the time the happy golfers were filling up the bet-book of the
+club, not with golfing bets any more than, or as much as, with bets
+about events of the great war that was in progress; as, for instance,
+when Mr. Satterthwaite "bets Mr. Callender a gallon of claret that
+Admiral Nelson's squadron does take or destroy the French transports in
+the harbour of Alexandria, or the major part of them."
+
+In the Knuckle Club and the Blackheath Winter Golf Club, forerunners of
+the Blackheath Golf Club, the same happy state of affairs prevailed. The
+Knuckle Club was a very remarkable institution. In form it was a secret
+society. Each member had to be initiated, and had to learn certain signs
+and answers to questions by which he would know brother members from
+strangers. Also, the members wore orders or a kind of regalia, and there
+were heavy fines if they allowed themselves to be seen outside the
+club-rooms with these special tokens of their community about them. On
+one occasion we have a member, named James Walker, heavily fined in
+claret for being so thoughtless as to take home his order. The holder
+of the golfing gold medal for the year was termed the Grand Knuckle, and
+was the chief of the club, which boasted also a "Registrar," and various
+other officials of much dignity of title. As the mystic element of the
+club decreased, so the golfing strength and enthusiasm of it increased,
+and it was by this process of evolution that in course of time the
+mystery lapsed and the name was changed. Before the competitions of the
+club took place advertisements were always inserted in the _Times_ and
+the _Morning Chronicle_ of the period, and it must be remarked that play
+in these competitions was usually conducted on the strictest lines. One
+record in the minutes reads: "28th March, 1795. Medal Day. It being
+stated to the club that Mr. Innes, one of the candidates for the medal
+played for this day, lost his ball; the opinion of the club was desired
+whether the loss of the ball put an end to the candidate's chance for
+the honours of the day." The club determined that it did. So more than a
+hundred years ago their medal rules were stricter than ours, in this
+matter at any rate. "Scrutineers" always examined the medal cards after
+dinner, and announced the winner. In the early part of last century
+there seems to have been rather less of betting and a little more of
+feasting. There were gifts of venison and turtle from the members, and
+the supply of claret, varied now and then by champagne and choice
+spirits, was very copious. Each time a child was born to a member, he
+contributed a pound's worth of claret to the weekly or monthly dinner;
+and whenever a member was married, the same thing was done. The golf of
+Blackheath, and all connected with it, was then a highly picturesque
+thing. The course was yet only a five-holes affair. The clubs of the
+players were carried by pensioners of the Royal Naval Hospital,
+Greenwich, in their quaint uniforms, and an allowance of beer was
+regularly made to them by the club until 1832. The pensioners were
+caddies until 1869.
+
+The Royal Blackheath Club was, and still is, most original and
+interesting in many points of its constitution and government. To be
+captain of this club, small one comparatively as it is now, is to fill a
+high office, the honourable nature of which is duly impressed upon the
+holder at the time of his election and installation, for he is elevated
+with much ceremony and in much the same way as the captain of the Royal
+and Ancient Club. The retiring captain sits in his chair at the meeting
+for the last time, and thanks are offered to him by grateful members for
+the good things he has done in his year. And then the captain-elect is
+called by name by the secretary, who takes in his arms the silver club
+which is the equivalent of the mace in Parliament, the symbol of power
+and active authority, and places himself at the head of a procession
+which is formed. The field-marshal, conducting the newcomer to the
+chair, follows behind, and so they make their way to the head of the
+chamber, where the field-marshal presents the new captain to the old
+one. There are various little forms of ritual to be gone through; the
+new captain makes a solemn declaration of loyalty and fidelity to the
+club and his office, and, particularly, expresses his anxiety to
+maintain its dignity, and then he commits himself irrevocably and
+awfully to an undying oath--he kisses the club! All this is to-day just
+as it was in the ancient days. Mention has been made of the
+field-marshal of the club; no other club boasts a field-marshal, who
+fills an office of most ineffable and incomparable dignity. Captains may
+come and go, year by year; they do their work well; and they lay down
+the club. But the field-marshal is above all captains, and he is in
+office till he dies. He is a prince over captains. He is essentially a
+golfer--not a mere ornament--and a good golfer, and one strong in the
+true spirit of the game. Because a good field-marshal is not easily
+found, he is made much of. The installation of a new one is a fine
+ceremony. There is a solemn gathering, all the famous trophies and bits
+of regalia are furbished up; there are speeches, forms, declarations,
+questions, answers; and if it were a very coronation the thing could
+scarcely be more serious. The silver club is held before the
+field-marshal elect, and he is presented with the special medal of his
+office, when he is finally addressed thus: "We expect and ask that you
+will wear this medal at all golf meetings as your predecessors did; and
+we have further to ask that you will in all time coming, while you are
+spared in health, do all that in you lies to maintain and support the
+rights and privileges of this ancient club; to maintain the honour and
+dignity of the club; and should any attempts be made to interfere with
+the rights of the club, that you will aid the executive in endeavouring
+to put down such interference, so that the club may maintain the high
+and honourable position that it ever has done, since its institution in
+1608. Kiss the club!" The field-marshal kisses it, and thus he is
+exalted among the highest in the whole world of golf.
+
+There are many eras with marked features to be noted in the history of
+the club. Even now many of those features are still perpetuated. Dinners
+are still held; dignity still is high. We have now heard much of the
+old-time Blackheath golfers; but an era of vast consequence, not only to
+Blackheath but to the game, is one that can still be remembered by some
+old golfers, that of great activity which began just before the middle
+of last century, and is only just now reaching its climax in the great
+and universal "boom" in golf. It has already been suggested that
+Blackheath led the way, and led it most effectively. For long after it
+had done so it was still the premier club in England, and in playing
+strength was the best. The club itself has few solid possessions--just a
+few fine old club heirlooms--but many great memories. In a very modern
+sense it is poor, having a comfortable but not a magnificent club-house,
+and no splendid links of eighteen holes. But the Royal Blackheath Golf
+Club is like a fine old English gentleman of the very best kind,
+ignoring all new ways of thought and life, eschewing all sordidness,
+clinging to the fine simple principles of wise fore-fathers. That is
+just what it is, the fine old English gentleman whom the age has
+outstripped. It is the Colonel Newcome of the clubs.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And in that pageant of London golf that we suggested there are many
+other picturesque and significant scenes. If we cannot be sure of the
+places where the holes were cut, nor of the situation of the teeing
+grounds, it is still certain, from documentary evidence, that a golf
+course that was made at Molesey Hurst was only second, in point of
+seniority, in England, to Blackheath itself, and it was very high up in
+the list of the golf clubs of the world. Manchester came next in 1818.
+There are concerned in the only existing record two people of no less
+credit and renown than David Garrick, the actor, and the eminent Dr.
+Alexander Carlyle, of Inveresk, who witnessed the Porteous riots, saw
+the fight at Prestonpans, and amid these many excitements cultivated his
+game to a fine point, was one of the keenest golfers of the eighteenth
+century, and won the Musselburgh medal in 1775. Carlyle was like many
+others of the Scottish parsons of those good times and the present, who
+would take their golf clubs with them wherever they might wander, on the
+chance of opportunity presenting itself. He came to London, and knowing
+of Blackheath, the clubs came with him. Garrick at that time had a house
+at Hampton which in recent days was occupied by the late Sir Clifton
+Robinson, the organiser of the London electric tramway system. Garrick
+asked John Home and a number of friends, including Carlyle, to dine with
+him at Hampton and bring their golf clubs and balls with them that they
+might play on the course at Molesey Hurst. When the six of them, who
+were in a landau, passed through Kensington, the Coldstreams, who were
+changing guard, observed their clubs, and gave them three cheers "in
+honour of a diversion peculiar to Scotland."
+
+There might be a railway train in the pageant of London golf, one of the
+early trains with engines of the Stephensonian style. The period would
+be just after the accession of Queen Victoria, and there would be two
+gentlemen travelling together from London to Aldershot, one of them
+being Sir Hope Grant, a keen golfer, a member of the Royal and Ancient
+Club, who held a military appointment at Aldershot, while the other
+would be the Duke of Cambridge. It has been recorded that in matter of
+companionship this journey was a very dull affair, for Sir Hope Grant
+was moody, and failed to respond to the well-meant attempts of the Duke
+to open conversation. He seemed troubled. But suddenly after long
+silence he jumped up from his seat, rushed to the window of the
+compartment and opened it. At this stage the Duke of Cambridge felt that
+things could not be well with his companion, and jumping up after him,
+grabbed him by the tails of his coat. A moment later they both sat down,
+and looked at each other. "Well," said Sir Hope Grant, in the manner of
+a man recovering from a great surprise, "that is a thing that you
+seldom see near London; there were two men playing golf in a field out
+there."
+
+And then in the pageant there would be represented the starting of golf
+at Wimbledon in 1865, with the Blackheath emissaries all on fire with
+the zeal of their enterprise. Wimbledon with its Royal Wimbledon and its
+London Scottish, its famous holes and its windmill, and all the rest of
+it, has played no small part in golfing history. At the beginning seven
+holes were made as they had them at Blackheath, and did you ever hear
+that at Wimbledon once there was a round that consisted of nineteen
+holes, the longest round in number of holes in the world? Tom Dunn, who
+was responsible for the extension of the course about 1870, told the
+story, and so far as I am aware he only told it in America. We may
+repeat it here in the words he used. The committee had asked him whether
+he thought they might make a full-sized course on their land, and,
+coming to the conclusion that they might, he was told to go on with the
+work, and eventually was satisfied that he had made a good job of it.
+The secretary of the period is said to have been somewhat imperfectly
+acquainted with the game in general just then, and went to Dunn with the
+inquiry as to how many holes they had on the old course at St. Andrews,
+and was told. "The secretary thought a moment," said Tom, "scratched his
+head and began to look wise. Then he approached very closely, and
+nodding his head for me to bend my ear, he whispered in a hoarse voice,
+'Tom, let us have one more!' 'Oh, that is impossible,' I replied. 'It
+cannot be, for eighteen is the orthodox number.' 'I care not for that,'
+replied the secretary, who was accustomed to have his own way, 'we will
+have one more!' I was very young at the time and I would do anything
+rather than offend the gentleman, for he had much influence, and I
+wanted his goodwill; so I reluctantly submitted to the demand. The
+committee met the next day, and I was asked if I had succeeded in making
+an eighteen-holes course. I replied, with some hesitation, that I had
+made a nineteen-holes course, and explained why I had done so. Well, you
+never in your life saw a more excited lot of men. There was an uproar in
+a moment, and all made a dive for the poor secretary, who never heard
+the last of it."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within sight of Wimbledon now there is Coombe Hill, one of the best and
+most recent achievements in the new metropolitan golf. Here is a
+contrast indeed! One may sometimes wonder how those ill-tempered people
+who grumble that golfers in these days take their game, and all about
+it, too richly, and that fine club-houses do not make plus players--such
+complainers still being eager for all the most modern comforts
+themselves--would like to live their golfing lives for a season after
+the early Wimbledon manner in all its great simplicity. The first
+club-house those golfers ever had, if you would call it by the name, was
+the old iron "shooting house," and it measured only eight yards by six.
+It served the purposes of club-room, clothes-room and others. If its
+floor space was small, its roof was high, and the members' clothes were
+hung up on hooks, to the very top; and were lifted up to their proper
+places, and reached down again by a pole. Most of the numerous members
+had their private hooks, and a boy who worked the pole had a most
+marvellous memory for the garments and their proper owners, so that when
+a member, coming in suddenly, called for his jacket and his stockings,
+up went the pole, and down came the goods without a moment's delay, and
+all correct. This remarkable young person has his proper and
+highly-developed successor in Gibbon, the house-steward at the present
+Mid-Surrey club at Richmond, who, though he has nearly a thousand
+members to consider, knows so well the particularities and possessions
+of them all. Tom Dunn had his workshop in this iron shooting house, and
+here he kept a fair stock of clubs and balls, and did his own repairs.
+Presently some of the members suggested to him that it would be
+agreeable if he stored some eatables and drinkables in his shop for
+their sustenance and comfort, before and after rounds; and so he laid in
+a stock of wines and spirits, sandwiches and eggs, and so forth, which
+had of necessity to be laid out on his bench where there were varnish,
+shavings, sawdust and pitch as well. Behold here the early London
+golfer! It is an interesting historical fact, that when a few years
+after its establishment, and just before the Tom Dunn era, the club
+first thought of engaging a professional, the committee set it on record
+that "they took a very favourable view of young Tom Morris's application
+for the post."
+
+The people who accuse the moderns of being over fond of prizes in
+competitions--and a nasty name they call them!--might be told the tale
+of the old golfing baronet of Wimbledon, now dead, who once won five
+shillings, being his half share of the third prize in the sweepstakes
+attached to the monthly medal competition there. It was the first prize
+that this keen but unfortunate golfer had ever won, and he begged the
+permission of the committee to be allowed to add more money for a richer
+keepsake. The consent of the authorities was graciously given, whereupon
+the prize-winner purchased for himself a golden-eagle writing stand for
+which he gave a hundred sovereigns, adding ninety-nine pounds fifteen
+shillings to the prize-money. Friends, not being golfers, who called
+upon him had the prize exhibited to them, and they said, "Goodness,
+what a fine player you must be!" He felt he was, and that the prize was
+worth the money.
+
+When the 'nineties of the last century were reached golf began to spread
+in London, and such clubs as Northwood with its "Death or Glory" Hole,
+Tooting Bec, and Mid-Surrey laid the foundation for the great London
+golf that was soon to come. This Mid-Surrey club with its thousand
+members, its financial turnover of thirty thousand pounds a year, its
+hundred thousand rounds that are played on that excellent course in
+twelve months without its showing hardly the wear of a blade of grass,
+the twenty thousand lunches that are eaten by their members, the four
+thousand pounds that were spent in one year lately on the improvement of
+the course, is, I believe, the busiest golfing institution in the world.
+It is well said that there is nearly always a couple driving off from
+that first teeing ground near the rails in the Old Deer Park. And one
+might add that as a place where golf is played in a plain but excellent
+spirit, without any fancy trappings, the club here is one of the best
+organised and managed in the world, and is a vast credit to the
+secretary, Mr. J. H. Montgomerie, while the course, whose putting greens
+are a match for any in existence, is a fine testimonial to that prince
+of greenkeepers, Peter Lees, who was lately captured by the Americans
+for a great new course on Long Island. Lees has been a great influence
+in the development of modern golf in England, and I know that he will
+make a great difference to American courses. And there is champion J. H.
+Taylor as the club's professional. In a special way Mid-Surrey stands
+for London golf.
+
+It has come to this, that we no longer fear to speak and write of the
+great excellence of the London golf courses. Sunningdale at the
+beginning of the present century opened up a new era not only in London
+golf but in golf in general--the period of the inland courses of a far
+higher class, better and more interesting in every respect than anything
+that had ever been dreamt of before. Sunningdale was followed by
+Huntercombe and Walton Heath, of which Sir George Riddell has assisted
+to make such a magnificent success. There have come after them
+Worplesdon, Burhill, Bramshot, Stoke Poges, Sandy Lodge, Coombe Hill,
+St. George's Hill, and many others all belonging to the same class. Many
+of us hold to the fancy that Sunningdale, the mother of the new sort of
+courses, is still the best and most charming of them all. She is the
+Berkshire jewel; magnificent. But comparisons are not easily made, for,
+most remarkably and happily, these new modern inland courses that are
+setting an example to the world and which the world is following
+wherever it can afford it, vary enormously in character, in appearance,
+in the precise sort of golf that they present and offer, whereas at the
+beginning of inland golf we had the fancy, and the fancy truly led to
+fact, that in the main all inland courses must be the same--plain, flat,
+one cross bunker here, another there, and then the green. Not only the
+architecture, but, far more than that in its beneficial effects, the
+greenkeeping has been improved, soils are understood, they are fortified
+and seeds are adapted to them, and results are achieved which not ten
+years ago would have been regarded as impossible. The result is that we
+have fairways and putting greens on some of our best inland courses near
+London which are rarely excelled at the seaside, although nothing can
+ever give to inland turf that firm springiness--a term slightly
+paradoxical but one easily appreciated--which is the characteristic of
+good seaside links. No longer is good inland golf to be despised. It has
+charms all its own, and it has the distinction that golf as we know it
+to-day would never have existed if it were not for the inland courses.
+There are fewer hedges on them now than once there were, and no more
+ditches than there should be.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To a section of old conservatives it may seem a dreadful thing to say,
+but it is the truth that one of the reasons why we love our golf of
+London, praise it and rejoice in it, is because of its glorious trees.
+We know courses on the coast where there is never a tree or a bush to be
+seen, and never one to be avoided in the playing. The golfers who live
+and play and die in those parts know nothing of the splendour of trees
+and the leaves that come and go, and knowing nothing they will even
+sometimes wrongfully say that no golf course ever should have a tree
+about it. Golf is a game of Nature; allow it then all the best effects
+that Nature can supply. Permit it the trees that the townsmen otherwise
+so seldom see; cutting them down, hewing them away will not bring the
+ocean nearer nor liken the course more to seaside golf. Trees belong to
+the inland game as much as sandhills to the other, and when a question
+of removal arises, let constructors and committees reflect that a golfer
+can be made in a season and he perishes some time later, that a new hole
+can be made in a week and may be altered the week after, that some shots
+which are thought of might be hindered by the tree but that only one
+shot in a dozen is likely to be of the kind that is considered--and that
+the tree has taken ages to grow, and will live ages on, being more of
+eternity than many generations of golfers.
+
+They may not always be conscious of the fact, but the people who live in
+towns and are cooped in them constantly, abiding in flats, working in
+gloomy chambers and travelling in underground railways, derive more than
+half their golfing enjoyment from the vision of Nature, less adorned
+than in the public parks, with which they become associated in their
+golf--grass to tread upon, surrounding trees through which soft breezes
+croon, and timid clouds creeping slowly underneath the blue. There is
+nothing so good as the golf of the true seaside links; there could not
+be. In this, the real thing, we have land formations that are impossible
+on inland flatness; there are the wildness of dunes and bent that cannot
+be reproduced artificially away from the coast; we have the perfect turf
+that is ideal for the game and which has never yet been completely
+imitated away from shore, and above all, through the rich variety of
+situation and possibility, we have the course springing surprises on us
+all the time. This is golf in the highest, the stern, cold, enthralling
+game. London golf is a gentler thing, a little softer, but it has charms
+that are all its own, and they are the charms of green Nature and the
+delights of changing seasons. By the sea it is warm or it is cold, and
+there is little difference else from the beginning of the year to the
+end. But in London the golfer notices the seasons as he does nowhere
+else, and they are everything to him and his happiness. And the trees
+best tell him of the seasons, and it is then that he might exclaim, as
+Ruskin did, "What a great thought of God was that when He thought a
+tree!"
+
+In this way the two most beautiful seasons of the year, spring and
+autumn, touching nearest the heart, creating inspirations and causing
+reflection, the germinal and the fall, are the most splendid times for
+golf in London, and at other inland places, and they are surely the best
+seasons of all for the enjoyment and happiness of the game. But
+particularly they are London's seasons. In the spring there is the time
+for preparation, when all golfers are keen in a new life. Then the
+leaves of the trees are opened, and are there prettier scenes on any
+course than on some of those near London then? There is hardly to be
+fancied a better day than could be had at St. George's Hill or on the
+New Zealand course at Byfleet when the golden gorse is in bloom and
+gives out its rich perfume, while the trees that line the fairway all
+about are full to life again. Think, when May is come, of the glory of
+Sudbrooke Park, Cassiobury, of Sunningdale, even of Neasden, Northwood,
+and a hundred more. Then there comes the holiday time, and the seaside
+links, and the golf of London rests until the autumn, and then it is
+alive again; and let the faults of London golf be whatever they may, the
+players are few who are not happy to return to the old courses of home.
+Be they ever so poor they are their very own.
+
+This of all others is the most delightful golfing season. The white sun
+of summer has been toned to gold, and the air is sweet and cool; the
+turf is moist again. It is soothing; but there is a pathos in it all
+that the golfer, sensitive and sympathetic observer as he has become,
+must always feel. One may tramp a country lane and notice little, but
+the men of this game have been trained to notice. Here present is the
+season of the fall, the rest after achievement, when Nature closes in
+upon herself and lapses to her sleep. She has done her season's work,
+done it wisely, ever well. So the fires of heaven burn low again. Green
+of the world turns russet and bronze, with flashes of scarlet and gold.
+A smell of earth that is moist with autumn dew rises in the morning air.
+When the round begins the sun warmth is not enough to dry away the
+little globules of the dew, tears of the sobbing night, and the course
+has a glittering sheen upon it. From drooping branches of beeches and
+sycamores that half surround a putting green in a corner of the course,
+crackling leaves are falling and some must be moved before the intruding
+ball can be putted to its appointed place. As the little golfing company
+moves along to the adjoining tee more of these spent leaves come
+fluttering sadly down. But, a little sad as this may be, the golfer of
+the towns, with summer memories of mountains and hills and deep lanes
+still lingering in his mind, hearing the crooning of the summer seas and
+the lapping of waves near northern putting greens, has his consolations.
+He is grateful for the coppery leaves and the early dew, though they may
+hinder play a trifle. They are as echoes from the north and east and
+west. We see no dew in Piccadilly, and there are no mountains in the
+Strand.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS ON GOLF
+
+
+THE SOUL OF GOLF. By P. A. VAILE. Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
+
+     _GOLF ILLUSTRATED._--"We can only say that we read it through
+     without finding a dull page, and that in our opinion it is a book
+     which will give hope to the duffer and new light even to the
+     advanced player."
+
+THE MYSTERY OF GOLF. By ARNOLD HAULTAIN. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
+
+    Mr. HENRY LEACH _in the EVENING NEWS_.--"Mr. Haultain's book answers
+    to all the tests to which it may be submitted, and I am strongly
+    disposed to regard it as the best book of its kind that has ever
+    been written."
+
+TRAVERS' GOLF BOOK. By JEROME D. TRAVERS. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 8s.
+6d. net.
+
+    _FRY'S MAGAZINE._--"Mr. Travers' book is a valuable contribution to
+    golfing literature, and it should be bought and read by every
+    golfer."
+
+THE ART OF PUTTING. By W. J. TRAVIS and JACK WHITE. Illustrated. Crown
+8vo. 1s. net.
+
+    _GOLFING._--"Into little space Mr. Travis crowds many valuable hints
+    to the willing student.... It's a big shillingsworth, and those of
+    you who invest will find that is so."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+GREAT LAWN TENNIS PLAYERS: THEIR METHODS ILLUSTRATED. By G. W. BELDAM
+and P. A. VAILE. With 229 Action Photographs. Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
+
+GREAT BATSMEN: THEIR METHODS AT A GLANCE. By G. W. BELDAM and C. B. FRY.
+With 600 Action Photographs. Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
+
+GREAT BOWLERS AND FIELDERS: THEIR METHODS AT A GLANCE. By G. W. BELDAM
+and C. B. FRY. With contributions by F. R. Spofforth, B. J. T.
+BOSANQUET, R. O. SCHWARZ, and G. L. JESSOP; and 464 Action Photographs.
+Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
+
+LAWN TENNIS, ITS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. By J. PARMLY PARET. With a
+chapter on Lacrosse by W. H. MADDREN. Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 8s.
+6d. net.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+BOOKS ON SPORT
+
+
+HUNTING THE ELEPHANT IN AFRICA, AND OTHER RECOLLECTIONS OF THIRTEEN
+YEARS' WANDERINGS. By Captain C. H. STIGAND. With Introduction by
+Theodore Roosevelt. Illustrated. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER. By JAMES SUTHERLAND. Illustrated.
+8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
+
+THE MAN-EATERS OF TSAVO, AND OTHER EAST AFRICAN ADVENTURES. By
+Lieut.-Colonel J. H. PATTERSON, D.S.O. Illustrated. With a Foreword by
+FREDERICK COURTENEY SELOUS. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. Also Globe 8vo. 1s. net.
+
+IN THE GRIP OF THE NYIKA. Further Adventures in British East Africa. By
+Lieut.-Colonel J. H. PATTERSON, D.S.O. Illustrated. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
+
+A HUNTER'S WANDERINGS IN AFRICA. Nine Years amongst the Game of the Far
+Interior of South Africa. By FREDERICK COURTENEY SELOUS. Illustrated.
+Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
+
+AFRICAN NATURE NOTES AND REMINISCENCES. By FREDERICK COURTENEY SELOUS.
+With a Foreword by THEODORE ROOSEVELT and Illustrations by E. Caldwell.
+8vo. 10s. net.
+
+A COLONY IN THE MAKING, OR SPORT AND PROFIT IN BRITISH EAST AFRICA. By
+Lord CRANWORTH. Illustrated. 8vo. 12s. net.
+
+SPORT ON THE NILGIRIS AND IN WYNAAD. By F. W. F. FLETCHER. Illustrated.
+8vo. 12s. net.
+
+NOTES ON SPORT AND TRAVEL. By GEORGE KINGSLEY. With Introductory Memoir
+by his daughter, MARY H. KINGSLEY. Extra Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.
+
+AN ANGLER'S HOURS. By H. T. SHERINGHAM. Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Golfer, by Henry Leach
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Happy Golfer
+       Being Some Experiences, Reflections, and a Few Deductions
+              of a Wandering Golfer
+
+Author: Henry Leach
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2011 [EBook #37136]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY GOLFER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Bergquist, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+<h1>THE HAPPY GOLFER</h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/deco.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="center">MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA<br />
+MELBOURNE</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO<br />
+DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span><br />
+TORONTO</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THE HAPPY GOLFER</h1>
+
+<h3><i>BEING SOME EXPERIENCES, REFLECTIONS, AND<br /> A FEW DEDUCTIONS OF A
+WANDERING PLAYER</i></h3>
+
+<h2>BY HENRY LEACH</h2>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF<br /> "THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS," "LETTERS OF A MODERN GOLFER," ETC.</h3>
+
+
+<p class="center">MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED<br />
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON<br />
+1914</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table width="75%">
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Seven Wonders of Golf, and the abiding Mystery of the Game,<br />
+with a Thought upon Traditions and their Value</span> </td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Ubiquity of the Game: with an Advertisement for the Community<br />
+of Golfers, and a Note upon the Effect of St. Andrews Spirits</span> </td><td align="right">28</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Tragedies of the Short Putt, and a Contrast between Children<br />
+and Champions, with the varied Counsel of the Wisest Men</span> </td><td align="right">56</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Old Champions and New, and some Differences in Achievement, with a<br />
+Suggestion that Golf is a Cruel Game</span> </td><td align="right">88</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">A Famous Championship at Brookline, U.S.A., and an Account of how<br />
+Mr. Francis Ouimet won it, with some Explanation of seeming
+Mysteries</span> </td><td align="right">110</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Beginnings of Golf in the United States, and Experiences in<br />
+Travelling there, with an Example of American Club Management</span> </td><td align="right">140</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Perfect Country Club and the Golfers' Pow-wow at Onwentsia,<br />
+with a Glimpse of the National Links</span> </td><td align="right">166</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The U.S.G.A. and the Methods of the Business-man Golfer, with a<br />
+Remarkable Development of Municipal Golf</span> </td><td align="right">199</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Canadian Courses, and a Great Achievement at Toronto, with Matters<br />
+pertaining to making a New Beginning</span> </td><td align="right">226</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Golf de Paris, and some Remarkable Events at Versailles and<br />
+Chantilly, with New Theories by High Authorities</span> </td><td align="right">251</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Riviera Golf, and what might be learned from Ladies, with a<br />
+Consideration of the Overlapping Grip</span> </td><td align="right">277</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">About the Pyrenees, and the Charms of Golf at Biarritz and Pau,<br />
+with Possibilities for Great Adventure</span> </td><td align="right">302</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Game in Italy, and the Quality of the Course at Rome, with a<br />
+Short Consideration of the Value of Style</span> </td><td align="right">324</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Awakening of Spain, and some Marvellous Golfing Enterprise in<br />
+Madrid, with a Statement of Golfers' Discoveries</span> </td><td align="right">339</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Superiority of British Links, and a Masterpiece of Kent, with<br />
+some Systems and Morals for Holiday Golf</span> </td><td align="right">364</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Old Dignity of London Golf, and its New Importance, with a Word<br />
+for the Charm of Inland Courses</span> </td><td align="right">392</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SEVEN WONDERS OF GOLF, AND THE ABIDING MYSTERY OF THE GAME, WITH A
+THOUGHT UPON TRADITIONS AND THEIR VALUE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The first of the seven wonders of golf is a mysterious fascination that
+it sets towards mankind, from which, overwhelming and enduring, no
+people are immune. The game seizes men of all ages, of every
+nationality, all occupations, dispositions, temperaments&mdash;all of them.
+The charm acts upon men and women alike. Sometimes we have suspected
+that males are more whole-hearted golfers; but there are circumstances
+of quick recurrence to cause a doubt, and even were there none the
+fancied difference would be capable of explanation. It has nearly become
+an established rule that they golf the most who golf the last, for there
+is no man of the links so keen, so simple and humble in his abandonment
+to the game, as he who but lately held aloof and laughed, with many a
+gibe upon the madness of the class. Savages have attempted golf and
+found they liked it, and the finest intellects are constantly exercised
+upon its difficulties. So this diversion, pastime, game has become a
+thing of everywhere and everybody as no other sport of any kind has ever
+done. The number of people who play no golf decreases daily, and events
+of the last ten years have shown that its supremacy as the chief of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+games is sure. It is clear, indeed, that, so far as the numbers attached
+to it are concerned, it is still only at its beginning, in toddling
+infancy. A few years hence its intimate part in general life will be
+better realised; even now you do not so frequently ask a man of movement
+and intelligence whether he plays golf or not as what his handicap may
+be and what kind of ball he likes the best. No other game or sport
+exercises anything like such power of fascination upon its people as
+this. A tennis-player may leave tennis if he must; the cricketer often
+voluntarily gives up cricket for no compelling reason; a man of the
+hills and moors may cease to care for shooting; and one who has made an
+automobile speed like the wind along the roads may sell his car and be
+motorist nevermore. But the golfer will and must always golf, and never
+less but more while strength permits. Men who go to the sea in ships
+take golf clubs with them; I have known golfers carry their materials
+into deserts, and one of the greatest and noblest explorers the world
+has known took them with him to one far end of earth. Surely this is a
+very remarkable thing, a feature of life that is strange as it is
+strong, and it is not nonsense to suggest that this is no ordinary game
+and cannot be considered as a game like others. Somewhere in a
+mysterious way it touches the springs of life, makes emotions shake. It
+grips; it twitches at the senses. Why?</p>
+
+<p>No person has yet answered that question well and with decision, though
+many have attempted to do so in written words, and ten thousand times
+and more have players in their talk touched upon the lasting problem,
+and then, with that natural human avoidance of the impossible, have
+shuffled off to some topic more amenable. Here, it seemed, was one of
+the mysteries of life, and these are such as it is better not to meddle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+with. So through neglect and our timidity the problem has seemed to
+deepen. It has become the Great Mystery. Wonder and awe are thick about
+it. Men who were innocent and have turned to golf do not give a reason
+why; they are silent to the questioner. They say that he too will see in
+time, and then they golf exceedingly. Surely, then, this Great Mystery
+of its fascination is the first of the seven wonders of golf; and it is
+appropriate enough that a game that covers the world and embraces all
+mankind should have special and well-separated wonders numbering seven
+like the seven others of the earth at large: the traditions of the game,
+its amazing ubiquity, St. Andrews, the short putt, the achievements of
+golfers, and the rubber-cored ball are the other six. Each has its
+well-established place, and between the seventh of the group and the
+eighth, being chief of the thousand minor wonders, there is a wide
+separation.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>It is not for one poor atom in a great and complex golfing world to put
+forward with any look of dogma a suggested solution to this subtle
+mystery which the philosophers have probed so long and fruitlessly. He
+will subscribe with others in a consoling renunciation to the view that
+it is not for human mortals, who should be happy with delights that are
+given them, to tear down veils from the faces of hidden gods. But as a
+theory&mdash;shall we say?&mdash;he may advance an explanation which is
+satisfying to one who has wondered as much as any others and inquired as
+often during many years, while yet it still leaves a place for mystery
+and a suggestion of eternal doubt. And the chief difference between this
+theory and others that have preceded it is that this is what might be
+called Collective while the others have commonly been theories of single
+ideas.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> Philosophic research towards the solution of the mystery
+hitherto has been almost exclusively based upon the supposition of there
+being one peculiar unknown cause for the amazing fascination, a
+magnificent <i>x</i>, something that in our present imperfect state of
+knowledge could hardly be imagined, but which has been vaguely conceived
+to be connected in some ways with the senses&mdash;and maybe the spirit. We
+have known that in some mysterious and it has seemed almost supernatural
+way the emotions have been stirred, most deeply shaken, by the pursuit
+of golf, and the case has seemed so inexplicable that the existence of
+an overwhelming unknown factor for the cause has been suspected. Here
+investigation has naturally faltered. I myself for long enough was
+inclined to the possibility of the single-cause theory being correct,
+and with devotion was attached to that "Hope" suggestion which satisfied
+most requirements and went far towards an explanation of all the
+mysteries. That this doctrine, whose merits shall be considered, is
+largely correct, that it does account for much of the mystery, I am well
+convinced; but we who have studied in the latest schools of philosophy
+are now unwilling to believe that it accounts completely for everything,
+that, in fact, this hope, which the circumstances of the game cause to
+flame continually in the golfer's mind like the great human passion that
+it is, is the one and only Force of golf, though it is almost certainly
+the major force of a group and dominates the others. Our new idea for a
+solution to the grand mystery is that there is a number of forces or
+causes of widely different character but associated in complete harmony
+for the production of strong emotional effects in the mind of the
+subject&mdash;emotions of the simplest and most natural character, but, like
+others touching at the mainsprings of life, in their action most
+intense. In a simple, unanalytical, and rather unphilosophical way, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+game of golf has often been compared to the game of life, just indeed as
+other games and pursuits have been pointed for comparisons with the
+process of human existence. So we have been exhibited as starting in
+life at the teeing ground, abounding in hope and possibility. The
+troubles, ills, and worries that have soon afflicted us have been found
+their counterparts, all the analogies made to suit the careful people
+who play short of hazards and enjoy a smooth existence, the bold
+adventurers who brave long carries and like best the romantic road, the
+deep bunkers of misfortune, the constant menace of the rough for those
+who hesitate upon the straight and narrow way, the unexpected gifts of
+Providence when long putts are holed, the erratic inclination of the
+poor human when the little ones are missed. But now we find that in a
+far deeper and more consequential way this sympathy between golf and
+life exists, and that in this gentle play there is a repetition in
+lighter tones of the throbbing theme of existence.</p>
+
+<p>In the strong action upon the emotions which takes place during the
+practice of the game there are effects which are purely physical and
+others which are largely mental and spiritual. The physical thrills of
+golf are above the comprehension of any man or woman who has not played
+the game. We are certain that in the whole range of sport or human
+exercise there is nothing that is quite so good as the sublime
+sensation, the exquisite feeling of physical delight, that is gained in
+the driving of a golf ball with a wooden club in the manner that it
+ought to be driven. This last provision is emphasised, for this is a
+matter of style and action, and the sensuous thrill is gained from the
+exertion of physical strength in such a mechanically, scientifically,
+and physically perfect manner as to produce an absolute harmony of
+graceful movement. It is as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> the satisfaction and thanks of Nature.
+Sometimes we hear sportsmen speak of certain sensations derived from
+particular strokes at cricket, others of an occasional sudden ecstasy in
+angling, and one may well believe that life runs strong in the blood
+when a man shoots his first tiger or his first wild elephant. But the
+feelings of golf are subtler, sweeter, and that we are not stupidly
+prejudiced or exclusive for the game may be granted if it is suggested
+that we reach some way to the golf sensations in two other human
+exercises, the one being in the dancing of the waltz when done
+thoroughly well and with a fine rhythmical swing, and the other when
+skating on the ice with full and complete abandon. In each case it is a
+matter of perfect poise, of the absolute perfection of co-ordination of
+human movement, of the thousands of little muscular items of the system
+working as one, and of the truest rhythm and harmony being thus
+attained. We come near to it also in some forms of athletics; we have it
+suggested in the figures of the Greek throwing the discus. In golf there
+is an enormous concentration of this effect in the space of a couple of
+seconds&mdash;not too long to permit of becoming accustomed to it, not too
+short for proper appreciation. In this brief time, if the driving is
+properly done as Nature would have it, the emotional sensation is
+tremendous. Again one insists on the method and manner, for, especially
+in late years, ways of driving have been cultivated as the result of the
+agreeability of the rubber-cored ball, in which the physical movements
+are restricted and changed, and nearly all of the thrills are lost. It
+is still, even then, a fine thing to drive a good ball; there is
+peculiar satisfaction and a sense of smooth pleasure felt in doing so;
+but it is not that great whole-body thing that is enjoyed when there is
+the long swing and the full finish. That is why, even if style be so
+difficult to attain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> and there are ways of playing which are far easier
+to cultivate and more certain of their good results, it is worth all the
+pains and study expended in acquiring it, and a hundred times again, for
+the pleasure that comes afterwards. In the winning of holes or in the
+making of low scores the driving may be a comparatively unimportant part
+of the play, as it is said to be, though a certain high standard of
+efficiency is demanded continually; but it will always be the favourite
+part of the game because it appeals so much to those physical emotions,
+stirs them up so violently, rouses the life of the man, and lifts him
+for a moment to a full appreciation of the perfection of the human
+system. Some of these emotions are experienced in a minor key when
+playing the short game, as we call it, particularly in finely-made
+pitching strokes with iron clubs. Here there are restraint and
+sweetness; it is as if we listen to the delicacy of Mendelssohn after
+the strength and stateliness of Beethoven. Undoubtedly there are keen
+physical sensations enjoyed in this part of the play. When it comes to
+the last and shortest strokes, to the putting, only a faint trace of
+action upon the physical emotions remains, and the pleasure and
+satisfaction&mdash;if any&mdash;that are gained are purely mental. So in the short
+space of five minutes, in playing one hole of fair length, we may run
+along a full gamut of emotions, and herein is a great part of the joy of
+golf.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>This, however, would be insufficient. The strong, self-controllable man
+would not, in their absence, crave for these emotions. But other
+influences are at work to kindle and continue the golfing fever in him.
+For the highest and deepest pleasure of civilised and cultivated man a
+combination of the best physical and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> mental emotions&mdash;with a little
+disappointment and grief&mdash;is essential; one without the other is always
+unsatisfying. Here, foremost among the mental experiences, so powerful
+as to have a certain physical influence, is our Hope. The major force of
+all life is hope. It is life itself, for without it the scheme of human
+existence would collapse. To look forward, to anticipate, to hope for
+better things, and believe in them&mdash;that is the principle of life. It is
+for that reason that the atheist comes so near to being an
+impossibility. An incredible he is. He asserts himself not only as an
+ignorer of gods but as a rejecter of Nature, and his position is
+untenable, impossible. He endeavours to place himself outside the scheme
+of creation. Without hope man could not and would not continue. He would
+give up. Motive would have vanished, and motive is essential to action.
+We strain analogy to no extravagance when we hold that it is the same in
+golf. It is pervaded with hope, lives on it, is played with it, depends
+upon it throughout in its every phase. At the beginning of the day's
+play a man hopes for great achievement. He does not ignore the
+possibilities, and rarely, whatever his temperament and disposition,
+does he wait for events, content in a manner of perfect wisdom to take
+things as they come. He anticipates, and in the human way he builds
+castles made of thoughts, and in his calculations overlooks existing
+facts and past experience. Thus are charm, eagerness, and romance given
+to life and the game. Never yet was golfer who did not believe that now
+his great day might come.</p>
+
+<p>So on the first teeing ground there is hope in the highest. Should the
+first stroke be successful the hope is stimulated; if the stroke is bad
+the hope is intensified. In the one case something more of the human
+power of man, the strong right arm and the fingers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> deft, is poured into
+the physical and temperamental boiler where the forces are being
+generated. The success has increased probability, the man can a little
+the more stand by himself, his independence increases, and his hope has
+a rock of fact beneath it. In the other event, the first drive having
+been a failure&mdash;as, alas! with the wearinesses of waiting and the
+anxieties they engender, first drives so often are&mdash;the hope is
+intensified by the addition of highly concentrated faith. The element of
+the practical indefatigable man is slightly reduced, and in its place
+there is filled the sublimer, grander essence of spirituality that is so
+far above the merely human. The hope is not the less. Providence is
+brought into the schemes, and the heart lives well. If the second shot
+is a good one there is more of the human given to the hope and the
+spiritual is a little subdued again; if the stroke should fail there is
+something like another mute appeal subconsciously made to Providence.</p>
+
+<p>These are the hopes of strokes. There are the hopes for holes; the hopes
+for days; the hopes for seasons, each series being units made of
+collections as years are made of months and days are made of hours. One
+who loses the first hole hopes to win the second, and is even insincere,
+for the encouragement of his hope, in saying and trying to believe that
+to lose the first hole does not matter and is often an advantage. If the
+second is lost there is a coming equality in the match imagined for the
+fourth or fifth. Three or four down at the turn, even five, and the man
+still lives and hopes (he is no golfer if he does not), and there have
+been magnificent struggles made when players have been six down with
+seven to play, or have even been dormy five to the bad. He who has only
+lost the first hole holds his hope in a state that is highly charged
+with belief in his own human capacity; he who is dormy down when the
+match is far from home still keeps hope,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> is buoyed well with it, but he
+does his best in a half-cheerful, half-nervous way, knowing that the
+time for supreme human endeavour has passed, and he gives the matter
+over to kind Providence, submitting that his deserts are good. So one
+who has played badly in the morning hopes for success in the afternoon;
+and where is the man who, having made poor shots all the day and lost
+holes and matches by them, does not fall to sleep at night consoled and
+peaceful in reflecting upon a discovery that will make full amends upon
+the morrow? After the failures of a summer season hopes arise for better
+fare when cool autumn makes the play more pleasant; when there has been
+one whole bad year there is hope enough that the game will mend in the
+time that follows.</p>
+
+<p>In this way it is hope all through, hope always, in the beginning and
+the end and in the small things with the great. Hope is the most human,
+most uplifting of all the emotions. Banish this emotional quality from
+the human mind and the golf clubs would be disbanded, for the game would
+cease to be golf for another day. The charm would have gone completely.
+Only the nature of the hope sometimes varies as we have shown, and the
+most wonderful feature of this wonder of golf is the sublimely simple
+way in which the man of a match, when all seems lost, when the cause
+seems wholly ruined, when by nothing human does it seem that a situation
+hanging upon a thread so thin can possibly be saved, believes in the
+future still. Providence still exists for him. Every human reckoning
+would show that he approaches the impossible, and yet he sees it not,
+but only the narrow way of escape to success beyond. And there is
+infinite satisfaction to the soul, much that is splendidly destructive
+of utter materialism, in realising that often the seeming human
+impossibility is broken and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> Providence pulls us through. In golf we
+often ask for miracles, and sometimes we obtain them. It seems to me
+that the golfer has one satisfying motto, and only one, and it is <i>Spero
+meliora</i>. What is the use of the "far and sure" that the ancients have
+bequeathed to us? Nearly meaningless it is. And if those words of hope
+are emblazoned on his coat of arms, the golfing man should have the
+Watts picture of "Hope" in his private chamber, courageous Hope
+straining for the faintest note that comes from the one lone string that
+remains on the almost dismantled harp.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Such strong exercises of emotions, physical and soulful, accounting, as
+we may believe, for much of the fascination of the game, are supported
+by others, subtler but also of large effect. There are the aggravations
+of the game. It suggests an object that no man has ever completely
+achieved and never will do, since none has ever arisen to a state of
+skill and consistency when he plays perfect golf and plays it always,
+though such success may nearly be achieved at other pastimes. And it is
+not given to the player to know why the skill he feels himself possessed
+of does not bear its fruit. He is left in wonderment and aggravation.
+The game goads, it taunts, it mocks unmercifully. Old Tom Morris
+expressed the simplest overwhelming truth when he said it was "aye
+fechtin' against us." It does so from the first hour, the first minute
+of the golfer's existence as such, when he misses the ball which it had
+seemed so easy to strike. Then, his vanity wounded, he attacks, and the
+lifelong feud begins. What always seems so easy becomes the nearly
+impossible. There is always something new to learn, always another scrap
+of explanation of mystery<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> to be gathered, and the player is always
+groping and being taught. But he moves forward only to fall back again,
+and the simple consolation he has from this ever-recurring process is
+that the tide of discovery, when it rolls back, returns a little higher
+up the beach with the next wave and in the long succession there is a
+gain. But this process is not so regular as the running of the tide, not
+so much a matter of calculable natural law, and therein is the
+disappointment and the aggravation. A man retires to his rest at night
+feeling himself a good and well-satisfied golfer with rapid advancement
+certain, and lo! the morning will be little spent when he is shown to
+himself as one of the poorest and most ineffectual players. The mystery
+of this reaction is quite insoluble; only the cold fact is clear,
+convincing. No more tantalising will-o'-the-wisp is there than form at
+golf. It is a game that lures a man, it coquets with him, trifles with
+his yearnings and his hopes, and flouts him. So does it excite him, and,
+hurting his pride, stirs his ambition and his desire to obtain the
+mastery. The spirit of adventure and conquest is aroused, and the strong
+man who has failed in no undertaking before declares that he will not
+fail in this. And so, with his everlasting hope, he perseveres and will
+not give in. But it is the game that wins.</p>
+
+<p>It appeals to the emotions of the primitive man in another way that may
+often be unsuspected. In essence it is the simplest and the most natural
+of games. It is indeed a game of Nature, and it is played not on the
+smoothest surfaces with white lines drawn upon them, but upon plain
+grass-covered earth, a little smoothed by man but still with abounding
+natural roughness and simplicity. Here on the links are space and
+freedom such as are afforded to people, especially those of towns and
+cities, rarely in present times. The tendency in all life now is to
+confine itself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> closely. We live in small spaces, with many walls and
+low roofs; we move through thronged streets and by underground railways.
+Things are not the same as when there was the Garden of Eden and the
+open world outside it. His confinement is a wearing oppression to the
+modern man, though he may not always suspect it. Because it emancipates
+and gives us back a little of our lost freedom is the chief reason for
+the popularity of motoring, and it was to attain more freedom still that
+man made up his mind to fly and now flies accordingly. We cannot
+entirely escape from this unnatural confinement which modern conditions
+of life have forced upon us, but for a little while at intervals,
+through the medium of this sport, we may experience the sense of space,
+of freedom, of the something that comes near to infinity. Unconscious of
+this cause, a golfer on the links is uplifted to a simpler freer self.
+He has a great open space about him, the wilder the better, and the open
+sky above. He takes Nature as he finds her, accepting her every mood,
+and that is why this game is and must be one for all weathers. There is
+the ball upon the tee. Hit it, golfer, anywhere you please! Hit it far,
+no limit to the distance! Strike with all your strength! Until in the
+game the time for wariness comes, as with the hunter upon his prey, see
+no limitations, accept all consequences. The golfer's freedom has a
+flavour that other people rarely taste.</p>
+
+<p>Emotions serve the human system better than comforts and conveniences,
+for these emotions are the pulse of life and the conveniences are mere
+aids to existence. Golf, being complete, has its advantages of
+convenience as well as its thrilling emotions, and when the players
+reason to their relatives and their friends upon the good of the game,
+shaping their excuses for a strange excess, they exhibit with a limited<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+sincerity the real advantages and conveniences. The game may be played
+anywhere and everywhere. It is the same in principle, the same in rules,
+the same in actions; but yet again it is like a new thing everywhere,
+and it is always fresh. There is a golf course wherever a man may go;
+and there is a new experience for him always. He needs only one man to
+play with him; or indeed, if there is no such man available, he may play
+with the game itself as his implacable opponent, fight it in the open
+and without the medium of a human opponent to break the shocks for him.
+If variety is the spice of life, then here is spice enough. Then it
+gives us such companionship as can be gained by few other means, for it
+brings us to inner intimacy with the man we play, bares his hidden
+nature to us, strips from him all those trappings of manner and
+suggestion by which in the ordinary social scheme every person plays a
+part as on a stage and rarely is well discovered. No man plays a part in
+golf; his individuality, in all its goodness and weakness, is unfolded
+in the light. He is known entirely and for his own true self. The game
+gives us fresh air and the most splendid exercise. These are enormous
+advantages in golf, and we extol them in defence of our enthusiasm and
+they are accepted; yet, honest to ourselves, we know that we do not play
+golf because of fresh air and exercise, and indeed we only think of them
+as gain when, in the slavery to which we have been subject, our emotions
+for a day have been shivered and shocked by failure. It has the
+advantage that we can play it when the period of life for other games
+has passed, and we can play while life leaves to us but a flick of
+vigour. Some of the meanest men, who are barely worthy of being in this
+excellent community where the sense of brotherhood is so good, have been
+gross enough to say that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> golf serves their professional and commercial
+purposes thoroughly well&mdash;as indeed it may&mdash;by giving them intimacy with
+valuable and helpful friends. These are men who would buy their idols
+and sell them for a profit of five per cent. The advantages of golf are
+there; but they are the accident of circumstances, or not perhaps the
+accident but simply like the scheme of Nature in supporting what is good
+with good itself; but they do not and cannot in any measure explain the
+mystery of the fascination of the game, for that mystery lies in the
+emotional, the spiritual, the psychological, and not in anything that is
+just material. Golf is something of a passion, and passions are of the
+blood and have nothing to do with conveniences and rules of life for
+health and plain advantage.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The traditions of golf are the second of its wonders. All things that
+are old have certain traditional sentiment clinging to them, and it
+makes a good flavouring to life, for it is suggestive of age and time
+and continuity and eternity. Had golf no traditions now, those emotional
+effects in its subjects might be produced the same, but yet the sport
+would not be the same rich colourful thing that we know it to be, but
+something grosser. And again we could stand for golf and say that no
+other sport can testify to its past and present worth and greatness with
+such excellent tradition. Three only can rank in the same class, and
+those are cricket, hunting, and the turf. Their traditions indeed are
+rich, they uphold their sports to-day, and they abound in those rare
+stories which, even if they have lost nothing with time, make fine
+things for the listening now and have the tendency always to promote a
+better sporting spirit. But three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> things are essential to good
+traditions, the first being acts, the second persons, and the third
+places, and the last of the three is far from being the least important,
+because birds do not love their nests more than traditions do the plots
+of earth where are their homes. They cannot live in space; there they
+would lapse to a state of film and would fade away. Give them abiding
+places, real solid ground upon which their delicate ghostly structures
+may rest, and they have a substance which gives them a fine reality. If
+a character of the past were invented, given a real name, all his
+manners and customs, his feats and follies carefully described, even his
+father and mother most properly identified, and a statement made of the
+provisions in his will for those who followed after him, that would
+still be likely to linger on as a character merely, a possibility of the
+past but a thing of no account, not an influence. He could not be
+placed. If we give ourselves a licence to roam the earth in search of
+golf, we like to think of the good men of the old traditions as being
+comfortably settled, as being at special places where, in our fireside
+fancies on winter nights when the winds are moaning and the rains are
+lashing against the window-panes, we can see them and sit down with
+them. The wandering hero of tradition does not suit. And here is a great
+virtue of the people of our golfing traditions: we can catch them tight,
+nail them fast. We have special plots of land&mdash;the majestic links of
+Scotland, the old course of Blackheath, almost every yard of which
+might, if speechful, tell a story of some old golfer of the past. The
+old golfers trod those links some time in their earthly days. We know
+the shots they played, where balls pitched and how they ran, the bunkers
+where they had disasters, their amazing recoveries and the putts that
+they holed and missed&mdash;for even the golfers of tradition missed their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+putts at times. We know where those golfers walked, and so the
+traditions are of the links and the men with the links, and the links
+are the same now as once. Let us then hope fervently that they may
+remain the same, though a hundred kinds of new balls, each farther
+flying than the one before it, should be invented, and such courses
+should be declared to be weakened and out of date. It is easy enough to
+invent a character, but it is not so easy to invent a links and then
+declare that by sea encroachments on the coast it has been swallowed up
+and has gone. The tale is weak and unconvincing. But invent your
+character, and then produce your place, and say: "He was here; his feet
+were on this teeing ground; here he took a divot; it was in this bunker
+that he was caught," and there is nothing more that is needed for
+complete conviction.</p>
+
+<p>Having seen a little of the way in which certain potential and probable
+traditions of the future are now being made, I have a suspicion about
+some of the amazing histories of the past that have been reported to us.
+Such suspicions are developed in the minds of those who have themselves
+been parties to some exaggerations of things done on certain links, and
+have lived to see those exaggerations improved upon by further tellers,
+and of a rich story, with scarcely a base of fact, being thus
+established in history and made ready for a monument. Having our plots
+of land, with their permanent marks and milestones, it is easy to do it
+so, and all golfers cannot be commended for complete veracity, though
+their lies are tolerably honest of their kind, being, like their shots,
+made subconsciously, and the cause, being companionable conduct, is a
+good one. Listeners believe in them and so make them three-parts truth.
+Cricket and racing have had their splendid men, and they have had
+certain sorts of places, but nothing homelike, merely round patches of
+smooth land with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> rails and grand stands, to which traditions can never
+cling like ivy to the crumbling tower. The ghost men of these old
+traditions were fine creatures; well did they do their work; they fought
+and won; but they seem lonesome creatures. They lack location, and they
+have no family histories and traditions of their own. They are mere
+particles of the past. Nearly all the men of our great traditions are
+heroes of fine countenance and rich character, brilliant in their
+individuality, with that proper touch of pride and arrogance blended
+with the finest old conservatism, which all good traditions should
+enjoy. Only the ancients of the chase are good company for them.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>It seems to me that our traditions and their associate legends might be
+separated into five periods. There is the primeval, the prehistoric, the
+most royal and ancient, the early Scottish, and the late gutty periods.
+Of the primeval there is no more to be said than there is of primeval
+man. We know the latter was born, that he did work of sorts, that he ate
+and slept, that in his way he lived and perhaps he loved, while
+certainly he died. Of the primeval golfers we are solid in the belief
+that they had clubs and balls, for they must have had, and they had
+holes or marks, for they could not have done without them. We suspect
+them of stymies, for only the weight of tradition has held the stymie to
+us still, and for its power this tradition must be far extended. Almost
+certainly they made their first clubs from the branches of trees, but
+there was nothing grand in that, for Harry Vardon and brother Tom,
+Edward Ray as well, all three beginning their golf in their native
+Jersey, did the same, and they played with stone marbles for their
+balls, played in the moonlight too. There would seem here to have been a
+tendency towards a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> throw-back in Jersey golf; but Vardon and his
+associates have made an ample advance since then. Good Sir Walter
+Simpson, in his deep researches, leaned to a more exact and defined
+theory or tradition of the primeval golf, and he gaily marked for it a
+beginning and a place. It is attractive and it is reasonable, and this,
+with the theory of the spontaneous and inevitable origin of the game in
+many places in the early times of man, theories with living detail
+thickening on them, come near in quality to real tradition. Sir Walter,
+you may remember, supposed a shepherd minding his sheep, who often
+chanced upon a round pebble and, having his crook in his hand, he would
+strike it away. In the ordinary way this led to nothing, but once on a
+time, "probably," a shepherd feeding his sheep on the links, "which
+might have been those of St. Andrews," rolled one of these stones into a
+rabbit scrape, and then he exclaimed, "Marry! I could not do that if I
+tried!"&mdash;a thought, so instinctive is ambition, as Sir Walter says,
+which nerved him to the attempt. Enter the second shepherd, who watches
+awhile and says then: "Forsooth, but that is easy!" He takes a crook in
+his hand, swings violently, and misses. The first shepherd turns away
+laughing. The two fellows then perceive that this is a serious business,
+and together they enter the gorse and search for round stones wherewith
+to play their new game. Sir Walter Simpson was a terrible man, and he
+must needs work into this excellent romance the declaration that each
+shepherd, to his surprise, found an old golf ball, every reader knowing
+that they "are to be found there in considerable quantity even to this
+day." Then these shepherd-golfers deepened the rabbit scrape so that the
+balls might not jump out of it, and they set themselves to practising
+putting. The stronger shepherd happened to be the less skilful, and he
+found himself getting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> beaten at this diversion, whereupon he protested
+that it was a fairer test of skill to play for the hole from a
+considerable distance. When this was settled it was found that the game
+was improved. The players, says the theorist, at first called it
+"putty," because the immediate object was to putt or put the ball into
+the hole or scrape, but at the longer distance the driving was the chief
+interest, and therefore the name was changed to "go off" or "golf." In
+the meantime the sheep, as sheep will do, had strayed, and the shepherds
+had to go in chase of them. Naturally they found this a very troublesome
+and annoying interruption, and so they hit upon the great idea of making
+a circular course of holes which enabled them to play and herd at the
+same time. By this arrangement there were many holes and they were far
+apart, and it became necessary to mark their whereabouts, which was
+easily done by means of a tag of wool from a sheep, fastened to a stick,
+which, as is remarked, is a sort of flag still used on many Scottish
+courses in much the same simplicity as by those early shepherds. And Sir
+Walter wrote with reason that since those early days the essentials of
+the game have altered but little.</p>
+
+<p>After the time of these first shepherds there were doubtless more
+shepherds, and the bucolics in general would be given to the game. Yet
+it should never be understood that even in its origins this game was one
+that was practised chiefly by persons of low intellectual strength.
+Indeed it was not. In the ancient classics there are references to ball
+games that bear close resemblance to primitive golf, and then when games
+began to appear in Holland and France that had golf in them, even though
+they were not golf, it was not the common people always who were most
+attracted. And in passing, it must be said, that while golf as we have
+it now is British&mdash;Scottish, if you like&mdash;and there is enough<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> authority
+and substance in the claim for the satisfaction of any pride seeing that
+the laws of St. Andrews have been for ages back the laws of the world at
+large, it is too much to believe that a game so simple in its
+essentials, so obvious and so necessary and so desirable, should have
+had an exclusive origin in any one country, to be copied by the others.
+The elements of golf must have come up spontaneously in many different
+parts of the world, although they were without rule, organisation, and
+might not have been known as a game or anything like that by those who
+employed them. But it was there, as eating and kissing were; and it fell
+to the lot of those canny and most discerning Scots to regularise it, as
+it were, to declare it a game and give it definiteness, and in due time
+to set up laws and a government, all of which were just what they should
+be and the best conceivable. It might not have been such a good game as
+it is now had it not been nurtured at St. Andrews, Leith, and
+Musselburgh, and in those other early cradles of the pastime; but I
+cannot believe that if there had been no land north of Newcastle there
+would have been no golf, and we should be moaning now in vague
+discontent for a mysterious something lost to life.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>I may adduce some circumstances from most ancient history and tradition
+which have not been applied to this question hitherto, but should have
+been, for they seem to be apposite and remarkable. In these days
+Ireland, with a fine spirit, is struggling for better golfing
+recognition, and should have it. When a game is for the world, what is
+the Irish Channel? The country has some very splendid links, and has
+produced some players&mdash;if few of them&mdash;of the finest quality; but a
+people who exhibit frequently a fine appreciation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> of the spirit of the
+golfing brotherhood, and to the wandering player extend a hospitality of
+which it can only be said that it is Irish, are treated coldly in
+championship dignity being withheld from their courses and their not
+being admitted to the higher councils of the game. I remember with
+gratitude a very early acquaintance with the golf of Newcastle in County
+Down, that glorious course in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains, and
+with Portrush in the north, while about Dublin there are links that fear
+no comparison with the best of other lands. The ordinary records may
+indicate that there was no golf in Ireland until 1881, when what is now
+the Royal Belfast Club was formed; but listen to a story which is
+brought to me in some spirit of triumph by a friend, Mr. Victor Collins,
+a golfer, who practises his game, for the most part, not on any mainland
+but out on the Arran Isles, west of the Irish coast, out on little
+Inneshmor, where he lives when he is not in London, and where he has a
+small course of just a few sporting holes for his own delight, one which
+would have been as agreeable to the golfers of the prehistoric period as
+it is now to a modern gentleman who occasionally becomes a little tired
+of over-civilisation and likes to retreat to simplicity and Nature. It
+is a considerable change from Stoke Poges to Inneshmor, but only a poor
+soul would not like it for a period. In London one evening we talked of
+golf and Inneshmor, and he told me a legendary story, the documentary
+narrative of which he has since produced in the form of an extract from
+"O'Looney's unpublished MS. translation of the 'Tain bo' Cuailgne' in
+the Irish Royal Academy, Dublin." Knowing little of these matters, I
+quote Mr. Collins direct in saying that this is the most famous of Irish
+epics, and describes the war Queen Maeve of Connacht, assisted by her
+vassal kings of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> rest of Ireland, waged against Ulster to obtain a
+bull which was reputed to be a finer animal than the one she herself
+possessed. The central hero of Ulster was the famous Cuchullain, the
+greatest of all Irish heroes, in truth an Irish Achilles. Fergus,
+ex-king of Ulster, who had taken refuge with Maeve, tells her who are
+the champions against whom her armies will have to contend, and these
+lines occur in the course of his terrifying account of Cuchullain, whose
+age at the time of this expedition was between six and seven: "The boy
+set out then and he took his instruments of pleasure with him; he took
+his hurly of creduma and his silver ball, and he took his massive
+Clettini, and he took his playing Bunsach, with its fire-burned top, and
+he began to shorten his way with them. He would give the ball a stroke
+of his hurly and drive it a great distance before him; he would cast (?
+swing) his hurly at it, and would give it a second stroke that would
+drive it not a shorter distance than the first blow. He would cast his
+Clettini, and he would hurl his Bunsach, and he would make a wild race
+after them. He would then take up his hurly, and his ball, and his
+Clettini, and his Bunsach, and he would cast his Bunsach up in the air
+on before him, and the end of the Bunsach would not have reached the
+ground before he would have caught it by the top while still flying, and
+in this way he went on till he reached the Forad of the plain of Emain
+where the youths were." This young Cuchullain does appear to have been
+appreciably better than scratch. Apparently he was going to attend
+something in the nature of a club gathering, and his way of getting
+there was much in the nature of cross-country golf with a touch of trick
+in it; for there are professionals to-day who make a show in their idle
+moments of pitching up a ball and catching it with their hands. My
+informer tells me that Cuchullain was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> not confining his attention to
+golf alone, but doing feats of jugglery as well in order to while away
+the journey. "The description of driving the ball before him," he
+remarks, "evidently contains the germ of golf. Some years ago I saw in
+an illustrated paper a reproduction of a picture of a tombstone from
+some place in Ulster dating to the twelfth century. It was the tombstone
+of a Norseman. On it were a double-headed sword, the sign of his
+profession, and below it the perfect representation of a cleek and a
+golf ball, his favourite amusement. It would be interesting to make a
+serious search in old Irish records for further information on the game.
+'Clettini' is from an Irish word for 'feather.' It was evidently a
+feathered javelin he hurled. 'Creduma' means 'red metal,' that is brass.
+Hurly of creduma therefore comes curiously near the quite modern
+brassey. Bunsach is a very obscure word. In middle Irish there was such
+a word, but it meant a kind of dagger." This discovery opens up an
+excellent speculation.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The periods of the traditions of course impinge upon each other and
+softly blend, so that the game some way or other seems to go back
+continuously from now to the beginning. We have in the most royal and
+ancient period the Stuart kings playing their golf, and Charles the
+First hearing of mighty troubles to his throne perpending while he was
+golfing on the links of Leith; of James the Second with his court
+playing the golf at Blackheath and sowing seeds that were to bear
+amazing fruit in the south at a far-off date; of Mary Queen of Scots
+golfing with her favourite Chastelard at St. Andrews. There was
+Archbishop Hamilton, who signed the authority that was given to the
+Provost and magistrates of St. Andrews to put rabbits on the links,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+which authority recognised the rights of the community to the links,
+more especially for the purpose of playing at "golff, futball, schuteing
+at all gamis, with all other manner of pastyme." This was a kind of
+ratification of a Magna Charta of Golf. There was Duncan Forbes, of
+Culloden, first captain of the Gentlemen Golfers, now known as the
+Honourable Company, in 1744. A marvellous man was Duncan Forbes, Lord
+President of the Council, and we know that he played for the Silver Club
+in 1745&mdash;for the last time, probably, because just then the rising of
+the clans obliged him to set out for the north, where he exerted himself
+to the utmost to prevent them from joining the cause of the Young
+Pretender. And here in passing let it be written that there is good
+cause to think that Bonnie Prince Charlie himself was the first to play
+real or Scottish golf on the continent of Europe, for he is believed to
+have had a course made for himself when in Italy, and was once found
+playing in the Borghese gardens, so Mr. Andrew Lang once told us. There
+was the wonderful William St. Clair, of Roslin, so much skilled at golf
+and archery that the common people believed he had a private arrangement
+with the devil. Sir George Chalmers painted a picture of him, which is
+possessed by the Honourable Company, and Sir Walter Scott wrote that he
+was "a man considerably above six feet, with dark grey locks, a form
+upright, but gracefully so, thin-flanked and broad-shouldered, built, it
+would seem, for the business of war or the chase, a noble eye, of
+chastened pride and undoubted authority, and features handsome and
+striking in their general effect. As schoolboys we crowded to see him
+perform feats of strength and skill in the old Scottish games of golf
+and archery." And from there the tale passes on with life and colour to
+the beginnings of the Royal and Ancient Club; to the activities of the
+early members<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> like Major Murray Belshes, and the interest of William
+the Fourth, whose gift medal is played for at St. Andrews to this day;
+to such fine gentlemen of the old school as the late Lord Moncrieff and
+the Earl of Wemyss; to the professionals also like the Morrises and
+Allan Robertson, and old Willie Park. So on along from the ages past to
+such as Frederick Guthrie Tait, who gave to the modern history of golf
+something that glows as well as the best of the old traditions.</p>
+
+<p>Now it may be said that these traditions and all the others, like them
+and unlike, make the game no better, and that they add nothing in yards
+to our driving from the tee. After a consideration I will not agree
+either that they make the game no better or that they add nothing to the
+driving. The spirits of a romantic history are a continual influence.
+They give a dignity to the game which is felt right through it. Only the
+golfer knows how true this is. Men who look upon it lightly as a pastime
+before they know anything of it, learn upon their initiation, and not
+only learn but feel, that there is all that is mysterious, wonderful,
+and awe-inspiring in the game and its past, a new and deep respect is
+created, and there is no more beginner's lightness and nonsense. Age and
+solemnity, and many ceremonies great and small, have given to golf some
+of the attributes of a religion, and with membership of it there comes
+responsibility. When a new Nonconformist chapel has the same exalting
+influence upon the mind and sentiment of a person of intelligence and
+sympathies as an ancient cathedral with all its tombs and relics, and
+the dim pillars among which echoes seem to float and mingle with spirits
+of the past and the great eternity, or when the dining-room of a flat in
+Knightsbridge inspires and dignifies its company like the banqueting
+hall of some ancient castle, I will perhaps agree that the traditions of
+golf are of no practical effect beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> that of merely preserving the
+game from vandalism and giving it a place above the others. Often when
+reflecting thus one feels that in duty to the game one's policy in
+matters should be "St. Andrews, right or wrong." But yet one could wish
+that these mighty traditions were not at times invoked for improper
+purposes. There is too much free and unintelligible talk about them in
+these modern times. They are wantonly applied to base uses; a man will
+urge the traditions in his favour and against his opponent when he
+attempts some vile procedure. When a crafty person is beaten in
+argument, he cries, "The traditions!" and people who speciously, and
+with insincerity, condemn what we may call the modern advancements of
+the game will murmur that the rubber-cored ball and clubs with steel
+faces are not according to "the traditions." Truly they are not, and
+those old traditions had nothing to do with gutties either; but Duncan
+Forbes would have rejoiced in the possession of a modern driver and
+mashie niblick. It is too often and absurdly assumed that the ancients
+used the tools they had because they were the best conceivable and most
+appropriate, just right in practical quality and proper sentiment. They
+were merely the best that had been discovered up to then. The Stuart
+kings might have had a happier time had they possessed some rubber
+Haskells to coax and lead them on.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE UBIQUITY OF THE GAME; WITH AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY OF
+GOLFERS, AND A NOTE UPON THE EFFECT OF ST. ANDREWS SPIRITS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The ubiquity of this game&mdash;being the third of the seven wonders&mdash;is
+remarkable, for it is played everywhere by everybody. No other sport has
+ever achieved such universal favour, and we may be sure that none will
+ever do so, because, apart from the fascination it exercises upon the
+people of different countries and different races, it is so strong in
+its simplicity&mdash;the stick, the ball, the mark, and, with them being
+given, the object plainly suggested. It has already been suggested that,
+in its essentials golf being obvious, it must have been practised from
+the earliest times. Everywhere the simpler emotions of man are the same,
+and so everywhere the game must make the same appeal when it is
+understood. So here, strange as it is still, we have a nearly satisfying
+explanation. What is yet wonderful beyond it is the fact that the
+regulated game with the rules and restrictions that have been agreed
+upon and codified by the high authorities at St. Andrews are everywhere
+accepted, and even in such embellishments it is the same game
+everywhere. Nothing can approach it in this universality. Yet that also
+is nearly explicable.</p>
+
+<p>By a process of continuous thought and deduction<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> from observation the
+people of St. Andrews, past and present, have gained a code of
+regulations which seems most completely to satisfy the requirements of
+the case. It has often been urged against the numerous and lengthy laws
+we have that they suffer from too many niceties and too many
+complications, and that they represent a remarkable evolution of
+man-made intricacy from the one simple governing principle that the ball
+shall be struck by the stick, and that if the object be not achieved by
+the first blow it shall be struck again from the place where it then
+lies. In that simple principle there is all golf, and by it the game
+must surely have been played at the beginning. But it is the disposition
+of man to depart from the most absolute simplicity in the direction of
+what he regards as improvement upon it, and therefore bare principles
+get covered up with fancy wrappings, while again there is in the human
+species an immovable distrust of each other and a tendency towards the
+setting up of safeguards and protections&mdash;laws. When this is done in
+different places, and by different peoples, the results also are almost
+certain to be widely different; and with the assistance of time and
+further development two peoples might at length produce two games which,
+originating in the same basic principle, might be in appearance,
+materials, and actions quite dissimilar. Nearly all ball games, indeed,
+must have had much the same original principle. Golf, as we know it, has
+had its integrity preserved, and has established its amazing
+universality because, despite the numerous and lengthy laws, the spirit
+of the game has been so completely preserved in them. Between absolute
+simplicity, the one natural law of golf, as we might call it, as just
+enunciated, and a lengthy, confusing, and sometimes even contradictory
+code there can be little compromise, and perfection and completeness in
+golfing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> law are impossible, because no two courses are alike, no two
+shots are quite the same, and there can be no end to new situations
+until there is an end of the world and man. It sometimes seems that St.
+Andrews, indefatigable, pursues an impossible finality, and thereby
+makes difficulties for itself. That through ages and generations it has
+produced a code of laws, and defined the principles of a game that is
+accepted all over the world, and causes the same game to be played
+wherever the sun may shine, is not merely an achievement in intelligence
+and discernment, but something that suggests a grand inspiration. These
+are times of change, when old systems of the world are being abandoned
+and new ones being set in their places. It may happen, though it is as
+unlikely as it is undesirable, that St. Andrews itself as a governing
+body will fall; but nothing that ever happens to the game in the future
+can equal the marvel of its foundation and establishment by this
+authority and its associates.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>It is not without good reason that they call golf the world game now. It
+has alighted upon every country, and wherever it has touched it has
+seized. The yellow man likes it; the black man in some places has to be
+kept away from it, because it is found that he grows too fond of it. One
+day when I was golfing at the Country Club, near Boston, they showed me
+a most primitive kind of club that was kept with some other relics in a
+glass case. It had been fashioned from the branch of a tree, and with
+this crude implement a nigger boy in one of the southern states had not
+long previously driven a ball over two hundred yards. Other games are
+for their own countries, like the country's foods, and they would
+neither be suitable nor adaptable elsewhere; but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> in its nature golf
+will do for all, and it has the same subtle attraction for everybody, so
+that what was once thought to be the "golf craze" of the British people
+only became the craze of the Americans too, then of the French, now of
+the Germans and others, and of really everybody. Its qualities and
+conveniences make it the only possible world game. At present in some
+countries it is confined to a few people of unusual distinction or
+circumstances, but it has been found in old and recent history that,
+following a beginning of this kind, the game in a new land has never
+languished, but that presently it has extended from the pioneers, who
+were probably from abroad, to the native people, and from the upper
+classes to the middle, and then to the lower. In France at the present
+time we see the game being started among the general French, and I have
+news that the statesmen have begun to play; yet a little while since the
+golf of Gaul was carried on by British only.</p>
+
+<p>Recently some of us were looking over the map of the world for odd
+countries that might be golfless, and it appeared then that there were
+but four: one being the Balkan States, considering them in the piece,
+another was Afghanistan, a third was Persia, and, scattering the
+attention over the islands of the earth, one reflected that no golf in
+Iceland had been heard of. But shortly afterwards this brief list of
+lone golfless places was reduced to one. To a little gathering of
+friends one night an adventurous gentleman was describing the
+excitements of a day's rough golf that he had had one time when near to
+Reykiavik, and, if the course was to some extent made for the occasion,
+little enough did that matter then. There were some real holes, and the
+pioneer declared one of them to be the longest and most sporting he had
+ever played; and we knew he had played some good ones. So Iceland came
+into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> fold. It was discovered during the recent wars that there was
+golf here and there in those worrying Balkans. Then lo! the land of the
+Afghans was also delivered to the game, and it was the Ameer himself who
+was chiefly responsible, thus emulating the rulers of many other lands.
+He had heard of golf, had seen it, realised it, and had been fascinated.
+Thereupon he had a short course prepared for him in the neighbourhood of
+Kabul, and began to practise with royal assiduity at his driving,
+pitching, and putting. Humble, doubtful, and yet loyal subjects observed
+this done from a respectful distance, and they wondered. After a little
+while they perceived that it was a game, and that the chief of Afghans
+invariably sought with his little ball the holes that were placed upon
+the course. Being practical people, they conceived that they might turn
+the game and their royal master's fondness for it to their advantage,
+and thereupon began to deposit in the holes at night such petitions as
+they had difficulty in getting placed before the royal eyes by any other
+means. They believed that by their new system the Ameer was sure to see
+and read what was intended for him. Yet it proved that he was somewhat
+angered by this manner of approach, and gave orders that all petitions
+found in his golfing holes should be burned unread. The petitioning
+parties had not understood how seriously the game he played was taken,
+nor the deep effect it had upon the mind and the disposition of the
+player, else they would surely have moved craftily and warily with their
+prayers, and then they might have gained imperial favour. Had they seen
+their ruler miss his drive, foozle his second, put his third into the
+pond, slice among the trees with his fifth&mdash;even Ameers being penalised
+a stroke for lifting from the water&mdash;and eventually reach the putting
+green in nine, three more strokes then being needed, they would have
+been stupid Afghans had they not at a convenient<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> moment taken their
+petitions from the holes, or withheld them if they had not placed them
+there. But when an Ameer hits a good one from the tee, when his ball
+flies fast and straight from his royal brassey (and rulers also laugh
+when a topped ball runs a bunker!), when by enormous luck he lays an
+approach quite close to the hole, and afterwards the putt is truly
+played&mdash;why, many an Afghan might pray for the release of a brother from
+prison in Kabul, and the brother, pardoned, might be raised to office in
+the palace, perhaps to be an executioner. Now, if the petition had been
+submitted when the sovereign had done his hole in twelve, the brother
+might have died as arranged, perhaps the petitioner also, and who knows
+but that the neglectful greenkeeper, for not having seen that all holes
+for the day were free of pleas, would not have joined the departures for
+another world. Wandering players may look forward now to some future
+golf in Afghanistan. Have we not heard of the Shah at the game? If it
+cannot be proved, Persia must be left in an Asiatic golfless solitude,
+with the gibe against her that even celestial China has her courses, and
+that they are everywhere save in the Persia where Omar was, and in fine
+worldly philosophy bade us take good pleasures while we may.</p>
+
+<p>Golf's vast ubiquity is illustrated in another case recalled by this
+reference to kings who play. Miss Decima Moore of the theatres has a
+love for roving far which has led her to many raw places of the earth
+for hunting and shooting and adventurous exploration when she has tired
+of the footlights and has longed for Nature with no mask at all. Then,
+being golfer too, she has wandered with her bag of clubs into many
+distant lands, and one morning in London, just back from Central Africa,
+she told me of some strange experiences of a golfing woman. She has
+played the game up in Uganda, and explained the quality of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> play of
+King Daudi Chwa, who is a ruler of those parts. Even once before, a
+colonial bishop had informed me of the golf of this dusky king. He had
+had some holes laid out for himself, so I was instructed, and when not
+engaged in duties of his kingly office, which were seemingly not
+onerous, he devoted himself earnestly to the reduction of his handicap
+and to lowering his record for his private course&mdash;upon which strangers
+in those parts are always welcome to a game. The bishop said that his
+Majesty drove an excellent ball, played his irons well, and putted with
+a good instinct for line and length, and the actress backed the bishop's
+story. In the region of the Victoria Nyanza there are no Sunningdales to
+be found, but the royal course of nine holes is considered a creditable
+thing. The king, who was lately in England and played a little here,
+will be glad to see any golfers who may go that way, and it may be his
+pleasure to call one of his holes by a name of theirs as, with a good
+African grace, he called one "Decima" when our English lady played it.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>These wandering golfers do bring home great stories, and others send
+them. A friend, poor Tom Browne, who is dead, the clever artist in black
+and white, sat with me once at lunch in the Adelphi, and we talked of
+golf in distant lands and many things concerning it, for in the morning
+he was going eastwards to China and Japan. He said he should play as
+much as possible, and he did. While at the table he drew a sketch on a
+piece of paper and passed it to me with a smile. It was a picture of
+himself leaving on a golfing holiday to those very foreign parts, with
+numerous bags of clubs, cases of spare clubs guaranteed for all
+climates, and innumerable large boxes piled up all round him, each<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> one
+labelled "One gross of best balls." Poor Tom always did take his clubs
+with him to foreign lands, and on this occasion he made good, as one
+might say, on that little sketch he drew at lunch by the places he
+played at afterwards, and queer drawings he sent to me of the courses
+and the people at them. He wrote from Tien-Tsin that the one they had
+there was just outside the town and was a flat plain covered with
+Chinese graves, the course being really nothing but one huge graveyard.
+"The Chinamen," he said in his letter, "plant their graves anywhere that
+suits them, and they consist of raised-up mounds which enclose the
+coffins. Off the graves the ball will bounce at all kinds of angles.
+Sometimes after heavy rains the mounds fall to pieces and expose the
+coffins. The golf club can remove any of these graves by buying them at
+four taels a coffin, and when a grave is bought in this way the native
+takes the coffin away, buries it somewhere else, and the grave is then
+flattened down. Fore-caddies are employed on this course. The 'greens'
+consist of baked mud, as is usual in these eastern parts, and are
+generally circular in shape. Chinese caddies do not understand the game
+and think that the foreign devils who play it are surely mad. They
+continually ask the players, 'When will you finish hitting and following
+that ball about?' And they have a local rule at Tien-Tsin that 'a ball
+lying in an open grave may be picked out and dropped without penalty.'"</p>
+
+<p>This graveyard golf, as I know, is not at all peculiar to Tien-Tsin, for
+not long ago I had a letter from a British official at Chiankiang on the
+Yangtse River, in which he told me that they had just begun to play the
+game out there on a course covered with crater-like excrescences, these
+Chinese graves again, and he declared that they made the most excellent
+hazards. It should be added for their credit's sake, golfers being
+considerate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> people and mindful of others' feelings, that they carefully
+ascertained in this case that no Chinese sentiment was injured by play
+in these cemeteries, if they are to be called by such a name. Again, I
+recall that a little while since the golfers who have a course in the
+Malay peninsula went down to it one morning and found a Chinaman digging
+up the remains of a deceased relative from one of the putting greens,
+intending to remove them to China; because it is a common thing, as I am
+told, when a Chinaman dies abroad, for his people to inter him
+temporarily if they can and give him another burial in his native land
+when opportunity chances. There has been a great move in things in this
+country lately. The Government has changed; the people, according to
+some trade returns that I have seen, are taking extensively to smoking
+English cigarettes and wearing unlovely English clothes. So it is
+inevitable that in their vast multitudes they will one day come into
+golf, for a little advancement towards modern ways often leads to
+strikes and golf. One fears to think that when China has a championship
+her people may compete in such a costume as is favoured by some of the
+oldest and best Scottish professionals (and if asked for a name we shall
+mention good Sandy Herd as a captain of the class), who always wear dark
+trousers and a light-grey jacket to their golf. There must be some
+virtue in this unconventional arrangement of tints; for so many of the
+great are attached to it.</p>
+
+<p>In other parts of Asia there is golf that is peculiar, especially in
+India where it flourishes to the extent of forty or fifty clubs,
+including those of Calcutta and Bombay, which are not merely the oldest
+in India but rank high in seniority among the golf clubs of the world.
+Both were well established before 1860, at which time there were only
+two or three in England, and the game was all but unknown in America.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+Despite the fact that it was born in 1842 and was really an Indian
+offshoot of the famous Royal Blackheath Club, the Royal Bombay remains a
+little primitive in the matter of its course. It is a golf course for
+one part of the day and something else for the remainder, and it is
+perhaps the only course in the world which is dismantled daily. The fact
+is that it is situated on what is called the "maidan," an open space
+near to the European business quarter, and the golfers, having no
+exclusive possession of it, are not allowed to play after half past ten
+in the morning and are required, when they have done, to remove their
+hazards. This obviously necessitates unconventional obstacles, and the
+club has had to resort to movable screens, varying from four to ten feet
+high, which are put up when play begins and taken away again when it is
+finished. Having become accustomed to this sort of thing it ceases to
+annoy, and in Bombay the course is considered good and sporting, and the
+greens are well attended. Then up on the hills at Darjeeling there is
+the highest golf course in the world, for it is situated at an elevation
+of more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea on the
+abandoned cantonment of Seneshal. Scenery often does not count for very
+much with golfers, and the better the golfer the keener he is on the
+game and the less does he care at times about the surroundings of the
+course. Yet, as I am told, it would be a dull poor soul that was not
+moved by the views from the Darjeeling course, with Mounts Everest and
+Kinchinjunga, both nearly thirty thousand feet high, in one direction
+and the plains of Bengal in another. But perhaps the most curious of the
+Indian courses is that of the Royal Western India Club, upon which is an
+idgah, or kind of temple, some thirty feet in height and fifty long,
+with bastions at either end and minarets in the middle. This idgah
+serves the double duty of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> club-house and a hazard also, for it has to
+be driven over from the tee on the way to the eleventh hole, and many
+are the marks on its walls that were made by balls that were hit too
+low. The course has another peculiarity in that it possesses seventeen
+holes only, no amount of ingenuity being enough to scheme out an
+eighteenth on the land available, so one of them has to be played twice
+over to make up the usual eighteen. This club has its course at Nasik,
+and mention of the idgah reminds one that the Royal Bangkok Club of Siam
+used to have an old and very imposing Siamese temple for a club-house. A
+little while since, when travelling northwards from Marseilles through
+France, I met, in the restaurant car of my P.L.M. train, an officer just
+going home on leave from India, and he assured me that he had found no
+place in the country where there was no golf, and he gave me some good
+examples of the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the golfers there. Thus at
+Multam, for the betterment of their sanded putting "browns" they keep
+them oiled all over, so that the ball runs evenly along them, and at a
+reasonable pace. There is an attendant to each green, who smooths over
+the track that is made by every ball when putted. And my companion told
+me also that in the season at Gulmurg in Kashmir, where they have two
+courses, there is such a crowd of golfers that it is difficult to
+arrange starting times for all of them.</p>
+
+<p>As one would expect, the game is played in Japan, and there is a highly
+flourishing club at Kobe, whose course is on the top of a high mountain
+at Rokkosan. It is a splendidly interesting course when reached, with
+views that can only be second in magnificence to those of Darjeeling;
+but for the occasional visitor the chief pleasure would seem to lie in
+the reaching, rather, perhaps, than in golfing on it afterwards, for the
+players<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> have to 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 at last the tees and bunkers come to view.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is indicated what great work must have been done by the pioneers
+of golf. They have been fine adventurers and explorers. In their
+strength of purpose, their resourcefulness, their enterprise and daring,
+and in their joy of doing beginnings, they have had some of the burning
+zeal and the quick inspirations of the voyagers of Elizabethan time.
+They too were discovering a world anew. When a golfer reaches a place
+afar where there is no course, his first and most natural impulse is to
+make one. Sir Edgar Vincent, keen player, told me once how he and that
+most distinguished amateur and ex-champion Mr. J. E. Laidlay, had a
+considerable hand in the starting of golf in Egypt, where it is now as
+well established as the Pyramids and Sphinx. Sir Edgar went to Cairo,
+and with him took his clubs, but on arrival found there was no course
+whereon to play, and there was Laidlay disappointed in the same way. So
+they twain obtained shovels and other implements of labour, enlisted the
+service of native helpers, and went out into the desert, making there
+the first golf course of Egypt. But theirs was not the distinction of
+hitting the first golf ball in that ancient land. Long before then a
+Scottish golfing minister did it. There is no better enthusiast than
+these ministers, about whom the best stories are told, as of the worthy
+who was left muttering the Athanasian creed in the lowest depths of
+hell, being the bunker of that name on the old course at St. Andrews,
+and the other who felt he would have to give it up because he played so
+ill and was so much provoked&mdash;not give up the game but alas! his
+ministry. And so the Rev. J. H. Tait, of Aberlady, went for a golfing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+holiday to Egypt long before the two gallants who did the spade work
+there, lumbered himself up to the top of the great Pyramid, and then,
+feeling in his pocket, curiously enough discovered an old golf ball
+there. To tee it up, to address it with the handle end of his umbrella,
+and to despatch it earthwards to Egyptian sand with the thwack of an
+honest east-coast swing, was the labour of no more time than would be
+needed to recite a verse of Psalms.</p>
+
+<p>A whole book having been written on Australian golf we may leave it
+unconsidered here. Hardly an island but there is a links upon it. The
+other day, when I had myself but just come back from foreign golfing
+parts, I was mated for the game on a London course to one who told me he
+had only then returned from Fiji, where his last game was at Suva and
+was a foursome in which the local bishop, the attorney-general, the
+chief trader, and himself were engaged. He explained the part that was
+played by <i>mimosa pudica</i>, being the "sensitive plant," in the golf of
+the Fiji islanders. When this herb is touched by anything, its leaves
+droop and close upon the object, and, <i>mimosa pudica</i> being all over the
+fairway of the course, balls would be too often hidden and lost but for
+the agile caddies who are sent in front to watch for them. In these days
+one is hearing frequently of travellers' tales like this.</p>
+
+<p>Spain having been captured by the game, as I shall relate in time, there
+is little need to dwell upon the other conquests of golf in Europe. In
+Germany it is fast advancing, and the German Golf Association, which
+publishes a German Golf Year-Book, is an enterprising body. The Kaiser
+has encouraged the game, and has given land for it. At Baden Baden they
+have given the most valuable prizes to professionals; at Oberhof, in the
+Thuringen Forest, there has been made under the guidance of the Duke of
+Saxe-Coburg one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> the nicest courses a German need wish to play upon,
+and the girl caddies in pretty uniform are the most picturesque alive.
+In Norway and Sweden, in Denmark, and nearly everywhere there is golf,
+and much of it. It flourishes in Italy, as is to be shown in a later
+chapter. Even in Russia you may golf. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow
+have their clubs and courses, and the Mourino Club, belonging to the
+former, has its place near a small village some dozen miles from the
+capital. The golf is good for Russia, but one does not quickly forget
+the roughness of the road in reaching it. And down at the bottom of that
+side of the map there is golf at Constantinople too! The game is done on
+the <i>yok maidan</i> just outside the city, <i>yok</i> being Persian for "arrow,"
+and <i>maidan</i> the word for "plain," the fact being that it was on this
+land that the sultans and their suites in days gone by were accustomed
+to practise archery, and there are still on the plain many stone pillars
+erected to the memory of great shots that were made. The
+English-speaking colony had some difficulty to gain permission to golf
+on this ground, and, having no exclusive rights in the matter, are
+harassed by many worries. It is used largely for drilling soldiers, and
+is described as being "a favourite resort for Jews on Saturdays, for
+Greeks on Sundays, and for Turks on Fridays." The golfer may need to
+delay his stroke while a long string of camels passes through the
+fairway, and again he may have difficulty in persuading a party of
+Turkish ladies, closely veiled, taking the sun on one of the putting
+greens, to retire therefrom for a little while. Yet the game is much
+enjoyed by the officials of foreign Governments in Constantinople, and
+the turf on the <i>yok maidan</i> is good.</p>
+
+<p>In the rich remembrances of the game there is little that is mournful;
+but one sad moment comes when I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> read a letter reminding me that golf
+was once played "farthest south," where man does not abide save briefly
+for exploration and adventure, where there is eternal ice and snow.
+Captain Robert Scott, the glorious British hero of the Southern Pole,
+whose friendship I enjoyed, was a golfer too. One of many letters of a
+personal kind I had from him, just before he set out on his last
+magnificent but fatal expedition, was addressed from the Littlestone
+Golf Club. He asked me to send to the ship a certain piece of golfing
+literature, believing that "members of the expedition would read it with
+interest and, I hope, with benefit to their handicaps!" He had taken
+some clubs and balls up there into the Antarctic on his previous
+expedition, when farthest south was reached. On one of the last days he
+spent in London I had some talk with him on different matters, and we
+joked about ways of playing Antarctic shots. We were in his office in
+Victoria Street then. "Good-bye!" he said in parting, "And you must come
+to meet me on my return!" And if none met him coming back, yet we know
+the game he played.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The fact that there is golf nearly everywhere on earth will make it
+appear to some minds, reasonably too, that here is a convenient
+diversion for those travellers who like this sort of thing, something
+with which they can fill up time when held up for a while in a distant
+country and being impatient or weary. True, golf is good for that; but
+the unsophisticated who imagine that this is the full relation between
+travel and the game, and that this is the function of the courses
+everywhere, suffer from a poor delusion, which is expensive.</p>
+
+<p>It is a modern necessity to the traveller. In these days we are a people
+of wanderers; railways offer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> cheap journeys, steamships carry us over
+seas at little cost, hotels are good and comfortable; and why should
+those who like and have the hours not be always roaming and seeing the
+open world? But travelling sometimes has its inconveniences and its
+tedious days. Some wanderers unconsciously exert themselves towards
+loneliness, and they do not love it when they have it. The joy of
+meeting with a friend when one is half a globe away from home! With all
+the travelling that is done in these days there has come a great
+increase of loneliness. Golf has been set to destroy it. There are still
+people who travel and do not golf, but they are fewer daily, and as each
+new travel-golfer is established he wonders how he lived and moved and
+was moderately well contented and satisfied before. His travelling was a
+plain occupation then; now it makes more emotion and thrill, and,
+positively, it is more educative. There was a time, when I was very
+young, when I did not golf as I travelled abroad, partly because there
+were few courses to play upon and no golfers to play with, for it is
+only in recent times that the game has been established in every country
+in the world; and as I look back upon those days it is hard to realise
+that they were in this present life. They should have belonged to some
+other existence, which in the course of time and nature was given up, a
+reincarnation having followed ages after.</p>
+
+<p>The traveller who is golfless has often no friends at the places that he
+visits. Some men and women have good capacity for making them at each
+hotel they stay in; others have not. In any case these acquaintanceships
+are exceedingly thin; the people do not really know each other;
+oftentimes they say not what they think, and they have no common
+interest. This kind of friendship with all its making of artificial
+conversation is poor stuff at times. The golfless wanderer in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+travelling does one of two things; either he does hardly anything at all
+or he goes to see the sights; and one suspects that much of the peering
+through the gloom of dark cathedrals and the lounging in picture
+galleries is done merely for the killing of time, and for the formal
+recording of places that have been visited and sights that have been
+seen. Some travellers are happiest when they have done their business
+with the churches and the local castles and may leave by the next
+train&mdash;one day nearer home and still working well!</p>
+
+<p>The case of the golfing traveller is very different. He has friends in
+every big town in every country, and all await his coming to make
+pleasure and happiness for him. He needs to scheme nothing in advance;
+they are prepared for him always. The automatic management of this real
+society of friends is most marvellously perfect. The wanderer, let us
+say, is advancing towards a new place&mdash;one that he knows nothing of.
+From the people about him now he may make inquiry as to which is the
+golf hotel at his destination, for often there is one to which golfers
+most resort, and, with his golf directory containing the names of all
+the golf clubs in the world, and with some particulars and the
+secretaries' addresses, away he goes complete and well prepared. His
+corny hands and his bag of clubs are his passport to every links. By the
+perfect system that we have, every man who is a golfer and a member of a
+golf club is <i>ipso facto</i> a travelling member of nearly every other golf
+club in the world, and is admitted to full playing and other privileges
+without delay on paying the trifling fees of temporary membership,
+sometimes with even less than that. And one golf club seems very much
+like another&mdash;just a branch of it; the atmosphere is the same, and the
+men are the same. The stranger reaches his new destination, in England
+or in India, in France or in America; he registers at his hotel; and as
+soon as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> may be he seeks direction from the manager or the hall porter
+as to the whereabouts of the golf club. There he goes. At once, then, he
+is admitted to the local community of players, and they make much of
+him. They arrange games for him, surround him with the most hospitable
+companions, discover that he and they have many mutual friendships in
+different parts of the world, and linger upon other common ground in
+their memories of the third hole at one and the seventeenth at some
+other place. How the talk goes on! This golfer arrived among the unknown
+at ten in the morning, and at four in the afternoon he is tied to as
+many good friends as man could need. They invite him here and there;
+they take him to their homes; they make much of him. Stranger indeed! A
+thin voice of a petulant cynic may be heard again. "Yes," says he, "but
+in travelling one does not wish to spend all one's time in playing games
+and lounging about golf clubs!" True; and the golfing traveller, though
+he likes to visit courses in other countries, and finds it well to have
+an object always and something good with which to fill the daylight
+hours and keep his health in a well-balanced state, uses the game and
+its people to greater advantage than even that. The golf community of a
+place is always the most active and the most useful. There are the local
+dignitaries, the people of influence and consequence, men who know
+everything about the town, and can do most things. They can open doors
+that are locked, and take you to the most secret places. And so the
+golfing traveller, the first desire for the best of games being
+satisfied, always finds that his new friends wish to help him. Perhaps
+the ambassador is here, and ambassadors are serviceable men. All wise
+people golf a little at the present time. They give their guest letters
+of introduction; they tell him how to go about. They do much more than
+that, for they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> get out their cars and take him. Places which seem
+unfriendly to others are always friendly to the golfer. There is no
+particular community, no society, no association, no brotherhood in the
+world that is so real in its effectiveness, so thoroughly practical as
+this of golf. A quarter of a million British golfers know that this is
+true, and they know the reason why.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>From the consideration of this busy world of golf in general it is an
+easy move in thought to the one wee spot of it from which it has to a
+large extent developed, upon which the great scheme continually hangs,
+being the fourth of our seven wonders of golf&mdash;ancient St. Andrews. In a
+measure I developed this idea at the beginning of the consideration of
+golf as the world game; but now for a moment regard the capital of golf,
+not as the parliament place where the high statesmen do ponderously
+deliberate and with stern visage that befits their lofty authority most
+solemnly severally and jointly promulgate various laws and ordinances,
+but as the wonder city of the golfing world where one gathers emotions
+from a ghostly past, a city where golf is everything and nothing else is
+anything, where golf is life. This is the aspect of St. Andrews, and the
+only one, in which it is really great. We have much respect for our
+rulers. They are wise men, and we believe that they maintain the spirit
+of the game better than any other body of men could or would. They are
+well born and trained in golf, and the atmosphere of St. Andrews keeps
+them straight in the true golfing way. One who lived in an inland
+manufacturing town or spent his days in the office of a colliery would
+lose his golfing perspective early in middle age. But these excellents
+of Fifeshire play a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> little, read a little, talk much and deliberate,
+and the social and intellectual atmosphere keeps them strong in their
+golfing sense always. The government of St. Andrews is really one to
+respect and have faith in, but it is not the existing wonder of St.
+Andrews. When you visit the place, such of these rulers as live there do
+not impress you for anything save their good golf, their excellent and
+pleasant manners, their keen wit, their fine sense in matters of
+intellect, their tolerable aestheticism, their shrewd judgment in
+political affairs, their sound advice on financial questions, their fine
+epicurean taste, their kingly cellars, their magnificent hospitality,
+and their charming women. In nothing else that I can think of do they
+excel, and as minor deities, or as a college of cardinals with a captain
+for pope, endowed with powers transmitted from a golfers' heaven, they
+are failures. They are merely human, very good, and excellently
+conservative.</p>
+
+<p>No sort of people make St. Andrews. Only in two circumstances are the
+living humans of the place specially interesting. One is on the occasion
+of the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club, when the cannon on
+the hill is fired, when the new captain plays himself in with ceremony,
+and when all the ancient rites are properly observed until far on in the
+night. The other is in the attitude of the people generally towards this
+game as a thing of life, their seeming feeling that it is nearly the
+beginning and end of all things in this world. This may not be a proper
+view, and it is for something of the kind, but yet long distant from it,
+that the golfers of the south are chided and ridiculed for their
+enthusiasm. That, again, is why the real golfer, heart and soul for the
+game, who, if he would confess it, does let it take a larger part of his
+life sometimes than is very good for him (but who knows what this fellow
+would be doing if not golfing?), feels happy when at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> St. Andrews, feels
+that at last he has come to his real home. For here the people look upon
+him just as merely right and normal because he is a golfer and nothing
+but a golfer&mdash;and a man with a little money to spare. His chief
+peculiarity is not that he stammers or is deaf or is a total abstainer,
+that he is a peer of the realm or mayor of his town or a professor of
+Greek, but that he addresses his ball with the heel of his club or pulls
+a little always. The place is attuned to his feeling of life; it is in
+sympathy with him. It is either a fine day for the game&mdash;as most days
+are&mdash;or it is no day at all. If we lose our match it does not matter
+what the papers say of politics or Germany; if we win it, the papers
+matter less. The caddies know that you are a golfer and what is your
+handicap; and if you are the real thing that is enough for them. Be not
+a golfer at heart or a namby-pamby person hanging to the game, and their
+contempt is rarely hidden. In the hotels they know what golf means to
+people; the chambermaid on calling you in the morning may tell you the
+direction the wind is blowing, knowing that it matters more than any hot
+water. The men in the club-makers' shops are sorely concerned in your
+domestic difficulties about the length of the shaft of your driver and
+your quarrel with an iron. They know what it is; they are kindly,
+worldly-wise doctors, who are the constant recipients of the confidences
+of poor sufferers. They will try to put you right. All the
+advertisements on the walls are of golf; the notices in the shop windows
+are of golf matches and competitions. The streets are called after golf,
+the taverns have golf names. Yes! golf is in all the air and all the
+earth and all the people of this ancient city with its far-seen spires.</p>
+
+<p>But yet even these things do not give to St. Andrews its ineffable
+charm; if they are all that the wanderer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> notices he is not the real man
+of the game after all, nor is the splendid quality of the holes on the
+old course and on the new enough either, great as is that quality. The
+wanderer missed St. Andrews if these things were all that were
+discovered. He should understand that here we feel that the Swilcan Burn
+is greater than the Dardanelles; Asia is a trifle when we survey the
+vast extent of the fifth putting green, and little enough do we worry of
+hell when with a fine long shot with the brassey we can carry "the
+devil's kitchen" on the way to the fourteenth green. Here the game is in
+the air; we breathe it, feel it. And the reason why is because the
+spirits are in the air, the spirits of the ancients who at St. Andrews
+laid the foundations of this game, served for its traditions, set it up
+and shaped it to the good service of men, and gave their stamp to every
+inch of this great old course. Do not misunderstand. These men, I do
+believe, were often very ordinary simple human beings; they may have
+been no better than we are. There is a possibility that they were worse.
+They may not have been worthy to be canonised as they have been; but let
+us not inquire upon these matters, for we should not peer too closely at
+the gods. What matters is that in the first place undoubtedly they were
+in at the game before we were, in at it the first of all, were evidently
+uncommonly shrewd people, and for their discovery of golf and their
+presentation of it to us their perpetual dignity was well won. It
+matters also that we have many volumes of good stories about them, and
+none that is in any serious sense against them. On legend and anecdote
+they win well. And, third, whatever they were, we believe them to have
+been these great men, we set them up in our imagination as such, we
+recreate them to our fancies and desires, and they seem somehow to
+respond.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So we imagine, believe, and are well satisfied, and therefore the
+spirits of golf take advantage and seem always to hover in the air of
+the old grey city, brooding upon the links, contented that things are
+moving as well as they are, and that what they began prospers so finely,
+though they wail a little, one would imagine, about what the
+rubber-cored ball has done, and the wraith of old Allan Robertson turns
+round to the ghost of the elder Morris, murmuring, "D'ye mind, Tammas,
+the awfu' trouble that we bodies had wi' ane anither when the gutty ba'
+kem hither to St. Andrews, and I caught ye, ma servin' man, ye ken,
+playin' gowff, as ye wad say, wi' Campbell of Saddell and wi' the gutty,
+and me a maker o' the featheries tae!"</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, I ken weel eno'," croons the shade of Old Tom, "and I'm telling
+ye, Allan, man, that I was fower up on Mr. Campbell at the eleventh
+hole, and I was playin' ma very best, and wi' ma second shot at the
+fourteenth, eh mon alive&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Na, na, Tammas, nane o' yer rantin' aboot the shots as ye played at St.
+Andrews, when ye spent the best pairt o' yer time ower theer at
+Prestwick, and ye never could mak' up a scoor from a' yer ither scoors
+as wad come to 56 like mine. Ye ken that, Tom! And dinna forget, ma
+laddie, as I was goin' to tell ye, that when I saw ye wi' that awfu' new
+ba' as wad ruin every bit body o' us I tell't ye straight, ma man, as ye
+must go, and never a bit o' wark did ye do in ma shop again."</p>
+
+<p>And then Tom, good-natured old ghost as he is, and loving his Allan
+still, just answers, "Puir Allan, ye always were a cunnin' body o' a
+man, and a guid man tae, and fun aboot ye a' the time!"</p>
+
+<p>And all this about ghosts and the times they have in the air over St.
+Andrews old links may look like nonsense, but those who do not believe
+it, or do not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> feel that they believe it by mental adoption, have not
+been to St. Andrews properly, and do not understand her.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The most utterly non-golfing and sceptical person may be convinced in
+another way, by matters not of ghosts and fancies but of laws and
+prisons, that St. Andrews is all golf and is not as other places are.
+There are laws of the town approved by Act of Parliament, by which it is
+made illegal to practise putting on the eighteenth green or to play on
+the course with iron clubs only, the penalty for offences in these
+matters being a fine or imprisonment. Where else is there a place where
+a golfer may get fourteen days for depending for all his long shots on
+his driving iron or his cleek? Clearly, the law is made for the good of
+the precious turf and the teeing grounds of the old course, and that it
+is not law made to be looked and laughed at is proved by the fact that a
+Prime Minister himself was once warned for infringing it. One time when
+at St. Andrews I made an examination of the complete bye-laws in which
+these prohibitions are included. They are embraced in the St. Andrews
+Links Act, which was passed in 1894, and in the Burgh Police Act of
+Scotland, which was made law two years earlier. The regulations for the
+use of the old and new golf courses make up these bye-laws, and they are
+twenty-one in number. Following them are four "general regulations for
+the whole links as defined by Schedule I. of the Links Act," and at the
+finish there is a clause about penalties, wherein it is said that "any
+person who shall contravene any of the foregoing bye-laws shall be
+liable, on conviction, in a penalty not exceeding one pound for each
+offence, and, failing payment, to imprisonment for any period not
+exceeding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> fourteen days." There it is, the law, and it is that last
+clause with its sting that gives the point to the whole story.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us look at these bye-laws and see how careful we must be when we
+go to the great city of golf, and for what we may be fined a pound or
+lodged in a Fifeshire gaol for a full fortnight, during which our game
+might go to rack and ruin.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place it is set down that "no person shall play cricket,
+football, or any game other than golf upon the golf courses." Surely
+nobody who ever went to St. Andrews would wish to play any other game,
+but here we have it plainly set forth that the golf of St. Andrews will
+bear no rivals, and it must be remembered that the great putting green,
+on which the fifth and thirteenth holes are made, is big enough for
+several cricket pitches, and also that the large flat space along which
+a fairway for the first and eighteenth is situated might be made into
+various football grounds. But what sacrilege! It is well that men may be
+sent to prison if they ever committed it. Then you may be punished by
+law if you do not begin your match at the first teeing ground, but no
+doubt some thousands of people in their time have risked chastisement
+for this offence. "No player shall, in teeing his ball, raise the turf
+of the teeing ground." There is sand there for him who wants it, and he
+must not make his tee in the prehistoric way. After this there are some
+points of etiquette which are made matters of law. Elsewhere, if we
+disregard the etiquette of the game as set forth at the end of the
+rules, we are merely told about it by other people and regarded as very
+badly-mannered golfers, but at St. Andrews the sovereign or fourteen
+days needs to be considered. Thus "no player shall play from the tee
+until the party in front have played their second strokes and are out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+of range, nor play to the putting green till the party in front have
+holed out and moved away." And again, "players looking for a lost ball
+must allow any other match coming up to pass them," and "every caddie,
+and every player unaccompanied by a caddie, shall replace any turf that
+may be accidentally removed by the player's club, and shall press it
+firmly with the foot." Then we may be fined or sent to prison if, when
+practising, we drive a ball off a putting green, that is, within twenty
+yards of a hole, and the eighth clause is that which is known to all
+men&mdash;"To prevent destruction of the turf of the golf courses, play or
+practice with iron clubs alone is prohibited." Also, "no practice is
+allowed over the first and eighteenth holes of the Old Course, nor shall
+any practice be allowed over any part of the golf courses so as to
+obstruct or delay players."</p>
+
+<p>Upon all this, it is enacted that when playing with three or more balls
+we must allow those who are only playing two, as in an ordinary single
+match, to pass us on being requested to do so, that we must let a match
+through if we do not play the whole round but cut in somewhere, that we
+must not pierce the ground with any golf club support nor with the flags
+from the holes, nor must we drive towards any person without calling out
+"Fore!" and waiting until he gets out of range. No man when at St.
+Andrews is allowed "to play the short game at the regular golf holes,
+except when engaged in a regular game of golf," and, as said, "no
+practising is allowed on the eighteenth putting green." There are five
+other bye-laws, mostly long, but the only other one which is specially
+interesting is that which is designed to preserve the integrity of the
+Swilcan Burn, which has played its part so thoroughly and drastically at
+times of great competitions. No other golf stream is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> protected by an
+Act of Parliament in the way that this one is, and its high dignity is
+unimpeachable. We are warned, under the usual penalty of a fine or
+imprisonment, that "no one shall wade in the Swilcan Burn, so far as it
+flows through the Old Course, nor shall any one, except players or
+caddies in search of their ball, do anything to cause its waters to
+become discoloured or muddy." There are surely times when we feel that
+we could not do anything to make the Swilcan Burn appear uglier than it
+does at those times.</p>
+
+<p>Why a distinction should be made between the "bye-laws" and the "general
+regulations," four in number, is not quite clear, but it would appear
+that the penalties of fine and imprisonment may be inflicted if the
+latter are disobeyed as well as the former. If that is so, we begin to
+wonder when we see the warning that "no one shall use profane language
+upon the links to the annoyance of the lieges." Let us then hope, for
+the sake of the law and our respect for it, that the lieges are not
+habitually in the neighbourhood of the putting green when putts are
+being missed that should not be. But it is good to see that there is a
+kind of general warning that "no one shall annoy or interfere with any
+one exercising a legitimate use of the links," which means, of course,
+playing golf. We golfers, according to these bye-laws and the Act of
+Parliament which supports them, may be sent to prison for doing so many
+things that it is excellent to know the common people may be cast there
+also if they meddle with us when we play the game in our own good way,
+and manage by thought and attention to avoid infringement of the many
+cautions which the fathers of St. Andrews have prescribed for our
+welfare and that of their dear old course. The Sheriff of Fife has set
+it down that he "allows and confirms" these bye-laws, the Secretary of
+Scotland has officially approved of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> them, and the staff employed by the
+Green Committee are authorised to see that they are obeyed, especially
+those about replacing turf, playing with irons only, and practising at
+the first and eighteenth holes. Contemplating these enactments, we
+conclude that St. Andrews is the best and proper place for the
+upbringing of the golfer's son.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE TRAGEDIES OF THE SHORT PUTT, AND A CONTRAST BETWEEN CHILDREN AND
+CHAMPIONS, WITH THE VARIED COUNSEL OF THE WISEST MEN.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The case of an earth so well explored by golfing travellers having been
+considered as the third of the wonders of the sphere, and the
+peculiarity of St. Andrews as the fourth, there is a clear suggestion as
+to which is the next or fifth wonder of the series. Inevitably one
+recalls the tearful situation of the mighty hunter in a story which is
+passed in company as fact. He declared he had encountered all the
+manifold perils of the jungle, had tracked the huge elephant to its
+retreat, and had stood eye to eye with the man-eating tiger. It is
+believed that he had done all these things. Then he added, "And never
+once have I trembled until I came to a short putt." For me one of the
+most remarkable things I have seen in golf was at an Open Championship
+meeting at St. Andrews when, watching and musing by the side of the
+eighteenth green, I saw four of the greatest players of this or any
+other time come up to it in the competition one by one and have putts of
+less than eighteen inches at that hole. Three of the four missed! In the
+old days, at all events, when the greens were not quite as they are now,
+but became very glassy and slippery with much wind and constant play
+upon them, I believe there were more short putts missed on the old
+course at St.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> Andrews than on any other two courses in the world, and
+the task of holing the little stupids on that home green was a most
+tormenting ordeal.</p>
+
+<p>So, with the broken-hearted explorer, and the tragedy of St. Andrews,
+there is pointed to us for the next wonder of the game the missing of
+the short putt. And I do believe, and so must others, that the missing
+of such a short putt as it seems humanly impossible for any man, having
+the control of his limbs and being <i>compos mentis</i>, to miss is one of
+the most remarkable features of any game, and one that would be
+completely and absolutely inexplicable did it not in itself offer a most
+splendid illustration of the full effect of strain of mind on physical
+action, of the pressure of great responsibility on an over-anxious man.
+It embraces nearly the whole psychology of golf. The short putt largely
+explains the game, and it is testimony to the soundness of this view,
+and the rightful selection of this as a permanent wonder, that the
+general public would never believe the truth as we know it, that it is
+possible for the greatest players with what is to them, for the time
+being, almost as much as their lives depending on it, to miss putts so
+little that no walking baby properly fed would miss. The general public,
+with its vast stores of common sense, would not believe the fact; it
+would ridicule it and treat the whole suggestion with contempt, and it
+might in a sense be right; but then the general public has not been
+fighting its way round a golf course against another and very truculent
+general public, driving, playing seconds and thirds, getting bunkered
+and recovering, and encountering all manner of difficulties and dangers,
+and then had its fate for the day depending on a short putt at the
+eighteenth green! By psychology of the game, as just mentioned, we mean,
+of course, the way in which the mind and the emotions act and react upon
+the physical system and its capacity,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> how doubts and fears are
+engendered, and things from not seeming what they are become really
+different, so far as the attitude of the player to them is concerned.
+Thus, as has been well said, a putt of ten inches on the first green is,
+as one might feel, a putt of thirty inches&mdash;though still in fact of the
+same length&mdash;when that green is not the first but the thirty-seventh,
+and that on which a long-drawn-out match is being finished.</p>
+
+<p>One summer's day, on a course in France, a little party of us were
+discussing the slow and sure methods of certain Americans then in
+Europe&mdash;if, really, they were quite so sure as they were slow. Indeed
+they hustled not. The point was put forward by one of us that there is a
+moment in waiting when inspiration and confidence come together, or at
+least come then as well as ever they can or will, and that if the
+hesitation is prolonged beyond that moment, the result is inevitably
+loss of faith, increasing doubt and timidity, and a distorted view of
+the situation arising from fear of fate. Half the difficulties of golf
+are due to the fact that the player has an abundance of time to think
+about what he is engaged to do and how it should be done. In that time
+hopes and fears and many emotions race through his mind, and tasks which
+were originally simple become every moment harder. In no other game has
+the player such ample leisure in which to think, to be careful, to be
+exact, and to decide upon the proper action, and thus responsibility is
+heaped upon him for what he does as it is in no other sport or
+recreation. He is oppressed with a mighty burden. That which he does he
+is entirely responsible for, and it can never be undone. It follows that
+this game has an extensive and peculiar psychology such as is possessed
+by no other. I shall proceed to tell a little story, dramatic in its
+circumstances, abounding in significance. It embraces the meanings and
+mysteries of golf.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The strange case of Sir Archibald Strand is one that caused much excited
+attention among the members of the golf community in general some months
+ago, and it is still discussed in the club-houses. Sir Archibald Strand,
+Bart., is a fair example of the thorough, enthusiastic, middle-aged
+player, who treats golf as something rather more than a game, which is
+as it should be. He is one of tolerably equable temperament, a good
+sportsman, and a man of strong character and physique, who did a long
+term of military service in India. Nowadays he spends an appreciable
+portion of his time in golfing, and a fair part of the remainder in
+contemplating the enduring mysteries and problems of the links. The game
+worries him exceedingly, occasionally it leads him to unhappiness, but,
+on the whole, he feels he likes it. He is a member of several London
+clubs, including Sunningdale, Walton Heath, Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and
+Woking, and of his seaside clubs those he most frequents are the Royal
+St. George's at Sandwich, and Rye. His handicap is 5, and generally he
+is what we consider and call a good reliable 5.</p>
+
+<p>He and his opponent, to whom, as a matter of discretion and confidence,
+we must refer as Mr. A., had just ended their match at Mid-Surrey one
+pleasant day, and Sir Archibald was trying his last putt over again as
+golfers often do. It was a putt of two feet. He had missed it before;
+but now, of course, he rolled the ball in every time. A question arose
+about circumstances altering cases, as they so commonly do in golf, and
+of responsibility weighing heavily on the mind that hesitates; and Sir
+Archibald declared that nobody in good health could be such a fool as to
+miss a two-feet putt like that, if he really examined the line<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+thoroughly, and took the proper pains. Just then the open champion of
+the period was passing by the green, and they called him up and asked
+his views upon the missing of two-feet putts. Taylor denied that a man
+was a fool for missing them. He mentioned the psychology of the
+business, and very forcibly argued that a two-feet putt was a very
+difficult thing, that the more important it was the more difficult it
+became, and that the longer one thought about it the more impossible did
+it seem to hole it. "Ah!" said he, with the solemn countenance he
+assumes when discussing the terrors of this game, and the deep emphasis
+he makes when he admits the difficulties it creates for him, "Ah!" he
+murmured, "if I had never missed any putts of one foot, let alone the
+putts of two! I tell you, sir, the two-feet putt, when it has to be
+done&mdash;mind you when it has got to be done&mdash;is one of the most difficult
+things in the world to do, and never mind the fact that your babies can
+do it all the time! Take that from me, sir!" This was a touch of the
+real Taylor, the true philosopher, one who knows the game.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. A., who is sometimes aggressive in manner, brought the matter in
+discussion to a pretty point at once. "Look here, Strand," said he, "I
+will tell you what I will do. I will place this ball here, so, exactly
+two feet from the hole, and I will give you a fortnight, but not less
+than a fortnight, to hole that putt. You are not to practise it here at
+this hole on this green in the meantime; but you may place the ball in
+position if you like, and look at it. And a fortnight to-day, at ten
+o'clock in the morning, you must make the putt, and I will bet you
+fourteen guineas, being a guinea a day for waiting, that you do not hole
+it. We will have the position of the hole properly marked, so that a
+fortnight hence it shall be in the same place."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The champion said he would tell Lees, the greenkeeper, and that should
+be done. Strand, with a laugh, accepted the wager, and the matter was
+settled.</p>
+
+<p>The events that followed were curious. In the club-house there was then
+little disposition to attend to the accounts of the proceedings that
+were furnished by both parties. The men who had finished rounds were too
+much occupied with their own troubles or joys.</p>
+
+<p>At his club in town that evening, Sir Archibald, over dinner, related
+the circumstances of the wager to a few friends, with an appearance of
+considerable satisfaction with himself, and seemed a little surprised
+that the other members of the party did not at once approve of his
+proceeding as sound and businesslike.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, you know, Strand, my good man," said Mr. Ezekiel Martin, a
+successful stockbroker, "these putts are missed sometimes, and I don't
+suppose it makes it any easier for you by waiting a fortnight. It's like
+carrying over in the House till one is a very tired bull."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" exclaimed Sir Archibald, "I could go out now and hole that
+putt nineteen times out of twenty in the dark!"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you could," answered Martin, "but doing it in the dark, when
+you cannot see the hole and realise all the imaginary difficulties, is
+very different from doing it in broad daylight; and putting now, on the
+spur of the moment, as it were, is very different from putting when you
+have a whole fortnight to think about what you are going to do."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see it," replied Sir Archibald, yet he began to feel a little
+uneasy. On returning home that night, instead of going to bed at once he
+went into his study, laid a tumbler on its side on the carpet, and
+putted from a measured two feet for about half an hour. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> holed most
+of them, and tumbled into bed feeling that Martin had been "pulling his
+leg," as people say. In the morning he engaged a gardener to smooth down
+a piece of his lawn, planting in a little putting-green turf, and he had
+a hole made in it, and a circle with two feet radius drawn round the
+hole, so that he could putt from every point. When this work was done,
+he spent an hour in practising there, and succeeded well. He only missed
+about one in ten. He tried seven different putters, with approximately
+equal results. In the afternoon he went down to Mid-Surrey, played a
+match, and lost it by missing a short putt at the home hole. After tea,
+he went out on to the eighteenth green, found the spot where the hole
+was the day before, examined it carefully, and saw that there were
+slight differences in the texture of the grass round about, and that
+there was a little depression to the left side. He had not noticed this
+before. However, said he to himself, it would be easy to make allowances
+for these things, but he began now to doubt whether thirteen days ahead
+he would use his wry-necked putting cleek or bolt the putt with an
+aluminium putter. Where there are troubles of that kind it is often
+better to make short work of the putt by the bolting way, and have an
+end of it. At home that evening he did more putting practice on the
+carpet, and did not hole them quite so well. Lady Strand, who
+understands her husband thoroughly, and is the sweetest, gentlest
+sympathiser, coaxed him to telling her the trouble, for she saw that one
+existed. With perfect wisdom she suggested that he should wipe the
+fourteen guineas from the current account as already lost, and face the
+task as one who had all to gain and nothing to lose. Of course, her
+husband said, it was not the money, but the frightful jackass he would
+look if he missed the putt.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He went to his club in town the next day instead of going to golf, and
+took with him a book containing a chapter on putting, by Willie Park. He
+stretched himself out on a Chesterfield in a corner of the library, and
+gazed at two spots on the carpet which he had measured as being two feet
+from each other. Eventually, he decided that that was not good for him,
+since equal distances in furnished rooms, as is well known, look longer
+than they look outside. He lunched with a few friends, and brought up
+the subject again.</p>
+
+<p>"Give him the money and have done with it, Strand. You are sure to
+lose!" said the brutish Martin.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I had not to wait for a fortnight," murmured Strand.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! He knew! The other man knew!" rejoined Martin. "He knows the game
+of golf! What I cannot understand is why he did not give you a year and
+make it 365 guineas. You would have sold out in six weeks at £200!"</p>
+
+<p>Sir Archibald wrote a letter to Mr. A. that evening, intimating that he
+would probably have to leave town the week after the next. He hinted
+that it might be convenient if they got their wager out of the way
+beforehand, and if he putted a week from then. Mr. A. replied that he
+was sorry it would not be convenient for him to attend then, and that
+the signed terms of the contract had better be abided by.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Archibald bought two new putters on the following day, and in the
+afternoon he had Taylor out for an hour, and they went practising on the
+putting lawn just outside the garden gate. Sir Archibald was putting
+very well then; but he insisted that it would be a good thing to change
+the ball he was using, which was rather lively. After he had done with
+Taylor, he went to look at the place on the eighteenth green where he
+would have to putt, and it seemed that the coarse grass<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> had fattened up
+considerably with the rain that had fallen, and that the sand below it
+was distinctly gritty. It began to seem that he would have to run the
+ball in at the right side of the hole. He asked Lees some questions
+about the grasses on that green, and was sorry he could not take a
+little Mid-Surrey turf home with him. He was feeling a little tired when
+he reached his home that night, and as it was Thursday he suggested to
+Lady Strand that they should go to Folkestone for the week-end, and not
+bother at all about golf, which they did accordingly. He found it
+delightful to linger on the leas and not be worried with the game.</p>
+
+<p>This kind of thing continued and became worse and worse again during the
+days that followed. There was practice, thought, and purchase
+continually, and unfortunately the proportion of missed putts at two
+feet, both on the carpet, on the practice lawn, and on the greens at
+Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and Woking, began to increase. At putts of
+three feet, four, and five, Sir Archibald was marvellous, and, of
+course, he never missed the very little ones; but the two-feet putts
+bothered him all the time. He attributed it to his liver; and he was
+certainly looking worn. Matters were not improved by such inconsiderate
+remarks as were made by Martin, Evans, and others, whenever he had a
+two-feet putt to do, such as "Now, Strand, that's just your distance!"
+It was only a joke; but in the circumstances it was not perhaps in good
+taste.</p>
+
+<p>On the evening of the twelfth day Strand, after deliberation, wrote a
+letter to A. in which he said he feared he would not be able to go down
+to the course at the appointed time, and intimated that, according to
+the terms of the wager, he would hand over the fourteen guineas to him
+when next they met. Before posting this letter he went and did a little
+practice in the dusk on the lawn outside the house. He seemed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> get
+them down with some confidence on this occasion, and Lady S., watching
+him, called out cheerily, "Silly boy! as if you could really miss! Now
+what shall I buy with the fourteen guineas?"</p>
+
+<p>So Strand tore up the letter and went to bed for rest.</p>
+
+<p>On the night before the appointed day he slept badly. He was putting in
+his mind until three o'clock in the morning. Then he rose, went in his
+pyjamas into the study, made a line on the top of his aluminium putter
+indicating the striking point, and went back to bed, but did not sleep.
+For some time he tried an imaginary humming of the "Jewel Song" from
+<i>Faust</i>, and repeated a few lines from Scott's "Lady of the Lake"&mdash;old
+dodges of his for assisting distraction and sleep&mdash;but they did not
+serve, nor did a fixed vision of millions of balls falling in an endless
+stream from the mouth of a pump and disappearing instantly through a
+golf hole in the ground.</p>
+
+<p>At five-thirty he rose again and took his bath. He hesitated as to what
+golfing suit he should wear. Finally, for the sake of complete ease, and
+that there should be nothing to attract his eye from the ball, he put on
+some dark-blue flannels.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at his breakfast, pecked at a sole, and at nine-fifteen,
+feeling distinctly unwell, he took a taxi for the course. He had one
+great consolation upholding him. At five minutes past ten it would all
+be over. He felt that he knew how glad a condemned criminal must be that
+at five minutes past eight on a certain morning&mdash;or a minute or two
+earlier with a little luck&mdash;a black flag would be hoisted on the prison
+pole.</p>
+
+<p>At seven minutes to ten he drank a large brandy and soda and went out to
+the eighteenth green. Mr. A. and a few others were there to see the
+business properly carried out. Taylor placed the ball exactly two feet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+from the hole, which was cut in the proper place. He had his watch in
+his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Archibald bent down and examined the putt with great care. He
+essayed to pick up what seemed to be a "loose impediment" on his line,
+but saw that it was not loose. The putt seemed very difficult now, and
+he wished he had brought his plain putting cleek out with him, but it
+was too late.</p>
+
+<p>At ten o'clock exactly, Taylor said, "Now, Sir Archibald, will you
+kindly putt?"</p>
+
+<p>Sir Archibald Strand looked like a man who had been hunted down. He made
+one swift glance around him, but saw no escape, so he pulled himself
+together, smiled a little sadly, and said to himself, "Don't be a fool,
+Archie!" Then he faced the putter to the ball; the club was trembling
+slightly. He swung it back much too far, checked it in the return swing,
+and came on to the ball in a nervous, stupid sort of way, doing little
+more than touch it. The ball took a line to the right of the hole, and
+did not run more than fourteen inches.</p>
+
+<p>You may have thought that Sir Archibald used unfortunate words and was
+dismayed. He did not. A look of established happiness and placid
+contentment spread upon his countenance, as a streak of sunlight might
+flash across a plain. "Ha!" he sighed in relief. He took from his pocket
+a cheque for fourteen guineas already made out, and handed it to Mr. A.,
+and then joyfully exclaimed: "Thank heaven, it is finished! Now, my
+friends, we will honour this unusual occasion in a suitable manner at
+your convenience, and this afternoon I leave for Sandwich for a week of
+golf. And no letters are being forwarded."</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Let us now enter consideration of this matter in a proper frame of mind,
+seriously and not looking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> contemptuously upon the problem of holing
+even the very shortest of putts as no problem at all after the affected
+manner of the inexperienced and uninformed general public. Let us
+approach it cautiously and in an analytical spirit. We should take the
+evidence of expert witnesses upon happenings in their careers, in our
+endeavour to discover the real truth. We have already remarked upon the
+case of the hunter who shot tigers and cringed at putts, and of the
+great champions who all missed them on the eighteenth green at St.
+Andrews, when they were playing for nothing less than the championship.
+We have also contemplated the circumstances of the distressed baronet
+who was given a fortnight in which to hole a two-feet putt, suffered
+intolerable agonies during the period, and was only restored to
+happiness when he had failed at the stroke. Now let us pay regard to the
+experience of a little child only six years old, who was completely
+successful at many putts in succession, at distances of from one to six
+feet, all the most perilous situations. This remarkable demonstration
+was witnessed by the proud parents, by a great professional, and by
+myself.</p>
+
+<p>The child is a boy, and not, as has been stated, a winsome little girl.
+There is, if I may say it without offence, nothing remarkable about his
+parents. They are excellent kindly-mannered people, of tolerable
+middle-class education, simple in their manner of life, and of no
+pronounced tastes in any direction. The father is in a large timber
+business in the Midlands, and has probably an income of about six
+hundred pounds a year. His handicap is 14. He is not a very keen golfer,
+and seems to spend a fair amount of his time in his garden. A total
+abstainer, he smokes little, and has no strong tastes in art and
+literature; but he once told me that in addition to much Scott and a
+sufficiency of Dickens he had read one of my books on golf. That<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> is the
+father. As to the mother, she is just one who might be called in the
+north a nice little body. She is a thoroughly good housewife,
+domesticated, affectionate, and if she does not play golf she
+sympathises with it. These are people who are tolerably satisfied with
+their state. They live in a pleasant house, employ two maidservants, and
+have no motor-car. Here, surely, is nothing to suggest the creation of
+genius. Yet they are the parents of this remarkable child who did, with
+no hesitation, with confidence, certainty, and frequency, what the
+mighty hunter, the champions, the bold but misguided baronet, and you
+and I have failed to accomplish.</p>
+
+<p>There is a man of wit and wisdom, Andrew Kirkaldy, who, when you inquire
+of him what is the most difficult thing in golf, responds with no
+hesitation that it is to hole "a wee bit divvle of a putt that long!"
+and so saying he will hold his hands four feet apart. Occasionally he
+may vary the phraseology, not to its advantage, but the meaning and
+effect remain the same. Andrew is solid on four feet. But authorities
+differ a little in this matter of measurement. Some will reduce the
+distance to thirty inches; others have it that the yard putt is the most
+trying; I have heard eighteen inches put forward. But it all amounts to
+much the same thing, that what looks ridiculously easy is very, very
+difficult. Now this tender little child, who knew nothing of the fears
+and dangers of this awful game, placed the ball at a distance of two
+feet from the hole on a curly and slippery green, and with a sublime
+aplomb hit it straight to the middle of the hole&mdash;the first putt of his
+life and a good one. Then he putted from a yard and holed it again, then
+from Kirkaldy's distance and played the stroke just as surely and
+successfully, and then repeated them many times, never faltering, never
+failing. We who watched<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> were a trifle sad, and perhaps ashamed. We knew
+that with all our thought and skill and golfing learning, all our
+strength and manhood, we could not do the same when at our games, and
+that, the more we needed to do it by the importance of the golf that was
+being played, the more difficult it was. Our selfish consolation was
+that in time the little child would grow up and then he would not be
+able to hole those putts, for then he would know that it was a difficult
+thing to do, and would be embarrassed and defeated accordingly. For it
+is the golfer's consciousness of imaginary difficulties that makes him
+such a strange coward when this putting business is being done. He knows
+that really the putting is easy, but he knows also that he must not
+miss, that an inch lost here is as much of a loss as two hundred yards
+in the driving&mdash;and he fears his fate. It is consciousness of the
+stupidity of missing, nerves, fears, imagination, that make this missing
+of short putts by the cleverest players, champions as much as any
+others, the most remarkable thing that happens constantly in any game.
+There is nothing like it. If it were not so easy, if there were good
+excuse for failure, those putts would not be missed so frequently. In
+putting, said Sir Walter Simpson, there is much to think about and much
+more not to be thought of. "When a putter," he reflected, "is waiting
+his turn to hole out a putt of one or two feet in length, on which the
+match hangs at the last hole, it is of vital importance that he think of
+nothing. At this supreme moment he ought studiously to fill his mind
+with vacancy. He must not even allow himself the consolations of
+religion. He must not prepare himself to accept the gloomy face of his
+partner and the derisive delight of his adversaries with Christian
+resignation should he miss. He must not think that it is a putt he would
+not dream of missing at the beginning of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> match, or, worse still,
+that he missed one like it in the middle. He ought to wait, calm and
+stupid, till it is his turn to play, wave back the inevitable boy who is
+sure to be standing behind his arm, and putt as I have told him
+how&mdash;neither with undue haste nor with exaggerated care. When the ball
+is down, and the putter handed to the caddy, it is not well to say, 'I
+couldn't have missed it.' Silence is best. The pallid cheek and
+trembling lip belie such braggadocio."</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The truth is that the man who golfs will unceasingly think of the things
+he should not think of, and that is what makes this easy putting so
+difficult, and it explains why the innocent child, unthinking, finds the
+business as simple and pleasant as swinging under the boughs of a tree
+on a sunny day in June. While there is one quite easy way of doing
+nearly every putt, there are perhaps a dozen more or less difficult ways
+of missing it, and it is these that are uppermost in the golfer's mind
+when the time of his trial comes, and so once more is vice triumphant
+while angels are depressed. There is the hole, a pit that is deep and
+wide, four and a quarter inches in diameter, and there is the little
+ball, only an inch and a half through the middle, and the intervening
+space between the two is smooth and even. It would seem to be the
+easiest thing in theory and practice to knock the ball into the large
+hole; but how very small does the hole then appear to be and how much
+too big for it is the ball! But the golfer knows that he should hole
+that putt, and that if he fails he will never, never have the chance
+again. Should he putt and miss the act is irrevocable; the stroke and
+the hole, or the half of it, are lost, and nothing that can happen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+afterwards can remove that loss. Should he at the beginning of the play
+to a hole make a faulty drive, or should his approach play be very
+inaccurate, he knows that he may atone for these mistakes by special
+cleverness displayed in subsequent strokes, and with the buoyant hope
+that constantly characterises him he thinks he will. But the hope seems
+often to desert him at the end; confidence lapses. The short putt is the
+very last stroke in the play to that hole, and if it is missed there is
+no further opportunity for recovery. In this way it does seem sometimes
+that there is a little of the awful, the eternal, the infinite about
+that putt. The player is stricken with fear and awe. He knows it is an
+easy thing to do in the one proper way of doing it, but raging through
+his mind are hideous pictures of a dozen ways of missing. Once upon a
+time I put the question to a number of the greatest players of the age
+as to what were their thoughts, if any, when they came to making one of
+these little putts on which championships or other great affairs almost
+entirely depended, and almost invariably their answer was that at the
+last supreme moment a thought came into their minds and was expressed to
+themselves in these words: "What a fool I shall look if I miss this
+putt!" Those words exactly did Willie Park, the younger, say quietly to
+himself just as he was about to make the last short putt of a round at
+Musselburgh, which would or would not give him a tie for the
+championship with Andrew Kirkaldy. He did not say that if he missed the
+putt he would lose the championship. He said he would look a fool.</p>
+
+<p>The other day in a quiet corner of London, away from the game but, as it
+happened, not from the thought of it, I had Harry Vardon with me engaged
+in some serious talk in a broad and general way upon golfing men and
+things. Ten years ago, when we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> were doing some kind of collaboration in
+the production of a new book, he said to me very impressively and as one
+who wonders exceedingly, "It is a funny game; let us impress that upon
+them all, it is a very funny game," and now, having played perhaps five
+thousand more rounds and won another Open Championship, he went forward
+to the admission, "It is an awful game." He meant it, and one reason why
+we like our Harry Vardon is because he too has always been awe-stricken
+by this so-called game, and because there is no other man in golf who
+sympathises better with the trials and tortures of the moderate player.
+On this morning of spring he was telling me of another new and great
+discovery he had made in putting methods, and in giving to me an account
+of his pains, his sufferings in missing all the short putts he had
+failed at in recent times&mdash;how dearly have they cost him!&mdash;he said it
+was the two-feet putt that frightened him most of all, and declared
+solemnly and seriously that he would rather have a three-yarder than
+such a putt, and that he would hole the former oftener than the latter.
+He said the two-feet putts frighten him, that as soon as he settles
+himself down to the business of putting in such a case the hole seems to
+become less and less. "I am overcome," says he, "with the idea that in a
+moment it will be gone altogether. Then I am in a state of panic, and I
+snatch at my putter and hit the ball quickly so that with a little luck
+it may reach the hole before it goes away altogether and there is
+nothing to putt at. When I have missed I see that the hole is there, and
+as big as ever or bigger!" Vardon once tried putting left-handed, a
+doctor having advised him to do so, and he found that the idea worked
+splendidly, but he did not like the look of it. He believes after all
+his sorrows that one of the greatest and best secrets of good putting is
+to keep more absolutely still than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> do most golfers, who seem to think
+it matters less in putting when it matters so much more.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Now the golfer in his wisdom, ingenuity, and resource has tried every
+way he can think of to solve this problem of nerves and doubts by
+mechanical and other means. Those who would be successful in
+competitions have retired to bed at nine o'clock in the evening for a
+month, and some of them have sipped from bottles of tonics hoping that
+physic would serve to give them strong nerve, steady hands and courage,
+but such methods have not availed. For no part of this or any other game
+have so many different kinds of instruments been invented, though the
+little child could do the putts with the head of a walking-stick or a
+common poker. Scarcely a week goes by in the season but some new kind of
+putter is introduced to the expectant multitude of harassed players, and
+now and then a thrill runs through the world as they receive a clear
+assurance that at last some special device has been discovered which
+will make their putting ever afterwards easy and certain. There is a
+thrill as if a secret of long life had been found. But the chill of
+disappointment follows quickly. Golfers have now tried all things known,
+and more short putts are missed than ever. Hundreds of different kinds
+of putters have been invented. They have been made with very thin
+blades, and with thick slabs of metal or other substance instead of mere
+blades. They have been made like spades, like knives, like hammers, and
+like croquet mallets. They have even been made like putters. They have
+been made of wood, iron, aluminium, brass, gun-metal, silver, bone, and
+glass. Here in my room I have the sad gift of the creator of a forlorn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+and foolish hope. It is a so-called putter made in the shape of a roller
+on ball bearings which is meant to be wheeled along the green up to the
+ball. Like some others it was illegal according to the rules. To such
+extravagances of fancy the desperate golfers have been led in their
+desire to succeed in this putting that the authorities have had to step
+in for the defence of the dignity of the game to declare a limit to the
+scope of invention in this matter. And yet I once knew a man who for a
+long period did some of the best putting that you would ever fear to
+play against with a little block of wood that had once served to keep
+the door of his study ajar, to which had been attached a stick that was
+made from a broom handle. This improvised putter was a freak of his
+fancy at a time when he thought there might be some virtue in a return
+to prime simplicity. Then Mr. James Robb, who has won the Amateur
+Championship once and been in the final on two other occasions, has
+putted all his life with a cleek that his sister won in a penny raffle
+when he was a boy and gave to him. Likewise Mr. John Laidlay has also
+putted uninterruptedly since he was a boy with a cleek that is now so
+thin with much cleaning that his friends tell him he may soon be able to
+shave himself with it. But these are the grand exceptions after all.
+Such fine settlement and constancy are unknown to the average player. It
+was but the other day that I learned that a friend of mine, one most
+distinguished in the game and of the very highest skill, had used
+fifteen different putters on the day of an important competition&mdash;three
+in the morning's play, nine others in noonday practice, and three quite
+fresh ones in the afternoon game. The same good man carried a choice
+assortment of his own putters to a recent amateur championship meeting,
+but at the beginning of the tournament made love to one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> mine,
+borrowed it, and used it until he was beaten&mdash;not a long way from the
+end of the competition. Sometimes it seems that what is rudest in
+design, almost savage, is now best liked when in our frenzy we have
+ransacked art, science, and all imagination in search of the putter with
+which we can putt as we would. There is the spirit of reaction; we would
+return to the primitive. Putters that look as if they might be for
+dolls, some of those stumpy little things made of iron on a miniature
+aluminium-putter model, which some of the great champions have been
+using, have hardly become popular. The crude and the bizarre, suggestive
+of inspiration, please well. I shall not forget Jean Gassiat, good
+golfer of France, coming up to me one championship day at Hoylake,
+holding forward in his right hand, and with its head in the air, what
+was evidently meant for a golf club, but which was as much unlike one as
+anything we had ever seen. On the face of the player was spread the grin
+of pleasure; wordlessly he suggested that at last he had found it, the
+strangest, the most wonderful. In principle this new club, as it has to
+be called for courtesy, is akin to the affair of the door-stopper and
+the broomstick. It consists of a plain flat rectangular piece of wood
+about four inches long, two inches wide, and three-quarters of an inch
+deep, and its two-inch nose is cut quite square, while for a couple of
+inches at the end of the shaft the grip is thickened to twice its usual
+size. It is weighted and balanced by large and small lead bullets in the
+sole. It is possible to frame a good argument in favour of a putter made
+of anything; nothing is without some advantage. It could be said for a
+ginger-beer bottle that it would insist on the ball being most truly hit
+from the middle of the vessel as the ball ought to be hit, and, given
+notice, one could prepare a statement of claim on behalf of an old boot
+seeking to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> be raised to the putterage. So there are good things to be
+said for this putter from France, and one of the best is that after
+smiling upon it Jean Gassiat began to wonder, then thought,
+experimented, and fell in love with this putter completely. Some weeks
+later I saw him doing those marvels on the green as are only done when
+man and putter have become thoroughly joined together, and Gassiat has
+always to be taken seriously in these matters, for, like Massy, he is a
+Basque, and, like the old champion, he is one of the most beautiful
+putters, with an instinct for holing. This most remarkable invention,
+without desiring its extinction in the least, one would say, surely
+departs a whole world of fancy farther from the traditional idea of what
+a golf club should be than the poor Schenectady of the Americans which
+St. Andrews proscribed. It was not the idea of Gassiat, nor of any other
+than the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, a French sportsman of
+thoroughness and a very keen golfer. Seeing what Gassiat was doing,
+James Sherlock obtained one of these barbaric tools, and at this the
+public came in.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Every thinkable variety of putting method has been adopted. Bodies,
+hands, feet have been placed in all positions, and the stroke has been
+made in every conceivable way. Are there any two players who do it just
+the same, or have the same advice to give? For a violent contrast take
+two of the most able amateurs of the time, both of them long since
+distinguished in the foremost competitions, Mr. John Low and Mr. H. S.
+Colt. The former favours the wooden putter, and he has one of that kind
+to which he is keenly attached, but he putts with all sorts of things as
+the spirit moves him on consideration of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> special circumstances. He was
+one of the early members of the thoughtful school of golf which has made
+such a strong advance in recent times. Nearly always, however, you will
+find him standing nearly upright when doing his putting, grasping a club
+with a tolerably long shaft somewhere quite near to the top of the
+handle. This erect attitude is that which our fore-fathers of the
+traditions mostly favoured. Those splendid gentlemen, as we have agreed,
+were fine golfers who conducted their game nobly, but it has always
+seemed to me that they were an unimaginative lot. It never appears to
+have occurred to them that because the club has a handle at the top was
+no reason why they should grasp it up there instead of nearly at the
+opposite end, as do a large body of the most enterprising and inquiring
+amateurs these days. Of this advanced party the eminent architect is a
+shining example, for he holds his putting cleek so far down, so near to
+the ironwork, that the shaft seems useless, and in addition to this he
+defies all teaching in putting by planting the heel of the club down on
+the green and holding the hands so low that the toe of the putter is
+cocked up, and with this toe he hits the ball, and, as it looks, he tops
+it. But that putting of his is too much for most of the men who have to
+play against it. When those who do not understand see men putting in
+this way, or something like it, they say to themselves, and perhaps to
+others, that they cannot see why the men do not have the unused part of
+the shaft cut off so that it may not be in the way. But there they show
+their deficiencies of knowledge, though one is not sure that all the men
+who putt with a low grip quite know why they do so. They only know that
+the method suits them, but the truth is often that in these cases the
+balancing piece of the shaft above the hands acts as a steadier for the
+piece below. A few students have carried this idea a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> point further by
+having a piece of lead attached to the top of the handle to increase the
+weight and the balancing influence of that part. Mr. Hammond Chambers is
+one of them. The amateurs are the most original and peculiar in their
+putting methods. For the most part the professionals, although adopting
+widely different stances, hold themselves fairly well up when doing
+their work on the green, and putt with an easy following-through stroke
+as is recommended by the old masters. Strange that we should realise
+that quite the most impressive, stylish, and beautiful putter of the
+erect school is M'Dermott, the brilliant young American champion, who
+stands straight up with his legs and heels touching, grips his putter at
+the very end, and moving nothing but his club and hands, makes the most
+delightfully smooth swing. The low-grip method is not at all conducive
+to the gentle swinging, following-through putt, but encourages a sharp
+little tap.</p>
+
+<p>All the old original philosophy and instruction in putting can be
+summarised in a very few words, but hundreds of thousands would be
+needed for discussion of the variations, most of which have been used
+successfully at some time. The majority of advisers make a point of it
+that the ball must be hit truly, but they would not all be agreed on
+what that "truly" was except that it was hitting it as they meant to do.
+What most of them have in mind is that there is on the face of the
+putter a proper hitting point, from which the ball will run more
+accurately and with less disposition to slide off the right line than
+when hit with any other part, that being the point of balance or the
+sweet spot which every iron club possesses, and this point should be
+brought to the ball by an even swing from the back, and the swing should
+be continued after impact by the steady smooth advance of the head of
+the club along the line that it was making at the moment of striking.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+Absolute steadiness of the body is quite essential, and lack of it&mdash;just
+the most trifling and almost undiscernible lack&mdash;is responsible for more
+putting failures than almost any other cause. Most of those who tell us
+what to do in golf advise that we should keep the arms and forearms
+quite still also, and putt entirely from the wrist. And yet even these
+canons, as they are considered, are defied by large bodies of players.
+There are thousands of golfers who putt from the toes of their clubs,
+and believe in the method. They say they can feel the ball better and
+direct it more surely.</p>
+
+<p>I quote again one of the first preceptors, Sir Walter Simpson, because I
+think in most matters of feeling and practice he stands so well for the
+old solid school of golf that has nearly died away. He insists on the
+wooden putter, to begin with, and maintains that no good thing upon the
+green can come out of iron, but therein he was mistaken and time has
+cried him down. And then he writes: "I have just said there are, at
+most, two or three attitudes in which good putting is possible. We are
+nowadays inclined to be more dogmatic, and to assert that there is but
+one. The player must stand open, half facing the hole, the weight on the
+right leg, the right arm close to the side, the ball nearly opposite the
+right foot. To putt standing square, the arms reached out, is as
+difficult as to write without laying a finger on the desk." Had he lived
+on to these more modern days he would not have been nearly so dogmatic
+as that. Some of the very best putters do not play with the open stance,
+but putt entirely from the left leg, that leg thrown forward and in
+front and bearing all the weight, the right being merely hanging on
+behind. Then they have the ball right opposite the left toe, and they
+putt with a sense of strain which they believe in such circumstances is
+conducive to delicacy. Tens of thousands of others<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> could not putt in
+this way, but those who can are very successful, and this is just
+another indication of the danger of dogma in golf. As to the right arm
+at the side, it may be said that there is now a fast increasing practice
+on the part of those who bend down somewhat to their putting to rest the
+right elbow or forearm on the right knee. J. H. Taylor experimented with
+this idea on the very eve of the 1913 championship at Hoylake, his
+putting for some time having been bad. He adopted it, won the
+championship, and gave the new way of putting all the credit.</p>
+
+<p>Now see how high and deeply thinking authorities can differ about the
+ways and means of doing this thing that the little child does so
+thoroughly and well. "A great secret of steady putting is to make a
+point of always 'sclaffing' along the ground," said the baronet. "The
+best putters do this, although it is not evident to an onlooker, the
+noise of the scrape being inaudible. To be sure of the exact spot on the
+putter face which is invariably to come in contact with the ball, is, of
+course, essential to the acquirement of accuracy. If you play to hit
+clean, your putter must pass above the ground at varying heights, as it
+is impossible to note how much air there is between it and the turf. In
+the other way you feel your road. But the greatest gain from treating
+putting as a sclaffing process is the less delicate manipulation
+required when short putts are in question. At a foot and a half from the
+hole the clean putter often fails, from incapacity to graduate inches of
+weakness, whilst the sclaffer succeeds because he is dealing with
+coarser weight sensitiveness."</p>
+
+<p>Now time and experience have showed us all that we cannot be dogmatic
+about anything in golf except that the ball must be struck somehow, and
+least of all may we venture to dogmatise in the matter of putting, and
+we will only say now that the late Sir Walter has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> a heavy majority
+against him on this suggestion that in doing the short putts it is well
+to let the putter scrape along the grass when going forward to the ball.
+It seems a small matter (that little man child never thought of it, but
+I noticed he did not sclaff), yet a whole world of good and ill upon the
+links is bound up with it. We shall set this happy golfer as he was, and
+friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, against one of the great champions and
+one of the finest putters who have ever handled clubs, and that is
+Willie Park, the younger, who says, "One of the secrets of putting is to
+hit the ball, and the ball only&mdash;a sclaffy style of putting is fatal;
+and, with the object of making absolutely certain of avoiding it, rather
+aim to strike the globe just the least thing above the ground. The ball
+should be smartly tapped with the putter, the stroke being played
+entirely from the wrists; and it should be neither struck a slow, heavy
+blow, nor shoved, nor should it be jerked."</p>
+
+<p>Most golfers will be with Willie in this matter, and those who have not
+tried already that way of putting, the sole of the club being kept clear
+from the turf when the stroke is being made, might do so to their very
+likely advantage. It is a point that a player of limited experience
+might never think about, and I know many who have been converted from
+bad putters to good ones by it. Some of the leading players of the
+Hoylake school have long been addicted to a slight elaboration or
+variation of this method. As they bring the club on to the ball they
+lift it slightly so that at the moment of impact a peculiar running spin
+is given to the ball, one that is not quite the same thing as is
+imparted by merely topping it. The way appears to help the hole to
+gather the ball when it arrives, but it is a method that needs natural
+aptitude and much practice to make it quite safe in application. And
+then again, right away to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> contrary, I have witnessed in recent
+weeks a way of putting by one or two of the best players in the country,
+which is new, and which they declare to be most effective when dealing
+with the small heavy balls that are now in vogue and which are so
+difficult to manage, especially on very keen greens. We have all heard
+of the push shot, generally done with cleeks and the more powerful
+irons&mdash;and many of us have tried to play it as Harry Vardon does, and
+the things that I have seen done and described as push shots by ordinary
+amateurs have been very dreadful. But, no matter; the idea of the push
+shot is to hit the ball a kind of downward glancing blow, the club
+coming to ground after impact, the result being that the ball starts off
+quickly and pulls up suddenly. The players to whom I have referred have
+applied this stroke to their putting, coming on to the ball above the
+centre and gently pushing the club through it, and in the circumstances
+I have indicated there can be no doubt they have succeeded. Balls being
+so tricky now, these matters are worth considering.</p>
+
+<p>You would perceive how boldly dogmatic was the writer of the early
+classic on the question of stance. On that point there is just one more
+word to say. The tendency seems to be increasing in these days towards
+holding the feet closely together. It is a stance to which Harry Vardon,
+after all his putting troubles, has nearly settled down, and many of the
+best men on the green, Tom Ball for one, are given to it. But there is
+no law, no recommendation even, only the most timid suggestion to be
+made to any man in this matter. That way which suits him and gives him
+confidence is the best, and one may find men putting marvellously well
+when their stance and attitude seem to be so ungainly and difficult as
+to cause them pain.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The method of holding the club has, at least, as much to do with good
+putting as anything else, and in this matter one may almost dare to
+dogmatise. The majority of players hold their putters with the two hands
+close together but detached from each other, in much the same way as
+they hold their other clubs. All of them have heard of what they call
+the Vardon grip, or the overlapping grip, by which, when the club is
+held, the left thumb is brought into the palm of the right hand, and the
+little finger of that right hand is made generally to ride upon the
+first of the left hand. Many try this grip for their long shots, but few
+persist with it, as they become convinced either that their hands and
+fingers are not strong enough for it, or that before they could master
+the method they would need to suffer too much in loss of the game that
+they already possess. Therefore they renounce the overlapping grip
+entirely. But if they would try it in putting they would experience none
+of the difficulties with which they are troubled when applying it to
+their wooden club shots, no sort of force having to be given to the
+stroke, and almost from the first attempt they would enjoy an advantage.
+It is a matter of the most vital importance in putting that the two
+hands should not interfere with each other to the very slightest extent.
+One of them should have the general management of the putting, and the
+other, if detached from it, should do little save act in a very
+subordinate capacity as a steadying influence. Everybody is agreed upon
+that; it is absolute. But when we have the two hands separate, as with
+the ordinary grip, there is always a danger of the subordinate asserting
+itself too much, or at all events varying in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> amount of work that it
+does. It cannot be avoided; it is inevitable. This, we may be sure, is
+the cause of much bad and uncertain putting.</p>
+
+<p>Join the two hands together, as with the overlapping grip, and we have
+them working as one completely, and the risk of undue interference by
+the subordinate vanishes. This is the best hint on putting that all our
+counsellors have to give, and they one and all declare it will do more
+than anything else to raise a man to the high level of excellence of the
+innocent child. Sometimes we see men putting one-handed, and one may
+believe that for medium and short putts this way is more certain than
+the separate hands. Mr. Hilton once putted that way in the Amateur
+International match, and I have seen many other good putters do well
+with it. But it savours of freakishness, and, as a famous professional
+said to the distinguished player who adopted the method, "God did not
+give us two hands for one to be kept in a pocket while the putting was
+being done." The simple truth is that the one-hand way approximates very
+closely to the two-hand overlapping method. It is nearly the same thing,
+the same principle&mdash;all the work being done from one point. Upon
+thought, we often come to realise that what appear to be some of the
+most freakish methods of putting have the same fundamental principle at
+their base. Thus, take the case of Sherlock, who putts extremely well
+and consistently. He almost alone, among players of the game, holds his
+two hands wide apart on the handle of the putter, the left one
+uppermost, of course. This looks very strange, and at the first
+consideration it might seem that surely one hand will upset all the good
+work and reckoning that is done by the other. But the simple fact is
+that the left is so far away that it cannot interfere, and that is the
+secret of the quality of this method. When<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> the left is close up to the
+right we cannot prevent it from meddling; we are unconscious of it when
+it is doing so; but get it far away and we have it in subjection, and
+all that it does in Sherlock's case is just to steady things up a little
+while the right hand does the business of the time.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Walter Travis, the most eminent American, than whose putting in the
+Amateur Championship he won at Sandwich nothing better has ever been
+seen since time and the game began, long since adopted a slight
+variation of this overlapping grip, specially for his putting, which, I
+think, has something to commend it. Instead of letting the little finger
+of the right hand rest on the forefinger of the left, he reverses the
+situation, and puts the forefinger of the left hand on the little one of
+the right, thus leaving the right hand in full possession of the grip,
+both thumbs being down the shaft. In the other way it is the left hand
+that has hold of the club with all its fingers, and it will now be
+remembered that while the left hand is the chief worker in driving and
+playing through the green, the right is the one that most frequently
+does the putting.</p>
+
+<p>Having thus mentioned Mr. Travis, one can hardly refrain from quoting
+some of his instruction in this matter as he once conveyed it to me. "I
+believe," said he, "that putting should always be done with one
+hand&mdash;with one hand actively at work, that is. The left should be used
+only for the purpose of swinging the club backwards preparatory to
+making the stroke. When it has done that its work is ended and the right
+hand should then be sole master of the situation, the left being merely
+kept in attachment to it for steadying purposes. When only one hand is
+thus employed the gain in accuracy is very great. Two hands at work on a
+short putt or a long one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> tend to distraction. When the stroke is being
+made the grip of the right hand should be firm, but not tight, and after
+the impact the club-head should be allowed to pass clean through with an
+easy following stroke. The follow-through should indeed be as long as it
+is possible to make it comfortably, and, with this object in view, at
+the moment of touching the ball the grip of the fingers of the left hand
+should be considerably relaxed, so that the right hand may go on doing
+its work without interruption. Never hit or jerk the ball as so many
+players do. There is nothing that pays so well as the easy
+follow-through stroke."</p>
+
+<p>Yet we find that there is less than ever of that easy follow-through
+being done in these days, and putting may be no better for the fact,
+almost certainly is not. These are days when old maxims are being
+abandoned and new systems are being proclaimed season by season. Jack
+White, a splendid putter and a magnificent heretic, lately declared that
+it is time to get rid of what has been regarded as the most inviolable
+of maxims, "Never up, never in," asserting that the determination to be
+past the hole in putting, if not in it, leads with these lively balls we
+now play with to far too many of them running out of holing distance on
+the other side. His counsel, therefore, is that the ball should be
+coaxed gently up to the hole with as much drag applied to it as can be.
+Then for years past it has been recommended that one of the best ways of
+managing the putting with these speedy balls is to have much loft on the
+putter, and so in that way do something to create the drag; but lately a
+change of opinion began to be made, and I am finding some of the best
+players using putters that are perfectly straight in the face, believing
+that by their agency they can putt more delicately and with a surer
+judgment of strength.</p>
+
+<p>It is a little bewildering. Arnaud Massy, the French<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> player who once
+won the Open Championship, and who is better at the putts of from six to
+ten or twelve feet than any man I know, says that he has come to believe
+that Nature has planted deep down in us a sixth sense, and it is that of
+putting. In the development of that sense lies the way to success. But
+after all such meditations as this, I go back to the remembrance of that
+wonderful little child who could never miss, and then from it all there
+emerges the only real secret of success in putting. The child has a
+quality which we elders do not enjoy, and never shall have it for any
+length of time. He knows not the hardness of the world. Having innocence
+and faith he looks trustingly upon it, and the old world and its four
+and a quarter inch hole is a little ashamed, perhaps. The child has
+Confidence.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A
+SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME.</h3>
+
+
+<p>If men who play games are not proud of their champions, of what then
+shall they be proud? If we advance the proposition&mdash;which is done here
+and now&mdash;that no other game or sport that was ever conceived and played
+has produced such remarkable strength and mastery in its champions as
+golf has done, the cynics will find that with the resources of the world
+and history at their disposal this position of ours can be well
+maintained, even though we have less than sixty years of championships
+for our support. And let it be said also at the beginning that we of
+golf declare to win, not with the Morrises or Parks, as might be
+supposed&mdash;good men they were too&mdash;but with the moderns, and especially
+with our Harry Vardon, our Taylor, our Braid, and the amateurs, John
+Ball, Harold Hilton, and the Frederick Guthrie Tait of immortal and
+beloved memory. I have long since grown accustomed to the mysterious and
+the inexplicable in golf, and pass them by on their fresh occurrences in
+these days as like the commonplace, something for which indeed there may
+be some explanation and a simple one, but one which the gods, with their
+humour and their teasing, are hiding from us. We who in this game have
+fed so long on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> wonders are now disposed to overlook phenomena. We tire
+of sensations and the extraordinary, and would revert to a smooth
+placidity of plain occurrence. It is in such mood that we often
+contemplate the records of the past, and then we dismiss them quickly
+with the comfortable judgment that the Morrises were themselves, and,
+being fixed on a permanent pinnacle, must not be disturbed. They have
+become a creed. One might imagine little plaster figures of old Tom, his
+left hand in his trousers pocket, thumb outside, and young Tom in
+Glengarry bonnet all complete, to have been placed in some over-zealous
+golfers' homes along with representations of Homer, Julius Caesar,
+Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Cecil Rhodes, and no questions are to be
+asked about them. It may be right to place them there, those early
+champions of the game, but when sometimes steeled to sacrilege and
+careless of all risk, I set myself to analyse the conditions and
+circumstances in which they gained their immortal glory, I can give
+reasons, ordinary worldly reasons, why they gained it; and can thereupon
+pass them as satisfying every reasonable requirement of human champions
+of the first degree. But with the others it is not at all like that.
+Golf being the game it is, the repeated successes of those three great
+players we call the "triumvirate," Taylor, Vardon, and Braid, at a time
+when competition is so enormously severe, and when&mdash;this point being of
+towering importance&mdash;the luck of the game, always considerable, is,
+through a variety of circumstances, greater than ever, appear to me,
+having seen most of them accomplished, and now looking upon the plain
+printed records of indisputable fact, to have still some elements of
+impossibility. One has a fear that three or four hundred years from now
+the golfers of the period may not believe that these things did happen;
+they may decide that we of this imaginative and progressive age, a
+little fearful perhaps of greater<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> wonders that might be accomplished in
+the future, had prepared a little trick for posterity and had set forth
+false records of what we had done, so absurd that their falsity was
+self-evident, and so we were to be pitied for our simplicity. In our
+humble way, and by stating the records of achievement in the coldest
+way, admitting moreover that even to us of the time they appear
+incredible, we do our best to gain favour and acceptance with our
+descendants. Fifteen Open Championships to the triumvirate, and eight
+Amateur Championships to Mr. John Ball himself. It is indeed impossible;
+but it is one of those things in golf that are to be described in the
+terms that Ben Sayers (who might have been given a championship by the
+fates for services rendered and skill displayed before the era to which
+he chiefly belonged was closed, as men are made lords when governments
+give up) applied to the victory over him by Fred Tait on his own course
+at North Berwick once by something like seven and six&mdash;"It's no
+possible, but it's a fact!" All of us know one man&mdash;perhaps more than
+one, but we do know one for certain&mdash;who nearly all the time that Mr.
+Ball has been winning those championships might have been winning them
+himself, has been almost good enough to do so. But he has won nothing,
+and after all it may not be a matter of much surprise if we consider the
+enormous odds against victory in a championship because of the luck of
+the game, the fact that it is not like running or rowing, billiards or
+chess, where strength and stamina, knowledge and skill, work out almost
+exactly every time, but a game in which skill has this element of luck
+blended so largely with it. But Mr. Ball, Amateur Champion eight times
+over, and the triumvirate as well!&mdash;when "the truth stands out as gross
+as black from white," with my eyes I can scarcely see it. These persons
+have forbidden the caprice of chance that was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> set to worry them, they
+have overthrown the laws of averages, they have annihilated the
+weaknesses of flesh and blood, and they have laughed at fortune and at
+fate which, defeated, have joined up with them. Then clearly they, with
+the collection of champions in general for their garnishment, are to be
+regarded as the sixth wonder of the game.</p>
+
+<p>It is now too late&mdash;as it always was too late&mdash;to make any fair
+comparison between the great players of our own time and those who were
+members in the early years of the Open Championship. There is not so
+much argument now as to whether Harry Vardon is better than young Tom
+Morris was, though such argument was common only ten or a dozen years
+ago. How may you compare these men? Young Tommy won four championships
+in succession, but there was only a handful of competitors each time,
+and the opposition was feeble almost to nothing in comparison with what
+it became a very few years later. Vardon, Taylor, and Braid have each
+won the championship five times, and many of these victories were gained
+against their own fellow-champions and the strongest opposition
+conceivable. Yet though such as Vardon produce what are in a sense more
+astonishing results in the way of scores, we are reminded that they have
+far smoother courses to play upon and much improved clubs and balls.
+Also they have better rivals to sharpen their game. From this one might
+argue that it would be strange indeed if they were not better than young
+Tommy was, that it is quite inevitable they should be. But our modern
+champions have done more than fulfil the obligations laid upon them.
+They have established an amazing supremacy at a period when golfers are
+reckoned in the hundreds of thousands; young Tom was champion when there
+were the hundreds without the thousands. His championship, at all
+events, did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> not mean so much. The championships gained by our
+triumvirate are proof beyond all possibility of doubt or question that
+these men are the most exalted geniuses, that they have such a clear
+superiority over all other golfers of their time as is, seeing the
+circumstances of the case and knowing the waywardness of golf, almost
+incredible. The success of the younger Morris proved, as some will hold,
+only that he was quite the best golfer of a few eligible to compete for
+the championship.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>After all, if comparison is fruitless and not properly practicable, this
+speculation as to the merits of the geniuses of nearly fifty years ago
+and now becomes enticing. One would like to reach some conclusion upon
+it, but cannot. It would be fine material for a golfers' debating
+society. Were I to regard myself as advocate for the moderns I should in
+an agreeable and inoffensive way suggest that time has done nothing to
+hurt the fame of young Tommy's skill. When what they call the golf boom
+began and the great game percolated through the mass of ignorant
+English, there was babble all at once about St. Andrews, and men of
+southern towns just discovering that the right hand on the driver should
+be the lower one whispered of the ancient city in a hypocritical manner
+of respect and awe as if it were high up above the blue instead of a
+day's journey up the northern lines from Euston or King's Cross. The
+name of the place was taken in vain, and to this day there are neophytes
+who lisp of "the Mecca of golf," as they say it, and its eleventh and
+seventeenth holes, though they have never been in Fifeshire and maybe
+never will. At the same time and by the same people there was
+established the vogue of young Tommy Morris, as one might call it. It
+was nearly sacrilege in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> the circumstances, for more people were living
+then than are living now who had known young Tommy, and fervently
+believed he was the best golfer who ever played the game. But what we
+may call the Morrisian traditions were established in this way, and they
+have laid a shoddy veneer on the really sound reputation of the young
+champion that it never needed. So the proposition is advanced that
+through ignorance and affectation and carelessness we posterity are
+being abundantly generous to young Tom and his father&mdash;forgetting Allan
+Robertson, such is the effect of championships, who was before them, and
+of whom it was said when he died that they might toll their bells and
+shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest was gone. We
+posterity are of another golfing world completely from that in which
+those early champions of St. Andrews lived and golfed. I have here in my
+room a driver with which old Tom played, and I see that the other day
+some rash fellows, unafraid of ghosts, took out from their receptacles
+some clubs which had belonged to him and others and played a game with
+them. But the handling of the old clubs and the looking on the picture
+of Tom which he once signed for me cannot bring the feeling of his time
+to ours, and I pass it on as a suggestion to our own posterity that our
+judgment in this matter, as it has been made, is nearly worthless.</p>
+
+<p>It has been coldly stated that lies are told by golfers. That allegation
+may be dismissed with no consideration, but it is certain that fancy
+traditions of flimsy origin gather about golfing history and soon
+establish themselves in the most remarkable manner. I know many
+incidents of the past ten or fifteen years, things I myself have
+witnessed, the truth of which has become completely obscured by masses
+of imagined stuff that has gathered on them. To take a good example,
+more than half the golfers in the world will tell you that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> Lieutenant
+Fred Tait won a championship at Prestwick after wading into water at the
+Alps to play a shot from there in the final; if they will look at the
+records they will find that splendid Tait did not win that championship
+at all, and they should be told that the shot that Mr. Ball made from
+the wet sand in that same bunker was nearly as difficult and, in the
+circumstances, more trying. Again, the victory gained by Mr. Travis at
+Sandwich, so recently as 1904, is now already described in many
+different ways, but one feature common to all of them is that the
+American holed a putt of twenty yards on nearly every green, that his
+driving was childlike in its shortness, and that he was smoking himself
+to death at the time. Still later, the very next year, there was an
+Amateur Championship at Prestwick, and I remember that Mr. Robert
+Maxwell, after a hard struggle against young Barry&mdash;who won the
+championship&mdash;had to loft over a stymie on the eighteenth green to keep
+the match alive, and then at the nineteenth the student was left with a
+short putt to win that hole and the match. I saw the play in that match
+and saw the putt, and I believe it was one of about a couple of feet. It
+was certainly too much to give in the circumstances, far too much, but
+Mr. Maxwell, great lover of golf as he is, had even by that time begun
+to tire of the strenuousness and the officialdom and the graspingness of
+championship tournaments, and he waved his club in token of presentation
+of the putt to his young opponent and generously shook hands with him.
+The Scottish spectators did not like it at the time, because "oor
+Bobbie" was their best and greatest hope, and it seemed like feeding the
+devil with chocolates to give putts like this to English golfers. By the
+time that we had returned to the club-house, only three hundred yards
+away, it was being said that that putt was three feet long, by the
+morning it had gone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> up to three feet six, and increasing gradually it
+even touched the five-feet mark within the next few years. At that point
+there was a reaction and, from what I can gather, the putt has settled
+down in history at four feet. It was half as long.</p>
+
+<p>So I think that golf posterities are fickle bodies, and even the best of
+them are not nearly so responsible and accurate in their judgments as is
+believed by those people who trustingly say that they will await the
+verdict of posterity. I remember that M. Anatole France urged that
+posterity was not infallible, because he himself and all human beings
+are posterity in regard to a long succession of works with which they
+are imperfectly acquainted, and he quotes the case of Macbeth whose
+reputation posterity has murdered, though Macbeth himself did no crime
+at all. Macbeth was really an excellent king. He enriched Scotland by
+favouring her commerce and industry. The chronicler depicts him as a
+pacific prince, the king of the towns, the friend of the citizens. The
+clans hated him because he administered justice well. He assassinated
+nobody. And as M. France remarks, we know what legend and genius have
+made of his memory. It is that way reversed with all our golfing
+traditions, and so we must handle them carefully. It is a principle of
+this game that no man can be a good golfer and a bad man, that those who
+are bad at heart have not the human qualities necessary for being
+golfers at all, cannot associate happily with the rest of the community,
+and so they get themselves properly out of it betimes. Hence it happens
+that of no golfer is there anything that is bad to be told. We have no
+Macbeths in this sport of ours, though it embraces some pensive Hamlets,
+and a number of the moderns would be golfing Romeos if their swings were
+finished in the old free style. But if tradition had indeed given us a
+foul Macbeth who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> improved his lie we should surely purify the
+remembrance of him, believing that his immediate posterity had almost
+certainly judged him wrong.</p>
+
+<p>This case which the advocate has set up against young Tom, with all this
+blame cast on posterity, will seem a weak thing yet to some. If we were
+counsel for the boy, who made a fine and a lovable figure in his day,
+should we bandy with words like that, or put evidence direct and plain
+before the tribunal, the evidence of those who saw? There are still a
+few of them left, and for myself I should not have far to send to gain a
+willing witness. I have a good and valued friend, Mr. Charles Chambers
+of Edinburgh, member of a distinguished golfing family of many
+generations, and a fine player himself, who was in the semi-final of the
+first Amateur Championship. He saw young Tommy at the game, and played
+it with him. And Mr. Chambers, once answering my plea for some of his
+remembrances, said, "As a youngster at St. Andrews, I was a great friend
+of young Tom, the champion, and on a summer evening often accompanied
+him alone, when, with a club and a cleek, he played out as far as the
+second hole. He was, I believe, the greatest golfer the world has ever
+seen, those giants of the present day not excepted. His driving, which I
+remember so well, was of the long, low, wind-cheating style so seldom
+seen now, with great distance and carry. He never struck a ball anywhere
+except on the centre of the club, and this was reflected in the faces of
+his driving-clubs, which had a clear and distinct impression in the
+centre, the wood above and below being clean and fresh as when last
+filed. His putting was perhaps even more deadly, and in ordinary matches
+I recollect he was seldom or never asked to hole out a yard putt. In
+driving from the tee, his style may be described as an absolutely
+correct circular sweep,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> with great accuracy and follow-through, and
+this applied equally to his iron play. It was his custom to wear a broad
+Glengarry bonnet, which very frequently left his head on the delivery of
+the stroke.... Without doubt he succumbed to his private sorrows and a
+broken heart." That is strong testimony, and the abiding conviction is
+that young Morris was great indeed, but in the nature of things
+comparisons cannot well be made between then and now, and are better
+left undone.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>I am glad that we have thus condemned posterity, for we strengthen the
+positions of our triumvirate and Mr. Ball at their only point of
+weakness, which is that their successes have been so marvellous as to be
+incredible to those heirs of ours who, not being of this period, will
+not have witnessed them. Posterity may suggest that such persons could
+not have lived, since none of us will hesitate to say that such
+posterity will not itself produce a man to win three championships. Even
+to win one twice is to make a proof of superiority such as in existing
+circumstances seems nearly impossible. Any man, as one might say, may
+win a championship; that would prove nothing save that he is as good a
+golfer as any other, or nearly so; but to win two championships is to
+prove that he is appreciably better than the others, that he is so much
+better as to balance with his skill the chances of the game&mdash;the putts
+he missed and the long ones that his opponents holed&mdash;that were flung
+against him. During a period of nearly twenty years the success of
+Taylor, Vardon, and Braid has been so complete, so overwhelming, so
+dazzling, that among them they seem almost to have solved the problem of
+perpetual victory. Each of these men is a genius, a great master of the
+game;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> each of them, had he lived in an age apart from the others, would
+alone have been enough to make a separate era in competitive golf; and
+it is a strange freak of fate that they should have been pitchforked
+into the arena at the same time. It is as if three Ormondes had been in
+the same Derby, or three Graces at the crease, when at their best;
+indeed, it is more wonderful than those things would have been. They
+were born within thirteen months of each other; Vardon and Braid within
+three months. The last-named is the eldest of the group; he was born at
+Earlsferry, in Fifeshire, on 6th February 1870; Harry Vardon was born in
+Jersey on 7th May 1870; and Taylor was born at Northam, in Devonshire,
+within a mile of where Mr. Ball won his eighth championship, on 19th
+March 1871. They are of different race; for Braid is a pure Scot, Taylor
+is pure English, and Vardon, while, of course, we are proud to regard
+him as belonging to us, is really half-French and half-English. They are
+of different build, different temperament, and of very different style
+in golf; but there they are. Among them they have won the Open
+Championship fifteen times, and when one of them has succeeded it has
+generally happened that the other two have been his most dangerous
+rivals. There must be a limit to the period of success as there is to
+human life, and for years people have murmured that these three are not
+like the little brook that purls down the hill, and they cannot go on
+for ever. And yet at the beginning of each new championship an instinct
+settles in the public mind that they cannot be beaten. Considering what
+the Open Championship is, what a fearful strain it exerts on
+temperament, mind, body, and muscle, how a single slip may mean failure,
+and then how many really magnificent golfers are in the lists, some of
+them old champions themselves, this is a strange state of things.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> I
+recall that when a championship was played at Muirfield in 1906 the
+sceptics were then loud in their prophecies that a "new man" would
+arise, and that the triumvirate would be cast down. And then? James
+Braid was first, John Henry Taylor was second, and Harry Vardon was
+third, though a hundred and eighty other players had done their best to
+beat them! Taylor, the Englishman, although the youngest of the three,
+was the first to score success. He and Vardon both made their initial
+appearances in the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1893, and on that
+occasion the 75 that Taylor did in his first round stood as the lowest
+made in the competition, although he did not win. At his second and
+third attempts in the championship he took first place each time, and on
+the second of these occasions an Englishman's victory was at last
+accomplished at St. Andrews, the Scottish headquarters of the game. He
+won there again in 1900, and is the only Englishman who has ever won the
+Open Championship on this hallowed piece of golfing ground. A year after
+the others began, James Braid entered the lists, and very quickly then
+did these three establish their triple supremacy. An injured hand kept
+Braid out of the great event in 1895, but since then each of the men has
+played in every championship, and among them have won fifteen times out
+of twenty-one. At the "coming of age" of the triumvirate in 1913, when
+it was twenty-one years after Taylor and Vardon started in the event,
+Taylor, the first to score in it, won his fifth and became "all square"
+with his friends. That was a remarkable occurrence. Since 1894, when
+Taylor won his first championship, there have only been five years when
+one or other of the triumvirate has not won the cup. In 1897 Mr. Hilton
+got it; in 1902 Sandy Herd, playing with the rubber-cored ball on its
+introduction, scored; in 1904 Jack<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> White was the winner, both Braid and
+Taylor having a putt to tie with him on the last green; in 1907 Massy,
+the Frenchman, triumphed; and in 1912 the hope of Edward Ray was
+realised. And in each of these years one of the triumvirate was second.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>But if each of the triumvirate is a phenomenon and collectively they are
+super-phenomena, in what terms then are we to describe Mr. John Ball,
+and how shall we account for his eight amazing championships? Mr. Harold
+Hilton, as all the world understands very well, is a great master of the
+game, a magnificent golfer who knows it through and through, and a
+tremendous fighting man. There has hardly been anything in all golf's
+history so splendid as his coming again and winning two more Amateur
+Championships when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly
+winning an Open Championship as well. But if after considering the
+professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs
+in their match-play championship, it is John Ball who is the wonder man.
+The luck of the game that was emphasised in the consideration of score
+play is surely greater in the match. At all events, the professionals
+themselves to a man declare that the score play makes the better test,
+and therefore is the fairer. If that is so, there is, inferentially,
+more luck to be conquered by a good man in the amateur event, and Mr.
+Ball has eight times beaten his fields and beaten all the luck against
+him. Twenty-four years after winning his first Amateur Championship at
+Prestwick he wins his eighth at Westward Ho! and, for all the great
+players that the game has yielded, no other man has gained more than
+half those wins, and only Hilton has done that. Surely it is a mystery<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+very profound as to how he has won so often. And yet it is less of
+mystery if we accept the proposition that he who plays golf for the sake
+of golf and fears not to be beaten is the most dangerous of opponents.
+Mr. Ball's early championships were won by his own skill and his perfect
+temperament; undoubtedly some of the later ones, which through
+increasing numbers of opponents have or should have been harder to win,
+have been gained because he cared little whether he won or not, and
+because his opponents feared to lose, and feared the more as they felt
+their impending fate when they had the master of Hoylake laid against
+them. To a little extent they have beaten themselves, and Mr. Ball has
+done all the rest. Has there been more than one of his championships in
+recent times that he has keenly desired to win, that being the one he
+gained at St. Andrews in 1907, because he wished to be victor at the
+headquarters where he lost long years before, after a tie with Mr.
+Balfour Melville? At eight o'clock on the morning after he won his
+seventh at Hoylake I saw him in the garden at the back of his house
+giving his chickens their morning meal. It was as if nothing had
+happened. How many other men would have been feeding chickens so early
+in the morning after winning an Amateur Championship? Has he finished
+winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won
+for his seventh the only championship ever played in Devonshire, and he
+has won the event on all the regular amateur championship courses on
+which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been
+something of a <i>bête noire</i> among courses so far as he is concerned.
+Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the
+international match, and then in the championship he went down in a
+surprising way to a youngster of Dornoch. Shall he not add Muirfield to
+his list?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Despite a certain beauty of his style and the ease and elegance with
+which he plays the game, Mr. Ball's golf is strongly individual to
+himself. There are many pronounced mannerisms in it, and they are of a
+kind that if any one tried to copy them, he might find his game being
+injured rather than improved. They are the ways of the genius who cares
+nothing for convention. Few can drive a better ball. At the outset of
+his career he was a long driver. His first big match away from his
+native Hoylake was one against Douglas Rolland. It was a home-and-home
+affair in England and Scotland, and Rolland was greatly celebrated in
+those days for the length he gained with wooden clubs. Yet he outdrove
+Mr. Ball but little in that engagement. He obtains his length not to a
+large extent from run, as most men get it now, but by a ball that starts
+on a beautiful line, makes a very long carry, and leaves it at that,
+with a little pull to finish with. It has seemed that he has had more
+control over his wooden club play than almost any amateur except another
+of fame who was bred in the same great school. An outstanding
+peculiarity of his method is the way in which he grips his club, which
+is done not in the fingers and lightly as by other men, but by a good
+firm grip in the palms of his hands with the fingers facing up. He makes
+small use of the thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand. His
+stance is an open one. His play with his iron clubs again is
+unconventional. Even for his shortest shots he swings his clubs, meaning
+that he makes less of a jerky hit at the ball than others do, and he
+resorts less to cutting the stroke than other great men. But what a
+master of judging of heights and distance he is! To see him just plop
+the ball over a bunker in the way and then watch it run the necessary
+distance afterwards is to understand what marvellous properties of
+control can be invested in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> such perfect human golfing machinery.
+Another of his peculiarities is that he carries no niblick in his bag,
+and I think he never has carried one. He has certainly not had one in
+any of his recent championships. And among many other of his
+characteristics is that peculiar gait with the bent knees that, because
+of their climbing over the hilly links, golf seems to develop in men
+(Harry Vardon has it), his extreme modesty in manner, and the splendid
+excellence of his sportsmanship. Some one once set forward a curious
+theory that children born in the winter-time are likely to become better
+golfers than others; their temperaments are supposed to be favourably
+affected by the prevailing rigour of the weather conditions! It is,
+anyhow, a curious fact that a very large proportion of our best players
+were born in mid-winter months, and of them all John Ball is the
+greatest, and he, if you please, was born on a day so far removed from
+midsummer as Christmas Eve.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>There has been lately a sort of revival of the game of attempting to
+punch another man so very hard that he can stand up no longer to make
+the smallest punch in answer. He has to be battered and pounded until he
+is made practically lifeless for a period of ten seconds, and then the
+other man is given the money. This is what we call the "noble art of
+self-defence," but, obviously, it is nine parts of such defence to
+reduce the other man to such a jellified condition that no more defence
+is needed. When well played it is a good game. Now golf never has been
+called a "noble" game at all. It is "royal" and it is "ancient," and it
+leaves its qualities to speak for themselves, as most eloquently they
+do. The boast has indeed been made for golf that, while in so many other
+English sports something flying or running has to be killed or injured,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+golf never calls for a drop of blood from any living creature. It is
+then inferred that it is a gentle game, as in some ways it really is.
+Also it has been demonstrated that it is a game at which elderly men may
+play and play quite well, as was proved in a recent year when golfers
+who are becoming older than they like to think of won so many of the
+trophies. But the result of this boom in the noble art of squashing
+another man for a prize of a few thousand pounds and the brave words
+that some of the lovers of this sport sometimes use, telling us that
+things like this made English hearts so strong, nearly giving us to
+understand that Sayers and his like had some influence on the fortunes
+of the British Empire, is that a kind of reflection is cast upon some
+other sports for their mildness and their timidity. Girls do not fight
+in rings and nearly kill each other, but girls can play golf and do, and
+they even play with men.</p>
+
+<p>Let us consider the proposition that golf is a game that needs a greater
+and a stronger heart than any other game. It demands fine manliness,
+such determination as strong Englishmen are made of, and courage of the
+best. The strain of a severe golf competition on the men who win, or
+nearly, is enormous. No weakling has ever won success at golf, and never
+will. The truth is that it is such a game that if the charge is made
+that it is a brutal sport we can barely stand for its defence. For there
+is cruelty in golf, cold hurting cruelty in this game. If now you
+hesitate, consider. The difference between the effect of boxing and the
+effect of golf on the human system is that golf hurts more and the pain
+is more enduring, for it is psychological. That may seem like an
+attempted escape from the proposition, because it may be suggested that
+maiden aunts can and do bear such psychological pain at golf, and bear
+it well. But we discuss real golf of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> championship kind, and match
+play wherein two good and keen players are really playing against each
+other, parry and thrust as it is in championship golf, with the issue in
+even balance most of the time, not taking sevens and eights and so being
+nearly indifferent to what the other may do until the clerking takes
+place on the putting green and the state of things is calculated.</p>
+
+<p>Golf, as we know, is a game for the emotions. We agree that it plays
+upon them continually, and chiefly through the medium of the supreme
+emotion, hope. While this hope is the most uplifting of emotions, it is
+also, with the strain it makes, by far the most exhausting. Now every
+golfer knows that in the real game if a good stroke is made by one party
+the gain is not only in the extra nearness to the hole that his own ball
+obtains, but also by the "moral effect" the shot has on the other man.
+This other may have been in a good state of hope before; now he receives
+a sudden shock&mdash;and it is indeed a shock sometimes when in a second, as
+the result of the other's effort, his hope is reduced to fear or
+complete dejection. Do you think the man who made the shot does not know
+that? He knows it well. There! he knew! The dejected man has foozled,
+and the hole has gone. This bout is ended. There is a rest of a few
+seconds, and then the contestants start again and smash each other on
+the mind, just as they did the other time. Some may suggest that the
+effect of these mental hurts is small, that they draw no blood, and that
+they are not to be compared with a left hook on the jaw which sends a
+boxer toppling. To that there are replies to make. In the first place it
+has to be remembered that a match at golf between two good players (we
+do not now write of habitual foozlers in whom the golfing emotions
+cannot, in the nature of things, be well developed) is taken very
+seriously indeed, and therefore the emotional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> effect is greater than
+might be supposed by one who does not play. Second, the effect is
+cumulative, and every golfer knows again how intensely depressing is the
+continual fight against a relentless opponent who scores with nearly
+every stroke and never lets one's hope burn bright again. Bang goes
+every shot of his on the sensitive temperament of his foe, and that is
+exactly why temperament has all to do with success at golf. It is the
+man who can stand punishment who wins; no other sort ever has won in
+greater golf, or ever will. And then again, if it is suggested that
+mental pain is after all not such a hard thing to bear with courage as
+pain of body, let us ask which has the longer effect, remembering also
+that, with full respect to boxing people, the golfer is a man of keener
+feelings. In championships how often has a man who has had a punishing
+match in a morning round, one that has gone to the nineteenth hole or
+after before victory has come to him, won again in the afternoon? Not
+frequently. If you had merely with a fist blow knocked that man
+senseless for a little while before his lunch, he might have been
+readier for his golfer opponent in the afternoon. It is notorious that
+some of the finest play in championships has been accomplished by men
+who were enduring much physical suffering at the time. And again, how
+exactly is the effect of the winning putt on the defeated man like that
+of the knock-out blow. His last hope is extinguished with the suddenness
+of vanished consciousness. So this psychological pain is a very
+discomforting thing. The law recognises it, and herein the law is surely
+not an ass. We have the legal cruelty of the divorce court. Husband who
+tells his wife he dislikes her new hat or gown is held to have been
+cruel as though he had smacked her pretty face, or something worse than
+that. He could kiss away a red mark from a dimpled cheek, and surely if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+permitted he would do so, but nothing could change the judgment on the
+hat. And in golf the mental injury is more real than that.</p>
+
+<p>Never was more absurdly untrue suggestion made against this game than
+that it is not like others where men play directly against each other
+and foil each other's shots, that it is a game in which each man plays
+his own ball independent of the other. Each stroke we make has effect on
+the stroke made by the opponent. That effect may be discounted by the
+opponent's own strength and resource, but yet it is produced. In no
+other game does a man play right and hard on to his opponent as in
+match-play golf, for it is a game in which the whole temperamental
+strength of one side is hurled against the strength of the other, and
+the two human natures are pressing bitterly and relentlessly against
+each other from the first moment of the game to the last. It is the
+whole man, mind and body. That is the meaning of the temperamental
+factor in golf, and that is why a great match at golf is great indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, it is a cruel game, one in which the primitive instincts of man are
+given full play, and the difference between golf and fisticuffs is that
+in the one the pain is of the mind and in the other it is of the body.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>A climax in our wonderment has been reached, and though a volume could
+be written on the romance of the rubber-cored ball, the seventh of the
+wonders of the game and the most modern, the story after all is known.
+Golf would have gained on its old degree of popularity if there had been
+no such invention and men had continued to play with gutties; but that
+the golf boom as we know it would have been created, that the game<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+would have risen to be the enormous thing it is, giving pleasure to
+hundreds of thousands of people all the world over, there is much reason
+to doubt. One night in the early summer of 1898 Mr. Coburn Haskell sat
+at dinner with a magnate of the American rubber industry, at the house
+of the latter in Cleveland, Ohio. They were both golfers, and naturally
+they talked golf during their meal. They agreed that a kindlier ball
+than the harsh and severe gutty was needed, and they thought that surely
+it might come through rubber. Eventually they settled on the idea of
+rubber thread wound under tension to give the necessary hardness, and an
+experimental ball was made accordingly. With the very first shot that
+was made with that first of rubber-cored balls a professional player to
+whom it had been given to try carried a bunker that had never been
+carried before! From that moment the great revolution was begun, the
+most extraordinary that has ever taken place in any game. There were
+set-backs, it was a little slow in starting, but its success was sure.
+In 1902, when Sandy Herd won an Open Championship with the new ball,
+after prejudice had held it back in Britain previously, the gutty was
+done for, and it quickly disappeared from the links.</p>
+
+<p>And oh, the ravings and the riotings of argument there have been about
+that ball since then! And the hundreds of thousands of pounds that have
+had to be spent on courses to make them suit it! Never was there such a
+giant commotion nor such a costly one caused in any sport before. We
+need not argue any more whether it has improved the game or spoiled it.
+These discussions are for the schools. It has anyhow made the game in
+the modern popular sense, and now we are informed that of this little
+white ball, that was first invented at the dinner-table on those Ohio
+summer nights, half a million are used on British courses in one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> week
+in a busy season, and a million pounds' worth are bought and consumed by
+golfers in a year. Then you may be sure that more than a million
+dollars' worth are driven and putted on the courses of the United
+States. Marvellous little ball! Indeed you are the seventh wonder of
+your game.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>A FAMOUS CHAMPIONSHIP AT BROOKLINE, U.S.A., AND AN ACCOUNT OF HOW MR.
+FRANCIS OUIMET WON IT, WITH SOME EXPLANATION OF SEEMING MYSTERIES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Abiding wonders of the past, perplexities of the present, the greatness
+of the game where it is still greatest, have been among recent thoughts;
+and yet one is conscious all the time that something which sure enough
+comes near to being the eighth wonder of it all has lately happened, and
+will for long enough be high in the minds of this community, something
+that will never cease to be discussed and will always be regarded as a
+matter for argument and speculation. Only because it is so very new, so
+utterly modern, so contrary to much of our olden faith, so inharmonious
+with the smooth story that we have learned and liked, has a witness
+hesitated to give it a forward place well won. Yet do we not know that a
+hundred years from now, when so much of golfing history yet unmade will
+have been piled on to the dusty records that we hold, this new wonder
+will still be a theme for club-house talk, and if by then matches are
+played with the people of other planets, will they not wish to know in
+Mars how this strange break came about? Then there shall be as many
+readings and explanations of the mystery of Brookline and of Ouimet as
+there have been of the moods of sad Prince Hamlet. So from the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+traditions, the famous players, the ancient links, the scene may move to
+new America.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>To the Fourth of July there shall now be added the Twentieth of
+September. In the year of nineteen hundred and thirteen it fell upon a
+Saturday, and that day at Brookline, near Boston in Massachusetts, was
+dripping wet. Clouds had run loose for two whole days and nights before,
+unceasingly, and still sent their torrent down. When, dull and
+splashing, the morning broke, with expectation in the air, it seemed
+that this had been planned by fate for a day of wretchedness and misery,
+one that might with convenience afterwards be blotted out from memory
+and considered as a <i>dies non</i>. But good Americans will now recall no
+clouds, no rain, no damp, no mud when they remember the Twentieth of
+September. I too, though my feelings then were more of wonder and real
+admiration than of joy which my own patriotism could not sanction, shall
+be glad to remember in time to come that then I was at Brookline and was
+one of only two or three from Britain who saw the amazing thing that was
+done that day, the most remarkable victory ever achieved in any golf
+championship anywhere at any time. It was something to have seen; it is
+a distinction to have the remembrance. On that day Francis Ouimet, a boy
+of twenty, bred to the game on the cow pastures of Massachusetts, played
+Harry Vardon and Edward Ray, great champions of British golf, for the
+championship of the United States&mdash;and won. They three had come through
+the great ordeal of a full championship and tied for first place
+together. They played, not against blank possibility as men, knowing not
+the exact nature of their task, have to do in Open Championships<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> where
+the test is play by score and each is against all others, having then
+some fears stilled by sweet hope which is ever the golfer's sustenance,
+but in sight of each other, together, one with another, man against man,
+ball against ball, seeing what was being done, knowing what had to be
+accomplished next. Could there ever again be such a three-ball golf? It
+is one of the compensations of having been so very wet at Brookline on
+that awful day that one knows that for the wonder and the drama of the
+thing it can never happen more, not ever. If such facts could be
+repeated, the wonder would be missing and the drama gone.</p>
+
+<p>An American and two Englishmen. These championships are mainly matters
+for individuals after all; the "international element," of which we read
+so much in newspapers, is not generally so deeply felt as we try to
+think it is. Golf, not being a game of sides as other games are, and, if
+it comes to that, not generally a game in which national peculiarities
+exert an influence, hardly lends itself to international treatment.
+Players who feel internationally before a contest relapse to
+individualism completely when they are pitching to the green and putting
+to the hole. Do not tell me that in the throes of a six-feet putt that
+shall win or lose a day a man thinks of his trusting country and not of
+his tortured hopeful self. It is not possible in the combination of golf
+and human nature, and there is no blame to the men. But on the Twentieth
+of September international feeling in the game of golf did for once rise
+high, and became a very real thing. What of individualism had been
+maintained by Vardon and his companion during that week had nearly
+disappeared on the nineteenth, when the tie was made, and there was
+hardly a trace of it when the curtain went up on the fifth act of the
+amazing drama of Brookline, none at all when it was rolled down again.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+This point is now emphasised because when I write of the wonder of the
+thing I have to show that not only was this Brookline boy, of no
+championship whatever save one of Massachusetts, pitted against two of
+the greatest golfers of the home country of the game, but that, the
+international feeling being now alive and intense, he for America was
+opposed to those two of England, and therefore in a very full degree he
+was playing their better ball. The boy was playing the better ball of
+Vardon and Ray! He beat them! A long time has now elapsed since the
+dripping day when I saw him do it, and wonders have a way of softening
+with age, yet to me now that achievement is as wonderful as it was when
+new, and so it will remain. The American golfers are justified in their
+pride and their exultation upon the result of that event, and there is
+nothing whatever to be said against it. No such feat had ever been
+performed before, or has been since. I shall describe the circumstances
+which led up to this amazing triumph, and what ensued.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Only once before had British players gone across the Atlantic to take
+part in the Open Championship of the United States, and that was in 1900
+when Harry Vardon and J. H. Taylor did so. At that time Taylor was the
+Open Champion, Vardon having finished second to him in that year's
+tournament at St. Andrews. American golf was then comparatively a baby,
+and practically all the opponents of the British pair were players who
+had been born and bred in the home country and had gone out to America
+as professionals there. Good as some of them were, they were no match
+for their visitors, who had the competition comfortably to themselves
+and finished first and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> second, Vardon becoming champion. Much happened
+in the next thirteen years. Most significant was the breeding of an
+American champion on American soil, a "native born," in J. J. M'Dermott,
+who tied for first place in 1910, but then lost to Alec Smith on playing
+off, and tied again the next year when he won, and again in 1912. About
+the same time two other native players in Tom M'Namara and Michael Brady
+came to the surface from the raw mass of rough golfing material that was
+taking shape under the American sun. Both are good men, and from my
+knowledge of them I like their manner and their style; but M'Dermott,
+despite some serious faults of which he has been made aware, is
+undoubtedly a marvellous golfer for his age. I think he has to be
+considered as the most wonderful prodigy the game has so far known. At
+twenty years of age, when he came over to Muirfield as American champion
+to compete for the great Open Championship, he was even then a most
+accomplished golfer, high in the topmost rank. Not tall in stature but
+well and lithely built for a golfer, he has a full, easy, and graceful
+swing. It is round like most of the American swings&mdash;but not so round as
+it used to be&mdash;and M'Dermott is often afflicted with what is commonly
+known as the American hook, being a most persistent tendency to pull the
+ball. It is remarkable also that he has been in the habit of using
+wooden clubs of most abnormal length, and it has been a wonder to me how
+he has controlled them as well as he has done. The history of the Open
+Championship, marked with so many crosses for tragedies and the
+blighting of fair hopes, embraces few incidents more pathetic than the
+driving of three balls into the Archerfield woods by M'Dermott in the
+event of 1912 at Muirfield, and his failing to qualify in consequence.
+But he was only twenty then. The first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> expedition made by a native
+American to this country in quest of Open Championship honours
+consequently failed. In the following year we saw him again at Hoylake,
+and with him his brother natives, M'Namara and Brady, and some of the
+Scoto-Americans also. M'Dermott did the best of the three, and his play
+for nine holes one morning was very nearly perfect. His swing was a
+little more compact than before; it was beautifully timed, and his
+straight-up style of putting with his heels touching and his grip upon
+the end of the shaft was most attractive. He found the conditions on the
+last day too severe for him, as nearly all except Taylor, the champion,
+did; but he made a fine display and became the first real American
+player to get into the prize list of the Open Championship, which he did
+with a score of 315&mdash;eight more than Taylor&mdash;which made him tie for
+fifth place. M'Dermott undoubtedly excels in temperament.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Here was a menace. It was felt that America was making very good in
+golf. And there came vaguely into the minds of British golfers the idea
+that a demonstration of their strength should be made in this new
+country, for satisfaction and for the sake of national pride. Yet, with
+their conservatism, our British golfing people are slow to move in
+matters of this kind. They are content with the game, and perhaps wisely
+so. But there was the feeling that something should be done. With
+initiative demanded, Lord Northcliffe, who had become a keen lover of
+the game, made a characteristic movement unobtrusively, as the result of
+which Harry Vardon and Edward Ray were sent across the Atlantic to test
+the strength of American golfers in their own Open Championship. Vardon
+was then five times Open<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> Champion of the world; Ray was the holder of
+the title. Two other Europeans sailed the seas with the same object in
+their minds, one of them being Wilfrid Reid, the clever little
+professional attached to the Banstead Downs club near London, a man who
+had gained international honours constantly and has much fine golf in
+him, and the other Louis Tellier, the professional of the Société de
+Golf de Paris at La Boulie, Versailles. Four good men; two great
+champions; one the greatest golfer the world has known. They seemed to
+be enough. Their design was to win the American championship.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Those who were not at Brookline during the week that followed, and only
+received a result that was amazing and inexplicable, were ready enough,
+perhaps not unnaturally, to suggest that this course of the Country Club
+could not have afforded a proper test, that it was so far different from
+a good British course, so mysteriously American, that the native players
+must have been favoured by it, and the superior skill that the British
+golfers possessed had no opportunity for an outlet. As I say, this was
+not an unreasonable supposition in the light of the amazing events that
+occurred; but it was entirely wrong. There are few courses in America
+that are better than this one, and to this judgment I would add that
+though there are inland courses in England that are superior there are
+not many. Judged upon the best standard of inland courses in Britain I
+would call it thoroughly good.</p>
+
+<p>It has seven holes of over four hundred yards each, one of them being
+five hundred and twenty, and, the total length of the round being 6245
+yards, it was good enough in this respect. It has three short holes,
+well separated, and some of its drive-and-iron-holes are quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+excellent. The Brookline course differs from many others in America in
+the quick and varied undulations of its land&mdash;heaving, rolling, twisting
+everywhere&mdash;and thus calling for adaptability of stance, and careful
+reckoning of running after pitching at every shot. By this feature the
+play is made as interesting as it should be, but often is not. Only two
+of the holes on the course are quite flat and plain, and these are
+novelties. They are the first and eighteenth, which take straight lines
+parallel to each other through the great polo field alongside the
+club-house. Polo is a considerable feature of the scheme of the Country
+Club, and its comparatively small territory is not to be interfered with
+for the sake of the golfers who have so much more of Massachusetts for
+their delectation. Yet it is necessary to play through this polo field.
+Consequently we start the round at one end of it and play a hole of 430
+yards right along past the grand stand. Then away we go out into the
+country, over the hills and along the dales, and through the trees and
+cuttings where rocks were blasted, and, after many adventures, return to
+the smooth plain land of the polo field as to the straight run home at
+the end of a steeplechase, and play along positively the plainest
+410-yard hole I have ever seen. The tee is at one end of the polo field,
+with the grand stand in the middle distance on the left. There is not a
+bunker along that field, but there is rough grass on the left of the
+part designated for the fairway, and there is the same with a
+horse-racing track as well on the right. At the far end of the field,
+near to the club-house, the race-track, of course, bends round and comes
+across the line of play. Just on the other side of that track the ground
+rises up steeply for three or four yards, and then up there sloping
+upwards and backwards is the putting green. Thus the race-track becomes
+a hazard to guard the green, and the green is on a high plateau with big
+trees<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> all round it. The hole is there all complete, with hardly a thing
+done to it by man, and it is one of the most remarkable examples I have
+seen of a piece of ready-made golf of the plainest possible description,
+resulting in something fairly good. It is 410 yards long, and if the tee
+shot is a little defective the attempt to reach the green with the
+second is going to be a heartbreaking business. With a good drive that
+second shot, played with a cleek perhaps, or the brassey may be needed,
+has to be uncommonly well judged and true. The margin for error is next
+to nothing. At the first glance at it I thought that this eighteenth
+hole was very stupid, but it is a hole that grows a little upon you, and
+the original impression has been withdrawn from my mind. It was the last
+hope of Vardon and Ray, and it failed them. The fairway at Brookline is
+far better than on the average American course, and if one says that its
+putting greens are among the very best in America, the greatest possible
+compliment is paid to them.</p>
+
+<p>There have been many touches of romance in the history of golf at the
+Country Club, but none more remarkable than that associated with the
+construction of the comparatively new ninth, tenth, and eleventh holes,
+two long ones with a short one between them, which are among the nicest
+holes in all America. For some years after the beginning of this
+century, when golf at Brookline had become a very big thing, these holes
+did not exist, their predecessors being embraced in the other parts of
+the course. But, for the crossing that they involved, those predecessors
+had become dangerous, and it was determined to take in a new tract of
+land, and to make three new holes upon it. It was a tremendous
+undertaking, for "land" was only a kind of courtesy title for the wild
+mixture of forest, rock, and swamp into which a man might sink up to his
+neck, but for which about 25,000 dollars had to be paid,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> while another
+thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars had to be spent in making it fit
+for golf and preparing the holes, so that these three cost an average of
+about thirteen thousand dollars a hole, or roughly £2500 as we may say
+if we are English. At the ninth as much rock had to be blasted as some
+one afterwards used to make a wall two hundred yards long, and the best
+part of a yard in thickness. The tenth hole is a very delightful short
+one, with the green in a glade far below the tee. They call it "The
+Redan," because Mr. G. Herbert Windeler (long resident in America, but
+English in nationality still, despite his past presidency of the
+U.S.G.A.), who is largely responsible for the golf at Brookline, and
+designed and superintended the construction of these holes, had the
+famous piece of golf at North Berwick in his mind when he planned this
+one, but before the end he departed far from the original conception,
+and all for the good of the hole. When it was being made the place for
+the green needed raising from the swamp, and nearly two thousand loads
+of broken rocks were deposited there; and after soil to a depth of
+eighteen inches had been laid upon the stone foundation a splendid
+putting green was made. With all its variety, this is not a course of
+such intricacy and such mystery as St. Andrews is, to need long weeks of
+study and practice to understand every shot upon it. You may play St.
+Andrews from childhood to old age and yet be puzzled and mistaken
+sometimes, but Brookline is more candid than that, and it is to its
+credit that with all its variety you may be completely acquainted with
+it in a very few days. Let me say then that the suggestion that Mr.
+Ouimet had a distinct advantage in a knowledge of the course obtained in
+his childhood, and maintained thenceforth by frequent practice on the
+course near to which he lived, is quite nonsense. He had no advantage
+whatever. Vardon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> and Ray had practised there for several days in
+advance, and if they did not know all about it that there was to know it
+was their own fault. They did know, and local knowledge, which counts
+for far less with great golfers than men a little their inferiors, had
+nothing to do with the issue.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Now consider the other circumstances, that the proper meaning and
+significance of the result may be understood, and that neither too much
+merit shall be awarded, nor too much blame. There were about a hundred
+and sixty competitors, and I would call the field a strong one, but of
+course not nearly so strong as the field for our Open Championship. Such
+men as two of the triumvirate were missing, and a highly respectable
+company of past champions, while there were no such English amateurs in
+the list as Mr. Graham, Mr. Lassen, and Mr. Michael Scott to make an
+occasional disturbance. But there were other amateurs. Compared to a
+British open championship field it was weak at the top and weak in the
+middle. Everybody who goes to our open championships knows that there,
+for three parts of the trial, there are comparative nobodies bobbing up
+from nowhere and creating all kinds of excitement by breaking the
+records of the courses, and fixing themselves up elegantly at the top of
+the list. There they sit like civilians on an imperial dais, but always
+they topple off before the end. Not one of them has ever remained to the
+finish, so that if the American entry was weak in this respect,
+Americans might argue that it did not matter anyhow since this middle
+part was not the one to count. Yet it always has its effect. But then
+the Americans may also point out that they too had their middle men who
+came to the front and created disturbances, only quitting the heights in
+time to make room<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> for the winner and his attendants. There was young
+M'Donald Smith, and there were Barnes and Hagin, who had come up out of
+the wild west&mdash;and one of them, saying it respectfully to his splendid
+golf, looked a cowboy too&mdash;and were distinct menaces until the last
+rounds came to be played. Then in estimating the strength of this
+American field remember that M'Dermott, who is undoubtedly high class,
+and was in the prize list at the Open Championship at Hoylake, was not
+nearly a winner here, and remember also that imported players of the
+high quality of Tom Vardon and Robert Andrew were not in it either.
+Altogether it is my judgment that the field was stronger than imagined
+in England, yet not nearly so strong as ours. Following a favourite
+American practice of reducing to percentages every estimate, however
+necessarily indefinite, such as even the comparative charms of wives and
+sweethearts, I would give the strength of a British field the hundred,
+and I would give sixty-five to this of America. I knew that I should
+fall to that percentage system some time, and now I have. For its strong
+variety, and for its flavour of cosmopolitanism, it was an interesting
+entry. The professionals all over the States&mdash;and the amateurs, too, for
+that matter&mdash;came up to Brookline from north, south, east and west, for
+what they felt was a great occasion, and over the border from Canada
+they came as well. Up from Mexico came Willie Smith, the Willie who was
+teethed in golf at his Carnoustie home, and whom we never shall forget
+as he who broke the record&mdash;and holds it with George Duncan still&mdash;for
+the old course at St. Andrews in the very last round that was played at
+the beginning of an Open Championship meeting there a few years ago. It
+was really a wonderful field, and its units presented a wealth of
+material for study and contemplation in matters of style and method
+during the first day or two. And yet for all the variety<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> of players I
+doubt whether there was so much difference in ways as we see in a big
+championship at home. The American golfing system is a little plainer, I
+think. Of course it was by far the largest entry that had ever been
+received for the American open event, and this fact necessitated a
+departure to some extent from established American custom, and one which
+we of Britain with unenviable experience of many processes in qualifying
+competitions could not congratulate the Americans on having to make.
+However, the numbers were not so large as to cause such trouble, even
+with a qualifying competition, as we experience in England and Scotland,
+and consequently a two-days' affair worked it smoothly through, the
+field being divided into two sections, and each man playing his two
+rounds off in one day and getting done with it. It was settled that the
+top thirty players in each section, and those who tied for the thirtieth
+place, should pass into the competition proper for the championship,
+which, as here and elsewhere, consists of four rounds of stroke play,
+two on each of two successive days.</p>
+
+<p>The United States Golf Association always manages its championships very
+well indeed with no more red tape than is necessary, but with an
+exactness of method which might serve as a fine lesson to some other
+great golfing countries that I have in mind. In this present case Mr.
+Robert Watson, President for the year of the U. S. G. A., after all his
+splendid work as secretary of the Association, was in charge of all the
+arrangements and as administrator-in-chief was the most energetic man
+during the whole of the week at Brookline. It was fitting that in his
+year of presidency, so well deserved, there should be this ever
+memorable happening to mark the season out from all others. Mr. Herbert
+Jacques, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, and Mr. John Reid, the new secretary
+of the U. S. G. A., were in the nature also of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> generals of the
+headquarters staff, and they laboured constantly in an upper room late
+at night working out the details of business when other persons on whom
+responsibility was more lightly cast, with cocktails to help, might be
+pondering over the tense problem as to what was going to happen next.
+The general idea of the system was much the same as we have it in
+Britain, as there is hardly much scope for variety in matters of this
+kind.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Now&mdash;Ouimet. It is easy for the Americans and others to compose anthems
+about him now, but little enough did they know or think of this
+Massachusetts boy until they saw that he was really winning, and then
+the remark that I heard of an ex-American champion to him in the
+dressing-room shortly after it was all over, "Well done, Francis, and
+there are lots more in the country like you!" was not only lacking in
+compliment and taste, but was not true. America is by no means full of
+Ouimets, and never will be. I had met him at Chicago in 1912, and heard
+of him next in a letter that I received just before starting for America
+in the following summer, which gave me particulars of what happened in
+the match in the closing stages of the Massachusetts State Championship
+between my old friend, Mr. John G. Anderson, and Mr. Ouimet, in which it
+was stated that Mr. Ouimet had done the last nine holes in that match as
+follows&mdash;yards first and figures after: 260 yards (4), 497 yards (3),
+337 yards (4), 150 yards (2), 394 yards (3), 224 yards (3), 250 yards
+(3), 320 yards (3), 264 yards (3). So he did the last six holes in 17
+strokes, and no wonder that poor John remarked, "I have never played in
+any match in my life where I did the last six holes in three over 3's
+and lost four of them, as I did on this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> occasion!" Of course Mr. Ouimet
+became State champion, and I determined to have a good look at him as
+soon as I got on the other side of the Atlantic. On the day after my
+arrival in New York I was down at the Garden City Club, the Amateur
+Championship taking place there the following week, and at lunch time
+Mr. Anderson, who was at another table with Ouimet, called me over.
+"Well, Mr. Ouimet, I suppose you have a big championship in your bag
+this season," was just the proper thing to say, and he answered
+something about doing his best, but feeling he might be better at stroke
+play. "Then," said I, "there is the Open Championship to take place in
+your own golfing country," and with that we tackled the chicken. He is a
+nice, open-hearted, modest, sporting golfer, and was only twenty years
+old in the May of his great championship year. Tall, lithe and somewhat
+athletic in figure and movement, he takes excellent care of himself in a
+semi-training sort of way. He abstains from alcohol entirely, and though
+he smokes a few cigarettes when "off duty" he rarely does so while
+playing, having the belief that the use of tobacco has a temporary
+effect on the eyesight, such as is not conducive to accuracy of play. He
+agreed entirely with a suggestion I put to him, in conversation, that
+most golfers make the mistake of playing too much and lose keenness in
+consequence, and he thinks that the American players in general are by
+no means at such a disadvantage as is sometimes imagined. The winter
+rest gives them extra keenness in the spring and summer, and that is
+everything. He does not play at all from November to April, but keeps
+himself fit with skating and ice hockey, while during the season he only
+plays one round three times a week, and two full rounds on Sundays.
+Business considerations&mdash;he is engaged at a Boston athletic store&mdash;have
+something to do with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> system, no doubt, but he thinks it sound. I
+looked at his bag of clubs; there are no freaks in it. It comprises ten
+items, an ivory-faced driver, a brassey, six irons including a jigger
+and mashie niblick, and two putters, one being of the ordinary aluminium
+kind and the other a wry-neck implement, the latter being most used. As
+to his style of golf, its outstanding characteristics are three: it is
+plain, like the style of most American golfers, and free from any
+striking individuality; it is straight; and it is marvellously steady
+and accurate. A marked feature of most of the American players is that
+their swing is very round and flat, and that they get a pronounced hook
+on their ball. Mr. Ouimet's swing is rather more upright than that of
+most of the others, he keeps an exceedingly straight line and has full
+length&mdash;as much as Vardon. I said he had no peculiarities, but there is
+just this one, that he grips his club with what is called the
+interlocking grip. This is a way of grasping the club that some
+professionals employed during the early period of general transition
+from the plain grip to the overlapping. Mr. Ouimet's little finger of
+the right hand just goes between the first and second of the left hand,
+while the left thumb goes round the shaft instead of into the palm of
+the right hand. Such a grip may suit a man who uses it, but it can
+hardly have any advantages. I note as a further peculiarity that the
+right forefinger is crooked up away from the shaft, so that the tip of
+the finger only comes to the leather at the side. This has to some
+considerable extent the effect of throwing that finger out of action,
+and as a means of reducing the right hand's power for evil is not to be
+condemned. Many other players have sought some such method of crippling
+the very dangerous hand.</p>
+
+<p>But after all it is not the shots he plays, good as they are, dependable
+as they always seem to be, as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> qualities of temperament with which
+they are supported. He has a golfing temperament of very peculiar
+perfection, wanting perhaps in imagination but remarkably serviceable to
+his game. He seems to have the power to eliminate entirely the mental
+oppression of the other ball or balls; he can play his own game nearly
+regardless of what others play against him. From the mere sporting point
+of view he misses something in the way of emotions perhaps, those rare
+emotions which some of us derive when we are fighting hard to keep our
+match alive and at a crisis become hopelessly bunkered; but he gains
+enormously in strokes and successes. When he settles down to his match
+or round, he can concentrate more deeply than any other man I know or
+have heard of. He sees his ball, thinks what he should do with it, and
+has the course and the hole in his mental or optical vision all the
+time, just those and nothing else. The other balls do not exist, and the
+scores that are made against him do not exist either. He has told me
+that in important golf, and indeed in that most mightily important
+play-off against Vardon and Ray, he was wholly unaware until it came to
+the putting what his opponents had done, and generally he had not seen
+their balls after they had driven them from the tee. Vardon and Ray
+pounded away as hard as they could, but their shots had no more effect
+on Ouimet than the patting of an infant's fist would have on the cranium
+of a nigger. He just went on and did better. Andrew Kirkaldy once said
+of Harry Vardon at the beginning of his career that he had the heart of
+an iron ox, and that is like Ouimet's. This championship will always be
+something of a mystery; but in this statement about the Ouimet
+temperament there is the nearest thing to a solution of it that can ever
+be offered. I know that what I say is the simple truth, partly from
+observation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> partly from inquiry, and partly from Mr. Ouimet's
+statements to me. He said he was unaware of the presence of the crowd on
+the fourth day when he made the tie until he was in the neighbourhood of
+the seventeenth green.</p>
+
+<p>See how interesting he becomes despite the plainness of his game. When
+such achievements as his of the 20th of September are made they rarely
+suffer from any want of added romance. On the day in question Mr.
+Ouimet, champion as he had become, told me in a talk we had, how he
+began the game when he was about four years of age. He was a French
+Canadian by blood, but his parents had come over the border and their
+little family settled at Brookline close to the sixteenth green of the
+Country Club. His elder brothers played a kind of golf, and he watched
+them and began to practise himself on some pasture land near his home.
+Then he became a caddie at Brookline, played the game more seriously
+than before, with three clubs that a member of the Country Club gave to
+him, and at sixteen years of age won, at the second attempt, the
+championship of his school. They make a feature of school championships
+in America. This story was attractive enough, but the next day, reading
+the American papers, one gathered that there was some of the romance of
+a Joan of Arc about this boy of Brookline. His mother said that when
+Francis was a little boy of six or seven he would cross the road and sit
+for hours fascinated by watching the members of the Country Club at the
+game. Then he wanted to become a caddie, and maternal objections did not
+avail. He became a caddie. His mother also said that he learned much of
+the game then, and would always try to get engaged by the strongest
+players, and he would copy as well as he could their best strokes. He
+passed from the grammar school to the Brookline High School, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> his
+mind was more on golf than on his books. The mother used to hear noises
+up in his room at night. Once she was frightened by what she heard, and
+went to his room at midnight fearing that he was sick. She found him
+putting on the floor, and he then confessed that he had often done that
+kind of thing before. On that occasion he had thought while in bed of a
+new grip and wished to try it. He did not care to wait until the
+morning. The parents desired their son to get all advantage from
+education that he could, but after two years at the high school he
+insisted on leaving and was engaged at a Boston store where golf goods
+are dealt in. All that and more was said of him.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>In a narrative of this kind circumstances and reasonable deductions are
+everything, and shots are next to nothing, for there is little enough to
+be said about a ball in the air or its place of stopping. Only one man
+knows the truth about a golf stroke as it is played, and that is the man
+who plays it. Very often even the most expert observers are quite wrong
+in their inferences and judgments. I have explained most of the
+circumstances already. On the first of the two qualifying days, Mr.
+Ouimet came very near to taking first place in the list, for he had a
+score of 152, and only Harry Vardon beat him, and by one stroke only, as
+the result of a long putt on the last green of all. The weather was fine
+and the greens were fiery on that Tuesday. Next day there was more wind
+and there were indications of a change of weather coming. Autumn gusts
+were breaking the leaves from the tree-tops. That day Ray headed the
+qualifying list with 148, Wilfrid Reid was next to him with 149,
+M'Dermott was 161 and Mr. Travers was 165. This was good business<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> for
+England, even though it yielded nothing but a little temporary prestige.
+Then came Thursday, and in the early morning and up to a little while
+after play began there was much rain, and the greens were considerably
+slowed down. They were, indeed, reduced to a soaking state in time, and
+Tom M'Namara told me that once or twice he had actually, instead of
+putting, to root his ball with a niblick out of the greens, into which
+they had buried themselves on pitching. But Brookline stood the weather
+test very well.</p>
+
+<p>First rounds are seldom eventful; the value of the play done in them
+seems to be discounted by the circumstance that there are three more
+rounds to come. M'Dermott did a 74 in this round, Vardon and Reid 75's,
+Mr. Ouimet 77, and Ray 79, but even M'Dermott was three strokes behind
+the leaders. In the afternoon round Ray recovered brilliantly with a 70,
+Vardon and Reid both did 72's, and Mr. Ouimet 74; and at the end of this
+first proper day Vardon and Reid were at the head of the list with
+aggregates of 147, Ray was next with 149, while Mr. Ouimet was seventh
+with 151. Again the British invaders looked well in their place, and
+that night they were strong favourites for the championship. "America
+has a fight on hands," "Little left but hope," and such like, were the
+headings in newspapers. As I lay in bed at the Country Club that night,
+I heard the rain pour ceaselessly down. It rained all through the night
+and alas! all the next day as well, and the great events of that Friday
+were watched through a heavy downpour. In their third rounds Vardon did
+78, Ray 76, and Mr. Ouimet, who was playing nearly a whole round behind
+the others, and with wonderful steadiness, did a 74: and so it came
+about that with the competition three parts done, all these three were
+at the top with aggregates of 225. Now was the time for the Englishmen's
+efforts if they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> were to be made. To their own chagrin they could not
+make them when they needed. Ray took 43 to the turn, in his fourth
+round, Vardon, whose putting all the week was distinctly moderate, and
+the chief cause for his inefficiency, took 42, and though both finished
+better, their two 79's were bad and seemed to have cost them the
+championship. Vardon certainly thought they had, and took a very gloomy
+view of things. I spoke to him a little while after he had finished, and
+he said he was sorry and that they could not win then. His putting had
+let him down, he said, as he had been afraid it would, though he felt
+that the rest of his game had never been played better. "There are three
+or four out there who will beat us," said the melancholy Vardon. It
+looked like that, but the American hopes one by one failed to
+materialise. Hagin fell out; Barnes fell out; M'Dermott fell out.
+Goodness! it was going to be a tie between Vardon and Ray after all, and
+these two Englishmen would play off here at Boston for the American
+championship! Hereupon said Englishmen came out to see what was
+happening, and looked happy again. They smiled. Then men came running
+and breathless from distant parts with tidings of Ouimet. He had had a
+worried way to the turn, but had improved afterwards, so rumour said. I
+went along with our British champions to pick him up at the fourteenth
+green, and there when he came along, we found that if he did the last
+four holes in a total of one under par he would tie with the leaders,
+or, in other words, if he did the miraculous and practically impossible
+he might be permitted to have a game next day.</p>
+
+<p>I shall never forget watching that boy play those last four holes; that
+was the real fight for the championship. Their respective lengths and
+par figures are 370 yards (4), 128 yards (3), 360 yards (4), 405 yards
+(4).<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> They were stiff pars, too, you will see, with nothing given away,
+especially as the turf was soaking. At one of those holes he had to gain
+a stroke on par if he were to tie, and the others must be done in par. A
+slip anywhere would surely be fatal. It seemed that that slip was made
+with the second shot at the fifteenth, for he was wide of the green on
+the right and had to pitch from the rough, but he was dead with his
+third and got the 4 after all. At the sixteenth he holed a three yards'
+putt for the 3 and still was level with par. The much-wanted stroke was
+given to him at the next hole, which is a dog-legged thing bending to
+the left, with rough and bunkers to be avoided. He played it with good
+judgment always, and this time, on the green with his second, he holed a
+nine-yards putt for a 3. Thus he was left to get the home hole in 4 to
+tie, and by holing a five-feet putt with not a second's hesitation, just
+as if everything in golf had not seemed to depend upon it, he tied.
+Jupiter!</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>According to American golfing law and precedent the tie had to be
+decided by one extra round, all three playing together. I have no fault
+to find with this arrangement; perhaps the result would have been the
+same if two rounds had had to be played. I know, however, that Vardon
+thought it would have been better and proper if each had played
+separately, with a marker. Most people thought that as Ouimet was almost
+playing the better ball of the two Englishmen he could not possibly win.
+Theoretically he was sure to have slept badly overnight and to be in a
+terrible state of nerves in the morning. They might see him top his
+first tee shot and be three strokes to the bad on the first green.
+Really I had no such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> ideas, and when I saw him hit his first drive as
+well, cleanly and straight as any drive ever need be made, I had no
+doubts about his having slept. Vardon drove the straightest ball and
+then deliberately played short of the muddy race-track in front of the
+green, but Mr. Ouimet boldly took his brassey, went for the carry, and
+just did it. The hole was done in 5 each, and the second in 4 each; but
+at the third Ray, who had driven too much to the right and had a bad
+stance below his ball, only just got to the corner of the green, a long
+way from the pin, with his second, and then took three putts, thus
+dropping a stroke behind the others. At the fourth and fifth, at the
+latter of which Mr. Ouimet put a spoon shot out of bounds through his
+club slipping in his hands, but recovered splendidly with the same club,
+the score remained the same. Then at the sixth, a drive and pitch up a
+hill, Vardon approached to within three yards, and the others to within
+six yards of the pin, Vardon holing his putt and Mr. Ouimet (who decided
+on consideration to concentrate on his 4) and Ray just missing. So
+Vardon was then one stroke better than the American, and the latter
+still one less than Ray who, by a better run up from the edge of the
+green at the seventh, scored over both his opponents. At the eighth
+there was a dramatic episode, for Mr. Ouimet laid a low approach
+stone-dead and holed for a 3, while Ray ran down a twelve yards' putt
+for another 3, Vardon being beaten here though getting a perfect par 4.
+All were level and the excitement and suspense intense. Something was
+expected to happen at the ninth, the longest hole on the course, and a
+great, romantic piece of golf. It is a long, heaving hole carved through
+rock, and partly built on a swamp, and away in the far distance is a
+high plateau green which, seen through the rain and mist, looked like a
+ghostly thing in the clouds. Here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> Vardon slashed out for length, but
+with a hook sent his ball into the woods. Yet he recovered well, and
+after stress and strain by all three this tortuous hole was done in five
+each. The parties were all level at the turn with 38 strokes each.
+Immediately afterwards Mr. Ouimet went to the front, and was never
+deprived of the lead. The tenth hole is the short one named "The Redan,"
+with a heavily bunkered green low down in a valley below the tee. Each
+tee shot was right, but Vardon and Ray were poor on the green and took
+three putts, while the American was down in one less. Vardon looked
+serious now, and Ray was fidgetty. There were three 4's at the eleventh,
+and then Mr. Ouimet reached the twelfth green with his second, four
+yards from the pin, Vardon and Ray being just off on opposite sides.
+They both took five to hole out. Mr. Ouimet, by boldness, might have
+gained two strokes here, but he was a trifle short with his putt and was
+satisfied with a profit of one. This was followed by Vardon holing a
+three-yard putt and getting a point back, but at the fourteenth there
+were ominous signs of the British game collapsing, for Vardon went into
+the woods again, Ray shot off wildly to the right with his second, and
+they were both well out of it with 5's, like Mr. Ouimet whose brassey
+shot went too low to clear properly a bank in front. Mr. Ouimet told me
+that at this stage he felt he was going to win. Not one of the three had
+been bunkered so far, but at the fifteenth Ray was caught and, needing
+two strokes for recovery, was virtually done for.</p>
+
+<p>The last stage of the struggle lay between Vardon and Mr. Ouimet. Both
+got 3's at the short sixteenth. Vardon was looking anxious and worried,
+for most brilliant play on his own part could not save him now, and he
+could only hope that Mr. Ouimet would come by disaster. Instead of that
+he himself, trying to cut<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> the corner of the dog-legged seventeenth too
+finely in an effort to gain distance, was bunkered. Ray, in wild
+desperation, had hurled himself with terrific force at the ball on the
+tee in an impossible attempt to carry straight over the bunkers and the
+rough in a straight line to the green. As to Mr. Ouimet, he just played
+an easy iron shot to the green dead on the line of the pin and holed a
+six-yard putt for 3 and a gain of two clear strokes. It was really
+finished then, and in the circumstances the playing of the last hole was
+a formality. Mr. Ouimet did it steadily for par 4; Vardon was caught in
+the race track before the green and took 6, and Ray holed a fruitless
+putt for 3. Mr. Ouimet was champion, and there was an end of it. Seeing
+that history was made, let me set down the scores:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<table>
+
+
+
+<tr><td></td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">First Half</span></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Ouimet        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align="right">5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  5</td><td>&mdash;</td><td>38</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Vardon        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align="right">5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  5</td><td>&mdash;</td><td>38</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ray           &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align="right">5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  5</td><td>&mdash;</td><td>38</td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td></td><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Second Half</span></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>Ouimet        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  4</td><td>&mdash;</td><td>34&mdash;</td><td>72</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Vardon        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align="right">4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  5&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  6</td><td>&mdash;</td><td>39&mdash;</td><td>77</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ray           &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td align="right">4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;5  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;6  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  5&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  3</td><td>&mdash;</td><td>40&mdash;</td><td>78</td></tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<p>Mr. Ouimet's score exactly equalled that of the better ball of Vardon
+and Ray.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>I shall say no more about what happened immediately afterwards than that
+the American crowd gave a hearty demonstration of the fact that they
+were very pleased indeed. A considerable sum of money was raised by a
+collection for Mr. Ouimet's little caddie,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> Eddie Lowry, who was a
+wonder of a mite and inspired the new champion throughout the week with
+all sorts of advice. He would tell him in the mornings to take time over
+his putts as it was then only ten o'clock and he had until six at night
+to play; would remind him again at a suitable moment that America was
+expecting great things from him, and, above all, whispered gently to him
+on handing him his club for each shot that he must be careful to keep
+his eye on the ball! It is declared, moreover, that at the beginning of
+the tie round he assured his master that a 72 would that time be
+forthcoming. Little Eddie Lowry had his share of glory.</p>
+
+<p>And now what about it all? How is it to be explained? Vardon and Ray
+generously and properly admitted they were beaten fairly and squarely on
+their merits. They could not say otherwise. I believe that Vardon came
+to the conclusion at the end of his American tour that he played worse
+golf at that championship than anywhere else, but on that final day on
+which everything depended he did not play so badly as he may have
+thought, and his putting was better than usual. I would not like to
+guarantee either Englishman to do much better in the same conditions at
+any time. On the other hand, Mr. Ouimet was blessed with no special
+luck, except that negative kind of luck that kept his ball out of
+trouble always, and made two putts invariably sufficient. His driving
+was as long as Vardon's, and he was the straightest of all, while he
+missed some putts by half-inches. He played a bold game too, and the
+only semblance of timidity was in occasionally being a trifle short with
+long putts, while Vardon and Ray, desperate, but in proper principle,
+were giving the hole every chance and often running past it. Mr. Ouimet
+seemed to general his own game so thoroughly well. Talking to me
+afterwards, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> explained completely his policy at every shot in the
+match, and showed himself to be a thinker of the finest strain. He was
+all for running approaches instead of pitched ones that day, because he
+feared the ball embedding itself in the soft turf, and also felt that
+when running it would be more likely to shed dirt that it picked up and
+leave him a clean putt. Everything was considered and well decided, and
+in his argument one could find no flaw. And he insisted that he just
+played his own game and never watched the other balls. "Looking back on
+it all," said he, "I think it was just this way, that Vardon and Ray
+rather expected me to crack, not having the experience for things like
+this as they had, and when the time went on and I did not crack but went
+along with them, I think it had an unfavourable effect on them. That is
+the way I reason it out, because when you expect a man to crack and he
+doesn't, you lose a little of your sureness yourself. I began to feel
+that the championship was coming to me when we were about the fourteenth
+hole, for Ray then seemed to be going, and he was swinging rather wildly
+at the ball." I think that Mr. Ouimet's explanation was tolerably near
+the truth. Some of the secret history of this championship may never be
+written, but I know that Harry Vardon realised when it was too late that
+he had been paying insufficient attention to what Mr. Ouimet was doing,
+and what the possibilities were in that direction. At the beginning he
+felt that the real contest lay between him and Ray, never dreaming that
+Mr. Ouimet could hold out against them. Therefore he concentrated on
+Ray, as it were, and when he had Ray beaten he realised too late that
+there was some one else. It may have made no difference, but a thousand
+times have we had demonstrated to us the capacity of our champions for
+playing "a little bit extra" when it is really needed. Anyhow it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> was
+Vardon's own mistake, if it was one, and he is very sorry for it.</p>
+
+<p>A consideration of great importance is the way in which this victory was
+confirmed, as it were, by the other events of the week. It does not
+generally happen that the men who distinguish themselves in preliminary
+qualifying competitions go through winners of championships afterwards.
+Men can rarely play their best for six rounds in succession, and, the
+law of averages being at work all the time, they would rather perform
+indifferently in the first test, so long as they qualify, than beat all
+the others. I do not recall a case where the champion would have been
+champion if all six rounds had been counted in, instead of the four of
+the competition proper. But this time at Brookline we had seven rounds
+played, and the astonishing fact is that, if all seven rounds were
+counted in, Mr. Ouimet would still be at the top with a score of 528
+against Ray's 530 and Vardon's 532. I think that this is a point which
+has not been much realised, and it is one of importance in dealing with
+the idea that a fluke victory was achieved. You can hardly have a fluke
+victory in four stroke rounds; much less can you have one in seven. Now
+I would suggest that if Vardon and Ray had dropped behind in the
+scoring, and had occupied other places than they did in the final
+aggregates, there might have been some good support for the fluke
+theory. Their defeat by several people would have needed far more
+explanation, because it would have been clear that, for some reason,
+they were beaten by golfers inferior to themselves. Conditions and
+climate would have become considerations of greater importance. But
+merely the fact that these men finished second and third in such a big
+field indicates that there was little fluke anywhere, for this was a
+marvellous vindication of form in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> competition, in a game where form is
+so much affected by fortune. And, finally, the fact that Mr. Ouimet beat
+these men in the play-off when he had them both there in sight, playing
+stroke against stroke with him, and not an invisible field without any
+definite menace as in the previous play, was quite enough to stamp him
+as the most thoroughly deserving champion of that week. British golfing
+pride will force the suggestion to many minds that such a thing, proper
+as it was on this occasion, could never happen again; that if the
+championship were replayed in the same conditions Mr. Ouimet would be
+beaten. But of how many champions could it be said that if they had to
+play the event over again a week or a month later, the luck of the game
+being what it is, they would repeat their triumph? Reflecting once more
+that this was but a boy of twenty, and the real greatness of our players
+being what it is, I am more amazed than ever at what has happened. It
+was an American victory and America takes the credit, but, again, the
+United States are by no means full of Ouimets. I look upon him as a
+first-class prodigy, such as the game has never known before, produced
+in the country where such a golfing prodigy was most likely to make his
+appearance. He accomplished what had never been done before, and what I
+feel sure will never be done again, and because it was such an historic
+happening, and there were so few from England there to see it as I did,
+I have told the tale in full. Nobody believes that Mr. Ouimet is as
+great as Harry Vardon and Edward Ray. He could not be. But also I do not
+think that any one else could do what he did at Brookline on that
+occasion. I found, a long time after the occurrence, that many wise
+American golfers, reflecting dispassionately if still proudly upon it,
+gave a certain satisfaction to their reason by suggesting as a final
+explanation that a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> miracle had happened. That is a good way out of our
+difficulties, and for my own part I accept it, for it is the only
+explanation that will stand all tests. A miracle happened at Brookline
+on that Twentieth of September.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BEGINNINGS OF GOLF IN THE UNITED STATES, AND EXPERIENCES IN
+TRAVELLING THERE, WITH AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CLUB MANAGEMENT.</h3>
+
+
+<p>There is little done to solve the mysteries of golf's beginning by
+pressing into the farthest recesses of American golfing history. Only by
+such little twinklings in the darkness of the almost prehistoric period
+of the game do we begin more to suspect that, being such a natural and
+simple thing, an almost inevitable kind of pastime despite its man-made
+intricacies and laws, and all its heartenings and maddenings, it came up
+of itself in different places, when man had reached full intelligence
+and the desire to play properly other games than such as bowls. Those
+Indian braves who wandered and hunted and fought over that magnificent
+land when in its virgin state must have tried to knock something like a
+ball, or a stone, in the direction of a particular mark, and that would
+be a game for them. I remember hearing that several years ago a visitor
+to one of the reservations found several of the red men playing golf of
+a kind, with real clubs and balls. "Purple Cloud" was the champion of
+the braves. Then in the autumn of 1903 another white wanderer looked in
+upon the Indians in the reservation at Montana and reported that he had
+witnessed a very spirited game. Golf, said he, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> much better suited to
+the Indian of to-day than his old game of lacrosse. He noticed very few
+subtleties in the game. When the champion, "Spotted Horse," drove off,
+there was a long stretch of clear prairie, with only here and there a
+shrub, so that the game resolved itself into a chase of the ball for a
+couple of miles and a return, the one who did it in the fewest strokes
+being the winner. He saw some really capital drives, several well over
+three hundred yards, he thought. The only thing that was very new and
+characteristic about these red men's golf, so far as he could see, was
+that the spectators "made a most infernal row all the time that the play
+was in progress." When a brave took his stance for a tee shot, it was
+looked upon as the signal for a perfect bedlam of yells and howling,
+which should have disconcerted the player but did not do so. And with my
+own eyes have I seen the modern Indians playing for the American
+championship, and it might be claimed that though laws be made at St.
+Andrews, and interpretations thereof in the council chamber of the white
+men at New York, this after all, in essentials, is a game that is native
+of the soil. Yet the history of such a game down the Indian line must be
+hazy as the history of the braves themselves, and we must leave it now
+with this ample recognition.</p>
+
+<p>But though in names and other matters there is a Scottish flavour in
+some of the records of the earliest American golf, and when it became a
+real and growing thing it was obviously imported, one is sometimes
+inclined to think that the Simpsonian theory of the spontaneous
+generation of golf, or what approximated in essentials to golf, must
+have applied to America as to other countries. A stick, a ball, a mark,
+and there is the principle of golf fully indicated.</p>
+
+<p>In a primitive way also it was played in America in the seventeenth
+century, and, as in the homeland, some of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> the earliest references to it
+that remain take the form of warnings of the punishments accruing to
+players who departed from such severe restrictions as were imposed. It
+was not proclaimed what advantages would be yielded men who played, as
+is done to-day, but what grievous penalties they should suffer if they
+played it when and where they should not, and alas! the times and places
+that were forbidden appeared to be many in proportion to those when the
+game might be enjoyed by those who liked it. Then as now, and in America
+as in happy England, those who were not of golf were against it, and
+bitterly. There were jealousies then as ever since. There were those
+often-quoted Laws and Ordinances of the New Netherlands of 1659 in
+which, because of a complaint by the burghers of Fort Orange and the
+village of Berwyck about the damage done to their windows and the danger
+to which they were exposed of being wounded by persons who played golf
+along the streets, the golfers were threatened of consequences to come.
+Then clearly the game was played in South Carolina in 1788, for at that
+time an advertisement appeared in a local newspaper thus: "Anniversary
+of the South Carolina Golf Club will be held at Williams's Coffee House
+on Thursday, 29th instant, when members are requested to attend at 2
+o'clock precisely, that the business of the Club may be transacted
+before dinner." Here there is a clear indication of the close connection
+maintained between the playing of the game and the social ceremonies
+about the dinner-table that were held by the golfers on the same day in
+the way that was practised by the early golfers of the Scottish centres
+and of Blackheath. For many years afterwards these meetings of the South
+Carolina Golf Club were held at the club-house on what was known as
+"Harton's Green," which is now in the heart of Charleston. Perhaps this
+was the first golf club-house in America, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> if that were so it shared
+the fate of pioneer establishments in many other places where towns have
+widened and gathered in the outlying lands. There is also preserved in
+the archives the form of invitation that was sent to Miss Eliza Johnston
+to attend the ball of the Savannah Golf Club at the Exchange hall in
+that city in December 1811. And then American golf seems to have lapsed
+and slept like Van Winkle in the Catskills until the time of the great
+regeneration came near the end of last century. One does not come now to
+make a history of American golf, but only to indicate that new and
+republican America also has something in the way of golf traditions.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The real beginning of American golf was made, as you may know, out at
+Yonkers up the Hudson, and Mr. John Reid, the elder, is rightly regarded
+as the father of American golf. Such recognition being of long standing
+and his claims being incontestable, he was again publicly and officially
+proclaimed as such at the silver jubilee celebration that was held in
+New York on November 19, 1913. That was twenty-five years from the time
+when the game was really set going in the States. One night I sat over a
+log fire in a club-house in Massachusetts and heard the story of the
+foundation by his father from the lips of Mr. John Reid, the younger,
+secretary of the United States Golf Association. He told me how his
+father and Robert Lockhart, who went to the same school in Scotland,
+came to America together; how Lockhart who, as a buyer of goods, had to
+pay periodical visits to his homeland, talked of the strange game that
+was played there; how Mr. Reid became interested and asked for clubs and
+balls to be brought across the water; how he tried the swings and
+strokes in a field by their house at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> Yonkers, the son "fielding" for
+the father; how the captain of a steamer was persuaded to bring another
+set of clubs over with him, and how irons were thereafter cast in
+America. Then he told me how other people, few but keen, were attracted
+to this new pastime that the Reids were trying, and how the first little
+club was formed here at Yonkers in November 1888, and called the St.
+Andrews Golf Club. They were as the golfing fathers. I learned how the
+members came to be known as the Apple Tree Gang because of the tree near
+to the first hole on which they hung their coats; how six holes were
+laid out at the beginning on Mr. Reid's land, his house being used as a
+club-house; how he gave a medal which was the first prize ever put up
+for competition in America&mdash;and it was for an annual thirty-six holes
+stroke competition&mdash;and how it was won for eleven years, three in
+succession, by Mr. George Sands. Those were days of consequence. From
+that little beginning the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, after many
+changes and enlargements, has risen to a place of importance and honour
+in American golf.</p>
+
+<p>These little histories and traditions of American golf do become
+attractive as one probes more deeply into them. It was in Massachusetts
+that the most remarkable thing that has ever taken place in the history
+of the game on the other side of the Atlantic, or anywhere
+perhaps&mdash;meaning, of course, the Ouimet triumph&mdash;happened lately, and I
+have been much attracted to the story of the beginning of golf in that
+part of the American world, and not less so when I see that the start
+was made such a very little while before the birth of the boy who won
+that great championship at Brookline. American golf and Ouimet have
+grown up together. One finds that in the summer of 1892 a young lady
+from Pau went on a visit to Mr. Arthur Hunnewell, at Wellesley, Mass.,
+and took with her a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> set of golf clubs and balls. They had been playing
+the game for a long time past at Pau, but it was only just being started
+in other parts of France. After Yonkers it had been reproduced at
+Shinnecock and one or two other places, but so far Massachusetts had not
+known it. The girl showed Mr. Hunnewell how the clubs were used, and
+some relatives of his, owning adjacent estates and being fond of outdoor
+pastimes, watched and were won quickly to the game. On the first of June
+Mr. Hunnewell wrote down in his diary, "F. B. arrived to-day from
+Europe"; and on the fifteenth of September, "We are getting quite
+excited about golf." A fortnight later he wrote that "J. B. is here and
+plays golf all day." I calculate it as a coincidence worth remark that
+twenty-one years afterwards, to the month and to the week, Mr. Ouimet
+won the great championship.</p>
+
+<p>Many of Mr. Hunnewell's friends were invited to come and attempt the
+game at his place, which they did accordingly and fell in love with it.
+He had fashioned a course of seven holes of moderate length over
+undulating lawns and some park-land. The actual holes consisted of
+five-inch flower-pots sunk in the turf, and the hazards were avenues,
+clumps of trees, beds of rhododendrons, an aviary, a greenhouse, and an
+occasional drawing-room window, as it is facetiously remarked by Mr.
+Lawrence Curtis, who became the first secretary of the golf committee of
+the Country Club, and to whose account of these happenings I am indebted
+for my notes upon them. Mr. Curtis, seeing the fascination that the game
+exercised upon all who became acquainted with it, wrote a letter to the
+executive council of the Country Club informing them of it, suggesting
+that it was a pastime that might very well be brought within the scope
+of the club, and that the cost of an experimental course need not
+exceed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> some fifty dollars. The suggestion was backed by several members
+and the council agreed, the course being laid out in the spring of the
+following year. The home hole was placed on a lawn in front of the
+club-house which was soon discovered to be a very dangerous place for
+it, so that it had to be removed. Almost immediately the game became a
+strong attraction at the Country Club, new members came along in droves
+because of it, and it has flourished ever since. The example of this
+powerful club was followed at the Essex County Club at Manchester, then
+just being begun. Mr. Herbert Leeds, now so closely and honourably
+associated with Myopia, won the Country Club's championship in 1893 with
+a score for eighteen holes of 109, Mr. Curtis being next with 110; and
+that summer a Country Club side won a team tournament that was played at
+Tuxedo against the St. Andrews and Tuxedo Clubs. And afterwards all went
+very well indeed.</p>
+
+<p>And while I write in this way of the grand pioneering work that was done
+in those days when champions of the present time were being born and
+trained, I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Mr. Edward
+Blackwell, in which he told me of his going out to California in 1886
+and staying there for six years. His people had bought some land in
+those western parts, and he and his two brothers went out there to
+convert it from barley to a vineyard. Mr. Blackwell is a very great
+golfer to-day, but considering the gutty ball and circumstances in
+general, he was, relatively to his contemporaries, as great then. Only
+about a week before he sailed for California a match was arranged
+between him and Jack Simpson, who had gained the Open Championship the
+previous year, and Mr. Blackwell won that match at the last of the
+thirty-six holes that were played. Out in California there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> was plenty
+of hard work to do on the land and good sport with the gun, but, of
+course, there was no golf. Mr. Blackwell's thoughts frequently turned
+towards it, and he missed it very much. He considered the possibilities
+and found that they were practically non-existent, for the country round
+about was too hopelessly rough for laying out any sort of holes. So he
+never saw a golf club and never hit a ball during those six years, but
+for all that he won the King William IV. medal at the autumn meeting of
+the Royal and Ancient Club immediately on his return. Then he went back
+to California and did not see club or ball for another five years. Some
+of us could almost wish he had made some sort of course out there in
+California and become the first golfer of that far west, for he would
+have been so good to have been a pioneer, and golf has flourished there
+exceedingly since then. California sends men to championships. It would
+have given a special piquancy to that fateful amateur championship final
+at Sandwich in 1904 when Mr. Blackwell was his country's last hope
+against America's Mr. Walter Travis, and as it happened he was not quite
+equal to the occasion, for the American captured four holes at the start
+with his amazing putting, and he won by as many at the end.</p>
+
+<p>That was a great day for American golf, a kind of consummation it was,
+and I shall never forget the queer sensation that filled the atmosphere
+on the St. George's course, nor the dumb feeling, not exactly of dismay
+but of incomprehension, there was at the end. As to the first of these
+sensations I believe that nearly everybody felt&mdash;without knowing why
+exactly, for comparatively few had noticed his play until he got to the
+fourth or fifth rounds and was appreciated as dangerous&mdash;that the
+American player was nearly sure to win, that nothing could stop him from
+winning. It was a conviction.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> Certainly Mr. Travis's wonderful putting
+had created a very deep impression, but if he had been a British player
+I think the feeling would have arisen that putting like that, which had
+been continued for the best part of a week, would be sure to give out
+before the end. Take the case, for instance, of Mr. Aylmer in the
+championship of 1910 at Hoylake. He had been putting in the most amazing
+manner all the time, and holing them from everywhere, but nobody had any
+confidence in his ability to beat Mr. John Ball in the final, and he
+collapsed utterly. Of course, Mr. Aylmer then had not the tremendous
+fighting power and pertinacity of Mr. Travis in match play, qualities of
+their kind which I have only seen equalled by a successor of his in the
+American championship roll, Mr. Jerome Travers, and to beat Mr. Ball at
+Hoylake is a different matter from beating Mr. Blackwell at Sandwich.
+But then they were saying that Mr. Aylmer could not go much farther even
+when he was only at about the third round, and as for Mr. Ball at
+Hoylake there was a considerable feeling among golfers about that time
+that the old champion could not go on defying the law of averages any
+longer, and that there could be no more championships for him. I confess
+that I rather shared this view, held in a superstitious sort of way, but
+now that Mr. John has clapped another championship on to that Hoylake
+affair, we have given him up. There is no reason why he should not win
+another eight! However, when the Scot and the American teed up that
+fateful morning there was a disposition to be sorry for Mr. Blackwell,
+and a kind of hope that the end might be painless. In the circumstances
+Mr. Blackwell's performance in losing nothing more after losing four of
+the first five holes was as good as it could be. He kept the pump
+working splendidly.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The truth is that he was by no means so gloomy as his friends about his
+prospects, as he told me afterwards. He said he thought he had a good
+chance of winning, and did not believe he would get beaten. He wished,
+however, that the tees had been farther back so that his long driving
+would have given him a better advantage. Two things about his opponent
+impressed him very much, one, of course, being his astonishing putting
+and the other his silence. But then, of course, one does not work one's
+way into a final of a championship for conversational purposes, or for
+debating the merits of the sixth sub-section of one of the rules of
+golf. When the deed was done completely Mr. Blackwell joined the
+converts who departed from the old prejudice and raided Tom Vardon's
+shop for Schenectady putters, with which they practised, and marvelled
+as the sun was setting on the first day that any but a British player
+had won a British golf championship. With that victory the first era in
+modern American golf, not counting the prehistoric times of golf in
+Charleston and the Indians' games, came to an end. America had made
+good. Now she became a power.</p>
+
+<p>The second era lasted nine years and was one in which she gradually came
+to be taken more seriously. She suffered a set-back of sorts when Mr.
+Harold Hilton won the American Amateur Championship at Apawamis in 1911,
+but there were some circumstances attending that victory at the
+thirty-seventh hole which were rather galling to the Americans, and they
+behaved well in saying so little about them. Mr. Hilton ran away with
+the match in the final, as it appeared, and Mr. Fred Herreshoff in the
+afternoon was offered about the most forlorn hope that golfer ever had
+to lighten his way for him. He brightened it up and made it thoroughly
+serviceable, and was distinctly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> unlucky in being beaten at the extra
+tie hole when Mr. Hilton's bad second shot cannoned off the famous rock
+to the right and went kindly to the putting green instead of getting
+into a hopeless place. It has been said that even if Mr. Hilton's shot
+was lucky, Mr. Herreshoff played the hole so badly that he hardly
+deserved to win it even if he was hardly treated by losing. But it is
+forgotten that it was match play, and that what one man does affects the
+other's game, and Mr. Herreshoff told me once, long after, that the
+American crowd, which is supposed erroneously to be many shots to the
+advantage of an American playing against an Englishman, on that occasion
+misled and upset him. It cheered for Mr. Hilton at the wrong time and
+for the wrong thing, and led to Mr. Herreshoff making a hash of a most
+fateful stroke. This era of American golf came to an end with the
+amazing victory by Mr. Ouimet at Brookline.</p>
+
+<p>The present state of things is very remarkable, and I have found the
+study of it very interesting during two long golfing expeditions through
+the United States, when I have visited many of the chief American clubs,
+met and made friends with men who are at the head of American golf and
+the most distinguished players, and in every way gained a good practical
+knowledge of the amazing progress of the game in this country. The
+Englishman who visits America and is not a golfer suffers a loss that he
+must regret always afterwards. To strangers in general the Americans in
+their own country are kindly and hospitable. That touch of carelessness
+and arrogance which is sometimes noticed in the wandering American when
+he is "doing Europe" is not in evidence among good Americans when they
+are at home, always provided that the Englishman has the good sense and
+manners&mdash;which one regrets to say is not always the case&mdash;to remember
+that when in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> house of his host it is not good taste to praise his
+own for its superiority in divers ways. Pay the American now and then,
+and with proper delicacy, that little compliment that is so very well
+deserved about the magnificence of his achievement in making a country
+like that in such a short space of time, and about the excellence of
+many of his established systems. It is a compliment that can and should
+be paid with the most absolute sincerity. The American has the right to
+be proud of his own country, and we should be proud of the American, for
+that his blood is much the same as ours&mdash;trite observations, no doubt,
+but commonly disregarded. Then with all his fancy hustle and his
+tarnation smartness, the American is at bottom rather a sentimental man
+(perhaps it is because he has to be so very businesslike most times that
+he is liable to a sharp reaction at any good chance) and he is touched
+with signs of genuine good feeling towards him and an appreciation of
+what he has done. Thereupon in a softened voice he will tell of his
+weaknesses, and of his appreciation of the greatness of mother England,
+and he will play the host in a more thorough and warm-hearted way than
+any other man on earth will or can. The ordinary non-golfing visitor may
+find out many of these things, and have his own good time in his simple
+way, but even in the freest countries there are often social omissions,
+accidents, and disasters when there is not good common ground for
+meeting and friends in waiting, and it is very possible to go to America
+and fail in the way of holiday. The man who visits as a golfer, enters
+at once into joys of existence and the most friendly companionship. I
+have visited clubs in many parts of the country, and have made good and
+abiding friends among countless golfers, and it is but a poor expression
+of my feelings to say that I am very appreciative and deeply grateful.
+If, therefore, for anything whatever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> I should criticise the golf of the
+country I hope that American golfers will believe that in my comments
+there is no trace of adverse prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to estimate how many players of this game there are in
+the country at the present time, and whatever figures were fixed upon
+would soon be made inaccurate through the rapid increase that is going
+on all the time&mdash;more rapid by far than is the case in Britain. I have
+seen it estimated that there are six or seven hundred clubs in the
+States at the present time, with a total membership of about a hundred
+and fifty thousand. The Americans say that they will double their
+golfing population in the next five years.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>It is impossible for a person who has not crossed the Atlantic to
+imagine the United States as the country and people really are. I found
+it easier to imagine Italy and Spain and oriental Morocco before ever I
+went to those places, than I did to conceive a picture of the country
+and the life of our own blood relations in this new America. All the
+fraternising with Americans in London and elsewhere, our reading of
+their newspapers and their books, printed in the words of our own
+language, pictures and photographs of the Statue of Liberty in New York
+Harbour, of the sky-scrapers in the background and the Fifth Avenue that
+glitters on a summer's day, all the pictures of Boston and Washington,
+or of the boulevards and business activities of Chicago, will not help
+any one to preconceive those places exactly. The atmosphere and the life
+and the ways of the people are a little beyond the imagination of the
+untravelled western man. In the same way I do not think that British
+golfers who have not been to the United States can understand the
+American's present-day<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> attitude towards the game; certainly those who
+have not been to America should not judge upon it as they are often
+inclined to do. It is good, sound, and in its every aspect it is
+exceedingly interesting.</p>
+
+<p>Wandering through the country I have visited many clubs and courses. If
+we would have much golf in America we must move quickly as the Americans
+do, and think as little of travelling all night as they think, for it
+would be too much waste of time to make the long journeys that have to
+be made by precious daylight. As a rule the golfer at home protests
+against being asked to play anything like his best game after a night in
+a railway train. I remember Mr. H. E. Taylor, who is not possessed of
+the strongest constitution in the world, told me that he had set off
+from Charing Cross one morning in the winter, arrived at Cannes in the
+south of France at breakfast time on the next morning, cleaned himself
+and put on his golfing shoes, and then gone along to the golf course out
+at La Napoule to win a scratch gold medal. Again I recall that Mr.
+Hilton once travelled all night from Hoylake to Muirfield and broke the
+record of the course there on arrival, playing two more rounds the same
+day. However, men like these are exceptions to most rules.</p>
+
+<p>But a golfer may cure himself of more of his weaknesses and
+susceptibilities than he may think he can&mdash;all that are imaginary and
+not really of the temperament. A man who hates wind and avoids it would
+learn to play well and bravely in it if he had always to take his golf
+on an exposed part of the eastern coast. The ability or otherwise to
+play in wind is largely a matter of temperament. So it is with the
+journeys. I had either to golf, and golf for me tolerably well, in the
+intervals of scampering from one part of the country to the other, or I
+had to spoil the whole expedition. I managed it somehow.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Arriving in New York for the first time early on a Sunday morning, I
+fixed myself up at my appointed quarters, rang up a golfer on the
+telephone, and then, according to arrangement, proceeded to track a man
+down at his club on the Fifth Avenue with the object of playing in the
+afternoon. I walked into Fifth Avenue from a cross street, and my first
+glimpse of it is one that will not soon be forgotten. It was a glorious
+morning, the sun shining hot and white, and New York, for the only time
+in its hustling week, was comparatively quiet. There was no traffic and
+few people just then in the Fifth Avenue, quite one of the most majestic
+and wonderful thoroughfares in the world despite its plain simplicity.
+But it was not the whiteness, not the glittering cleanliness, not the
+real splendour of this Fifth Avenue with all its newness, that struck
+the first impression on my mind. Upon the moment that this wandering
+British player of the most meditative of games emerged from somewhere
+round about West 36th or 37th, into the big avenue, there whizzed along
+it, right in front, a motor funeral which was doing a fine fifty miles
+an hour clip along the smooth and open thoroughfare. There was just the
+hearse with glass panels, the coffin plainly exhibited inside, and the
+chauffeur on the seat, with another man beside him who might have been a
+mourner. Holding life a little more cheaply in America than we do, they
+grieve a little less for those who lose it, which is not to say that
+they are heartless or unsympathetic, but more practical. This funeral,
+done with petrol instead of horses, was positively going north at the
+rate of fifty miles an hour. It was moving just as fast as I saw any car
+ever go in the United States, and I could not help reflecting that the
+spirit of the good American, viewing the last journey of its separated
+corpus, must feel a certain satisfaction that it was hustlingly done and
+that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> no time was wasted. <i>Finis coronat opus!</i> Inspired, I played on
+two different courses in New York on the same afternoon.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>English people hear much about railroad travelling being far better in
+the United States than it is in our own country. It is&mdash;and it is not.
+The comfort and conveniences of the cars in the daytime are much in
+advance of anything we have. The men's smoking cars, the observation
+cars, the parlour cars, are delightful and enable us thoroughly to enjoy
+the journeys. Although they standardise so many things in America, they
+cease their standardisations when considerations of personal comfort and
+peculiarities have to be considered. It never occurred to me until I
+travelled my first thousand miles in America that it is a hardship that,
+no matter what our girth may be, nor the length of our bodies and legs,
+we must all of us at home, though we pay for our first-class
+accommodation, sit in standardised seats which are all the same and
+attached to each other. In the American railroad car running on a
+long-distance journey there are seats of different sorts, some are high
+and some are low, and they are detached. This makes much difference. In
+the dining-cars the tables and chairs are all loose, and one does not
+have to squeeze into them with the feeling that one is being locked into
+one's place as we do in England. And the dining arrangements on the
+American cars are far superior to what they are elsewhere. But if the
+American system gains by day the British system makes up for much of the
+lost comfort at night, and that is when the American, golfer and
+non-golfer, does most of his long-distance travelling. The Pullman day
+cars are converted into sleepers by the dark-skinned attendants
+(uncommonly good railroad car servants<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> these niggers make), and by an
+almost magical transformation the lounging car is made into a sleeper
+with about two dozen berths, a dozen on each side, half uppers and half
+lowers, and an alley down the middle. The chief difference between the
+upper berths and the lower is that the uppers have to be reached by a
+short stepladder and are not convenient to fat, gouty, or unathletic
+persons, while those who wake early and like to look upon the prairie,
+or what once was that, have a window at the bottom as the people in the
+top have not. The berths are covered in with thick green curtains which
+button together. We may leave our boots outside for the attendant to
+brush in the morning, but our other clothes and traps must go along to
+bed with us, and be stowed away at the bottom of the berth, or in the
+little netting that hangs alongside. And here I must timidly state in
+evidence that there are not separate cars for the sexes; in America all
+go together, and the ladies and the men occupy the same cars. The ladies
+generally go off to bed earlier than the men. Whether they do or not, we
+all climb into our respective berths, fasten up the curtains, and
+undress in the very limited space at our disposal, a process which seems
+to me must be the same as that by which acrobatic performers wriggle
+themselves out of chains and ropes with which their limbs and bodies
+have been tied up fast. After a time we become expert. What is most
+difficult to become accustomed to is the horrible jolting, and the
+painfully sudden stopping of the trains in the middle of the night.
+Their permanent ways are not laid so finely as the magnificent lines
+along our coasts from London to Scotland. Their rails are not fixed in
+chairs laid on the sleepers, but are pinned down straight on to the
+wood. This makes much difference. The cars shake exceedingly. Then the
+drivers at night have to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> wary and stop quickly at times, and no
+doubt they do right not to reduce their speed gradually for the sake of
+the men and women who are asleep behind them, but instead to stop with a
+suddenness that could only be improved upon by a collision. However, I
+say again, that we find ourselves accustomed to it all in time.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not forget my first experience of a thousand-mile golfing
+journey from the New York Central Station to Chicago. A few golfers were
+in a party going westward for the championship at Wheaton in Illinois,
+and we discussed the game from the time of starting in the late
+afternoon until we had passed Albany, about ten, when we moved into our
+sleeping quarters. My bag of clubs had to go to bed with me, and they
+lay alongside all the night; there was no room for them underneath. I
+had to sleep with one hand on the bag to prevent them from attacking me
+or going overboard into the avenue, so much did that wretched train
+rattle and shake as it hurtled its way through the darkness, with the
+big bell in the front of the engine jangling mournfully all the time.
+And what a wild, sad note it is that is struck by the bells on these
+American engines, suggestive of the loneliness of the open country
+through which they speed, now and then making a big noise with a sort of
+foghorn. I am much attached to my clubs, and they are the chosen
+favourites of a vast number that go with their master everywhere, and
+are carefully watched and tended, but the intimacy that was sprung upon
+us then was too much, and I invented another arrangement for the next
+travelling night. James Braid, very wise man indeed, tells me that long,
+deep nights of placid slumber are the best things in the world for the
+golfer who would keep steady his hands and nerves and clear his eyes so
+that he may play the best game of which he is capable. But no British
+golfer could sleep at the beginning of his American experiences in such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+circumstances. I was just falling into some sort of a doze in the small
+hours of the morning when the train pulled up sharply at a station which
+I discovered to be Schenectady, where the famous putter that disturbed
+the peace of two nations was born. Next, one realised that we were
+within a mile or two of the Niagara Falls, and so on with jolting and
+banging and sudden stopping all the night. By and by daylight came and
+then we had a long day of travelling through the heart of America to
+Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>Some may suggest that all this about railroad travelling in the country
+where there is more of it than any other has little to do with golf, but
+it has all to do with it, for the thorough golfer in America, whether a
+citizen or British, must needs spend a large part of his time in the
+train, and if he would have the maximum amount of golf, much sleeping
+must be done behind the green curtains in the darkened cars. The
+travelling done by the American golfer, therefore, is a surprising
+thing, but a few months of it is a fine and valuable experience for the
+British golfer afterwards. No longer, since I have been across the
+Atlantic, do I consider it a far way from London to the links of
+Dornoch. St. Andrews and North Berwick have come pleasingly near to me.
+All the world has shrunk, and I feel I have my foot on every course&mdash;or
+soon may have.</p>
+
+<p>Though it be a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and these are
+the two great golfing centres of the east and west, it is a fact, as I
+know well, that the golfers in the two places visit each other for a
+weekend's golf almost as frequently and with as little fuss as would be
+the case with golfers in London who go down to Sandwich. They take the
+"Twentieth Century Limited" from New York on Friday afternoon, and on
+Saturday morning they are at Chicago. They flash out on a local train to
+Onwentsia, Midlothian, Glen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> View, Wheaton, Exmoor, or one of those
+places, play all day, start play again at eight o'clock on Sunday,
+finish their couple of rounds early in the afternoon, catch the fast
+train back to New York, and are at their office on Monday morning as if
+they had spent the week-end pottering about the garden. I am not
+concerned with the question as to whether they are prolonging their
+lives by these acts; nor are they concerned. In the meantime they appear
+to be in the best of health, and are certainly in the highest of
+spirits.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>With this talk of journeys we seem in fancy to be in Chicago now, so let
+us consider the leading club of the busy district in the heart of
+America. The course of the Chicago club is at Wheaton, some twenty-five
+miles out on the North Western line, and this is the foremost club of
+the Central States, and west in the sense of being west of the east, for
+all golfing America is divided into two parts, the east and the west,
+Chicago being the capital of and held chiefly to represent the west,
+which holds some close rivalry with the east, where New York is
+headquarters. The west out California way is just the far and other
+west, and is in another world. The Chicago club is exclusive and
+dignified. The most solid men in the city support it, and they see that
+everything is good. It is not an ancient institution, but it has some of
+the characteristics of solidity and strength of age and sound
+experience. Chicago is not an old city, but, as the proud citizens like
+to tell you, about a hundred years ago there was no Chicago at all, but
+just a few wigwams of Indians and some huts and things round about a
+creek. Since then the place has been once burnt down, and yet it is now
+the fourth largest city of the world, while in its tenseness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+commercial industry it is the foremost of all. If all the ages past in
+Chicago only amount to a hundred years, then one-fifth of all time as
+known to Chicago history, which represents the life of the Chicago Golf
+Club, is comparatively long indeed.</p>
+
+<p>In 1892 a small golf club was started for the first time round about
+Lake Forest, but the promoters had only about sixteen acres of ground.
+In the following year, when the World's Fair was held, a number of
+foreign visitors were in Chicago and asked for golf, as travellers will
+do, though the great golf boom had not yet then set in. Mr. Charles B.
+Macdonald came in with the movement, ground was searched for, and the
+Chicago Golf Club was organised at Belmont, some twenty-two miles out of
+the city. When the Fair was over in the following spring, only about
+twenty members were left to the club, and the outlook did not seem
+splendid. But once begun, in either place or man, golf is a very hard
+thing to kill. The twenty die-hards asked their friends to come and see
+the place and try the game. They did so, and those men of Chicago knew
+at once that they had discovered the real thing. A hundred and thirty
+members were quickly obtained. The inevitable result followed. They
+wanted more and better golf, and they wanted it to belong to them and
+not to be on leased ground, so in 1894 the club met and authorised the
+purchase of two hundred acres at Wheaton, twenty-four miles out from the
+city, a fine course was laid out, a splendid club-house was built, and a
+really great club was established. Here and now we may gain a very fair
+idea of the difference in cost to the player between American golf and
+British. No better club could be selected for the purpose of
+exemplification than this one. It so happened that a few days before I
+arrived there, its club-house was burnt down, with all its contents and
+appurtenances, and from the wreck<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> only a single one of the club-books
+of rules and regulations was rescued. I took possession of it while I
+made some notes upon the terrace of the only part of the building that
+was saved.</p>
+
+<p>The first paragraph in the book, being Section 1 of Article 1 of the
+bye-laws, states that "this club is incorporated under the laws of
+Illinois as Chicago Golf Club, and its corporate seal is a circular disc
+bearing the words, 'Chicago Golf Club,' the figure of a golf player, and
+the motto, 'Far and Sure.'" To become a member of the club the applicant
+must be over eighteen years of age; he must have not more than one
+adverse vote cast against him by the governing body; and he must pay an
+entrance fee of not less than a hundred dollars or £20. The resident (or
+full) membership of the club is limited to 225, and the annual
+subscription is 75 dollars or £15, half of which is payable at the
+beginning of the year and half at midsummer. Now this subscription is
+much higher than that of any golf club in Great Britain, and the fact is
+only partly attributable to the circumstance that everything in America
+is more expensive than it is in England. The higher subscription is
+necessitated because the membership is kept down so low as 225, and that
+is done in order that there may be no overcrowding of the course. In
+England such a club, being situated within thirty miles of a great city
+and having the best course round about, would probably admit at least
+five or six hundred members, with the result that on the fine and busy
+week-end days the course would be hopelessly blocked and there would be
+no pleasure for anybody. This is certainly so in the case of two or
+three of the most popular clubs in the outer London golfing area, and
+one may come to a speedy decision that in this matter the American way
+is by far the better. Ladies who are over sixteen years of age and the
+immediate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> relatives of a member are permitted to have the privileges of
+the course, subject to the rules of the Green Committee, on payment of
+ten dollars a year. There is another class, "summer members," who are
+not to exceed fifteen in number, and who pay 150 dollars for one summer
+season's play. There is practically no play in the winter, the climatic
+conditions being too severe. The other rules as to membership are much
+the same as those which obtain in the case of British golf clubs.</p>
+
+<p>Among the "house rules," it is stated that the club-house generally will
+remain open until midnight, and the café, which is the British
+equivalent of the smoke-room with bar, until one o'clock in the morning,
+which is a lateness of hour almost unheard of in England, but then it
+has to be remembered that such club-houses in America are mostly
+residential. "Juniors" are not allowed in the café. The warning is given
+that smoking and the lighting of matches in the locker or dressing room
+are absolutely prohibited, and that a fine of ten dollars will be
+imposed on any member violating this rule. Fires in club-houses in
+America being so numerous is the cause of this rule, which is rigorously
+applied. Then it is perceived that no member makes any payment
+whatsoever in cash in the club-house. He signs a check or bill, an
+account of his expenditure is kept, and it is served to him fortnightly.
+Payment must then be made within ten days, failing which the member is
+suspended. Some interesting items are to be found among the ground
+rules. One says that in medal play competitions new holes must be
+assumed to have been made on the morning of a competition, unless
+otherwise stated by the Green Committee; and another that a member
+playing a round, and keeping score other than in club competition must
+allow parties playing pure match-play<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> to pass. The Americans are not
+content with merely requesting a player to replace the divots of turf
+that he cuts up in play. They say: "Divots of turf cut up by players
+must be carefully replaced and pressed down. A fine of one dollar will
+be imposed on any member violating this rule. All members are earnestly
+requested to report any member who violates this rule to the Green
+Committee." Caddies are paid "from the time of their employment until
+the time they are discharged, to be determined by an electric clock, at
+such rate per hour as may be determined by the Green Committee." There
+is nothing that is inexpensive about a club of this class, and let it be
+understood that there are few second-class golf clubs in the States
+where the fees are small. A day's golf at a good club is cheap indeed at
+five dollars. When one goes to stay there for a night or two one finds
+that the statutory price for breakfast is a dollar, for lunch 1.25, and
+for dinner 1.30 upwards. When I returned to England it appeared that
+golf and all pertaining to it was cheap, almost to the gift point.</p>
+
+<p>The course at Wheaton is good, although there are some in America that
+are better. It is plain, its holes sometimes lack strength, but it is
+well tended and its putting greens are quite perfect. Its fairway is not
+perfect, any more than the fairways of other American courses are. The
+climate will hardly permit of their being so. It bakes them up and makes
+them hard, and the inevitable result is little knobs and depressions
+which give cuppy lies, and turf which for all its greenness is not by
+any means comfortable to the feet in comparison with the yieldingness of
+our British turf. The Americans cannot help this; if it were practicable
+to treat every inch of their turf for climatic troubles all through the
+day and night they would perhaps do it. It is practicable to treat their
+putting greens thoroughly, and the result is that, taking them all
+round, they have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> undoubtedly got the best putting greens in the world.
+I mean, without reservation, that the average of the best courses in
+America is higher than the average of the best in our own country, and I
+say it with some regret that they have a score of courses in the United
+States with greens far superior to those on the old course at St.
+Andrews the last time the Amateur Championship was played there, those
+greens being then not what they used to be. I think much of the credit
+for the high quality of the greens at Wheaton is due to the splendid
+work of David Foulis, the professional and greenkeeper there. Need I say
+that David is a Scot, and a very true Scot too, who still loves his old
+homeland better than any other, and is glad when the wandering golfer
+from it gets his way. Chicago may seem a strange place to visit for
+facts of old golf history, and yet here I added some details to the
+histories of the people and their golfing ways of fifty years and more
+agone, for Foulis has his father living with him out in Illinois, and
+Foulis the elder was at work with old Tom Morris in the great days when
+the Open Championship was young, and stirring are the stories that he
+can tell you, as he did to me in David's shop, of old Tom and Allan
+Robertson, and the other giants of those times, carrying one in mind and
+spirit far away from the land round about the big lake of Michigan to
+the old grey city which was old more than a hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>I took away with me as a memento from David Foulis a club that he has
+invented, and which for a special purpose I can commend. It is a kind of
+mashie niblick, David claiming to be the inventor of this type of club,
+but it is different from others in that it has a perfectly straight,
+flat sole and a concave face. I, like others, found that by the use of
+this club I saved some dollars, for it enabled me to pitch the ball from
+a hard lie on to the hard greens and make it stay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> close to the hole
+when nothing else would serve the purpose. The ordinary mashie niblick
+with curved sole is not perfect for baked and iron-hard courses, as it
+is not easy to get well hold of the ball when taking it cleanly as must
+often be done in such circumstances, and the margin for error is
+painfully small. The flat-soled club is essentially one for taking the
+ball cleanly, and somehow that hollow face does impart extra backspin to
+the ball. It lifts it up and drops it dead as no other club that I have
+handled will of itself ever do.</p>
+
+<p>But let me write that the Americans are not given to fancy and freak
+clubs as some people suppose they are. There is nothing freakish about
+this article of which I write, and for the most part the implements that
+the American players employ are the simplest. And just to complete my
+generalising remarks on American courses, which naturally vary greatly,
+let me say that commonly they are not so severely bunkered as are the
+best of ours, particularly from the tee. They do not demand either such
+long or such straight driving as our best courses do, and I think that
+the Americans realise now that this is the case and that they need
+stiffening up. They are doing that already. There are some very good
+holes at Wheaton, and the short hole at the ninth is about the most
+tantalising water hole I have encountered. It is all water from the
+teeing ground to the foot of a high plateau on which the green is
+situated, and it is about a hundred and ten yards across the pond.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PERFECT COUNTRY CLUB AND THE GOLFERS' POW-WOW AT ONWENTSIA, WITH A
+GLIMPSE OF THE NATIONAL LINKS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Round Chicago there is now a great belt of golf which is thickening
+rapidly. More hundreds of acres are being claimed for the game
+constantly, and one hears in these parts of the most splendidly equipped
+club-houses being built to replace others at the cost of very many
+thousands of dollars. Activity in the increase of golf is feverish. But
+even here maturity has its charm, as it always must have in golf, and
+the most delightful resorts in Illinois are those which are the oldest.
+Such as Onwentsia, Exmoor, Midlothian, Glen View are excellent.</p>
+
+<p>I am glad I went to Onwentsia. Most British golfers who have never been
+and will never go across the Atlantic have heard something, even if but
+the name, of the Onwentsia club. It seems to suggest American golf, and
+there is a look of some mystery about the name. Onwentsia is by no means
+like the others, and there are good reasons why. Here on a wall of mine
+are two feathers of eagles fastened crosswise; below them an Indian's
+pipe of peace with its silken tassel. They were sent to me across the
+sea from Onwentsia by some members a while after I had been there, and
+they are a reminder not only of happy days but of the characteristics of
+Onwentsia, for the name of the place is an Indian one. Here were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> the
+redskins before all others, and then the white men and golfers came, and
+still it is almost as if the soil were redolent of the Indian trail. The
+club perpetuates in a manner considered suitable the memory and legend
+of the braves; my eagles' feathers are such as a "Running Driver" or
+"Mighty Mashie" might have worn in their fighting days, and they adorned
+our modern Onwentsians on the day of their Indian feast! Let me explain.
+Lake Forest, where is Onwentsia, is a very charming suburb of Chicago,
+at the side of Lake Michigan. Its name suggests its character; it is
+well wooded, and one of the kind friends that I made there, Mr. Slason
+Thompson, drove me in his car in the dusk of a balmy evening for miles
+through the beautiful public grounds. The Onwentsia Club, as it is
+called, is a close fraternity of the best people of these parts. It is a
+country club in a large sense. It is a hunt club, it is a polo club with
+a splendid ground, it is a tennis club, and it is a golf club, and it
+need hardly be said that the golf is a very strong feature, the
+predominator of the institutions. Now the Onwentsian golfers, zealous
+and good, have their own manners and customs, and, particularly they
+have one custom which has a fame all over America, and it has spread
+even beyond the seas. If it be not sin to mention them together
+Onwentsia has one great day of celebration as the Royal and Ancient Club
+has one. Towards the end of September the Royal and Ancient Club calls
+its members together for the autumn gathering at St. Andrews, and there
+on that occasion, as has been related, many ancient and solemn
+ceremonies of great dignity are performed. The captain "plays himself
+in," guns are fired, in the evening at the banquet new members kiss the
+silver club and swear their loyalty, and much more in that splendid and
+time-honoured way is done. America is true to St. Andrews golf in its
+law, but Lake Forest,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> far out toward the west, is not the same as
+Fifeshire, and the Onwentsia Club at Lake Forest is not like the Royal
+and Ancient. It is not a question of which is the better; they are
+different, and when I was in Illinois, at any rate, Onwentsia was to me
+a very entertaining place. And I do not say this merely because
+Onwentsia, near to Lake Michigan, is so charmingly situated; because the
+club is such a delightful place, perfect in equipment, with a luxurious
+club-house, and inside it a huge swimming pool and many shower-baths,
+making one sometimes a trifle regretful upon the bareness of our British
+golfing-houses. It is just because when I first reached there the great
+golfing gathering at St. Andrews was nearly due and the golfers at
+Onwentsia were having theirs. When I dined with Mr. Thompson that
+evening at his charming house overlooking the great lake, and we smoked
+cigars on the lawn overhanging it, he told me why on everything that
+concerned the club there was the same sign, the head of an Indian brave
+with the big feather in it, and why they were just going forward to the
+great annual pow-wow. If you would do it properly you should pronounce
+Onwentsia in the soft, crooning Indian way. Murmur it slowly and gently,
+and mount the cadence high upon the second syllable; then, after a
+suspicion of a pause, lower the notes gradually to the end. If you said
+it in the right way an old Iroquois brave would know that you were
+referring to "a country gathering," for that is the meaning of the term.
+In days of old the Iroquois trailed over all these parts where now the
+course is laid. Here were their wigwams; here lingered their squaws with
+the little papoose, while the red men hunted and fought. That is why the
+golfers of Onwentsia have their pow-wow once a year.</p>
+
+<p>The pow-wow is an invitation golf tournament lasting two days, and it is
+open only to those members<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> who are of a certain age or over (it was
+thirty-nine when I was there) and their guests, one guest per member. In
+order to preserve complete the familiar friendliness of the gathering
+and to maintain its traditions undisturbed by new influences, the age
+limit is increased from year to year to keep the new and young men out.
+The call to the pow-wow, which is written anew for every festival, gives
+us the key to the nature of the function, and I quote from one of them:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On the banks of Skokie water,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the water flecked with golf balls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stands the wigwam, the Onwentsia,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The great wigwam of the Pow-wow.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come ye forth, ye Jol-li-gol-fas,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come ye forth and come ye quickly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Onwentsia, the big wigwam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Onwentsia, the big Pow-wow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the Moon of Falling Leaflets,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ere the trees are red with autumn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come in trains, the Puf-choo-choo-puf;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Come in motors, Aw-to-bub-buls;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the 'bus, old Shuh-too-get-thah,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Onwentsia, to the Pow-wow.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here's the bartend, Wil-lin-mix-ah,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The head waitress, Goo-too-loo-kat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The great golfer, Hoo-beets-boh-ghee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the caddy, Skip-an-fetch-it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Waiting all to do you honour.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leave your war club, Tom-ah-haw-kus,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bring the peace sticks, Dri-vah-nib-lix;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leave your toilsome reservations<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the dust of smoky cities<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the Pow-wow in the wigwam;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bring the peace pipe, Swee-too-suk-kat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Taste the bowl, Hi-baw-laf-tah;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Play the game, Roy-al-skoch-wun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the morning in the sunlight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the afternoon, till evening<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Spreads the feast of squab and chicken<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Mid the joy of good companions<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gathered in the spreading wigwam<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Onwentsia for the Pow-wow.<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Lasting for two days, with one great night in between them, it happens
+that the first session of play is conducted in a state of high
+anticipation and with much joyful shaking of hands and exhibitions of
+brotherly attachment, and the second session with a feeling as of a
+slowly receding past. Only those who attend the feast in the big wigwam
+are eligible to play in the numerous competitions to which are attached
+such an abundance of prizes that it is difficult for the golfing brave
+to go empty-handed back to his gentle squaw. A law indeed has had to be
+made that he shall not take more than two of the trophies away with him.</p>
+
+<p>At eight o'clock on the morning of the first day the play begins. There
+is a thirty-six holes medal competition for the Sum-go-fah trophy (the
+"Indian" titles are changed from year to year), and at the end of
+eighteen holes the numerous competitors are grouped into sections of
+eight, according to the place in the returns&mdash;first eight, second eight,
+and so on for separate match-play competitions for the Sko-ki-ko-lah
+prizes. The prize for the first eight is the Mis-sa-sko-kih, for the
+second the O-ma-go-li, for the third the Hit-ta-sko-kih, for the fourth
+the Sti-mi-gosh, for the fifth the Bum-put-tah, for the sixth the
+Went-an-mis-tit, for the seventh the Top-an-sli-sah, for the eighth the
+Let-mih-tel-you, and for the ninth the Dub-an-duf-fah. Then there is a
+competition for the Bun-kah-bun-kah prize, which is embraced within the
+Sum-go-fah, being for the best eclectic score made in the two rounds, or
+"choice score" as they prefer to call it in the States. Two-thirds
+handicap is allowed. Likewise there is the Noh-bak-num-bah prize, which
+is by medal play with an age handicap, the handicap being determined by
+the years of the contestant above or below forty. By such play, whether
+it is successful or not, do the braves qualify for the feast, and at
+half-past seven there is the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> call to the big and happy wigwam. The
+great dining-room is indeed made by fitting and decoration to appear as
+one great wigwam, and there are some of the adjuncts of the life of the
+old Iroquois. The golfing braves stride eagerly, joyfully, chatteringly
+in. Reddened are the golfers' faces; wrapped around them are their
+blankets, from their hair stick big black feathers; long pipes of peace
+are held before them. Then there are strange but toothsome dishes; they
+taste the "Hi-baw-laf-ta-tah"; happiness and contentment increase; there
+are toasts and shouts and whoops. The successors of the Iroquois hold
+their pow-wow well. At the beginning of the morning, when the moon is
+riding through the fleecy heavens of Illinois, softly they steal away,
+and in the distance now and then there may be heard the same lone cry
+that once resounded through the forest when Iroquois were on the trail.
+But at nine in the morning more competitions begin, and are most
+thoroughly attended. There are tournaments for the Bus-tis-tik-sah, the
+Boo-li-bus-tah, the Strok-a-hol-ah, the Heez-noh-mut-sah, the
+Ho-pu-get-it, the Get-sa-loo-kin, the He-za-pee-chah, the
+Wil-lin-loo-sah, the Oh-you-papoose, and other cups. Some of the prizes
+go to the players doing certain holes in the lowest gross score during
+the tournament, the Wil-lin-loo-sah is captured by the man who does the
+four rounds worst of all on the two days, and an Onwentsia medicine
+pouch, the nature of which may be guessed by golfers with little
+difficulty, remembering British practice, is awarded to the brave who
+does a particular hole in one stroke. It is all very remarkable,
+wonderful, interesting, and thoroughly American, and not the ragged
+corner of a paper dollar the worse for it either. Happy Onwentsia!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>At the Glen View Country Club they have a special autumn festival also
+which has a character of its own. The motto of Glen View is "Laigh and
+lang"&mdash;low and long&mdash;which is a good variation on the monotonous "far
+and sure." And about Glen View there is a Scottish flavour; in manners
+and customs for a very brief season in the golden days of the fall there
+is wafted from the far distant Highlands a breath of Scotland. Here they
+call their festival the "Twa Days," and it is carried through with a
+fine spirit. There are competitions in number and kind to satisfy
+everybody, and the social side of the affair is excellent.</p>
+
+<p>Glen View, again, is not like the others either. I spent some days there
+as the guest of the club, and nowhere have I had a more pleasurable
+time. It came after an exceedingly strenuous, rushing period at other
+places, and towards the end of one of the hottest spells of weather that
+they had known for many summers in those burning parts. Glen View is a
+pretty name, but it is not prettier than the golf course there, which is
+one of the most charming I know. It reminded one in some ways of
+Sudbrook Park in the early summer, always, as I think, one of the most
+delightful inland courses in the south of England; but Glen View, with
+its sleepy streams, is nicer. It may not be up to "championship
+standard" in its architectural features, but it might be made so. Yet if
+such a change would remove much of the character of Glen View, I, in my
+selfishness, knowing that on some future morning I shall again take the
+9.35 from Chicago on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, and
+alight at the station which is called "Golf," hope for my high pleasure
+that there will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> be none such made. When a club once becomes infatuated
+with the championship idea its contentment and happiness depart, and
+Glen View is best as it is. The holes have character. The greens are
+placed in the most beautiful nooks and corners, great belts of trees
+surround the course, and a stream winds snake-like through the grounds.
+At about every third hole there is a large barrel which is filled every
+morning with fresh spring water, into which a large block of ice is
+placed. When you play in a shade temperature of nearly a hundred
+degrees, as I have done at this place, you appreciate these barrels.
+They have a natty way of naming their holes at Glen View. The first is
+called "The Elm," the second "High Ball," the third "Sleepy Hollow," and
+the next in order are "Polo," "Lover's Lane," "Old Hickory," "The Round
+Up," "Trouble," "Reservoir," "Westward Ho!" "The Grove," "Sunset," "The
+Bridge," "The Roost," "Spookey," "The Orchard," "Log Cabin," and "Sweet
+Home." The course is 6279 yards long, and every one of these yards is a
+pleasure to play along. Visitors do like this place. In one year
+recently there were 3550 of them who paid a dollar a day for the
+privilege of playing. The members of the club pay one hundred dollars a
+year subscription, and nowadays it costs about five hundred dollars for
+admission. Every member must be the possessor of a hundred-dollar share
+in the club, and these shares are now at a premium of about five times
+their par value. At few other places in the golfing world is there such
+a nicely appointed club-house as there is here. One could put two or
+three of the largest dining-rooms that our golf clubs possess into the
+one of Glen View, and the furnishing is finely and tastefully done in a
+Flemish style. Some of the golfing prints with which we are most
+familiar hang upon the walls. Other pictures of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> value keep them
+company, and there is a large crayon drawing done on the spot by my old
+friend, the late Tom Browne, who once came here with his bag of clubs.</p>
+
+<p>The café at the Glen View club is an interesting institution. The club
+has one of the cleverest cocktail mixers in America, and the printed
+list of available liquid refreshments that is laid upon the tables
+suggests a little consideration. The American golfers, for the most
+part, do not drink very much, and what they do drink has little effect
+upon them, thanks to the heat and much perspiration; but they do like
+novelties and the variety. So on this list&mdash;which, mind you, includes no
+wines, which are quoted on a separate sheet&mdash;there are scheduled no
+fewer than 147 different kinds of refreshments. There are thirteen "soft
+drinks," eight different lemonade mixtures, eleven sorts of mineral
+waters, thirteen beers and ales, six rye whiskies, seven Bourbon
+whiskies, eleven Scotch and Irish whiskies, thirteen varieties of
+cocktails, two "toddies," three "sours," three "rickies," three
+"cobblers," six "fizzes," two "flips," seven "punches," three "smashes,"
+and thirty-six "miscellaneous." The last is a most interesting section.
+It includes the "Prairie Oyster," the "Millionaire," the "Pousse
+l'Amour," the "Sam Ward," the "Russian Cooler," the "Japanese Cooler,"
+the "Golfer's Delight," the "Angel's Dream," the "Ladies' Puff," and the
+"Glen View High Ball." Nearly all of these cost twenty or twenty-five
+cents each.</p>
+
+<p>One may be most pleasurably lazy at Glen View. The club-house has some
+forty bedrooms, with a fine equipment of shower and other baths, and the
+usual telephone service to all the bedrooms with a complete telephone
+exchange downstairs. The service and comfort are as good as they can be.
+I liked the lounges and the shady verandahs, with rocking-chairs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> to tip
+one away to a short dream on a hot afternoon of purling brooks on
+English hills and woods in Wales. Yet when I awake I am satisfied. There
+is no hurry here. In the mornings one would hear the men rising at six
+o'clock and splashing themselves about in the bath department, and
+generally becoming very active all at once. Some time later I would join
+them at breakfast, and see them depart very early for their businesses
+at Chicago. When they had gone one could settle down, and there were
+ladies to chatter with or to play Chopin or something else on the piano.
+It is necessary to take things a little easily during the early and hot
+part of the day, because soon in the afternoon the men come back from
+Chicago, and they are all energy and rush as if they had not spent a
+howling morning in the "Pit" or one of the other great business centres.
+One has to fall in with their schemes of activity, which endure until
+the evening meal, taken in an easy way of <i>en famille</i> in the restaurant
+of the club, luscious green corn to begin with and the most appetising
+dishes later, with laughter and gossip always. And later in the evening
+David Noyes and I might sit in the dark on the verandah, and under those
+stars of Illinois speak of the differences between English people and
+the Americans as we respectively saw them. We understood each other and
+could be frank. "The worst of America," said I, "is that it has no soul,
+and the Americans have none either." "Well," said he; "but we have big
+hearts." Agreed. He is a leading broker in the "Pit" at Chicago, the
+great wheat market of the world, and one morning he took me there and I
+met many golfers I knew round about those four screeching masses of men
+who make of this place a babel and such an exhibition of raw fighting
+human nature as, with all its differences, I can only compare with the
+same brilliant and yet ugly show<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> that is made in the rooms of the
+Casino at Monte Carlo. It is raw life on the strain at both places&mdash;hot
+seething life. The reposeful Glen View is needed for the people who
+barter there.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Massachusetts is a fine golfing land, and it rose to the heights in
+1913. After gaiety in New York, and amazement at Chicago, you should go
+to Boston. And really they who live there have reason for their pride.
+There is no other town or city in the United States or Canada that has
+anything like such an English flavour as this in the New England. There
+are times when we wander along the great thoroughfare, Washington
+Street, or turn up one of the side avenues like Boylston, that the
+American idea for a moment ceases to press closely upon us, and when we
+pass the old churches, wander through historic chambers Georgian in
+their style, look into the Faneuil Hall, or into the old-fashioned
+market, or go down to the shipping in the docks where our Boston man
+will surely take us, that we may see the place of the "tea party," as
+they call it now, which had vast consequences to the States and England
+when taxes were made and were rejected&mdash;then in the New England we feel
+the old one there. And, of course, the wandering Englishman is taken out
+to Bunker Hill as well. Though with all Americans their spirit of
+independence is an obsession, and it seems sometimes that they like to
+think of themselves as a new race of people come up out of nothing or
+from heaven, owing nothing to any other race, yet at Boston I suspect
+they are a trifle glad that they and their city are not like the others,
+but are something more English in their way. There is a difference in
+the atmosphere. A certain ease is possible, a culture is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> apparent.
+Streets and shops do not look as if they had been cut out by machinery
+at the same time that the streets and shops of a dozen other cities were
+being cut, and all life is not mathematically arranged and standardised.
+If an American university is not at all like either Oxford or Cambridge,
+still Harvard is an influence, and Harvard is at Cambridge, a near
+suburb of Boston. The result of it all is that we feel something of the
+old atmosphere of home and are stimulated. Boston grows upon us very
+rapidly. The father of one of my good American friends, Mr. John G.
+Anderson, who has gone on golfing expeditions with me in England,
+Scotland, France and the United States, is a Scot with a great love for
+his home country, and our rambles round old Boston have been of a
+peculiarly interesting kind. And when in Boston, and the car of a friend
+comes along to the Touraine in the morning, we throw the clubs in the
+back of it, and get up with just that feeling of having a sporting day
+ahead that one develops in the country at home and hardly anywhere else.</p>
+
+<p>There are many courses round about Boston, and there are four of them,
+all quite different from each other, of which I shall have a clear
+recollection always. Two have very special places of their own in
+American golf, one being The Country Club of Brookline already
+described. Massachusetts itself will not be called a "state" like other
+states, but is a "commonwealth," and The Country Club is not the Boston
+Country Club or the Brookline Country Club, but The Country Club, and
+visitors who would be appreciative and make no <i>faux pas</i> are
+recommended to keep the point in mind, the reason being that this one,
+with its charter of incorporation away back in the eighteenth century,
+was the first of all the country clubs in America, and is dignified
+accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>They do blow the place up in America when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> they determine to make a golf
+course. Forest and rock are of no more hindrance to any idea or scheme
+than a few daisies might be. I was strongly impressed with this view of
+things when I was out one day at the Essex County Club at
+Manchester-by-the-Sea, another of the outer-Boston courses. "Come to
+golf at Essex in the morning; you will see something of the way in which
+we do our golf in America that you have never seen before." Such was the
+substance of an invitation from Mr. George F. Willett, one of the most
+ardent and admirable leaders of the golfing movement in the Eastern
+States. So in the morning golf at Essex, twenty miles out of Boston, was
+the programme of the day, and by half-past ten we were on the first tee
+preparing to drive from an eminence down towards low land in front. The
+terms of the invitation were amply justified. Towards noon, when we
+might be somewhere about the thirteenth or fourteenth hole, a great roar
+and crashing sound came from the other side of the course in the
+locality of the fifth hole, and looking towards it there was to be seen
+a rising cloud of smoke, with masses of earth and splintered rocks being
+hurled high into the air. A moment later and there was another deafening
+bang and more earth, more rocks, and various stumps of trees were shot
+up towards the sky. Bang! bang! bang!&mdash;ten times in the space of a few
+seconds was this surprise repeated, and it began to seem that we must be
+on Olympian links and that Jove himself or Hercules was bunkered. "It's
+only Ross's men tinkering away at the new fourth," said my man
+unconcernedly, as he ran down a long putt. A couple of minutes
+afterwards we rounded a bend of the course, and as we did so some wild
+yells were heard and a number of the Italian workmen were seen running
+fast in our direction and then stopping suddenly to hide themselves
+behind trees. Three more big bangs, more smoke, flying earth, flying
+rocks and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> roots, and then as my partner played his brassey he
+soliloquised that he had added, unintentionally, a touch of slice to the
+stroke and was in the pot on the right. As to the noises, our part of
+the course, I was assured, was perfectly safe. The three explosions were
+made by Ross's Italians at the new fifth. Thirteen of them in five
+minutes was perhaps a little unusual, but they were all over now, and,
+as could be seen, the Italians, with sundry calls to each other, were
+moving back towards the place they had sprinted from. The object of this
+concentration of noise and disturbance in five minutes, it was
+explained, was to give the full body of workmen plenty to do as soon as
+they resumed after their midday meal.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is, that golf at Essex, when I was first there, was undergoing
+a great and most wonderful transformation, regardless of cost,
+regardless of the magnitude and seeming impossibilities of the task,
+regardless of everything, but caused by the insatiable desire of the
+American golfer to have courses that are as good as they can be. To
+satisfy this desire he is everywhere pulling Nature to pieces and
+reconstructing her, doing his work deftly and skilfully, and with a good
+eye for pleasing effect. At the finish you might think that, save for
+the putting greens and bunkers, it was all the simple work of the mother
+of earth herself in her gentler moods, smooth swards for rocks, and
+chaste glades where forests were. This transformation and extension of
+American golf and the way it is being done is most amazing. All the old
+courses are being lengthened and greatly improved, and new ones of
+first-class quality are being made in large numbers. When it is desired
+to make changes and extensions on a British course the work that has to
+be done is not generally of a very formidable character. Some tolerably
+smooth sort of land is frequently available, and alternatives to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+existing holes may be planned. But even so, the question of expense
+seems often to be a fearsome thing, and a year or more of thought and
+yet another year for action are commonly needed. A thousand pounds or
+two thousand seems to be a mighty sum to spend, but for all that we
+think that in the south, at all events, we are doing our golf on a very
+grand scale in these days. And when I think of St. George's Hill and
+Coombe Hill and others of their kind I know we are doing it on a very
+fine scale. But the case of America at present is most specially
+remarkable. In the Eastern States particularly, the courses have had for
+the most part to be carved out of virgin forests. Tens of thousands of
+tons of rocks have had to be blasted, and hundreds of acres of swamps
+drained before the fairways could be laid and sown with grass. Such work
+is having to be done now for the extensions and improvements, and it is
+wonderfully done. The committees appear to take about a week to think
+about it, a day to decide, and then in two or three months, with the
+help of dynamite, tree-fellers, and hundreds of foreign workmen, the new
+scheme is carried through. The cost is not considered till afterwards,
+and then it never worries, but it is enormous. Here at Essex, the chief
+work that was being done was the addition of a total of 175 yards only
+to the fourth and fifth holes, which were to be given new numbers, and
+this little bit of lengthening, with the tree-felling, the splendid
+draining of a swamp, and the use of 400 lbs. of dynamite on the rocks,
+was costing 10,000 dollars or £2000. Some other alterations and new
+constructions were being done, and the course, one of fine undulations,
+well-planned bunkering, magnificent putting greens, and glorious
+scenery, was being brought to perfection. The work was being carried out
+under the direction of Mr. Donald J. Ross, the chief superintendent of
+the club and course, who was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> once a Dornoch man. He thinks out his
+construction schemes in the grand way, and he is going about America
+blowing hundreds of acres of it up into the air and planting smooth
+courses upon the levelled remains. Shortly before this, they called him
+up to a mountainous place at Dixville Notch, in New Hampshire, to plan a
+new nine-holes course that had to be cut out of solid rock, at a cost of
+£10,000. No golfer had ever been to that place, and the first had yet to
+arrive when the promoters wrote hurriedly to Mr. Ross, not long back
+home, saying: "We are convinced that it will soon be necessary to have a
+longer course, and are very desirous that you will come at once to lay
+one out on Panorama Hill." It will cost £20,000, but that does not
+matter. Golf is demanded everywhere in America, and it must be supplied.
+A little extra space was required for play by the Rhode Island Country
+Club at Narragansett, so, with Ross's help they took forty acres from
+the sea, and are now playing the game where a year previously the waves
+were rolling. Again, this remarkable golf engineer a little while since
+finished his work on the very first course that has been laid out in
+Cuba. I do not know what the future of American golf will be, but its
+present is a bewildering, astonishing thing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>"Yes, but wait until you see Myopia!" I was not glad to leave Essex, but
+I was happy to go from there to the Myopia Hunt Club a few miles distant
+(and may I never forget that glorious ride in Mr. Willett's big car,
+along the winding road fringed with silver birches and autumn-tinted
+foliage, past placid little lakes, through some of the country of
+chastest charm in New England!), for Myopia is America's golfing pride.
+Besides, it is one of the few American courses that have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> a wide
+international reputation. Remember the astonishment when Andrew
+Kirkaldy, a St. Andrews golfer, if ever there was one, a man believing
+in the old course of Fifeshire as a Mussulman believes in Mecca, came
+back from an American tour and declared to British people that Myopia
+was the best course in the world! So we approach one American golf
+course with wonder and a certain awe. There are other reasons for doing
+so if we only knew them beforehand. Traditions and old dignity are
+strongly attached to it, and this Myopia is such a club for high feeling
+and exclusiveness as would do credit to any institution we have at home,
+golf or otherwise. It is, at the very least, as difficult to become a
+member of Myopia as of the Royal and Ancient. If I dared I would say it
+is more so. Myopia, I am told, will use the black ball with joy when
+there is a candidate at the doors. It might be easier in some
+circumstances for a man to become the President of the United States
+than to become a member of the Myopia Hunt Club. The dignity of Myopia
+exudes from the timbers of its long, quaint club-house. The ceilings are
+low, while the walls are panelled and are really old, for in quite early
+days of New England this, or part of it, was a farm-house.</p>
+
+<p>The name of the club in this case has nothing to do with golf, nor with
+the name of a place, for the place is Hamilton. Myopia is a technical
+term for near-sight. The original members despised the game, and as for
+letting it influence them in their choice of name of the club, such a
+thing is inconceivable. Originally, and for long afterwards, and
+primarily even now, Myopia is a hunt club; it prides itself on being so,
+and when anybody asks one of the old hunting members if they do not
+possess a good golf course there, he might say he supposed they did play
+some game with that name there sometimes. In the early days, I believe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+that many of the members wore coloured glasses for some reasons
+connected with their sight, and it was through this that the name of the
+club was given. Golf was a very late addition, and some of the old
+hunting-men, whom you will see moving about the club-house in real and
+unaffected riding costume as hardly anywhere else in America, feel a
+little sore about it still, and it is even now the fact that the hunting
+section keep to themselves in one part of the club and the golfers to
+themselves in their part, with such as Mr. Herbert Leeds and one or two
+others in both. Mr. Leeds showed me some of the old prints on the walls
+illustrating the race meetings that had taken place there in almost
+prehistoric times, and some mementoes of the early days of the golf
+club, together with the score card of George Duncan's record round on
+the course. I hope you realise that Myopia is not an ordinary golf club;
+I did so within a minute of my arrival there.</p>
+
+<p>The course is not like others in America. It is almost more of the open
+heathland sort of course than any other I have tramped over while in the
+country. It is a little barer, seemingly a little wilder than most of
+the others, and none the worse for that. Its putting-greens are capital,
+and at some of the holes, if not all, I have certainly trodden on turf
+that is better than anything else that my feet have touched on that side
+of the Atlantic. I remember that I nearly shouted with delight to my
+partner when I came upon the first stretch of it&mdash;green and soft and
+velvety. But it was not all like that, and in some respects I do think
+that, splendid as the course is, praise of it has been a little
+overdone. Yet on the other hand it is certainly a course that grows on
+the constant player there, and reveals new subtleties to him every time
+of playing. That after all is the test of a great course.
+Architecturally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> many of the holes are splendid. I do not quite like the
+idea of the man having to drive uphill at the first hole, but the
+tee-shot has most decidedly to be placed&mdash;to the left&mdash;or the player has
+the most fearful approach that he might ever dream of after the most
+indigestible dinner. The fourth hole is a splendid one of the dog-leg
+kind, a drive and an iron with the green very well bunkered, and some
+very low land to the left which is a constant attraction to the
+weak-minded ball. Then for my own part I liked the tenth very much, for
+a big drive has to be done over some high ground with a bunker away to
+the right that draws hard at sliced balls, while the green is one of the
+nicest and most prettily guarded. I lingered about it for some time in
+an admiring way. The last hole also has infinitely more in it than
+appears at the first glance, for here again a big bunker jutting into
+the edge of the green and to the right is a strong factor, especially
+when the pin is behind it; and if the hero does not place his tee-shot
+to the left, and within a very little space there, too, he will be
+sorry. It is 6335 yards round the course. In the club-house over the
+tea-cups, on the occasion of my first visit, I pondered upon the
+marvellous excellence of Duncan's record round, and paid some most
+sincere compliments to Mr. Leeds for the quality of the golf
+architecture of Myopia, for it is he, after close study of the best
+British models, who has been chiefly responsible for it.</p>
+
+<p>A day and night at the Brae Burn Country Club at West Newton, near
+Boston, left a warm glow lingering in my mind. Here if anywhere in
+America there is country charm and social delight. Nowhere is the idea
+of the complete and happy social community of the country club better
+developed. The course is a fine one, and here also, at the time of my
+first visit, extensive works were being carried out, and some splendid
+new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> holes over heaving land were in the process of formation. They have
+since been completed and the course has now risen to the highest
+standard. The putting-greens are in the nicest and most beautiful
+places, belts of trees line the fairway at several of the holes; there
+are others in open country, and the short ones are uncommonly good. A
+new one that they were making then, calling for a drive from a height
+down to a pocket-handkerchief kind of green is one that I hope to be
+puzzled at in the play within a few weeks of the moment when I write. I
+had the happiness then to nominate the situation of a new bunker at one
+of the new holes, and sure I am that a momentary vexation will be the
+result when I play that hole, for I, too, in America, have found that I
+develop the American hook, which seems to be in the climate and the
+soil. It was on this course that Harry Vardon in his all-conquering tour
+in America in 1900 sustained his only defeat. Our dinner-party in the
+club-house in the evening is an unforgettable reminiscence. It was a
+good-fellowship golfing party such as this game only can bring about.
+Mr. Harry L. Ayer, Mr. E. A. Wilkie, Mr. George Gilbert, Mr. C. I.
+Travelli, good Anderson and self talked our golf, British and American,
+to the full extent of a good ability. One of the topics was club
+captaincy, and the discussion we had may lead to the creation of the
+office at Brae Burn and elsewhere, for it is a curious thing that the
+American clubs have never thought of creating captains, and this
+community was rather pleased with the idea. It is an office that a golf
+club needs. If the captain is the right man, if he is chosen for his
+past service, for his present strength, and for his tact and quality as
+man and golfer, he can do much for a club, and his appointment is a
+recognition that a club needs for its best and most faithful men.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The country round about New York abounds in interesting golfing places,
+and if inclination were followed there should be descriptions given of
+Nassau, of Apawamis (not forgetting the rock to the right of the first
+green there which an English ball most usefully struck when the
+thirty-seventh hole was being played in the final of the American
+championship, Mr. Fred Herreshoff, finalist, being loser thereby), of
+Garden City, Baltusrol, and many other good golfing places in these
+parts. Garden City is a name familiar to golfers in Britain, because it
+is the place where Mr. Walter J. Travis came from when he won the
+championship at Sandwich. If it lacks some of the boldness of feature of
+some of the later American courses, yet this is a fine testing course,
+thoroughly&mdash;and so deeply!&mdash;bunkered, and with splendid putting-greens,
+and all the place round about is very pleasant. And now I am very
+anxious to see Piping Rock, as I soon expect to do.</p>
+
+<p>There are good reasons for making a journey by the Pennsylvania railroad
+from New York to Washington. One must pay the visitor's homage to the
+seat of American government and experience the feeling of being at the
+heart of the States, with its magnificent buildings and its historical
+remembrances. It is an intensely interesting place. At the White House
+there is Mr. President Wilson who is a golfer, as ex-President Taft was,
+and remains one of the keenest in the land. Mr. Taft will write
+enthusiastically about the game, and make speeches about it when he
+thinks it proper. "My advice to the middle-aged and older men who have
+never played golf," he says, "is to take it up. It will be a rest and
+recreation from business cares, out of which they will get an immense<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+amount of pleasure, and at the same time increase their physical vigour
+and capacity for work as well as improve their health." And he also
+says, "Preceding the election campaign in which I was successful, there
+were many of my sympathisers and supporters who deprecated its becoming
+known that I was addicted to golf, as an evidence of aristocratic
+tendencies and a desire to play only a rich man's game. You know, and I
+know, that there is nothing more democratic than golf, and there is
+nothing which furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint,
+nothing which puts one more on an equality with one's fellows&mdash;or, I may
+say, puts one lower than one's fellows&mdash;than the game of golf. If there
+is any game that will instil in one's heart a more intense feeling of
+self-abasement and humiliation than the game of golf, I should like to
+know what it is." One who was in office there told me something of his
+enthusiasm for the game. I asked him how often Mr. Taft had played when
+he was there in the golfing season. The answer was that Mr. Taft used to
+play every day, positively every day, and some of those who played with
+him indicated to me what a very thorough and determined golfer he was.
+It might be said of the ex-President that he has spent more time in
+bunkers than most citizens, because he has generally insisted on playing
+out, no matter how many strokes have been needed. He has been playing
+now for sixteen years, and is quite one of the oldest American golfers
+in point of service to the game. Nothing can take away from him the
+distinction of having been the first President of the United States to
+play what they have determined shall be their national game.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>I had a happy experience when one day I left New York, where it was most
+swelteringly hot, and went<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> up into the Green Mountains of Vermont for
+golf at the Ekwanok Country Club. A friend, Mr. Henry W. Brown of
+Philadelphia, who had played with me at my favourite Brancaster in
+Norfolk once, had heard I was somewhere in America and sent a letter to
+me directed to a chance address, which, being a golfing kind of
+address, found me with little delay. "Come," said Brown, "to
+Manchester-in-the-Mountains in Vermont. You ought to see our quite
+famous Ekwanok course, and I can promise you some fine mountain air,
+good golf, and a hearty welcome. If you will tell me what train you will
+come by, I will meet you with the car at Manchester Station." A moment's
+hesitation dissolved in firm decision and action, which took the form of
+a taxi-cab to the New York Central Station, and the north-bound train
+which left at twenty minutes to one in the afternoon. Then along we went
+by the Hudson river, up which I had sailed from Albany a year before,
+past the Palisades, past Poughkeepsie and the Catskill Mountains,
+through Troy and Albany, and as the daylight waned we were mounting
+upwards through the hills of sweet Vermont. At a quarter to eight the
+train reached Manchester, Brown and his car were waiting there, and we
+sped along the main street to his home.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that the silver moonlight was shining not upon an earthen road
+but glistening on snow. Little villas like chalets and chateaux of
+Switzerland lined the way and the people living in them could be heard
+in their laughter and song, for the dinner time was just gone by and
+yellow light shone from the windows, making that happy contrast with the
+coldness of the moonshine, that speaks of home and comfort. We passed
+the great hotel where five hundred people are constantly gathered
+together in the summer time from all parts of the States, and indeed
+from places far beyond the States, for there are Britons in numbers
+here, and travellers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> from Africa and the deep southern lands, making
+such a cosmopolitan gathering of its size for drawing-rooms and bridge
+parties and the usual orderings of social gatherings as is not easily to
+be matched. And there is an amazing vivacity among all these people, for
+two reasons, one being that the American spirit at its best pervades,
+and the other that it is Ekwanok, the heartening, the vigour-making, the
+youth-restoring. In New York and Chicago at the end of the day one is a
+little apt to think of the wear and tear of life and the fading capacity
+of a good constitution; high up in the mountains of Vermont, in the
+shadow of the hills of Equinox, one revels in fresh youth again and has
+no more envy for the lad of twenty. And that again is a reason why
+Ekwanok is not like the other golfing places of America, and another
+following upon it is that this is, so far as I have discovered, the only
+truly golfing holiday resort in all the States, a place to which people
+go for the pleasure of the happy game and for hardly anything else, a
+place that lives and thrives on golf. From far and wide the Americans
+come to it and leave all their work behind, and are happy and leisurely
+as you rarely see them at other times. In Britain we have a very large
+number of resorts that are for holiday golf alone, and more are coming
+all the time, but this is a feature of golf that America in general has
+yet to know. If it comes to that, Manchester-in-the-Mountains is not so
+very high (that is a rather curious association of English
+ideas&mdash;Manchester and mountains, dingy streets with the smoke-thickened
+atmosphere of the Lancashire city and the big bold hills of God), but
+here is the mountain scent, enlivening, heartening. The house of my
+host, Breezy Bank as it is called, is set at the foot of one big
+mountain and looks across the green valley, where the golf course lies,
+out toward another&mdash;a delightful abode. A log fire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> burned red on the
+big hearth, a kind hostess gave us welcome, and after a supper that
+embraced fresh green corn (it is the essence of the enjoyment of green
+corn that it should be taken quickly from the growing to the kitchen),
+we talked, over cigars and coffee, golf from one end of the game to the
+other, and right across it, and handled clubs, until bedtime came. Brown
+is keen, and he has sound views on the influence of the game on national
+character.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning, with sunlight and breeze, we went along to the course, so
+near that a ball could have been driven to it from the lawn of Breezy
+Bank, where the master has been known to practise mashie shots by
+moonlight, and I was joined in foursome with Mr. Walter Fairbanks of
+Denver, Colorado, against B. and his son Theodore. What then happened is
+of no consequence; the tale may be told in Colorado but not in England.
+But the course&mdash;it is splendid, and reflects an infinity of credit upon
+Mr. James L. Taylor, the first in command, who has for the most part
+designed it, has constantly improved it, and has made it what it is. All
+the holes have abundant character. They are up and down, straight and
+crooked, interesting always, with a good fairway that gives fine lies to
+the ball, and putting-greens of the smoothest sort. We drove first down
+a hill with a slanting hazard that made awful menace to a slice, then up
+again and away out to the far parts, with some very pretty short holes.
+The gem of the collection of eighteen is the seventh, which has been
+called, and with some fitness, the King of American Holes. A great,
+fine, lusty piece of golf it is, 537 yards from the tee to the green,
+and every shot has to be a thoughtful, strong, and well-directed shot,
+with no girl's golf in it anywhere. It is a down drive from the
+high-placed tee, and the land below heaves over in a curious twisted way
+that demands very exact placing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> of the ball. Then there is a strong and
+straight second to be played over a high ridge in front into which big
+bunkers have been cut. Afterwards there is plain country to a
+well-protected green. It is a great hole, a romantic one, and is well
+remembered. Some of the drive-and-iron holes that follow are splendid
+things, and this course was very well chosen for the Amateur
+Championship Meeting in 1914. When we were leaving it at the end of that
+day, the sun had just gone down behind big Equinox Hill, but presently
+and by surprise he sent a last good-bye. Round the mountain side a
+golden bar of light was cast, and it spread along the olive-coloured
+hill across the shadowed valley like a clean-cut shining stripe or a
+monotinted rainbow. These were the glorious Green Mountains of Vermont!
+We tarried until the sun went right away, and took with it that parting
+beam, and, sighing, we passed along.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>I have left to the last of these few remembrances, what is in many
+respects the greatest of American courses&mdash;the National Golf Links at
+the far end of Long Island. In recent times it has probably been more
+discussed than any other course on earth. A while since a number of very
+wealthy, ambitious, and determined golfers put their heads and their
+money together, and decided on the establishment of something as near
+perfection as they could reach. In pursuit of this idea they have so
+far, as I am informed, spent about two hundred thousand dollars, and are
+in the act of spending many more thousands. They have their reward in a
+magnificent creation, as great in result as in idea, or nearly. All the
+people in the golf world have heard by this time of this National Links,
+and have no doubt wondered upon it, and the extent to which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+extraordinary scheme that was developed a few years ago has been
+realised. It has been referred to as "the amazing experiment," and "the
+millionaires' dream," and so forth. Undoubtedly in its conception it was
+the grandest golfing scheme ever attempted. It came about in this way.
+America, with all its golf and money and enthusiasm, was without any
+course which might be compared with our first-class seaside links, the
+chief reason for her deficiency being that nowhere on either of her
+seaboards could be discovered a piece of land which was of the real
+British golfing kind. But at last a tract was found nearly at the end of
+Long Island, about ninety miles from New York, which was believed to be
+nearly the right thing. It was taken possession of by a golfing
+syndicate, and they determined there to do their very best. The question
+of expense was not to be considered in the matter. A member of the
+syndicate, Mr. Charles B. Macdonald, an old St. Andrews man, and one of
+wide golfing knowledge and experience, went abroad to study, photograph,
+and make plans of the best holes in Great Britain and on the continent.
+The whole world of golf was laid under tribute to assist in the creation
+of this wonder course. After exhaustive consideration a course was
+decided upon which was to embrace, in a certain reasonable measure,
+features of such eminent holes as the third, eleventh, and seventeenth
+at St. Andrews, the Cardinal and the Alps at Prestwick, the fifth and
+ninth at Brancaster, the Sahara at Sandwich, the Redan at North Berwick,
+and some others. The scheme was modified somewhat as the work
+progressed, but in due course the National Golf Links, a string of
+pearls as it was intended to be, was opened. Many different reports have
+been circulated as to the quality of the course, and the extent to which
+the object has been achieved. It has been described both as a failure
+and as a magnificent success.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I preferred to go there alone and see things for myself without
+explanations and influences. A certain penalty had, however, to be paid
+for this enterprise. I shall not soon forget my journey to the
+Shinnecock Hills out at the end of the Island, nor the journey back
+again. It was on a glorious Sunday morning in October that I went to the
+Pennsylvania station and took train there for Shinnecock, which was a
+three-hours' journey along the line. In getting out at Shinnecock I was
+nearest to the course, but there were no cars waiting there, and the
+tramp that had to be made across country for two or three miles was one
+that might have suited an Indian brave better than it suited me,
+although I have an instinct and a desire always to find things and ways
+out for myself rather than be told and led. It was nearly noon; the sun
+was high, and it was burning fiercely. The so-called path was something
+of a delusion. It was more of a trail through a virgin bush country with
+a tendency to swamp here and there, and occasionallv one was led to a
+cul-de-sac. I could see the National Golf Links a little way ahead all
+the time. There was a big water cistern standing out against the
+sky-line, and there were some smoothly laid out holes, but grapes were
+never more tantalising to any fox than those holes are to the wanderer
+who tries to get there from Shinnecock along a route over which a crow
+might fly, and who determines that he will discover the elusive secrets
+of the National Links, however dearly the expedition may cost him.
+However, the enterprise succeeded, and the journey back from the course
+to the Southampton station was also accomplished despite the prevailing
+difficulties, and, with the sense of something having been attempted and
+done, we rode home on the Pennsylvania, and were back in New York by the
+same night&mdash;about the hardest day's golf business I have ever done.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A certain disappointment is inevitably threatened when one visits a
+course of this kind about which one has heard so much beforehand. An
+ideal is established in the mind which cannot possibly be realised, and
+it is the fault of nobody. We do not know exactly what it is that we
+hope to see, but it is something beyond the power of man and Nature to
+achieve. But the National is a great course, a very great course. It is
+charmingly situated, most excellently appointed, and bears evidence of
+the most thorough and intelligent treatment by its constructors. Any
+preliminary disappointment there may have been soon wears away as the
+real excellence of the course and its difficulties are appreciated. Had
+we heard nothing of this copying, and did we not make comparisons
+between new and old in the mind, through which that which is new does
+not often survive, we should glory in the National at the first
+inspection of it. And the fact is, that the comparisons we suggest ought
+never to be made, though I, for one, was not aware of that till
+afterwards. Absolute copying was never intended; only the governing
+features of the British holes, the points that gave the character and
+quality to them, were imitated so far as could be done. That has been
+done very well, and some of the holes are very fine things. Those the
+design of which is based on such gems as the sixth at Brancaster and the
+eleventh at St. Andrews are very well recognisable. I should like to
+write much more about this course; it is a strong temptation. If I
+thought less of it and did not realise its greatness as I do, I should
+yield to the desire, and yielding, might rashly criticise as well as
+praise. But there is an imperative restraint. Upon a moderate course, or
+even a very good one, you may sometimes, if sufficiently self-confident,
+judge in one day's experience. But there are courses which, not because
+they grow upon you as we say, but because they command a higher respect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+at once than is given to others, which do not permit of such
+presumption. I saw the National on one day only, though I hope to see it
+many times again, and to gain courage for comment upon it. Now, with cap
+in hand, I can only signify my respect and full appreciation that here
+is something that is by no means of an ordinary kind, the accomplishment
+of a magnificent enterprise, and no doubt the achievement of a great
+ideal. But I shall say, at any rate, that a links more gloriously
+situated than this one in Peconic Bay, with pretty creeks running into
+the land here and there, and hill views at the back, could hardly be
+imagined. The view as I beheld it from different parts on that peaceful
+sunny Sunday afternoon is one that I never shall forget. It is the ideal
+situation for a national course.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>To Mr. Macdonald thus belongs the credit for the initiation of what we
+may call the higher golf in America. In the last few years this movement
+has made strides as long and rapid in the United States as it has done
+in England, and above all other countries in the world America, which is
+so much dependent on her inland golf, having scarcely any other, is the
+country for this movement to be carried to its ultimate legitimate
+point. The day for very plain and purely and obviously artificial
+construction of inland golf courses is gone, the original inland system
+in all its stupidity and its surrender to difficulties has become
+archaic. It has come to be realised in this business that man may
+associate himself with Nature in a magnificent enterprise, and only now
+is it understood that this golf course construction is, or may be, a
+really splendid art. Landscape gardening is a fine thing in the way of
+modelling in earth and with the assistance of trees and plants and
+flowers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> the natural forces, while engineering across rivers and
+mountains is grander perhaps; but in each of these the man takes his
+piece of the world from Nature and shovels it and smashes it, and then,
+according to his own fancy and to suit his own needs, he arranges it all
+over again. But in the making of a golf course, while we have indeed to
+see that certain requirements of our own are well suited, knowing how
+particular and hyper-critical we have become, yet we wish to keep to
+plain bold Nature too, and we want our best work to be thoroughly in
+harmony with her originals. I believe that if we could express it
+properly to ourselves, we wish now to make our golf courses look as if
+they were fashioned at the tail-end of things on the evening of the
+sixth day of the creation of the world&mdash;just when thoughts had to be
+turning to the rest and happinesses of the seventh. And so the great
+architect now takes a hundred acres or more of plain rough land and
+forest, hills and dales among it, and with magnificent imagination
+shapes it to his fancy. The work he now does will endure in part, if not
+in whole, for ages hence, and so it is deeply responsible. It is a
+splendid art; I do not hesitate to say it is a noble art.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Colt, with his great thoughts and his splendid skill, has done fine
+work in several parts of the United States. The new courses of the
+Mayfield Country Club, and of the Country Club of Detroit, are splendid
+things. But Mr. Macdonald's creations&mdash;for more of them now follow upon
+the original at Southampton&mdash;are destined to be leading influences in
+the new American golf course construction. I have had some interesting
+talk with him upon these matters, and am glad to find that he is artist
+and creator enough to have the full strength of his own original
+opinions in this matter, especially as in some ways his ideals differ
+from those commonly accepted in Britain. I have been so much interested
+in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> his views, and I think that these views are destined to have such an
+enormous influence upon American golf in the future, that I have asked
+him for some brief statement of them, an enunciation of his creed as an
+architect of courses, and he has kindly made it to me in writing, as
+follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"To begin with, I think the tendency to-day is to overdo matters
+somewhat, making courses too long, too difficult, and with too much
+sameness in the construction of two-shot holes. To my mind a course over
+6400 yards becomes tiresome. I would not have more than eight two-shot
+holes, and in constructing them I should not follow the ideas or fancies
+of any one golf architect, but should endeavour to take the best from
+each. While it is the fashion now to decry the construction of a hole
+involving the principles of the Alps or seventeenth at Prestwick, I
+favour two blind holes of that character&mdash;one constructed similar to the
+Alps, and another of the punch-bowl variety of hole some fifty yards
+longer than the Alps. It is interesting now to read the 'best hole'
+discussion that took place in 1901. The leading golfers of that time
+were almost unanimous in pronouncing the Alps at Prestwick the best
+two-shot hole in the world. The eleventh at St. Andrews and the Redan at
+North Berwick were almost unanimously picked as the best one-shot holes.</p>
+
+<p>"To my mind there should be four one-shot holes, namely, 130, 160, 190,
+and 220 yards. These holes should be so constructed that a player can
+see from the tee where the flag enters the hole. The shorter the hole
+the smaller should be the green, and the more closely should it be
+bunkered. The most difficult hole in golf to construct interestingly is
+a three-shot hole, of which I would place two in the eighteen, one 520
+yards and the other 540. The putting greens at these holes should be
+spacious.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"This leaves us four drive-and-pitch holes&mdash;280, 300, 320, and 340 yards
+in length. These should have relatively small greens and be closely
+bunkered, one or two of them having the putting greens open on one side
+or corner so as to give a powerful, long, courageous driver, who
+successfully accomplishes the long carry, the advantage of a short run
+up to the green. The size and contour of the putting green and the
+bunkering should depend upon the character and length of the hole. The
+principle of the dog's hind leg can be made a feature of several holes
+advantageously. The gradients between the tee and the hole should be
+made use of in bunkering. Whenever it is possible it is best that the
+bunkers should be in view. A number of the holes should be built with
+diagonal bunkers, or bunkers <i>en echelon</i>, so constructed that the
+player who takes the longer carry shall have an advantage over the man
+who takes the shorter carry. The hazards for the second shot should be
+so placed and designed as to give a well-placed tee shot every
+advantage&mdash;in other words, should make a man play his first stroke in
+relation to the second shot. There should be at least three tees for
+every hole, to take care not only of an adverse or favourable wind, but
+also of the calibre of the player. It is necessary on a first-class golf
+course to have short tees for the poorer players, otherwise they are
+everlastingly in the bunkers. The lengths which I give should be
+measured from the middle of the middle tee to the middle of the putting
+green."</p>
+
+<p>There is so much knowledge and good suggestion in this statement, and
+the matter is of such high consequence, that every player of the game
+should think well upon it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE U. S. G. A., AND THE METHODS OF THE BUSINESS-MAN GOLFER, WITH A
+REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT OF MUNICIPAL GOLF.</h3>
+
+
+<p>People in England or Scotland do not quite understand what a splendid
+thing for American golf is the United States Golf Association. It is so
+absolutely necessary for the game in America that I am sure there would
+be little that is like golf there now if there had been no U. S. G. A.,
+with its loyalty and attachment to St. Andrews. There would be few
+Americans coming to play on the links of the homeland of the game, and
+there would be no British golfers wandering happily among the American
+courses. American golf would have become as much like the old game as
+American college football is like the football that is played at Oxford
+and Cambridge, which is to say that it is not at all like it. America is
+not a country small in space like our own happy islands. There it is in
+its millions of miles, new everywhere, and with little communities of
+golfers so far apart as New York and San Francisco, Massachusetts and
+Arizona, and isolated golfers in the loneliest places trying to bring
+others to their pastime for the matches they would have. What should all
+these people, away from all the influences of the home of the game, hot
+with the spirit of freedom, unrestrained by laws and conventionalities,
+eager to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> do things better than they have been done before&mdash;what should
+they care for St. Andrews and traditions, and the preservation of the
+unity of the game? As sure as eagles fly, and stars are bright, they
+would have made it to suit themselves in every community. Here they
+would have abolished the stymie, in another place they would have
+changed the size of the hole, away in Texas they might have permitted
+the introduction of the "mechanical contrivance," and soon there would
+have been a hundred golfs in the States, and not a real one among them.
+Just when this possibility, without being an immediate probability, was
+arising the U. S. G. A. came into existence. It joined all the golfers
+of America together in a republic for the preservation of the unity of
+the game, and for the promotion of its welfare in the spirit that the
+game had been cultivated in the homeland. And being thus given power, it
+has ruled with a strong hand. It has kept American golf in order as
+nothing else could have done, and as a governmental machine, I who have
+made some close examination of it, regard it as perfect, which is not to
+say that we need such a thing in Britain. In America I have had the
+pleasure of the intimate acquaintance of Mr. Robert Watson, Mr. Silas H.
+Strawn, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, Mr. William Fellowes Morgan, Mr. Harry
+L. Ayer, Mr. John Reid, junior, and many others of the leaders of the
+Union, and better men for the direction of such a game as golf, in whose
+hands it is quite safe, there could not be. They hold the right spirit
+of the game, and they are wise men, conservative in their golfing ways.
+Mr. Windeler indeed is an old British golfer like Mr. Macdonald, who was
+one of the original gathering that established the U. S. G. A. In the
+December of 1894 the representatives of five of the leading clubs met
+and framed the constitution of the U. S. G. A., and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> Mr. Theodore A.
+Havemeyer, of the Newport Club, was chosen president.</p>
+
+<p>The constitution of the U.S.G.A. is an interesting study. There are two
+classes of members, active and allied, and the difference is that the
+active members, who exercise control, are clubs that have been steadied
+by age and experience, and have acquired dignity. The definition in the
+constitution is made thus: "Any regularly organised club in the United
+States, supporting and maintaining a golf course of at least nine holes,
+and whose reputation and general policy are in accord with the best
+traditions and the high ideals of the game, shall be eligible to
+election as an Active Member." Then, as to the Allied Members, it is
+said that&mdash;"Any regularly organised club of good reputation in the
+United States shall be eligible to election as an Allied Member." There
+are far more allied members than there are active members, and the
+former are only admitted to the latter when they have thoroughly proved
+their worth. Thus the allied clubs have always an ambition before them,
+and they can only achieve it by conducting their golf on the best and
+oldest plan. At every meeting of the Association each active club is
+entitled to be represented by one voting delegate whose appointment has
+to be certified in advance by his club to the secretary of the
+Association. Allied clubs have no voting privileges, but all members of
+active and allied clubs have the right to attend all meetings of the
+Association, and to participate in the discussion of any question. The
+active clubs pay thirty dollars a year for subscription, and the allied
+clubs pay ten. Article IX. of the Constitution gives the Association its
+power and authority. It says: "The acceptance of membership in the
+Association shall bind each club to uphold all the provisions of the
+Constitution, bye-laws, and other rules of the Association; and to
+accept and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> enforce all rules and decisions of the Executive Committee
+acting within its jurisdiction. Any club failing in its obligations as
+above set forth may be suspended or expelled by a two-thirds vote of the
+Association, or by a two-thirds vote of all members of the Executive
+Committee; provided such club shall have been given due notice of the
+charge or charges preferred against it, and an opportunity to be heard
+in its own defence. Any club thus suspended or expelled by vote of the
+Executive Committee may appeal from its decision to the delegates at any
+annual or special meeting of the Association."</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>After this about the machinery of American golf, consider the men. There
+are three classes of golfers in the United States, corresponding to some
+extent to similar classes in Britain, but they are rather more sharply
+defined than with us. There is the class that regards the game as a
+sport for competition, almost as a form of athletics, being mainly but
+not exclusively the younger class; there is the business-man class that
+believes in it as the ideal, and indeed the only recreation satisfying
+the needs of the times as a relaxation from the strain of life and work,
+and a means of promoting physical and mental efficiency, such people
+being as with us the largest section and the mainstay in one sense of
+the game; and there is the humbler class who play upon the public
+courses.</p>
+
+<p>I do not believe after the closest observation and most impartial
+consideration that the best American golfers are yet quite so good as
+ours, but in recent years they have been rapidly lessening the gap that
+has existed, their thoroughness, determination, and efficiency are most
+wonderful, and if they had our courses and climate they might become
+better than we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> are. They think they will anyhow. As it is they are
+handicapped by lack of full-blooded seaside courses, and a climate that
+is by no means ideal for the game; and although by their zeal they have
+to some extent discounted that handicap, I feel that they can only
+neutralise it altogether and go beyond it by the production of the
+occasional genius. The good Americans seem to me mostly to play what we
+could call a plain, straight game. American courses are for the most
+part without any sharp undulations; there is nothing in America like our
+rolling seaside links. Therefore the players are not taught or induced
+to be making allowances for this and that in all the days of their golf
+from their youth upwards, and they have not the sea-coast winds to lead
+them in the same way as we have. So they have good reason to play
+straight to the hole, and never to depart from doing so without the most
+obvious and pressing cause. It follows from this that the American
+players have fewer "scientific" or "fancy" strokes at their disposal,
+and those who have visited this country have been remarked upon for the
+plain simplicity of their iron play. They seem to standardise their
+shots. But assuming that this is their principle or their system, it
+enables them to concentrate keenly and with fine effect on accuracy.
+Delicacy of touch, splendid judgment of distance, and perfection of
+execution are strong characteristics of the American players, who do not
+need to be reminded that there are no bunkers in the air. It is the
+straight game of the Americans with all its accuracy that is paying in
+their matches against us. At the same time I think that the comparative
+weakness of the Americans in wooden club play is a serious handicap to
+them, and their courses need to be tightened up to improve it. That
+"American hook" of theirs is a dangerous thing sometimes, and their
+round flat swings are looked upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> by some of our best British
+authorities with much suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>But there is one most important way in which they are scoring over us.
+They are beating us in temperament, concentration, and determination,
+and in the capacity to make the very most of their own game, so that not
+a shot of it is wasted. This means very much. A man may be plus five,
+but of such a temperament and such ways that he habitually wastes two or
+three holes in a match through negligence or slackness. The Americans do
+not waste holes in this way. They waste nothing. The game of which they
+are capable is produced nearly every time at full quality and is made as
+effective as it possibly can be. The utmost pains are taken over every
+stroke; the man blames himself for nothing after it is made. His
+concentration is enormous; he is often inclined to race through the
+green, but his capacity for being slow and meditative, when necessary,
+is great; and most noticeable again is his persistence, which is another
+way of making the most of a game that a man possesses. Of course all
+these remarks are applied to the two classes of players in a very
+general way. There are many exceptions among the Americans and there are
+many among our players, but that they do indicate the tendencies in the
+two countries I am certain. The American game may not be as scientific
+and complete as ours, but its more serious exponents do make the most of
+it as ours do not, and probably the high importance that is attached to
+the numerous first-class tournaments they have over there has something
+to do with it. They believe in competitions more than we do.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>This matter of consideration and concentration is one to which every
+player should give closer attention.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> His success is largely dependent
+upon it. He may think he concentrates enormously as it is, more than on
+anything else, but often he deceives himself. Not one man in ten gets as
+much in effect out of his game as it is capable of. He walks to his ball
+and plays some kind of a shot, with a more or less hazy idea of what it
+is that he wishes to do. When he finds his object has not been
+accomplished he suddenly remembers something, and it is a case of "I
+should have known," or "If I had only thought," or "What a pity I did
+not look." With such people a round of golf is a succession of regrets,
+and it is the simple truth that the majority could do far better with
+their game if they did not waste so much of it by carelessness,
+thoughtlessness, and a sort of distraction which allows their minds to
+wander to other things than the stroke in hand, and sometimes by their
+conversation too. When a man has played a stroke he has quite sufficient
+to occupy his mind for the next minute or two in considering how he
+shall play the next one, and the many features of the case that will be
+presented to him.</p>
+
+<p>It is a remunerative resolution to make at the beginning of the season,
+to think deeply upon all the points of match play, and then exploit the
+art of it with some thoroughness. It is not difficult. All who have
+attended the Amateur Championship meetings and have been close observers
+of what happens there can remember how even players of the very first
+class in this most important of tournaments let themselves get beaten by
+inferior players simply because they do not make the most of their game.
+They forget things, do not think enough, and play strokes carelessly
+because at the time of doing so they seem to feel it does not matter. No
+stroke should ever be played as though it were not the most important of
+the game&mdash;as it might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> turn out to be. The old maxim that if a thing is
+worth doing at all it is worth doing well, applies with tremendous force
+to match-play golf. Many a time when the result of a stroke played
+exactly as intended, is not what was anticipated, through some of the
+circumstances not having been taken into consideration, the mistake that
+was made is obvious then. The man excuses himself by saying that he
+cannot see and think of everything, but nine times out of ten he should
+have seen. The most fatal mistake, however, that many players make in
+the early part of the season when their match-playing qualities have not
+been properly revived, is in their letting matches slip, in not pressing
+home advantages that they gain, and, above all, being too indifferent
+upon the future in the early part of a match, and too careless when they
+get a lead. All this sounds very simple, very obvious, but it often
+takes the best part of a season to drive the lessons home into the minds
+of golfers who are losing matches through their weakness in fighting
+quality.</p>
+
+<p>Now here are one or two samples of points in regard to which the golfer
+constantly neglects to display his cunning and is the loser thereby.
+Assuming that in the general way you can get as much length when it is
+wanted as the other man, always try to make him play the odd to you. You
+do so naturally with your tee shots and many of the others, but are not
+really thinking at the time that you are wanting him to play the odd.
+The man who is playing the odd, even from a very little way behind the
+other, is at a much greater moral disadvantage than is often suspected,
+and if the other man always noticed things as much as he should, he is
+at a greater practical advantage than he realises, for if his opponent
+fails he can see the cause of it, this remark applying especially to
+what happens in the short game. How many putts have gone wrong that
+never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> need have done had the man who made them watched what happened
+when his adversary putted first! Then, again, on this point of making
+the other man play the odd the case is constantly recurring where both
+men are obliged to play short of some hazard, or to take a particular
+line to a hole which is not the straight one. The man who goes second
+will find it very much to his advantage if he tries to squeeze so
+closely up to the point of danger as to be just nearer to it than the
+other, the latter then having to play the odd and being then more
+inclined to press with it and perhaps to miss it. The man who is playing
+the odd is in a sense taking a shot into the unknown; the other man
+knows everything. That is just the difference. Another stupid mistake
+that many men make is to try experimental or fancy shots, perhaps with
+clubs that are unfamiliar to them, just because the other man has played
+two more. How many thousands of holes have been lost through that! The
+experimental shot fails, the other man makes a good one, the
+experimenter suddenly finds he has to fight for it, and a minute or two
+later is watching his adversary take the honour from the next tee.
+Again, what matches could have been won that were lost if the players
+had only shown half the sense that Mr. Hilton did in the Amateur
+Championship of 1912 at Prestwick, in picking his places for putting, as
+it were, always, whenever possible, running up so that he would have to
+putt uphill instead of down, the former being far the easier kind of
+putting. Nowadays there are inclines on every green and round about the
+hole, and a flat putt is a comparative rarity. But the average man never
+thinks of these inclines until he has to play along them. The time for
+most thinking about them is when making the stroke before, so that the
+putt may be along the easiest line to the hole. This is not a question
+of skill; it is simply one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> sense. A man can play short of the hole
+or past it, or to the right or left, and there will be one point from
+which the putting will be easier than the other. It may often happen
+that it would pay better to be four yards past the hole than two short
+of it, for you will not only have had the chance of holing, but the putt
+back may be an uphill one.</p>
+
+<p>But with it all, the habit must be cultivated of thinking as much as
+possible in advance&mdash;thinking quickly and acting with decision.
+Questions of the value of practice swings have arisen lately. We have
+seen rather too much of these practice swings in some quarters. We may
+believe in the practice swing&mdash;just one or at most two. A man may be an
+experienced golfer, and he may have played a certain stroke nearly a
+million times before, but golf is essentially a game of fears and
+doubts, and apart from just setting the right muscles in a state of
+complete preparation for the task in hand a practice swing gives one a
+little confidence. The shot is shaped; there is nothing to do but repeat
+the stroke that has been made; it can be done. To that extent the
+practice swing may be thoroughly recommended. But some members of the
+young American School go farther than this, and it is questionable
+whether they are wise. For one thing the delicate muscles and the
+nervous system that are concerned with the stroke in hand are easily
+tired, and if the shot is a long one needing power the odds are against
+its being done so well after five practice swings as after one. Show me
+the man who can drive his best and straightest after five practice
+swings on the tee. Then there is the hesitation and doubt that are
+induced. I believe that in most cases these players are really waiting
+for an inspiration. They are not ready for the stroke they have to play.
+Jack White in once confiding to me some of the secrets of his
+successful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> putting, said that when he went about on the green examining
+the line back and front, he was simply trying to gain time and nothing
+more. "I want to feel that I want to putt," he said, "and while I am
+waiting for that feeling coming on I can hardly stand motionless on the
+green or look up at the sky." It is that way with these Americans; they
+are waiting for an inspiration. But it does not always seem to be
+responsive, and they wait too long. A moment must come when they are as
+ready for the shot as ever they will be in their lives; if they let it
+pass nothing but doubts and hesitations can follow, and that is the
+danger to the player of excessive slowness. He begins to fear his fate
+too much. And also one round of golf played like this makes a fearful
+mental strain, and how often do we see that men who win their morning
+matches by such methods look very tired and lose easily in the
+afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>The case of Mr. Ouimet, who has so suddenly become a great power in
+American golf, has already been considered, and Mr. Walter Travis's high
+position was established long ago. Apart from these two, the new star
+and the old one, and the young professional M'Dermott, there are two
+others who hold a higher place in the opinion of the golfers of their
+own country and ours than any other players do, and those are Mr.
+Charles Evans, junior, of Chicago, and Mr. Jerome D. Travers, foremost
+players of the west and east as they respectively are. In every way Mr.
+Evans is a very delightful golfer. When we saw him at Prestwick in 1911
+he was even then a brilliant player, and one who impressed British
+golfers as no other had ever done since Mr. Travis had won at Sandwich,
+and he had then an advantage which the winner of our championship had
+not&mdash;he had his whole golfing life before him. Since that time he has
+undoubtedly improved. He has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> become physically stronger, experience has
+helped him, and he has greater resource and skill. And despite the fact
+that he has not yet won an American championship, there is this to be
+said for him, that in the sense of accomplishment, in variety of stroke,
+perfection of it, in playing the game as it was meant to be played, as
+we say, he is still, for all his failures, the best amateur golfer in
+the United States at the present time. But Mr. Evans is a man of very
+keen and somewhat too sensitive temperament. He is inclined sometimes to
+fear his fate unduly. Yet whenever we are inclined to judge him a little
+harshly for his temperament, let it be remembered that fortune has dealt
+him some cruel hurts, and that it is not a quality of human man to bear
+himself indifferently to perpetual adversity. When he was the last hope
+of his country at the championship at Sandwich in 1914, and striving
+gallantly, his opponent went to the turn in a record score of 31. To be
+merely sorry for "Chick" in such circumstances is inadequate; along with
+him we smiled at the absurd extent to which his ill-luck spitefully
+pursued him then. Even though it had to be counted, it was unreal. He
+must be a champion some time.</p>
+
+<p>One of the greatest tragedies of his life, so far, was that he suffered
+in the appalling Amateur Championship at Wheaton, Illinois, in
+1912&mdash;appalling by reason of the terrible heat that players and all
+others, including my unlucky but still deeply interested self, were
+called upon to bear. It has come to be nearly a settled understanding in
+Britain that the championships must be attended by weather quite
+ridiculously and most uncomfortably unseasonable. Thunderstorms and
+lightning, gales and floods&mdash;these are the accompaniments of the great
+golf tournaments of the year in the summer months of May and June, and
+matters seemed to reach a climax in 1913 when the progress of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> the final
+match of the Amateur Championship at St. Andrews had to be suspended
+because of the terrific storm which flooded the putting greens until
+there were no holes to putt at, and when in the Open Championship at
+Hoylake shortly afterwards Taylor had to play his way to victory through
+a gale against which ordinary people could hardly stand up. Almost does
+it appear that the American climate is disposed to follow the bad
+British example in times of championships, seeing what happened at
+Brookline in the same season; but it was very different at Wheaton in
+the year when Mr. Hilton failed to retain the American Amateur
+Championship he had won the season before at Apawamis, and when Mr.
+Travers beat Mr. Evans in the final by seven and six. Mr. Norman Hunter
+and some others, Americans, were burned out of that championship by a
+temperature which at times was more than a hundred in the shade, and
+while some players conducted their game beneath sunshades that they
+carried, most of them had towels attached to their golf bags for
+body-wiping purposes. There was no escape from the heat anywhere, night
+or day, and no consolation in anything, unless it were that in the city
+of Chicago a few miles distant the people were reported to be even worse
+off than we were, and deaths were numerous. Well did we call that the
+blazing championship, and when I am asked, as is often the case, which
+of all championship experiences I recall most vividly, my remembrances
+of events in Britain, far more numerous as they are, give way to an
+American pair, the hot one at Wheaton in 1912, and the wet one of the
+British debâcle at Brookline a season later. But the sun at its worst
+could not diminish the enormous interest that there was in that Wheaton
+final, for the draw and the play had brought about the ideal match, from
+the spectators' point of view, and even that of the players too, Mr.
+Travers of the east and Mr. Evans of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> the west, and finely did the
+Americans show their appreciation of what had come to pass by wagering
+incredible numbers of dollars upon it and watching it in thousands. That
+time it was thought that Mr. Evans would win, and he was three up at the
+turn in the morning round, but he lost two of the holes before lunch,
+and I am sure that the reason why he fell such an easy victim to Mr.
+Travers in the afternoon was that he grieved too much for the loss of
+those holes, and feared his fate when he need not have done. I know that
+Mr. Travers in that second round played golf of the most brilliant
+description that nobody could have lived against; but did Mr. Evans
+encourage him to do so? This matter of temperament might seem to be a
+fatal consideration for ever, being one of Nature and seemingly
+unalterable, were it not that we have had cases of fine golfers with
+weak temperaments who, perceiving their desperate state, have resolutely
+and with patience changed those temperaments, or curbed their influence
+as we should more properly say. The best modern instance of such a
+change being made is that of George Duncan, and never fear but that
+"Chick" will soon come to his own as well.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jerome Travers is undoubtedly one of the strong men of golf to-day,
+a big piece of golfing individualism. At twenty years of age he won the
+American Amateur Championship, in 1912 I saw him win it for the third
+time, and the following year he won it again at Garden City. In his own
+golfing country he must be one of the hardest men in the world to beat.
+He plays the game that suits him and disregards criticism. He began to
+play when he was nine years old. A year later he laid out a three-holes
+golf course of his own at home&mdash;first hole 150 yards, second 180, third
+apparently about the same, back to the starting-point. There were no
+real holes&mdash;to hit certain trees was to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> "hole out." For hour after hour
+this American child would make the circuit of this little course, and
+day after day he would work hard to lower his record for these three
+holes. At thirteen he started playing on a proper nine-holes course at
+Oyster Bay. At fifteen he became attached to the Nassau Country Club,
+and there, chiefly under the guidance of Alexander Smith, to whose
+qualities as tutor he pays high tribute, his game improved. His swing
+was wrong at the beginning. "Shorten your back swing, and take the club
+back with your wrists. Swing easily and keep your eye on the ball." That
+was Smith's advice to him, and he says it served him well. He began to
+place the right hand under instead of over the shaft, and that added
+more power to his stroke, and then he discovered that taking the club
+back with his wrists or starting the club-head back with them, increased
+its speed and gave him greater distance. Then it was practice, practice,
+practice for an hour at a time at every individual stroke in the game.
+He would play the same shot fifty times. He putted for two hours at a
+stretch, placing his ball at varying distances from the hole, trying
+short putts, long ones, uphill and downhill putts, and putts across a
+side-hill green where the ball had to follow a crescent-like course if
+it had to be holed out or laid dead. During the championship at
+Apawamis, when he was playing Mr. Hilton, he had what everybody declared
+to be an impossible putt of twenty feet, downhill over a billowy green,
+and he holed it because he had practised the same sort of putt before.
+In the next championship at Wheaton he did an "impossible" bunker shot
+and laid the ball dead from the foot of the face of the hazard because
+he had practised that shot also. Next to the Schenectady putter
+belonging to Mr. Travis his driving iron is, or should be, the most
+famous club in all America. It is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> a plain, straight-faced iron with a
+round back, and is heavy, weighing sixteen ounces. It has a long shaft
+and a very rough leather grip, and was forged at St. Andrews. This and
+his other irons are kept permanently rusty. He carries very few
+clubs&mdash;five irons, a Schenectady putter, a brassey and a driver, but, as
+Mr. Fred Herreshoff, who turns caddie for him in the finals of
+championships, says, the two latter are for the sake of appearances
+only. He believes in the centre-shafted Schenectady putter, illegal here
+but allowed in America, as in no other. He calls for a very low tee, one
+that is only just high enough to give him a perfect lie, "the duplicate
+of an ideal lie on the turf." He plays his drives off the right foot,
+which is about three inches in advance of the left, the ball being just
+a shade to the right of the left heel, because in that position he finds
+it easier to keep the eye on the ball without effort, and in the strain
+of a hard match or competition every simplifying process like this is
+valuable.</p>
+
+<p>But the most remarkable thing about his preparation for driving is his
+grip, which is unique. He does not employ the overlapper. He likes the
+right hand to be under the shaft; but this is the main point&mdash;that the
+first fingers are almost entirely free of the shaft, with the tips
+resting on the leather, curled inside the thumbs. Both thumbs are
+pressed firmly against the sides of the first joints of the second
+fingers, forming a locking device which prevents any possible turning of
+the shaft. He is an utter believer in this detaching of the first
+fingers from the club, and declares he could not play in any other way,
+his theory being that it permits better freedom of the wrists and
+enables him to get greater power into the stroke without deflecting the
+club-head from its proper sweep in the swing to the ball. With his
+driving iron he is a supreme master, and with it alone he has played a
+round of a difficult course in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> America, Montclair, in 77. When I
+watched him win his third championship I decided that in whatever else
+he might excel he had a finer temperament for match play than almost any
+other player I had seen. Silent, imperturbable, not a trace of feeling
+in his countenance, he seemed to be mercilessly forcing his way to
+victory all the time. Only once since he became established as a
+champion kind of golfer have his nerves ever failed him, and that was on
+an occasion of supreme importance, and yet one when the strain upon
+nerves was not, or should not have been, unduly severe. I saw him lose
+his match to Mr. Palmer at Sandwich in 1914, and there was something
+nearly as mysterious about that occurrence as there was about the
+victory of Mr. Ouimet at Brookline&mdash;far more than there was about the
+defeat of the latter at Sandwich by Mr. Tubbs, for then Mr. Ouimet
+simply played a poor but not a timid game. But in the Palmer-Travers
+match the American for the first time for years was afraid. Half way
+round, all the watchers were saying so, saying his nerves were catching
+at his shots. Knowing the man, having seen so much of him in America, I
+could not believe it then; but before the round was ended the truth was
+clear. His nerves had failed, and it was responsibility that had caused
+them to do so. He could not possibly have played so poorly otherwise. It
+was not the real Travers who played that day.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The middle-aged business-man golfer is an important individual in the
+general golfing scheme of things in the United States. He is that
+elsewhere, but he stands out most in America. Well enough does he know
+how the game is good for him. The early American golfers (those of from
+ten to twenty years ago) adopted the game<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> enthusiastically, because it
+answered exactly to certain requirements they had in mind in regard to
+creating and preserving physical fitness. The American business man
+leads a quick life and a hard one and, in recent years particularly, his
+pursuit of this physical fitness has become something of a craze with
+him, for the reason that through it he seeks to bring the human machine
+to the highest point of working efficiency and, at the same time, enable
+the human man to derive more enjoyment and satisfaction from the
+pleasures of life. This is not a vague, subconscious idea in the
+American; it is a clear, definite scheme, adopted by thousands and
+thousands of those who have devoted themselves to the game. Hence their
+generous support and excellent enthusiasm. The country swarms with men,
+two-thirds way through an ordinary lifetime, who have only been playing
+the game for five or six summers and no winters&mdash;for in very few places
+in the northern parts of the United States is any play possible between
+the late fall and the spring&mdash;and who can play a good six-handicap game,
+British reckoning, for in America they have a system of handicapping
+according to which scratch is the lowest, and their six handicap is
+about equivalent to our two or three. The majority of our middle-aged
+men seem to resign themselves to the idea that in no circumstances can
+they ever become really good players, and they pretend they are
+satisfied to make their way round the links merely for the sake of the
+health and exercise that they obtain from so doing. Perhaps in a sense
+they are wise, but still it is certain that more than half of the joys
+and pleasures of golf are missed by those who never feel any improvement
+being made, who never rise above a steady mediocrity, and who never feel
+the thrills of playing above their ordinary form.</p>
+
+<p>The business-man golfer is seen at his best at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> country clubs near
+to the great cities. There is nothing elsewhere which for its healthy,
+honest pleasures and the satisfaction it yields is comparable to the
+American country club and the life that is pursued there. It gives to
+the busy man the ideal relaxation he could not obtain in any other way.
+I spent several days at one of these country clubs, a railroad journey
+of an hour or so from Chicago, and the experience was illuminating. The
+American business-man golfer works in the city for part of the day in
+the summer and spends the rest of his time at the country club, where
+the predominating features of the life are golf, rest, and sociability.
+These country clubs are provided with a large number of bedrooms, and
+are surrounded with cottages, nicely equipped, which generally belong to
+them and are let for periods to the members. The vitality of the man of
+whom we are thinking is enormous. He is out of his bed at the club at
+about six o'clock in the morning, and goes through a process of shower
+baths, with which the establishment is splendidly appointed. By seven
+o'clock he is dressed in the thinnest flannels, and sits down to
+breakfast with thirty or forty other members at 7.15. At this time he is
+jacketless, and all in white. A large glass of iced water is laid before
+him to begin with, and then the half of a grape fruit or a cantaloup,
+with a piece of ice stuck in the middle, is presented as the first
+course. These things, as we get them in America, are very delicious. At
+once an argument begins round the table about the qualities of different
+balls and clubs, and I am closely questioned about the way we do things
+in England. Next, there is oatmeal porridge laid before us, with tea or
+coffee, and the men begin to match themselves for the afternoon round.
+Mr. A says he will play Mr. B for a certain stake, but the latter finds
+he is already engaged to play Mr. C for a higher one.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> Eventually,
+Messrs. A, B, and C agree to play a three-ball match for still more
+dollars. Such extensive wagering is not the rule, but it is frequent.
+After the porridge, bacon and eggs, calf's liver and bacon, or something
+of that kind, is served with a baked potato, a little more iced water
+may be called for, and there is marmalade with toast and sweet cakes,
+and, then at a quarter to eight, all get aboard the club motor-omnibuses
+and are whizzed away to the railroad station, light jackets very likely
+carried on their arms.</p>
+
+<p>Before nine o'clock they are hard at work in the big city. Some early
+birds were even there by eight o'clock. They work very hard, no dawdling
+of any kind, and by one or two o'clock they have finished for the day
+and are off back to the golf club as fast as they can go. Frequently
+they are back in time to lunch there. Soup, some meat done in American
+fashion, an American salad, blueberry pie, iced water, and a glass of
+cold tea with a lump of ice in it and a piece of lemon, finishing up
+with a large supply of ice cream, and then a big cigar, are what the
+American golfer goes out to play upon. The caddie whom he takes out to
+carry his clubs costs him tenpence an hour&mdash;always paid by the hour,
+during which he is in the golfer's service, and not by the round. By
+this time the player is in thinner and lighter clothes than ever, and he
+has been cooled down by more shower baths. His round is played very much
+as it might be done in England. He is very keen on his game. But he
+takes a little more time on the consideration of his stroke when once he
+has reached his ball than we do, and he is most deeply painstaking.
+Towards the end of the match he may develop an idea for playing the
+enemy for a number of dollars a hole for the remainder of the round, and
+when it is all over, everybody is quite satisfied with everything. More
+shower baths, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> lounge, and a cigar, and then a long American dinner,
+with vegetables very fancily done, corn cobs, sweet salads, plenty of
+iced water, ice creams, "horses' necks"&mdash;ginger ale with lemon and
+ice&mdash;and so forth. Long arguments on the verandah upon the respective
+merits of British and American golf, and at ten o'clock this busy golfer
+of the United States gets himself off to bed. He never sits up late. He
+sleeps, of course, with his windows wide open, with a wire netting
+arrangement to keep out the flies and mosquitoes, and as he falls away
+to his slumber he feels that golf is the best of games, that America is
+the chief of countries, and that this is the most agreeable of all
+possible worlds. Here I have been writing in general terms, but I should
+add that each and all of my details are taken from the life, from
+personal experience at one of the best of these country clubs.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>There are some interesting characters in American golf as everywhere,
+and the very wealthy golfer in the States is often to be considered. Mr.
+John D. Rockefeller, the "Oil King," is, as all of us know, an extremely
+rich man. He is also a business man, if ever there was one. And he is
+extremely fond of golf. His case may have as little to do with the
+matters just discussed as you may think, but I shall present it as I
+found it out. A few years gone Mr. Rockefeller, who has a capacity for
+giving advice of a very shrewd and worldly character, announced his
+intention of retiring from the presidency of the Oil Trust and of
+devoting a fair part of the remainder of his life to playing golf. Since
+then he has discovered that it is easier to make a million dollars than
+to hole a five-yard putt, for the Rockefeller millions now make
+themselves and the putts are as unholeable as ever.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> His methods of
+playing, and his moralisings on the game, are not like those of any
+other man. Readers must judge for themselves as to whether they have
+anything to learn from them; I think they may have something. Take this
+case for an instance. One day when playing the game he made a very good
+shot on to the green, and, ever ready to draw a moral from the game of
+golf which would apply to the greater game of life, turned to his
+companions and said: "Waste of energy I regard as one of the wanton
+extravagances of this age. Rational conservation of energy and
+temperance in all things are what the American nation must learn to
+appreciate." Mr. Rockefeller is now seventy-five years of age, and he
+was nearly sixty before he first began to play. He became an enthusiast
+at once, and, as with most other men, his golf aggravated him, goaded
+him, tantalised him, and made him ambitious and determined. He began to
+find things out and to invent new ideas as rapidly as any of us have
+ever done. He said the game changed his life. Made him happy. Brought
+back his youth to him. His friends when they played with him declared
+that he was not a cantankerous old man, but a really charming fellow.
+Golf was doing him good. It was making a new man of him, as it does of
+all others. But he did not get on at it as quickly as he thought he
+ought to do. He found that there were rather more things to remember in
+a very short space of time when making his shot than he had ever had to
+remember before, and that for the first time in his life he was liable
+to forgetfulness on the most important occasions. Then he acted on the
+business man's principle of getting others to do things for him. He got
+others to do the remembering. For a time whenever he went to play a
+match he had three caddies attending on him; even now he generally has
+two. He employed them for other purposes than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> carrying clubs. When he
+was about to make a stroke No. 1 Caddie stepped up to him and said
+respectfully but firmly: "Slow back, Mr. Rockefeller, slow back!" He
+might otherwise have forgotten to take his club slowly back from the
+ball at the start of the swing. This adviser having moved away, Caddie
+No. 2 went forward and said: "Keep your eye on the ball, Mr.
+Rockefeller, keep your eye on the ball!" Then, in turn, Caddie No. 3
+advanced and spoke warningly: "Do not press, Mr. Rockefeller, do not
+press!" So, reminded of the common faults, the Oil King made his stroke
+and did not commit them, but was guilty of several others, and realised
+a little sadly when the ball did not travel as it should that he needed
+a hundred caddies for warning, and not three. Still, there is some good
+sense in this method, and the man who made it a strict rule to say to
+himself always, just before a stroke, what Mr. Rockefeller hired the
+boys to say to him would make fewer bad shots than he does.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Rockefeller has a very nice course of his own on undulating land at
+Forest Hill, on the edge of Cleveland, Ohio, and there he has parties to
+play with him constantly. He is fond of cycling, and instead of walking
+after his ball when he has struck it, he takes his cycle on to the
+course with him, jumps on to it, and wheels himself along to the place
+from which the next shot must be made. By this means he not only saves
+much time, and gets more golf in an hour than we do, but considers that
+he derives more physical benefit from the combination than he would from
+golf and walking. More than this, he knows exactly how far he has hit
+the ball every time, for he counts the number of turns of the pedals he
+has to make in cycling from point to point, and calculates accordingly.
+He does not lose his temper when he makes a bad shot or a series of
+such, as some have suggested, but he is quite ecstatic when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> he makes a
+good one; and, despite his seventy-five years, has been known to leap
+high into the air when the result of his efforts has been specially
+good. He is a most thoughtful player, and takes the utmost care always
+to note effects and to try to attach causes to them. "Now gentlemen," he
+has said, "that was really a very good stroke that I made then. You
+observe that I am learning to make better use of my left arm. It was
+that Scotchman who told me of the trick, but somehow I have never been
+able to use it advantageously until now." He has a large number of clubs
+in his bag, including all the most usual implements, while two or three
+have been made according to his own special ideas. One of his caddies
+also carries a large sunshade to hold over him while playing when the
+weather is uncomfortably warm, and it is the duty of this boy also to
+give a hand at pushing the bicycle when the line to the hole is uphill
+and Mr. Rockefeller finds the pedalling too much for him unaided. So you
+see that there is nothing that is conventional about Mr. John D.
+Rockefeller and his golf. You would hardly expect it.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Now for the public or municipal golf in America; it is one of the strong
+features of the game in the United States that impressed me most. The
+average player in Britain, where the municipal golf movement is making
+slow headway, may be surprised to know that there is such a thing across
+the Atlantic; let him understand, then, that public golf in America is
+far ahead of public golf in Britain. Some Americans of great golfing
+experience, not confined to their own country, have not hesitated to say
+that they will "make America the greatest golfing country in the world."
+If we disregard such a challenge, there are yet circumstances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> and
+forces in operation in America of which serious notice must be taken,
+and the first of them is this great movement that is progressing in
+favour of municipal golf. The whole vast country is taking to it. The
+leaders of the people are appreciating the necessity of it and preaching
+it. They say that the times are desperately strenuous, that an antidote
+is needed, an ideal relaxation for body and nerves, a perfect recreation
+and diversion, and that, having tried everything and thought of other
+possibilities, they have come firmly and decisively to the conclusion
+that golf is the only recreation that meets the requirements of the
+times. Therefore they say that it must be provided for everybody, for
+the "common people," and given to them absolutely free with every
+inducement put forward for them to play it. The result is that public
+golf in America is already advanced to such a state as is almost
+incredible to those who have not seen it there. I have seen it. In New
+York, Boston, Chicago, Kansas, Louisville, Milwaukee, Elgin, Toledo, and
+a host of the smaller places, there are good public courses. In the
+large cities there are often two or three. Chicago has now three and a
+fourth was being made when I was there last, a fine long course in the
+Marquette Park. Two of the existing courses are in the Jackson Park, one
+being eighteen holes and the other nine. The third is in Garfield Park.
+The full-sized course in Jackson Park is quite an excellent thing. The
+turf and the putting greens are well tended, the views are pleasant, and
+the play is absolutely free to all who obtain the necessary permit from
+the Parks Commissioners. The regular player may have the use of locker
+and dressing-rooms in the pavilion, and good meals may be obtained at a
+reasonable cost. How shall we wonder then that the Americans take kindly
+to this game and are becoming overwhelmingly enthusiastic at it, or that
+more than a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> hundred thousand games are played on one single course at
+Jackson Park alone in the course of a year? Though for the best part of
+the winter there is snow on the ground and play is impossible 105,000
+games were played on the long course at Jackson Park during 1912 up to
+the beginning of October, and the news just reaches me that on one day
+at the very beginning of this season of 1914 nearly 900 tickets were
+given out! On a fine morning in the summer there will often be a little
+crowd of players waiting at the first tee for their turn to start at the
+dawn of day, and as many as two hundred have been counted there at seven
+o'clock in the morning. Having finished their game on ordinary mornings
+these people go off to their work, and they "hustle" all the more for
+the shots that they have played and hope to play again before the
+falling of the night. It is the same in the Franklin Park at Boston, in
+Van Cortlandt Park in New York, and everywhere. In this matter these
+Americans have sense. If public golf in England is ever to be a good and
+useful thing we must do as the Americans do, and if we do not the people
+will be the poorer, and we shall be sorry. Corporations must provide
+free golf, and they must be satisfied with the good done to the people,
+and not take the narrow view that the balance-sheet must show a direct
+profit apart from the indirect one that is certain. They must also put
+their courses in central and convenient places where people will be
+attracted to them, and which will not take the greater part of the time
+available to reach them. The game must be played in central parks which
+will then become more useful than they have ever been so far, and for
+the first time will be a real joy to the people who pay for them. I may
+be an enthusiast in golf, but I have gone deeply into this matter and
+studied it in its every bearing, and I know that I am right.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>And the Americans are gaining in another matter&mdash;they are bringing their
+young boys into the game. I have been to preparatory schools where they
+have their own little courses and their school championships. The boys
+like it, the masters encourage it, and the grown-up players admire the
+youngsters' enthusiasm. This is the way that "prodigies" are produced.
+In England we do not encourage the boys to play golf. The head-masters
+of schools say that it is a selfish game and that it is bad for them. I
+wonder how much these principals have thought of the moral qualities
+that must exist in the good golfer who knows how to play a losing match
+and perhaps save it, and how long in real argument before an impartial
+tribunal the contention would hold that it would be better for the young
+boy to stand for hours in the deep field at cricket on a hot summer's
+day than for him to learn to play golf and learn to keep a tight hold of
+himself when the whole scheme of things might seem to be breaking up.
+Cricket and football are great games, and they are splendid things for
+boys, but that golf is inferior to them in what it does for character I
+deny, and if the comparison is pressed the golfers with me can put
+forward an invincible case. Anyhow the fact is there that young America
+is getting golf and young England is not, and that will make a
+difference some time some way.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>CANADIAN COURSES, AND A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AT TORONTO, WITH MATTERS
+PERTAINING TO MAKING A NEW BEGINNING.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Towards the end of an afternoon in September, rounds being done, I stood
+with Mr. George Lyon (who is a kind of John Ball of the Dominion of
+Canada, having won the championship of his country seven times) on the
+heights where stands the club-house of the Lambton Golf and Country Club
+in Ontario, and we looked across the valley along which the course is
+traced to the woods on the opposite side where there were some fiery
+crimson spots to be seen as if burning amid the mass of foliage that was
+olive or tinting down to brown. They were the maple leaves of Canada,
+the emblem of the new land, of which it is prophesied that it shall be
+the greatest country of the earth. In early days the Canadians dabbled
+with the lacrosse which the Indians played, and some of the invaders,
+too, brought their cricket with them and taught it to others whom they
+found there. Then the people who are near to the borders of the United
+States, and are somewhat impressed with the American ways of doing
+things, have been cultivating an interest in baseball for its
+spectacular properties. Rounders revised is well enough for those who
+are within shouting distance of Buffalo and for places like Toronto, but
+I could never believe that such a game or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> pastime, whatever its
+merits&mdash;and I know that it has many&mdash;could suit such a very serious,
+contemplative, cold, and earnest people as the Canadians are. I regard
+the nature of these people, as I have had the opportunity of considering
+it, as more serious and intense than that of any other, and I know only
+one recreation beyond those that are the simplest and most essential, as
+of roaming in the untamed country, fishing, shooting, and hunting, that
+is agreeable to such a nature. They also know it; they have declared for
+a national game.</p>
+
+<p>There is this to be said at the beginning for Canadian golf and its
+courses, that the general atmosphere of the game in this great country,
+rough and often bare and primitive as still it is, seems to be much
+nearer the atmosphere of golf in Britain than that of any other country
+different from us. One misses the sea-coast links, courses are long
+distances apart, fine players are comparatively few, for the men of
+Canada are still so busy and so earnest that they have not even time to
+play, but yet there is a fine chain of the game all the way from St.
+John's to Vancouver. There is more of the peculiarity of British
+sporting instinct in the Canadian than in any other person out of the
+British Isles; he likes what we like, and he likes it in the same way
+and for the same reasons. Except that the coldness, like that of the
+Scot, is sometimes too much exhibited in him, and that even on suitable
+occasions he is reluctant to demonstrate his enthusiasms, so serious he
+is, so deep he looks, I have found him to be a splendid opponent with an
+agreeable persistency, and a most desirable partner in a foursome. Here
+in Canada there are trestle tee-boxes, a few&mdash;but only a few&mdash;of the
+club-houses are built and equipped in the manner of the Americans,
+betokening an existing prosperity and a provision for that greater one
+which is felt to be as sure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> as the fruit and the corn of the following
+season; but otherwise golf seems much like what it is at home, and
+especially do we feel like that when we reach the old places where the
+game first took root out there. There is a Canadian Golf Association to
+rule the affairs of the game in the country with a certain subservience
+to home and St. Andrews as the Dominion holds to Westminster, and such a
+ruling authority is necessary in a new and wide country like this where
+so much pioneering is being done, just as it is necessary in the United
+States and in Australia. The chief function of such an authority is to
+keep the game together, hold it compact and maintain it in even
+uniformity with the game elsewhere. There is no blame to the Canadians
+because they have not associated themselves with the subtle and
+insoluble mysteries of the British handicapping system, but have
+followed the American lead in this matter and put their best champions
+at scratch. Otherwise they are full British still, and even if they have
+their doubts upon the wisdom of the edict of St. Andrews which banned
+centre-shafted clubs and the Schenectady putter of American origin, they
+have remained loyal to the law without dissenting as the Americans did.
+So in Canada you may not use the Schenectady. You may putt with it on
+one side of the Niagara Falls but not on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>It is fortunate that a ball cannot be played across the Falls, or over
+those whirling Rapids, or some puzzling international complications
+might arise. The adventures are called to mind of two great scientists,
+the late Professor John Milne, who made such a fine study of earthquakes
+and could feel them in the Isle of Wight when they were taking place in
+Asia, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the eminent Cambridge pathologist,
+when they went to the meeting of the British Association for the
+Advancement of Science when it was held in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> South Africa. They travelled
+to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, and there they contemplated
+a mighty carry of a hundred and sixty yards over roaring, foaming water.
+The keen golfer is always prepared, for the emergencies of the game are
+constant and attractive, and Mr. Milne produced driver and ball, and,
+with a fine nerve and eyes that were controlled most marvellously,
+delivered a golf ball from one side to the other for the first time
+since the world began. The pathologist admired the achievement and
+emulated it. He also carried the Falls of the Zambezi. It were better
+that these greedy men had left it at that and been well satisfied.
+However, they came to think they might go on with this majestic carry
+continually, and generous Fortune chided them. Crocodiles took the balls
+that they drove into the Zambezi.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Let us take a look at Lambton. From my room in Toronto I rang up Lyon,
+whom I had met several times in England, and asked him to guess the name
+of the caller; he gave the name without hesitation, though he had no
+more reason to know that I was in Canada than in Tasmania. So quite in a
+matter-of-fact way we met on the following day in a Grand Trunk car
+starting from the Union station, and inquired of each other as to the
+ball that each was using. The journey from Toronto is one of only a few
+minutes, and soon after the stopping of the train the feet may tread on
+some of the nicest golfing turf that is to be found out of England, and
+the reason is palpable, for here are the big bunkers of the proper kind
+made of real yellow sand, which is natural to the place. When they need
+new sand bunkers at Lambton they cut them open and there they are. So
+sandy is the place that sometimes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> they have a difficulty in making the
+grass grow properly, and one result of these favourable natural
+conditions is that the course is better bunkered than most others on the
+American continent. Tee shots and approaches must be played well, and at
+the very first green the hint is given that the short game must be well
+done. The fourth hole is one of the jewels of Canadian golf. The teeing
+ground is on a height, and below it is a series of descending plateaux
+like giants' steps until the level is reached. When he has made a very
+passable drive the player is called upon with a very proper second to
+carry the Black Creek which guards the green and is coiled like a snake
+about it. The shot must have fair length and it must be very straight as
+well. Normally the hole is 365 yards long, so that in mere distance it
+is not a terrible thing, but when medals are being played for its length
+is stretched out to the four hundred yards. At the sixth the stream
+which they call Humber comes into the reckoning. It is a nice two-shot
+hole, and the seventh is an excellent short one with the inky creek here
+again. With the stump of a tree protruding from the water, large leafy
+growths upon the surface, a general sleepiness and the green in a
+sequestered corner beneath a shading hill, this is quite one of the most
+attractive of water holes. It is a strong hole, too, with fear about it,
+for the carry is one of 165 yards, and I was told that when Miss Rhona
+Adair, now Mrs. Cuthell, several times lady champion, was in these parts
+some years ago she twice did the carry and a third time her ball skimmed
+the water and reached the green after all. This was good work for a
+lady, especially as I rather fancy she must have been using the gutty
+ball at that time.</p>
+
+<p>The greens at Lambton are generally excellent, and they have adopted a
+means for keeping them in good<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> order which, though it has been tried in
+other parts of America, has not to my knowledge been employed elsewhere.
+I have heard objections raised against it, but the results at Lambton
+are uncommonly good. Nearly all the greens here are kept properly
+moistened by a process of sub-irrigation, and are never watered on the
+surface. Below the green there is a deep bed of cinders, and over this
+and about eighteen inches from the grass there is a network of water
+pipes made of a hard porous clay, "weeping clay" they call it, the
+entire under-surface of the greens being covered with them. At the
+corner of each green there is a feed pipe connecting with this network,
+and once a day the water supply is laid on to it and all the pipes under
+the green are loaded. The heat of the sun then slowly draws the water
+through the porous pipes and up to the surface, and the results of the
+process are uniformly good. Lambton is a fine institution altogether.
+There is a short ladies' course as well as the other, a fine toboggan
+chute down the slope in front of the club-house, and the latter is in
+all respects an admirable place, well fitted with baths, bedrooms, and
+public apartments that are elegant and comfortable. This place has
+something to do with Toronto life of to-day. There are seven hundred
+members, and now it costs a new one the equivalent of six hundred
+dollars in his first year. He has to get a hundred-dollar share in the
+club to begin with, and these are at such a premium that he has to pay
+five hundred dollars for one. On one of the walls of the club-house is a
+life-size portrait of the champion of the country in a characteristic
+attitude with his brassey under his arm.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The case of Toronto is very interesting. The club, which takes the name
+of the city and is one of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> oldest in the country, was started in
+1876, and completely reorganised some eighteen years later. The pretty
+little course that it had until lately was on the outskirts of the city,
+with an old and quaint farm-house, which had from time to time been
+enlarged, for a club-house. As to the course, it was quite nice. It was
+very undulating, ravines, gullies, and belts of trees being prominent
+everywhere. The turf was good, and some of the holes were excellent. In
+the club-house there were fine trophies and some old prints, and a plan
+of the old course at St. Andrews, with a photograph of old Tom Morris
+attached to it, signed "From Tom Morris, to the members of the Toronto
+Golf Club, 1896." Everything belonging to this old course was sweetly
+mellow, and one's visit there made a pleasant experience. But it met a
+fate which has been common enough near London but rare elsewhere. The
+speed of Toronto's expansion brought it about, and, owing to the
+encroachments of the builders, the club had to move. I was there at the
+parting, and it was a sad one. Its members, however, being a very
+wealthy and enthusiastic body of gentlemen, determined to make for
+themselves a new home which should be as good as anything that could be
+done, and their ambition was fulfilled. Etobicoke! It is one of the
+wonders of the west, and I was the first wandering British player to set
+his foot upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Etobicoke is several miles out from Toronto, and here with the money
+that the club obtained from the sale of the old course they bought 270
+acres of what was virgin land, being for the most part covered with
+trees at the time. This they had cleared, ploughed, and properly
+prepared, and Mr. Harry Colt came out from England to lay out the
+course. His finished work, as I have seen it, must rank as one of his
+masterpieces. As on so many of the Colt courses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> there is something of a
+Sunningdale look about the holes, and nearly all are extremely good. A
+very fine short one is the fourth and one with which the architect
+himself was much in love when he had completed the design from the
+natural materials that were at his hand; and the tenth is a wonder of
+its kind, the hindmost tee being on a hilltop from which a glorious view
+of the course is to be had, with Lake Ontario beyond it, while some way
+lower down the slope are second and third tees, making the distance
+shorter. The soil is sandy, the turf is good, and the course must be
+considered to rank as first class absolutely. Mr. W. A. Langton, who
+went over it with me, said he believed they had come into possession of
+what would be the finest golf course in America when it has matured, and
+his judgment may be right.</p>
+
+<p>Many parts of the world were laid under tribute for the making of this
+course at Etobicoke where the club is still called by the good old
+simple name, the Toronto Golf Club. It was designed, as I have said, by
+an English architect, and in order to give a grass to the course that
+would stand the rigours of the climate better than the ordinary grasses
+with which courses in North America are generally sown, seeds were
+obtained from Finland. Then nearly all the rough work of construction
+was done by Bulgarians and Roumanians, these immigrants being splendid
+for work of this kind. They were paid at the rate of about seven
+shillings a day, and they lived in huts which they made on the ground
+and saved the greater part of the money that they earned. A little over
+£16,000 or 80,000 dollars were paid for the land, and about the same
+amount was spent on its preparation and completion as a course; while
+£20,000 or 100,000 dollars were spent on the building and equipment of a
+splendid club-house, embracing the utmost comfort and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> convenience, with
+about fifty bedrooms. This is a members' club, and the club has all the
+members and money that it needs, and it is not a speculative enterprise
+in any way whatever. But British golfers must surely pause with wonder
+when they hear of a place like Toronto spending £50,000 on a new golf
+course! Such is the enthusiasm of the Canadian for the game, that while
+this enterprise was afoot a six-holes course was being constructed
+alongside it, at a cost of £10,000, for a gentleman who intended to
+build a house near by to which he might ask his friends.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>One pleasant day when staying at Montreal I went out to Dixie, a few
+stations along the Grand Trunk line, where there is the course of the
+Royal Montreal Club, to be regarded now as the oldest properly
+established club in the Dominion. This one alone has that title of Royal
+which Queen Victoria gave it permission to use in 1884. In its early
+days the course was in Mount Royal Park, overlooking Montreal. Out here
+at Dixie a certain flavour of the old spirit and good strong sporting
+simplicity of the game are tasted. The course is somewhat flat and
+parky, and big banks of bunkers stretch across the fairway, making the
+general style of the architecture very much of the Victorian, but the
+undulations and unevennesses of the banks and hollows are redeeming
+features. Some of the holes are good and the putting greens are
+excellent, but generally the course suffers from the absence of testing
+second shots. There is a magnificent view up the river from the seventh
+tee. A house agent might honestly declare that the club-house is
+commodious and comfortable. It was made before it was the fashion to
+erect palaces on golf courses, and sheet-iron bulks largely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> in its
+composition; yet it is cosy enough inside, and contains many relics of
+peculiar interest. In a glass case there are some ancient clubs with
+which members played in the early days, and a leather belt for which
+they competed, the names of the winners being written on the inside.</p>
+
+<p>There are many other courses in Montreal and round about it. There is
+the Beaconsfield Club with its place situated some way up the river,
+reached by the G. T. R. at Point Claire. The part of Fletcher's Fields
+in Mount Royal Park, on which the Royal Montreal Club first played, is
+now in the occupation of the Metropolitan Club, and is only about five
+minutes' ride by car from the centre of the city. On the eastern slope
+of Mount Royal is the course of the Outremont Club, which, at the time
+of my visit, was about to go forward to a new and great enterprise;
+while on a plateau at the western end of Mount Royal are the nine holes
+of the West Mount Club, most charmingly situated, with fine views of the
+city and the river.</p>
+
+<p>At Ottawa there is a course which ranks high among the very best on the
+continent. It is different in character from that at Dixie, for here
+there are ravines and gullies, and the land is strongly undulating
+everywhere. The bunkers and other hazards are natural, the putting
+greens are smooth, and the subsoil is of sandy loam. It is on the other
+side of the Ottawa River, beyond Hull, and owing to its being exposed to
+a broad reach of the stream it is seldom that there is not much wind
+blowing across it. And there are courses all the way from east to west
+of this wonderful, blossoming Canada. We find that wherever we wander in
+the Dominion we are not much distant from a golf club. Even when on a
+day I sailed across Lake Ontario and made the Gorge Valley trip to the
+Niagara<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> Falls there was golf near by had it been wanted. Winnipeg,
+Edmonton, Calgary, round and about the Rockies, and up them
+too&mdash;everywhere the game is played. I was told that when the course at
+St. John, New Brunswick, was started in 1897, Mr. H. H. Hansard, who
+made the opening stroke, holed from the tee in one. Holes in one have
+been done in many curious circumstances, but surely this is one of the
+most interesting of all. Compare the excellent beginning of St. John
+with what happened the other day when a new course was being started
+here at home. I am sorry to say that the municipal dignitary upon whom
+the chief responsibility was cast missed the ball the first time, and
+also the second, but contrived to move it from the tee at the third
+attempt.</p>
+
+<p>A note has just reached me from a friend in the Dominion saying that out
+on the Gulf of Georgia, on the coast of Vancouver, they are reaching
+forward to a golf ideal. They have planned and started there a new town,
+which they have called Qualicum, of which the golf course is the central
+feature. They have laid out a fine one along the shore, one that has
+splendid natural qualities, and they are doing their best to make it
+understood that here is a golf city if ever there was one, for they have
+christened the streets and roads by such names as St. Andrews Road,
+Berwick Road, Portrush Road, Rye Road, Sandwich Road, and Dollymount
+Road; and there are others with the names of Hoylake, Sunningdale, and
+all the rest of our British best.</p>
+
+<p>Friends whom I consulted in the matter declared there was no golf in
+Quebec, little but French people, French talk, and French games of two
+generations back, the Canadian French not yet having adopted the sport
+to which so many of the Parisians have attached themselves with great
+earnestness. I was barely satisfied<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> with such denials, and when, after
+another night on the C. P. R., I found myself on a glorious Sunday
+morning on those famous heights of Quebec, whence the view is one of the
+most magnificent in the world, I set about investigating the matter all
+alone. I can hardly say why, but somehow I strongly suspected the Plains
+of Abraham, the big, bare piece of land on the heights overlooking the
+St. Lawrence, on which Wolfe and Montcalm, more than a century and a
+half ago, fought that great fight, and died. I have always found it as a
+most remarkable thing that where great battles have been waged, and big
+encampments made, golf courses in a great number of cases have been laid
+out there later. Sure enough, then, the game was here on the Plains of
+Abraham. I had just been looking upon the pillar with the simple
+inscription, "Here died Wolfe victorious," and had walked for the length
+of two or three good drives towards the citadel end of the plain,
+called, I think, the Cove Fields, when putting greens came to view, with
+sticks not two feet long and bits of red rag attached to them in the
+holes. The greens and the teeing grounds were rough as could be, and
+there were no proper bunkers on the course, but plenty of trouble for
+all that, the ground being coarse and stony. The public could roam about
+the place just as it pleased, and did so, and there did not seem to be
+anything to prevent any one from playing the game on this course. It
+looked just like public golf on common land, and though it is a far cry
+from Blackheath to Quebec, there is something in the nature and
+character of this golfing ground at the historic Canadian port to remind
+one of England's oldest and crudest course. I discovered afterwards that
+the Quebec Golf Club, a club without a club-house, had acquired the
+rights to play on it; that this club is one of comparatively early
+origin; that its members are clearly primitive in their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> tastes, but
+sincere and earnest; and I am led to the belief that the course has
+another point of similarity with Blackheath, being the oldest now in
+existence on the American continent. It is said that a daughter of old
+Tom Morris, who married a Mr. Hunter and went to America, was largely
+responsible for the beginning of golf at Quebec. Men and boys were
+playing on it on this beautiful Sunday morning when the bells in
+countless steeples of Quebec and at St. Levis on the other side of the
+St. Lawrence were ringing their music through the stillest air. I sat
+down on the edge of the course overlooking the precipitous depths to the
+river, far down below, where the smoke from a warship at anchor came
+lazily from the funnels, and looked for long enough to gain an undying
+impression of one of the grandest panoramas in the world, seen at its
+most peaceful and its best. Nature had a grand inspiration when she made
+Quebec as now we find her.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>This marvellous country is a rare place for making the new beginning.
+Everything is so raw, so suggestive, so encouraging to earnest failures
+who would, like Omar, if they could, conspire with fate, shatter the
+existing scheme of things and "remould it nearer to the heart's desire."
+Canada is indeed a fine place for hope for the future. I met several men
+in the country who told me, that on leaving England and Scotland, they
+had perforce, with all the hard work before them, to give up the game
+for a long period; while another reason was, that those having been much
+earlier days, there were fewer courses there. So years after, when the
+fortunes had been made, they came back to golf again, and they were
+making another new beginning, and felt a certain gladness as they
+remembered some of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> faults and the torments of the old game with all
+its vast imperfections. In everything they would start over again as if
+it were all quite new, and they knew nothing about it. Generally they
+have made successes of their second golfing lives on earth in this way,
+but yet they have found that they needed to act warily and be on their
+guard always against old enemies, for golf poisons are marvellously
+subtle and enduring things; and it has been found that when once a man
+contracts a habit that is bad it will last for ever, whether he plays
+the game continually or not, and the worse the habit the more incurable
+it is. The best that can be done is the application of a system of
+subjection, by which the disease is kept under, and does not pain or
+hinder. But men who have fallen into bad and hopeless complications with
+their golf, and found that it never could be improved any more, have
+tried to begin it all over again as left handers&mdash;the most drastic
+change&mdash;and even that has failed. They have then realised that the only
+way to die happy is to give up the game for a matter of half a
+generation and start again, with the determination to keep the head
+still, to begin the back-swing with the wrists, and not to start
+pivoting on the left toe as soon as the driving is begun, as if it were
+necessary to do this thing, as so many of the teachers have suggested,
+to the ruin of their pupils, for the unsteadiness it has produced. One
+learns to do this pivoting after an hour's practice at the game, and can
+pivot well when nothing else can be done at golf. But it takes years and
+years sometimes to get rid of such a stupid custom. The left heel must
+rise, but let it rise as little as may be, and of its own accord. Its
+rising should be always a result of something, and not a cause of
+something else.</p>
+
+<p>What is needed at a beginning, or a fresh start in any golfing life, is
+a thorough grasp of essential principles.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> Considering the subject the
+whole way through, we may feel that there are really only two essential
+and compulsory principles applicable to all cases, instead of two
+hundred or more as the bewildered player is often led to imagine. These
+two are, first, that the eye must be kept upon the ball until it has
+left the club; and, second, that in addition to the still head there
+must be one fixed and practically motionless centre in the human system
+while the stroke is being made. It is neglect, generally accidental, of
+one or both of these principles that causes most of the bad shots that
+are made. Let us remember that. Never, or hardly ever, should we neglect
+these principles, and if we do not our handicap is almost sure to come
+down, not only because so many bad shots will be avoided, but because
+the exactness, certainty, and quality of all the strokes will be
+steadily improved as they cannot be when hampered by neglect of the
+principles. The eye makes the connection between the captain in the
+brain and the engineers of the physical system. It is the speaking-tube
+or the telegraph apparatus. There can be no union without it. But, as we
+all know, it is not such an easy thing to keep the eye on the ball as it
+ought to be kept on it, and the more anxious the player the more liable
+is he to err in this matter. As to the fixed centre&mdash;somewhere in the
+interior of the waist&mdash;we should reflect that the golfing swings, when
+carried out properly, consist of the action and movements of thousands
+of different muscles, operating in different ways, different directions,
+and at different times. Perfect harmony and correlation among them all
+is necessary if the general result is to be smooth and exact. Make no
+mistake about it, the golfing swing, with all its complications and the
+acute precision that is necessary for its good and proper effect, is one
+of the most wonderful things of which the physical system is capable.
+When I reflect upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> it I think it is marvellous that the human man can
+make it as he does. To obtain harmony among all these thousands of
+movements there must be one centre from which they are all regulated. If
+we think it out we see that this is so, and then we appreciate the
+importance of what is too baldly described as keeping the body still, as
+we have perhaps never done before. As a point of truth, the body as a
+whole cannot be kept still, but there must be one centre that must be
+fixed from the moment that the club addresses the ball until the latter
+has left its place after impact. The captain in the brain, the eye, and
+the fixed head and centre are the great trinity who manage the whole
+concern. Only one man who has neglected this law has ever raised himself
+to eminence in golf, and that man is Edward Ray, who has done it by mere
+physical strength. When the fixed centre is held secure a great host of
+evils which constantly cause failure are avoided&mdash;swaying of the body,
+collapse of the legs, improper foot work, dropping of the right
+shoulder, falling forward, and more of such a kind of fatal faults.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>In the biggest dictionary that I can find neither the word "futurism"
+nor "cubist" is given a place, and yet these words, meaning certain
+movements, are probably on the tongues of art folks with much frequency
+in these times. In the same way the word "subconsciousism" and
+"subconsciousist" are not in this or any other dictionary; but they may
+yet be coined and made legitimate to fill certain vacancies, and they
+represent definite golfing systems. The principle of subconsciousism in
+essence, then, is that of showing a visionary picture to the mind for a
+moment, banishing it, and, in a certain measure, forgetting all about
+it, and then going<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> on with the game as if the incident had been closed.
+But the mind retains its record more or less vaguely always; and the
+picture thrown on the mental screen makes an impression there which
+stays; and that impression is an influence upon the succeeding physical
+actions. Subconsciously the player does something&mdash;it may be little or
+much&mdash;to imitate the movements in the mental picture that he saw. He
+cannot avoid it; the influence upon him cannot be wholly resisted. If,
+as it were, he saturates his mind with impressions of this kind, of the
+strokes he would like to play, of the way he would like to play them, he
+will gradually and almost surely begin to play them just like that. It
+has been recognised for ages that the best golf is that which is played
+entirely subconsciously, that is to say without conscious effort, and
+without thinking in detail of the stroke that has to be played. When a
+man is "on his game" he has none of this thinking to do, and does none.
+There seems to be only one way of playing the shot, and that way is
+unavoidable to him and quite natural. He does not need to shuffle about
+to find his proper stance, and he is not anxious about any part of his
+swing. The moment a clear consciousness of detailed action asserts
+itself, and the man does think about the movements of his swing, and
+does shuffle about for his stance, he goes off his game, and the
+stronger the consciousness the more he goes off. These points are
+disputed by nobody. A little while since a new writer on the game
+declared that the golfer at the beginning of his swing thought of the
+advice of one professional; half way up he thought of the suggestion of
+another; at the top he remembered the recommendation of a third man; and
+coming down, the hint of a fourth flung itself into a mind that must
+have been working with amazing rapidity in the most difficult
+circumstances. What the result of such strokes is was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> not suggested;
+but if any number of golfers carried out their scheme of swinging in
+this way we should know exactly why it is that so much bad golf is
+played. As a matter of truth nobody has ever been able to mix up his
+plans in such a manner; but the statement suggests the extreme of
+consciousness, and fear with it also. With subconsciousness there is no
+fear, no hesitation, and no doubt.</p>
+
+<p>Now we can show how our subconsciousism, when unaided and not encouraged
+(there is nearly but not quite a contradiction in terms here), has had
+its effect upon the player hitherto. If a man watches the play of any
+golfer much better than himself, say a first-class professional, very
+closely for some time he takes a little of that man's style into his own
+system without knowing it, and, it may be, without making any conscious
+effort to imitate it. He is much more likely to succeed in this way than
+by making any deliberate attempt to copy. Again, you will often find
+players telling you, that after a week of watching a championship
+meeting, and without having paid attention to any player in particular,
+certainly without attempting to imitate any one, they find on resuming
+their own game that a new influence is upon it; that in particular they
+address the ball in a more businesslike way, with more confidence; that
+their swing is less flabby, and that they play their iron shots with
+much greater sense of wrist, and with more firmness. This has been
+noticed over and over again, and it is a most interesting result of the
+influence of impressions involuntarily recorded on the mind. Consider
+another way in which the impression acts. A player may be removed from
+the game through illness or some other reason for a time, and during
+that period he works some of the problems of golf out in his mind, and
+constantly pictures a new and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> particular way of playing a stroke that
+has troubled him. When he returns to the links he plays the stroke like
+that without any effort to do so, or perhaps without even thinking of
+it. Another remarkable example of subconsciousism was afforded to me
+recently by a good golfer, who said that to develop a certain stroke
+which he had found beyond his best efforts&mdash;conscious efforts&mdash;he had
+three enlarged photographs made of that stroke as executed properly by a
+first-class man, one showing the beginning, the other the top of the
+swing, and the third the finish. He had these pictures placed alongside
+each other on one of the walls of his room, and there they were all the
+time, not to be avoided. He made no effort to study them, but his mind
+simply absorbed them, and then subconsciously he found the stroke coming
+to him until in the end he played it just like that. In these matters
+subconsciousism is shown to be at work without being understood or at
+all suspected.</p>
+
+<p>Having this valuable agency at command the next thing is to apply it,
+and make it of more thorough practical effect without permitting it to
+change to interfering and dangerous consciousness. In the cases that
+have already been cited certain methods are plainly suggested. Here is
+another which has, as I know, proved amazingly effective at times. The
+player, we may say, is not driving as well as he should, or in the way
+he would like to do. At the moment of taking his place on the
+teeing-ground he runs through his mind, as it were, a cinematographic
+picture of his favourite model player doing the drive. He sees, in
+imagination, the man taking his stance, swinging the club back, down on
+to the ball again, and finishing. He just sees it once, and bothers
+about it no more. Then he sets about his own drive without any further
+reference to the mental picture that his mind has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> absorbed. The mind
+does the rest. The drive may not be made in the ideal way that was
+imagined. It may be done in the old way. It may even be foozled. But
+there has been an influence at work, and if that influence is always
+employed in the same way the good result will come in time, always
+provided&mdash;and this is important&mdash;that the model is one that is suitable
+to the player, and can be copied by him. It would be useless for a man
+who is far past forty, very fat and very short, with no athletic quality
+in him at all, to take Harry Vardon and his graceful lithesome swing for
+his mental cinema show.</p>
+
+<p>Another way in which practical subconsciousism may be made exceedingly
+valuable is by imagining a place to which the ball has to be delivered
+without looking at it when it ought not to be looked at, as when a very
+short running or pitching approach has to be made. The very best of men
+often find it impossible to keep the eye fixed on the ball until the
+stroke is done. A little while since there was the case of one of the
+finest amateur golfers of the time flopping his ball into the bunker
+guarding the green of the first hole at Sandwich from the bank thereof,
+when, if he had played an easy shot and kept his eye at rest, he would
+almost certainly have avoided this trouble, and then won the St.
+George's Cup for which he was playing. I remember an exactly similar
+case in the final of the Amateur Championship of 1908, at Sandwich, when
+Mr. Lassen, who did win, knocked his ball into the big bunker in front
+of the old tenth green there from the top of the cliff overlooking it.
+What is needed in such cases, or in like cases when presented to
+inferior players, is something to keep the mind's eye contented, and it
+has been found to serve if a picture of the hole is flashed into the
+mind just before the stroke is made. This is what is certainly done,
+though unintentionally,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> when putting. The man does keep his eye on the
+ball when making his stroke this time; but yet it is most desirable that
+his mind should retain a very clear and exact impression of the place
+where the hole is, the distance of it, and the features of the green in
+between. In other games that may be compared with golf, the player has
+his eye on the object at the moment of striking; in billiards the very
+last glance is given at the object ball, and the eye is on it at the
+moment the stroke is made. That is because the player is sure of his way
+of striking, as in putting he is not. If you try a method of putting
+which was once attempted by some players, but was severely and properly
+discountenanced by the authorities, of lying down on the green and
+putting with the end of the club, billiard fashion, you will find that
+then the eye is on the hole when the stroke is made. In golf, the
+player's eye being wanted for the ball, a last look is given at the
+hole, and the picture of it is kept on the mind when the stroke is being
+made, and it influences the application of strength more than the player
+often realises.</p>
+
+<p>This application of strength is always done subconsciously, and here
+again there is a part of professional teaching which does not recognise
+the fact when it ought to do. The teachers tell us that to strike the
+ball a certain distance with an iron, the club chosen should be swung
+back to a certain point, that to get twenty yards more it should be
+swung upwards so many more inches or degrees, for a farther distance so
+much more swing should be made, and so on, throwing the onus of swinging
+the proper distance on to the conscious effort of the player. By a
+moment's thought it will be realised that players do not consciously
+regulate the lengths of their swings in this way, that they could not do
+so, and that any deliberate stopping of their swing at a certain
+carefully calculated point would be ruinous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> to the stroke in hand. What
+is done is, that an estimate of the distance to which the ball has to
+travel is made; this is taken into the mind, and the mind, having much
+experience, influences the swing so that it is quite subconsciously made
+of the proper length, or at all events the length that the mind
+suggested. In this way the swing is certainly made short for short
+shots, and longer as the greater distance is needed; but it is wrong to
+suggest that the matter is carefully and consciously arranged by the
+player. The truth is that not one player in a thousand could tell you,
+when about to make a swing with an iron club, exactly how far he intends
+to swing, or having made the shot successfully, how far he did swing.
+His mind subconsciously arranged the whole affair.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting case was quoted to me some time since of the success a
+man achieved in lofting over stymies, and the reason why. This person
+never seemed to miss. He related that he found previously that his
+failures were due to looking at the other ball too much when in the act
+of making the stroke. He then found that he succeeded frequently when he
+did not look at either that ball or his own but at the hole itself.
+Doing this enabled him to carry his club through, failure to do which is
+the chief cause of missing these shots. But he did not altogether
+believe in this system, which seemed dangerous, and he compromised by
+keeping his eye fixed on his own ball, but at the same time imagining
+the hole and seeing mentally his ball dropping into it. Since then his
+success has been wonderful. In much the same way and by the same
+principle it will be found that the best way in the world to encourage a
+good follow-through, and to stop jerky hitting with wooden clubs, is to
+look at the ball properly and yet imagine it a couple of inches farther
+on.</p>
+
+<p>The principles of this subconsciousism suggest one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> earnest
+recommendation to the player who is bent on making a change in a faulty
+or ineffectual style, and it is that such change is better brought about
+gradually and in the way of a coaxing influence rather than by a quick
+drastic alteration. Thus the player whose swing is too upright and who
+wants to obtain a flatter one, or he who desires to change from a long
+swing to a short one, or the other way about; or again he who would
+bring the ball more over to the right foot (one of the most difficult of
+all changes to make for a player accustomed to have it nearly opposite
+the left toe, but a desirable one in these days when the rubber-cored
+ball shows no disinclination to rise as the gutty did); all these
+players would do better to make their changes slowly and gradually and
+by way of subconscious influence. If the ball is moved three inches to
+the right all at once the entire swing is upset and the whole driving
+arrangement is likely to go to pieces. But when done in the other way
+the gradual change is not noticed, and when the ball gets to the desired
+position it would be as difficult to play it from the old one, as the
+new one would have been, if assumed suddenly. It is sometimes said of
+golf that the most exasperating part of the whole thing is, that the
+more you try to succeed in it the more you fail. There is more truth in
+that sad reflection than may have been fancied, and a fine moral in it
+too. To "try" in this case means to make conscious effort.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>After all, in this teaching about subconsciousism we are merely going
+back again to Nature, to simplicity, and to an original idea that there
+is undeveloped golf in all of us just because all the movements of the
+game are so natural, and natural because they are so true and
+rhythmical. In everything Nature encourages always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> the best in a man,
+and she likes most the graceful movement, the perfect poise, the equal
+balance. The easier, the more natural, and the more rhythmical our
+movements are in golf the more successful will be the efforts always.
+The undeveloped golf is always in the system, and with fair
+encouragement or a hint that is sufficiently obvious the instinct will
+surely lead a young subject to its cultivation on good lines. Man when
+old becomes awkward and contrary, and so the aggravations of the game
+arise.</p>
+
+<p>I have always maintained that if we placed a young boy who had never
+seen or heard of golf on a desert island and left him there with means
+for his subsistence for a few years, together with a set of golf clubs
+and a few boxes of balls, the people who might be wrecked on those
+lonely shores thereafter would find him playing a good scratch game and
+in want of nothing but a caddie, for which part the arriving boatswain
+might be indicated. But these wrecked miserables, with their shiverings
+and their grumblings, would jar unpleasantly upon the happy peace of
+this purely natural golfing youth, in all the ecstasy of the discovery
+of his own world. Probably he would wish the others&mdash;all except the
+boatswain&mdash;to leave him there when a white sail of relief was seen upon
+the horizon. A pretty speculation arises instantly. Suppose at the same
+time we had placed upon another desert island four thousand miles away
+another raw child, innocent of the simplest, vaguest thought of what
+golf is or could be, and left him also with clubs and balls and
+directions for obtaining fresh meat and fresh water when the human
+desires in food were felt. He would surely take to the game in the same
+way as the other boy did, practise it and probe into its mysteries with
+just the same enthusiasm, would become a good scratch player also, and
+would probably make use of the same simple expression of condemnation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+when a shipload of people uncivilised to golf were wrecked that way. But
+here is the point: this second scratch desert-island boy would probably
+be just as good as the first scratch desert-island boy, no better and no
+worse, and if they were to play for the Championship of the Most Lonely
+Islands, nothing is more likely than that their excellent match would
+have to go to the thirty-seventh hole or beyond it. They would, being
+good material to begin with, attain approximately equal results so far
+as playing the holes in a certain number of strokes is concerned, and
+each youth's system would be perfect for himself, but between the two
+there would be the very widest differences, and the basic principles
+that were common to the games of both players would be so encrusted with
+masses of individual detail and coloured with temperamental attitude
+that they would be scarcely discernible.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>GOLF DE PARIS, AND SOME REMARKABLE EVENTS AT VERSAILLES AND CHANTILLY,
+WITH NEW THEORIES BY HIGH AUTHORITIES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>In front of the red brick club-house of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club at
+Hoylake, a citadel which by its tower and clock commemorates the great
+achievements of Hoylake's famous son, John Ball, there was assembled
+late in the afternoon of Friday, the 21st of June 1907 (being the
+forty-seventh year of the Open Championship), a large gathering of
+golfing persons who by their speech and demeanour suggested some of the
+vivid unrealities of a stage crowd near the footlights. They had a
+self-conscious and somewhat artificial bearing towards each other. They
+muttered and beckoned. They gave the impression of being a little uneasy
+and nervous. Friends among them who essayed to conduct a conversation
+found themselves at a loss for appropriate comments upon what had
+happened and made remarks which had no clear or relevant meaning.
+Professor Paterson, wearing the red rosette, came from the house and
+stood before the little table bearing a silver cup which had been held
+by the line of champions all the way from the time of Morris, the
+younger, and a familiar friendly figure in chequered garments moved
+about in a manner of official preparation. What had happened<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> had indeed
+been dramatic; but the drama had had the living circumstance of full
+reality. We could not discuss constructions and readings, and suggest
+other endings. Here was the one gross fact, that Arnaud Massy, a Basque,
+the professional attached to the leading club of Paris, a strong bonily
+built man with no British blood in his being, had just made himself the
+possessor for the year of that historic championship cup, which hitherto
+had never been taken out of the United Kingdom. This was something which
+the gathering did with difficulty absorb into their golfing minds. They
+were good sportsmen, and they cheered because they knew that this Massy
+was a fine fellow and a good champion; but it was all a little
+dream-like, and there was a spell that needed to be broken.</p>
+
+<p>Massy, the victor, with a big smiling face came forward. The gold medal
+was delivered to him. There was a little silence, a few muttered
+incoherent words, and then this splendid Massy threw up his hands into
+the air and shouted out with a full blast from his lusty lungs, "Vive
+l'entente cordiale!" The tensity was broken; the people cheered easily,
+naturally, and whole heartedly; they accepted Massy as the true and
+proper successor to James Braid in the Open Championship, and wished him
+thoroughly well&mdash;even though he were a Frenchman or a Basque. He had
+done the right thing.</p>
+
+<p>This foreign player (never forgetting that he was trained to the game at
+Biarritz, which in golf is mostly British, though it lies under the laws
+of France) was brought to England and Scotland by Sir Everard Hambro,
+and was improved in golf at North Berwick with Ben Sayers assisting him.
+He well deserved to win that championship, and it should not be
+overlooked that, so to say, he has confirmed his victory by making a tie
+for the championship again since then. He is the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> only man outside the
+great triumvirate who has done so much as twice to reach the top of the
+list in modern times. He was well on his own very good game. There was a
+crispness about his play with his wooden clubs that indicated the man
+who for the time being had full confidence and could hit his hardest.
+And Massy's putting, especially in the case of the most difficult and
+fateful of all putts, those of from five to nine feet&mdash;putts for the
+missing of which there is the fullest excuse, for whose holing there is
+enormous gain&mdash;had been splendid for a long time before and was most
+excellent then. At those putts of the kind I remark upon I do not think
+that Massy in accuracy or confidence has his equal in the world. He
+strokes the ball into the hole as though it were the simplest thing to
+do; easily and gracefully he putts it in. In other ways he makes a fine
+figure of a golfer. Military training in France has given him a stiffer,
+straighter build than most great golfers have, for this game tends a
+little to a crouching gait and posture. Massy marches from the tee to
+the ball that has gone before with a quick, regular step of the
+right-left-right military way, and when he comes up with the ball he
+does a right wheel round, presents his club, and plays his second with a
+quickness and lack of hesitation in which he is second only to George
+Duncan. Particularly in putting is Massy a man of inspirations and quick
+impulse. And I must not now forget that there is in the world a charming
+little lady who is called Mlle. Hoylake Massy, which is her proper name.
+Providence is disposed often to be kind and generous to the strong and
+those who have well deserved, and that week Mme. Massy gave to the man
+who was even then making himself the champion a sweet little daughter.
+Having won the championship, the next question was one of christenings,
+and, said Massy to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> his wife, "Voila! Surely she shall be called our
+little Hoylake!" Which she was accordingly, Mme. Massy, rejoicing in her
+husband's success, like the good, happy little woman of Scotland that
+she is, having cordially agreed.</p>
+
+<p>And in France there were rejoicings among the golfers. My friend, M.
+Pierre Deschamps, fine and keen sportsman (and the "father of golf in
+France," as we call him for the grand work he has done in establishing
+the game so well at La Boulie, where he is president of the Société de
+Golf de Paris, and encouraging it with all his heart and energy
+elsewhere in his country), rose and made a remarkable declaration that
+golf was to be the "national game of France." The national game of
+France, our Scottish golf of English development, started, as some still
+will have it, in Holland, played in some sort of way as <i>jeu de mail</i>
+even in France, practised in Pekin, called the "national game" also, as
+I have heard it, in America&mdash;now it was to be naturalised and made the
+"national game of France!" Ubiquitous golf indeed! M. Deschamps, whose
+words are careful if they are quick, as befits one who is in the
+diplomatic service of his country, sat down and wrote an essay on golf
+in general, and Massy's success in particular, and, addressing the new
+champion as if he were before him, said: "Et maintenant à vous la
+parole, mon cher Massy; continuez votre brillante carrière, jouissez de
+votre belle gloire dont nous sommes tous fiers, comme Golfeurs et comme
+Français; à cette heure, où tant de links s'ouvrent chez nous, pour
+répondre aux besoins d'enthousiastes sportsmen, puissent d'autres
+professionels de notre race suivre votre example, unique encore dans les
+fastes du 'Royal and Ancient Game,' et contribuer à faire de ce sport un
+jeu national dans notre beau pays de France!" That was written. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+victory you may be magnanimous, and M. Deschamps at this time would
+graciously waive all questions of origins and growths; he must have felt
+that then it mattered little that a kind of golf called <i>chole</i> had been
+played ages back by the people of the north, and that it was possible
+the Scots had copied from them. It was enough that Arnaud Massy was "le
+Champion du monde."</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Disregarding all those doubts about the <i>jeu de mail</i> and the game of
+<i>chole</i>, and considering only the real thing as we know it, taking its
+time from the stone temple by the Fifeshire sea, it was away back in
+1856 that the game was first played on the soil of France, and that was
+in the south by the Pyrenees at Pau. Yet at that time only the wintering
+British were concerned. Forty years went on before the French themselves
+made a fair beginning with the game. In 1896 the Société de Golf de
+Paris was established, and it has been a splendid success. To-day in
+prestige and influence it stands for the headquarters of the game in the
+country, though since it was begun there have sprung up many clubs of
+great pretensions, with good courses, nice club-houses, distinguished
+memberships, and unlimited francs. Yet La Boulie holds her queenship
+still. Excellent golfing places have been made at Chantilly, Le Pecq,
+Compiègne, Fontainebleau. Out on the north-west coast at such resorts as
+Le Touquet, Dieppe, Deauville and Wimereux by Boulogne the game is
+established. Long years back I played at pretty open Wimereux when there
+was but a nine-holes course there, and not the excellent one of eighteen
+that has now been made. Shall it not be considered as a happy token that
+golf links are commonly found on old battlefields and at places where
+armies have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> encamped? Sometimes this is just because the soldiers play
+the game when they are abroad; sometimes it is because entrenchments are
+bunkers all prepared; but oftenest it is just coincidence. Whatever it
+be or why, it is the fact that there is golf where armies and battles
+have been in Egypt, in South Africa, in the United States and Canada,
+and at many places. Where there was the fury of flying shells there is
+now only the peaceful hum of the rubber ball. One recalled when first at
+Wimereux that here the great Napoleon had encamped with his grand army,
+the same as was to cross the Channel to defiant isles and make a
+conquest of them. But playing neither the first hole nor the last do we
+need any reminder of what great Bonaparte wished to do, for by us there
+towers aloft the monument that he had erected to that successful
+invasion of Albion that never did take place. Hereabouts is indicated
+the place where the master-general in full satisfaction with the
+progress of things, and in remembrance of great achievements,
+distributed his military favours. And here all along are deep
+grass-covered trenches, and larger, rounder, shallow pits that once
+might have been kitchens or stables. All these that now are bunkers and
+hazards are where Napoleon camped and waited. And on a fine day our
+white-cliffed Albion is in full view. Sometimes there may even be a sigh
+as one reflects that the Corsican little dreamt of what should be done
+with his camping land when a hundred years were gone, that those
+sportsmen of Britishers would be playing their game about there, taking
+their divots and holing their putts, and striving for golden tokens
+given for competition by the mayor and municipality of adjacent
+Boulogne! It was not for no reason that Arnaud Massy called aloud "Vive
+l'entente cordiale!" In the heart of the country there have been more
+golf clubs and courses formed, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> they are supported now mostly by the
+French. At Rouen and Rheims the game may now be enjoyed. It is
+spreading. M. Deschamps may yet be soundly justified. And indeed when we
+take our clubs to Paris we feel that he should, and heartily do
+wandering players echo the cry of Massy, who by his victory signalised
+the fact that French golf had grown from babyhood to the strength of
+independence, and was now to be considered as an entity. There is a
+subtle sweetness about a golfing expedition in Paris that there is about
+a little holiday for the game at no other place. One is not here
+suggesting that it is better for golf and other matters to go to Paris
+than elsewhere, only that it is quite different, intensely enjoyable,
+and easily convenient. We breakfast in comfort in London, read the
+newspaper afterwards, go through the pack of clubs to see that the
+roll-call is rightly answered, and with time enough for everything move
+along to Victoria. Had we dawdled less we might have gone much earlier
+from Charing Cross. We meet quite casually other golfers in our
+compartment on the South-Eastern, and inquire with no astonishment as to
+which of the Parisian courses will be scarred by their irons before
+their trip is done. From Dover or Folkestone we have a quick and
+comfortable crossing; we discover some people who are bound for Le
+Touquet and tell us of the excellent changes there, and then on the
+comfortable railway of the Nord we are swung happily into the heart of
+France, and are in the capital before the sun has set on a summer's day,
+and with time yet to go out to La Boulie, which is by Versailles, or
+Chantilly, and stretch our English arms and legs in preparation for
+matches of the morrow. We are at home as golfers without delay.</p>
+
+<p>What one feels about golfing in Paris now is that while there is always
+that elevation of the spirits, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> sense of extra life, that little
+superfineness of feeling that are induced by a sojourn in the capital by
+those who feel themselves somewhat akin to her, and there is a certain
+subtle difference in the golfing ways and systems, such as we not merely
+find but wish for, golf at Paris and the world over is really very much
+the same&mdash;the same not merely in the playing of the shots as in the
+general scheme of things, the going and the coming, the <i>tout ensemble</i>.
+We settle ourselves comfortably in a big hotel in the Rue de
+Castiglione, and next morning we fling away the sheets before eight as
+alive as any Parisian <i>ouvrier</i>. The <i>café complet</i> disposed of, the
+next question is that of clubs and balls. If it is a fine day and there
+is time for the walking, we may stride through the corner of the gardens
+of the Tuileries, across the corresponding corner of the Place de la
+Concorde, over the bridge and into the station to the left by the side
+of the Seine and down the steps to the platform, where there always
+awaits us at the most convenient time what is in essence largely a
+golfers' train. Our golfing people are in full evidence. You cannot
+mistake their kind in a train of France any more than you can when they
+journey from Charing Cross to Walton Heath. They pervade. So on to the
+other end of the journey at Versailles, and there the carriages await
+us, and the brake for those who like it, and we are bowled and rattled
+along through that place which has seen much of the makings and undoings
+of France, and on to La Boulie, where we hasten to the first tee,
+fearful of any waiting. Or, alternatively, we take a taxi-cab that is
+outside the hotel in Paris, and let loose through the Parisian streets
+with it, across the Place Vendôme, past the Opera, away along to the
+Gare du Nord with our inimitable Parisian taxi-man hurtling round the
+corners with all the fury of a charioteer in the races of ancient Rome,
+making us<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> reflect that it is well there will be a rest of an hour
+before being called upon to do the first putting at Chantilly. So we
+perceive that the going and the coming are very much what they might be
+in England, with just that difference that gives a piquancy, while,
+after a day on the course, it is found to be quite excellent to have the
+gaiety of Paris at one's disposal. Those who have tried it generally
+agree that golf de Paris makes the finest change of the game, the most
+exhilarating that may be had by the player of the south of England, who
+is not too far removed from Charing Cross or one of the ports. It may be
+444 miles from our metropolis to St. Andrews, and 383 to North Berwick,
+but it is only 259 to Paris, and despite the sea the journey lasts a
+much shorter time than the dash to the north by the fastest trains. We
+do not compare the golf of Paris with the golf of our historic and
+beloved seats of the game, but the courses of France, as inland courses,
+are good, and we think again of the virtues of the change complete, of
+the <i>tout ensemble</i>. Good things have come out of France in the days of
+long ago and in recent times; golf that is nearly of the best order
+rises in it now, and when we see Mr. Edward Blackwell and some others of
+the great men of the auld grey city who are most particular about all
+golfing things playing themselves on the slopes of La Boulie, over the
+plains of Chantilly, and through the forest of Fontainebleau, we know
+that things are moving tolerably well.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Upon our initiation at La Boulie, our curiosity is stirred and attention
+is attracted to many things. Perhaps M. Deschamps, or such a good
+sportsman as the Baron de Bellet&mdash;whose son, M. François de Bellet, has
+won the Amateur Championship of France, while Mlle.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> de Bellet is the
+best of the lady players in the country&mdash;would conduct a guest about the
+place and show him many things that would interest him, and many more
+that as a golfer he would most honestly admire. La Boulie is not a great
+course despite all the championships that have been played upon it, but
+the Société de Golf de Paris, which has a membership of 750 at a
+subscription of about £10, is quite a great institution. Yet, let me
+hasten to say that in the first remark I was judging La Boulie on the
+highest inland standard, and even then the judgment must be qualified by
+the statement that if not great in the best sense La Boulie is good and
+is quite interesting. At one time it suffered much from the nature of
+its soil and turf, but greenkeeping science, the francs of France, and
+the loving and most assiduous care of M. Deschamps, have changed much if
+not all of that. In the summer time it is quite one of the most
+beautiful courses I can think of with its wealth of trees, in which the
+nightingales sing soon after the golfers have done, and its majestic
+undulations, which come so near to being mountainous that herein, with
+so much climbing to be done and so many uphill and downhill shots, is
+one of the greatest faults of the course. But everything is well done at
+La Boulie, and human ingenuity and thoroughness are well applied. M.
+Deschamps is a fine humanitarian, and exerts himself constantly for the
+welfare of the caddies, who are as good for their business as any
+caddies in the world. It was a happy idea on his part to have these boys
+trained under a semi-military system as he has them now. They are all
+housed in a building near to the first tee under the care of the club;
+they have to observe regulations of duty and life which are good for
+them, and they are dressed in a boy-scout khaki uniform with touches of
+red to brighten it, and the principles of boy-scoutism are worked into
+their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> young lives. This is excellent, and indeed it is the truth that
+already we have a little to learn in golf from France. By the way, one
+of the curious laws of the country&mdash;curious as it seems to us, though
+soundly sensible&mdash;is that boys are not allowed, when under about fifteen
+years of age, to carry more than a certain weight in the way of work,
+and this prohibits caddies from carrying a bag of clubs of more than
+fair extent. As a matter of detail you will find that the weight
+quantity allowed works out to something like ten clubs of an average
+mixture, but happily for some good friends of mine there is no weighing
+at the first tee and no officers of the Republic there to see it done.
+They threaten to arrest us at St. Andrews if we play the game with iron
+clubs only, and they have the power through bye-laws ratified by
+Government to do so and send us to prison. Is it possible that a
+wandering player in happy France should be lodged in a modern Bastille
+for that on one eager day he defied ill omen and the law by carrying
+thirteen clubs in his bag, as both James Braid and Edward Ray have done
+when winning championships, the weight limit being exceeded and all the
+unhappiest consequences following? M. Deschamps took the initiative in
+founding the Golf Union of France, which is based completely on the
+American system and is likely to be a strong force in the golf of the
+future.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>To the best of my knowledge they have only one plus-handicap amateur in
+France, being M. François de Bellet, who is rated at plus 1 at two or
+three clubs, but I have examined the handicap books at different places
+and find that there are a few scratch men, and that the number of
+players who have single figure handicaps is quite good in proportion to
+the whole, and is increasing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> The fears we had that the French
+temperament was not good for the game prove to be unfounded; while the
+French enthusiasm is equal to anything that we know. There are cases of
+golf fever in France that are every degree as bad&mdash;or as good&mdash;as those
+we find here at home.</p>
+
+<p>One muggy winter morning, when a friend and I teed up at the beginning
+of the round at La Boulie, we could with difficulty see the flag on the
+first green, short as was the hole. We surmised that we might be the
+only players; but, no, many holes ahead, having started early, was a
+match going on between a baron of France and one of his rivals. The
+baron was taking the game with exceeding seriousness, and the
+information was given to me that he played two rounds on the course
+every day of his life. "Saturdays and Sundays?" I asked my caddie.
+"Toujours!" was the answer. "Even if it rains?" I pursued. "Toujours!"
+the boy answered with emphasis. "Or snows or is foggy?" I persisted, and
+then the carrier of clubs replied a little impatiently and with
+finality, "Toujours!" intending to convey that in all circumstances
+whatsoever the indefatigable baron played his two rounds a day, and
+independent witnesses confirmed the statement of the boy. This surely is
+the French counterpart of what is considered to be the finest case of
+golf enthusiasm that Britain has produced, being that of old Alexander
+M'Kellar who played on Bruntsfield Links in the brave days of old and
+was known for his ardour as "the Cock o' the Green." He also would play
+always; when snow covered the course he begged and implored some one to
+become his opponent in a match, and if nobody obliged he would go out
+alone and wander the whole way round, playing his ball from flag to
+flag, the greens and holes being hidden. At night he would sometimes
+play at the short holes by the dim glimmer of a lamp, and golf by
+moonlight was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> his frequent experience. Once upon a time his suffering
+wife thought to shame him by taking to the links his dinner and his
+nightcap; but he was too busy to attend to her. M'Kellar is long since
+dead, but something of his soul survives in England&mdash;and in France. And
+there are old and experienced golfers in France. There are Parisians who
+are members of the Royal and Ancient Club of St. Andrews, and I have met
+others who could argue most deeply with me upon the peculiarities and
+merits of many British courses from Sandwich and Sunningdale to Montrose
+and Cruden Bay. I took tea at Fontainebleau with M. le Comte de
+Puyfontaine, who exercises a kind of governorship over the course, and
+he told me that he learned his golf twenty-three years ago at a place
+near Lancaster, and that since then he has played in many parts of the
+United States and elsewhere.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>I have endeavoured to make the point that the French are worthy and
+thorough, that the Parisian golf and golfers must be taken seriously,
+and that it is a pleasure to go among them with our clubs. Their courses
+are nearly good enough for anything, and they are all different from
+each other in type and characteristics. Fontainebleau is cut out of the
+forest, and silver birches line the fairway, while some of the great
+boulders which are peculiar to the place stand out as landmarks near the
+putting greens&mdash;but not so near as to be useful to the erratic player.
+Holes of all kinds are at Fontainebleau, and some of them make pretty
+puzzles in the playing. The teeing ground for the third is high up on a
+hill and the view is charming, but that may be of less account than the
+circumstance that the carry is farther than it looks, and the hole is a
+long one. The fifth is a catchy dog-leg hole, which the caddies of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+Fontainebleau do not call a <i>jambe du chien</i>, as you might expect them,
+but a "doc-lac." Soon the game will be Gallicised completely. The ninth,
+being a drive and a peculiar pitch, is a strange hole which worries the
+pair of us exceedingly. It looks one of the simplest things, but there
+is an inner green and an outer one, as one might say, and the former is
+on a high plateau. There is a secret about it which we did not discover
+in three full days. The tenth is a fine long hole, with a guard to the
+green that might have been brought up from the Inferno, and so on to the
+end in great variety. I like Fontainebleau. Chantilly has less character
+but more length. It is a better test of wooden club play, but not of
+pretty work with the irons in approaching. Yet it is well bunkered, the
+fairway is smooth and dry, as it is at Fontainebleau, all through the
+winter, and the putting greens are most excellent, fast and true. If
+most parts of the course are a little flat, there is a great ravine
+about the middle of it which gives a touch of the romantic and helps to
+the enjoyment. The turf at La Boulie does not winter so well as it does
+at the other places, though the club has spent many thousands of francs
+in applying real sea-sand to it for its improvement; but in the spring,
+the summer, and the autumn, golf here at Versailles is a fine pleasure.
+Yet some will say that, much as I tempt them, they would not after all
+go to France for golf, that indeed they could never confess to others
+that they had been to Fontainebleau and Versailles and Chantilly for
+their game. But why may they not take their game and their historical
+views and reflections on the same days, as they may do better in France
+than elsewhere; though when we play at St. Andrews or at Sandwich, where
+Queen Bess visited, and Westward Ho! we wonder again how strangely this
+royal and ancient game does attach itself and cling to the old places of
+celebrity, and especially those whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> fame was made for them by kings.
+It is curious. The keen golfer is a man of thought and sense. We play on
+a morning at Fontainebleau, and in the afternoon we wander through the
+rich galleries of the wonderful palace where many kings of France held
+magnificent court, a place where the great Napoleon loved to rest a
+while between campaigns. There are relics of the Emperor in many
+chambers; and it was at the chief entrance here that he bade his last
+good-bye to the old guard and went lonely away, an emperor no more. The
+wonders and the glories of Versailles are known even to those who have
+never crossed the Channel; Chantilly has had its great romances of
+history also. The old castle was put up in the ninth century; here the
+Condes lived in fine state, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries the place was very famous. The good French have endeavoured to
+make their courses suit their places. Sometimes we seem to look even on
+these playgrounds for a touch of art, a little delicacy, a fineness and
+a high quality, and we think in just that way of the golf de Paris when
+the train of the Nord runs us homewards again.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The seaside golf in the northern and north-western parts of France is
+coming to be an important thing in the general scheme. Personal
+association and its seniority above all except Dieppe have led me
+already to mention Wimereux, but the golf of Wimereux is not the queen
+of the game of northern seaside France. In all honesty we must crown the
+slightly younger Le Touquet, on the other side of Boulogne, with that
+distinction. Here you may have one of the most charming changes of the
+game, and the most wholesome, delightful rearrangement of your general
+daily living system. Go to Etaples from Boulogne, then spin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> in the car
+through that splendid forest, skimming by Paris Plage and its casinos
+and evidences of lightness of life, and so through to Touquet, where
+there is a course for golf that is most excellent in every respect,
+lengths and character of holes, sandy nature of soil, quality of putting
+greens&mdash;everything. Some of the holes are a little tricky; but the
+course in general has been enormously improved in recent times, and it
+well deserves the championship dignity that has now been accorded to it.
+The girl caddies there are the best of their kind. I remember a little
+Marie for such an intuition regarding clubs to be used as I remember no
+other assistant: and after playing for a day through these avenues of
+fir trees with the great banks of silver sand in the distance, shutting
+off the sea, then dawdling among the coloured lights at Paris Plage
+listening to the music after dinner, and in the night sleeping in an
+upper room near to the links, and hearing at the last moment of
+consciousness the wind music floating in from the surrounding trees, one
+feels that this is almost an enchanted land, with the spirits of
+happiness and pleasure controlling a joyful cosmos.</p>
+
+<p>Dieppe is good, and it is quite different. Here the golf is some
+seventeen years of age, the whole system of things is well matured and
+settled, and the golfing season goes along with a fine swing from the
+beginning to the end. It was Willie Park who first laid out this course,
+but it has been much altered and lengthened since then, and now there is
+a fine club-house and all that a player might wish for, and especially
+one who likes to contend in competitions. There is something for such
+challengers to do all the time; I know few other golfing places where
+there are so many competitions in August and September, and yet they are
+no nuisance to the people who say they hate such things. At Etretat the
+game has been making excellent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> progress lately; at Deauville by
+Trouville, where you bathe always except when you do not golf or sleep
+or eat, it has been long established, and the course there has recently
+been raised very high in quality; and at Cabourg and Havre, in the same
+region, there are courses also. There are at Etretat thirteen holes, and
+yet you may play a lucky round, and I am reminded that in the long ago,
+when golf near the sands of Picardy was first being thought of, a wise
+man of Cabourg sent for an English course architect, and, displaying to
+his view one nice field, said, "Voila! Make me a hole! Two if possible!"
+But they know much better now than that, and Cabourg has its full
+eighteen. To golf, to lie down and sleep, to splash and tumble in the
+sea, to seem to do so much and yet to do so little except make a few
+drives and miss some putts&mdash;it is all a very happy holiday that you may
+enjoy at these places.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The championships of France, which began in a small and gentle way, have
+lately risen to be very important events, and they gain a most
+wonderfully cosmopolitan entry. In 1913, which was the greatest year for
+championships in general that the game has ever known&mdash;Taylor winning
+his fifth Open at Hoylake, Mr. Hilton his fourth Amateur, Mr. Travers
+his fourth American Amateur, Ouimet beating Vardon and Ray in the
+American Open&mdash;the championships of France did indeed rise to the first
+class, and in both events, the Amateur at La Boulie and the Open which
+was held for the first time at Chantilly&mdash;and the first for it to be
+taken away from the mother course at Versailles&mdash;produced some most
+exciting business. I have never seen a more extraordinary final in its
+way than that in the amateur event at La Boulie on this occasion,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> when
+Mr. E. A. Lassen came to grips with Lord Charles Hope&mdash;and such grips
+they were! I was led to describe it at the time as a dramatic affair of
+four periods and a spasm, and that is just what it was. Lord Charles
+Hope, though not physically strong, has acquired a fine game, and in the
+first period of this thirty-six holes match we witnessed him playing
+some quite beautiful golf and exercising the most complete
+self-possession and steadiness, gradually piling up a big lead of holes
+upon his more experienced opponent, who has been once Amateur Champion
+of Britain and a finalist another time, and seeming to make himself a
+certain winner. The duration of this period was one whole round, and at
+the end of it Lord Charles had five good holes to his advantage. The
+second was a period of peace, in which we watched Lord Charles keeping a
+tight hold on his most valuable gains, while Mr. Lassen, if losing
+nothing more, was gaining nothing when it was absolutely necessary he
+should be gaining quickly if he was not to be the loser of the day. Time
+was flying and holes were being done with, and fewer of them being left
+for play and recovery. This period terminated at the turn in the second
+round, with Lord Charles Hope still four to the good and "still
+winning." The third period lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth holes
+in this round, and in it the man who had seemed to be very well beaten
+threw a new life into his game, tightened it up, made it exact, certain,
+and aggressive, while at the same time his opponent seemed to collapse
+entirely, his driving becoming soft and uncertain and his short game
+nervous. The Yorkshire player won four of these five holes and at the
+fourteenth he was level with his man. Never was there a more
+extraordinary illustration of the truth that no match is lost until it
+is won; to some extent it recalled that amazing championship at Hoylake,
+when Mr. Sidney<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> Fry so nearly gained the title after being at one time,
+as it appeared, hopelessly beaten by Mr. Charles Hutchings. Now it was
+surely Mr. Lassen's match; but in the crisis Lord Charles Hope came
+again and fought every inch of the way home. In this period every hole
+was halved to the end of the round, so that after the statutory
+thirty-six had been played the state of things was as at the beginning
+of the day. No business had been done, and each man might be said to
+have had his tail up quite as much as the other. The spasm followed. The
+thirty-seventh had to be played. Mr. Lassen teed up his ball, said to
+himself that he must keep it to the left as there was the dread
+out-of-bounds on the right that had been a constant trouble to him,
+swung, struck, and to his dismay saw the little white ball bearing
+slowly but surely to the right after all. It did not reach the trees,
+but, almost as bad, it fell into the big deep bunker out that way, and
+made recovery difficult. Lord Charles Hope seized his advantage. A good
+ball shot straight down the middle of the fairway, and the hole and the
+match were his. An extraordinary game indeed that was.</p>
+
+<p>In the Open Championship at Chantilly there was an entry that was nearly
+good enough for a championship on British soil. Vardon and Ray, out
+across the Atlantic, were missing, but otherwise the class was as
+numerous and good as need be, and there were a few of the best British
+amateurs. George Duncan won, as he had won the "News of the World"
+tournament the week before, and so made it clear that he had come into
+his own at last. These two were his first really big victories in
+classic open events, and they were brilliantly and indeed easily gained.
+But it was not Duncan's victory, so well deserved as it was, that makes
+this championship at Chantilly worth a place in golfing history. It was
+something else that very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> nearly happened. Among the competitors was an
+amateur in Mr. H. D. Gillies, who at different times in recent seasons
+has shown an immense capacity. At St. Andrews in the Amateur
+Championship only a few months before he had made a brilliant display.
+Now, here, he did a thing which to the best of my belief and after a
+searching of all the records had never been done before, and that was in
+an open championship competition of the first order, decided by four
+rounds of stroke play and with the best players of the world arrayed
+against him, he as an amateur led the whole field for three consecutive
+rounds. Mr. Ouimet in America did not lead for three rounds, no amateur
+had led for three rounds in any open championship before, and it is not
+often that any professional has done so either. Mr. Gillies has enormous
+powers for concentration and effort, and, as one might say, he can
+strain himself at the game until he nearly drops. In his third round he
+had a wicked piece of bad luck which cost him two most valuable
+shots&mdash;not the sort of bad luck that one gets through finding a
+specially nasty place in a bunker, but the much worse variety which is
+the result of a grave error in course construction. After one of the
+finest drives one might wish to see, at a hole just after the turn he
+found his ball lying on a road which had to be treated as a hazard, and
+from here he was bunkered. He knew that Duncan was pressing him hard,
+and that he had not a stroke to spare. Still by an enormous effort he
+kept his lead, and at the end of the third round it looked as if it
+would still be a lead of two strokes, when alas! on the home green he
+lost a stroke in putting. Instead of having a lead of two over the
+terrible George for the last round he had now a lead of only one. There
+is not much difference between one and two&mdash;it may all be accounted for
+by the very smallest of putts&mdash;but in a case of this kind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> the moral
+effect is very great. You see, when you lead by two strokes you realise
+that you can afford to lose one of them and still be leading, but when
+you only have an advantage of one there is the cold truth that you
+cannot afford to lose anything at all or the lead will go&mdash;the lead that
+Mr. Gillies had held all the time. One may be sure that he felt this,
+for coming off that home green some one said to him quietly, "You still
+lead, Gillies," and he turned with a little melancholy and responded,
+"Yes, but one stroke is not much to lead Duncan by, is it?" The effect
+was visible at the first tee in the afternoon. He knew the
+responsibility. He took an infinity of pains, far too much. He addressed
+his ball until he was sick of looking at it any more, and then he topped
+it into the bunker in front of him. Good-bye, Open Championship of
+France! But there it was, a brilliant achievement for all that, and if
+he had won, as once he seemed likely to do, no man could have done
+justice to the golf history of that year with amateurs Ouimet and
+Gillies as Open Champions.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Surely Mr. Gillies is one of the most interesting studies in the game at
+the present time. Born in New Zealand, he became a boat-race Blue at
+Cambridge, and is the only one who has won a high position in
+first-class golf. Now he is a surgeon in Upper Wimpole Street, already
+with a high reputation as a specialist in matters affecting throat,
+ears, and other organs of the head. He is evidently a man of immense
+will-power, with a most enviable capacity for concentration and for
+obliterating from his mind completely what is not essential to the
+business of the moment. He will work at his profession continuously for
+a week or a month and only just remember golf, and then he will suddenly
+appear in a great competition, perhaps a championship,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> and be a golfer
+and nothing else whatever. That is as it should be, as it is always
+supposed to be in golf, but few men can exchange themselves to this
+extent. When he won the St. George's Cup at Sandwich he had not touched
+a club for ages, but somebody insisted on motoring him down there for
+the occasion. He had no idea of going to Chantilly, but was at Wimereux
+when an entry form was sent along to him there, and he said to Mrs.
+Gillies, "Let us go and watch the professionals," but they watched him
+instead. He is always going to courses he has not seen, and when he has
+not been playing golf for a long time, and then doing wonders on them.
+Tall and athletic in build, in demeanour he is solemn, and I have heard
+it said that his attitude at times somewhat suggests that he is about to
+put his opponent on the operating table&mdash;which in a sense he often does.
+He belongs to the hard thinking and slow playing school. Although he has
+a keen temperament, and is a man who at his best plays largely from
+inspiration, yet he is much of what we call a mechanical golfer, and is
+very measured and deliberative in his movements. He has studied and
+satisfied himself about what are the essential principles of this
+mysterious game, and he applies them to the best of his intense ability.
+He keeps himself steadier on his feet than almost any other player I can
+recall. Those who have had the necessities of pivoting on toes drilled
+into them from their first day at golf should make close observation of
+the Gillies way and see how well that way pays. He swings his club
+backwards but a little way and very slowly, but finishes the swing at
+great length. As is often the case with players of his attitude towards
+the game, his iron strokes are plain and they can be depended on.</p>
+
+<p>But the most interesting feature of his system and his principles is the
+remarkable steadiness with which he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> holds his head during the making of
+his stroke. We understand very well that of all principles this is the
+most imperative, and that he who disobeys it is completely lost. When we
+have foozled we know well that the presumptive cause was a little
+movement of that most restless and anxious head. We know also that head
+movement disturbs the general balance, and induces body movement, and
+have not troubled to consider why. A reason seems vaguely obvious, but
+Mr. Gillies knows more about matters of the head than other people, and
+from his surgical knowledge he has come by one of the most interesting
+theories that have been propounded in connection with this game and
+believes in it absolutely, which is one reason why he has decided that,
+when driving, whatever happens his own head shall be absolutely
+motionless. This is not a matter for a layman to explain or guess at,
+and so I have gone to Mr. Gillies himself and begged from him his
+theory. He says to me, then, that he has always felt that keeping the
+eye on the ball is certainly the key to the situation, but in recent
+times he has realised that the importance of so doing is really in
+keeping still the delicate balancing organs of the head when executing
+the shot. These organs or semicircular canals are intimately connected
+with the eye, and also give one the sense of position. The least
+movement of the head upsets the fluid in these canals, so that the sense
+of position is more or less lost, according to the amount of movement.
+Without the sense of position the stroke is almost sure to fail. "I take
+it," he says, "that your visual memory is good enough to remember the
+position of the ball, if you shut your eyes just before hitting it; but
+if you move the head at the moment you cannot hit the ball correctly.
+Swaying the head in putting, as Tom Ball does, is probably not very
+disturbing owing to the movement being so slow that the fluid in the
+canals<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> does not get jerked. At the same time I can understand him
+requiring a great deal of practice to perfect the sway." To the layman
+this theory is very remarkable, and it is impressive for two reasons,
+one being that it is backed by expert scientific knowledge, and the
+other that it is emphasised by successful application.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>And if Mr. Gillies is one of the most interesting figures that have
+arisen in amateur golf in recent times, most certainly George Duncan is
+the most interesting of the newer professionals. Here is an artist at
+the game if you will, the greatest genius of golf that has come up since
+Harry Vardon rose to fame. I am convinced that in the new period that is
+beginning with the inevitable decline, to some extent at all events, of
+the old triumvirate, George Duncan will be far and away the most
+conspicuous figure. He is a great golfer, and is in every way admirably
+fitted for supremacy. A more fascinating player to watch and study and
+think about afterwards has never driven a ball from the tee.</p>
+
+<p>When he first came out it was declared that he was the fastest golfer
+who had ever lived. It was said that he walked up to his ball and hit it
+away before anybody had time to realise that he had taken his stance. He
+was likened unto hurricanes, lightning, and racehorses. I remember that
+Mr. Robert Maxwell, being once partnered with him, in an Open
+Championship I think, remarked afterwards that it was the most violent
+and disturbing experience of fast golf he had ever known. All this was
+true. Duncan never seemed to find it necessary to think as we do, and
+not merely we with all our doubts and hesitations, but those far better
+than we are, men who have won championships. He dispensed with all
+alternatives, those fatal alternatives that ruin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> our own game. We often
+fail because there are not only so many ways of doing the same thing in
+golf, but because we try to think of too many of them when we have a
+stroke to play and change from one to another and then to a third, until
+our increasing indecision can be no longer tolerated and some sort of
+shot has to be played. Analyse your own emotions and experiences, and
+you will discover that this vacillation has been the cause of many
+disastrous failures. But George Duncan never suffered in this way. He is
+a man of lightning decision, of peculiarly sound and valuable
+inspiration, and he is one who, having once decided, does not swerve
+from his determination no matter what may be the allurements in the way
+of alternatives. Duncan does not know the alternative. He has no use for
+it. He does not recognise it. He believes that first thoughts in golf
+are best, and he abides by them. He decides and he acts. And he does all
+such thinking as is necessary for his decision while he is walking from
+the place where he played his last stroke to the place from which he
+will play his next, so that when he reaches his ball there is nothing to
+do but get to business without any waste of time. All these were
+features of the early Duncan just as they are of the present one, and
+they have been developed and perfected during the ten or dozen years
+that he has been out in the professional world.</p>
+
+<p>But the Duncan of the early period had a fault of temperament in that he
+would go wild. He would at the moment of crisis lose his head, think of
+impossibilities and try to do them. He would lose his grip of his game.
+Elation and despondency would alternate too quickly in his mind. He
+would be careless; he would forget consequences. Who that ever saw it
+will ever forget the way in which he let the Open Championship at St.
+Andrews in 1910 slip from his grasp in that terrible last round? He had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+done rounds of 73, 77, and 71, the third being then and still the record
+of the course. Another 77 would have given him the Championship. Instead
+of that he did an 83. The next year at Sandwich he did very much the
+same sort of thing in his third round. It has seemed that in each of the
+last four or five years he was good enough to win the Championship, and
+that it was largely his own fault that he did not do so. That is why we
+used to say of him that ambition should be made of sterner stuff, that
+these weaknesses of his temperament were inexcusable and must be stamped
+out.</p>
+
+<p>Duncan has cured that fault of temperament now. He has stamped it out.
+The other day when he and I were discussing his predecessor in the same
+flesh, he said, "All that is past and done with. It is gone behind me.
+There is no more of it. I am quick still. I shall always be quick
+because that is I, Duncan, my nature. I cannot be anything else. And why
+should I not be quick? Are there not too many slow golfers in the world?
+But for the rest of it I am steady now. I feel hold of myself and the
+game. I do not forget." Championships should come quickly to him now.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>RIVIERA GOLF, AND WHAT MIGHT BE LEARNED FROM LADIES, WITH A
+CONSIDERATION OF THE OVERLAPPING GRIP.</h3>
+
+
+<p>One who will only play on summer days is a little less than half a
+golfer after all. Golf at the full demands resource, good heart, some
+courage, and a settled nerve, and it is of its principle that in the
+matter of places, times, and weather the game shall be taken as it is
+found. Hence the real golfer should not only tolerate the play in the
+bad seasons when there are howling winds and drenching rains, and much
+of life seems damp and sad, but he might be expected even to feel some
+occasional satisfaction in it. One who can hold himself up to the big
+wind and drive a ball that whistles through it to the full drive length,
+then play a good second and all with fine allowance and good wind work
+with his irons, so that the game works out well enough for any day, is
+one whose contentment is a state to be envied. Rarely does one feel the
+thrills of the golfing life better than when playing well in a lashing
+wind, with clothes that soak and stick; the sense of mastery is
+magnificent. Yet of such luxuries of winter golf one may sometimes tire.
+The strong would be gentle again; and sunshine comes well after storms
+and leaden skies. Swearing in December that this winter shall see us
+stay at home<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> the season through, playing on our east coast links
+throughout, January finds us hesitate, and in February, if we wait till
+then, there is a journey being made away through France to the sweetness
+of life by the blue Mediterranean Sea. It is an unforgettable change. We
+have spoken wrongly when sometimes after, at the end of a winter season,
+we have declared we tired of it. Never.</p>
+
+<p>We have returned to London weary at the end of a January day from
+Sunningdale or Walton Heath, or it may have been just back along on the
+underground from the Mid-Surrey course at Richmond, which seems as well
+in winter as any, and much better than most others. But London is murky
+and dirty. It is cold, it is windy, there is a drizzling rain, and the
+streets are very dirty. It will be three-quarters of an hour before we
+may be seated at the dinner table. Oh, we become a little tired of this!
+Troubles never come singly, and probably on such a day a match or
+matches have been lost. Those who are not of the community do not
+understand what worries make up the full agony of this game, and that is
+why the loss of two matches was considered by the gentle lady with her
+friend at tea to be the cause complete of the horrid din as of breaking
+furniture in the hall, the barely-stifled awful words, the yelping and
+limping of the little dog that suggested some sudden and unexpected
+injury, and the general impression that was conveyed throughout the
+household of havoc and disaster. "It is nothing," said gentle Fanny of
+the perfect understanding as, with her toes in pink satin on the fender,
+she poured another cup for Mrs. Larcombe. "Really, it is only George,
+who, I can tell, has lost <i>both</i> his matches, dear!"</p>
+
+<p>But it was not the matches only. It was the waiting lone and weary for
+Marmaduke at the beginning of the day; it was the lame excuse of
+Marmaduke for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> his tardiness; it was the aggravating manner of the man
+throughout and the stupidity of the caddie; it was the stickiness of the
+greens; it was something wrong with the fateful golfer's lunch that made
+it all worse in the afternoon; the slicing that was more frequent and
+farther into the rough; the pitch shots that were topped still more; and
+the putts that ever lipped and stayed outside. It was the luck that went
+viler all the time, the cruelty of circumstance, the misery of it all;
+and after the twin defeat the sad discovery and reflection that if one
+little thing&mdash;perhaps only the pressure of a finger&mdash;had been remembered
+about some big things that were wrongly done, it might all have been
+avoided. It is realised again that of all the sad thoughts the saddest
+is: "It might have been." It is then that the agony of golf is
+experienced; it is then that the golfer is not happy. And it is then, on
+the retreat to town, that one may seem to hear the Mediterranean call,
+and see a vision of a sun glistening on a flowered and song-laden land
+where golf is played. Take the chance, unhappy man; make the change then
+if you can.</p>
+
+<p>The strongest emotions often arise from the widest and most sudden
+contrasts. Our beautiful English summer comes to us too slowly and
+gradually through the vicissitudes of spring for the fullest delight.
+One may step out from the mist and drizzle of a London street into the
+greater darkness of a theatre, and it is all blank and gloom and
+nothingness, but there is a quick expectancy. A few moments, and there
+is the tinkling of a bell, the curtain is rolled up, and there is a
+blaze of light with a pretty picture, perhaps, of summer with a full
+suggestion of Arcadia. Music and song, love and gladness, and younger
+again is the heart in years. Thus for a while the load is lightened. It
+is like that when one wanders to the Riviera for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> golf in the depth of
+England's winter. We leave London when it rains and is cold and heavily
+depressing; the spirit is weary from the trials of the season. Charing
+Cross&mdash;the Channel&mdash;Paris, hardly less gloomy than her sister
+Londres,&mdash;the plunge into the rumbling darkness of the fast train on the
+P. L. M.&mdash;sleep and dreams. And in the morning the bell rings and the
+curtain of the new and sunny world rolls up, and it is glorious summer.
+Nothing in the way of change of scene is quite so good as this. Those
+who do not know the Riviera may try to imagine it, but in the clearest
+vision they cannot approach the grand reality of this sudden change.
+Marseilles&mdash;Toulon&mdash;Hyères&mdash;Costebelle; and there is the sunshine, the
+flowers, and the game. A rest of a day, quiet slumber through the night,
+and in the morning drowsily one hears a beat, beat, beat upon the
+window-panes, and, not being then awake to Hyères, or Costebelle, it
+seems perhaps but the dismal tapping of the London rain. But later it is
+discovered to be the tapping of the leaves and rosebuds on the glass.
+Breakfast on the terrace, the contenting cigar whose smoke rises
+wreathingly through a still atmosphere upwards to the blue, and then an
+effort to lift oneself from a summer languor. Clubs in possession again,
+a walk for a little way along a rose-fringed road, and then a plunge
+through a coppice along a broken stony path that thousands of golfers
+have trod before. Through a field of narcissi, through the planted
+violets, past a little vineyard on to the plain below&mdash;there the golf
+course is. Then play the game all day, and mount to the hotel again when
+the afternoon is nearly spent. But in the earlier afternoon at
+Costebelle I would rather climb back through the little wood after my
+single round, enjoy this perfect illusion of summer, and read and rest
+in laziness. Tints of lemon and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> citron come into the sky when the sun
+falls to its setting. Out beyond the plain is the sea and then the Iles
+de Hyères, or the Iles d'Or as they have been called, because the sun
+will shine upon them when it has left the mainland for the
+day&mdash;Porquerolles, Portcros, Titan, Bagaud, and Roubaud&mdash;a
+pearly-coloured group. You may make a short journey to them, to the blue
+Mediterranean which is so very blue. There is the delicate blue of the
+sapphire, and the richer blue of the turquoise. There is the wide blue
+of the Italian skies, and a wonderful blue in some women's eyes. But
+there is no blue that is so deep, so glorious, so soulful as that of the
+Mediterranean Sea, as in fancy I see it now. We gaze upon it and are
+content. All is so peaceful and pleasant. Over the hills comes a booming
+sound; it must be naval gunnery at Toulon. Grim realities of life and
+strife press even into this sweet scene. Yet they are French guns, and
+they are not meant for England either. I love Costebelle. For the simple
+sunny happiness of the life that is led there it is incomparable.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>And this happiness in scene and sun, be sure, is the greater part of the
+golf on the French and Italian Riviera. There is often much doubt by
+those who have not been there upon the quality of Riviera golf. It
+varies. It once was poor; it was bad. It is now much improved, and it is
+improving still as the demand for it has quickened, as the people of
+southern France who depend so much upon their British visitors have come
+to realise the full meaning of "the golf boom" and the education and
+bettered tastes of the golfing people who leave Britain in the winter
+time. It is now, as golf of the inland kind, quite tolerably good, which
+is to say that in degree it might rank fairly well up in the second
+class<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> of British inland golf. It is no better than that; it is
+sometimes not so good. Climatic difficulties on the Riviera are somewhat
+desperate. In the summer there is a continuous baking heat, and this is
+followed by days of warmth and nights of frost, and in such confusion of
+temperatures the golf courses have to be grown afresh for every season.
+Until recent times the putting greens needed to be newly sown and
+cultivated for every winter season, and I believe that it was at Nice
+that Mr. Hay-Gordon, secretary of courage and discernment as he is,
+first gave battle to the destructive climate and determined he would
+hold his putting greens&mdash;which at Nice are better than at almost any
+other place in southern Europe&mdash;right through the suns of summer and
+keep them on from one season to another. At Nice, again, thanks to gold,
+and thought, and enterprise, they have what the guardians of other
+Riviera courses do much envy, a magnificent supply of water, and this is
+lavished upon the turf through the dry time when the golfers are back at
+their homelands. The experiment of Nice, which was a fateful one, proved
+successful, and since then it has been copied by other clubs out that
+way, and greens are kept on and are much the better for it. In the old
+days it was a painful thing, as I remember it, to tread upon those
+tender new-born blades of grass, thin and scarce they were, and unfit
+for such usage as golfers give. It is far better now. Then also the
+construction of the courses has been much improved; but it must be
+remembered again that conditions and circumstances do not encourage or
+even agree with ideas of length and bunkering as we of Britain entertain
+them. Yet these things do not matter. We need no six thousand yards and
+no bottle-neck approaches when we wander southwards to the sun. Life
+shall be taken simply then; the press of existence shall be relieved,
+the game<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> shall be made a little gentler than at other times, the nerves
+shall not be unduly tried. So we discover that there is a virtue in what
+is little more than five thousand yards, a generous amplitude of short
+holes, and enough to satisfy of those that can be done with a driver and
+an iron of sorts. In a mood of ease and languor, when even strong men
+who like the game find joy in a mixed foursome, we come to admire the
+Riviera system; and we may find men at nights hard in argument upon the
+points and delicacies of the fifth hole or the fifteenth, the
+aggravations of the sixth and the sixteenth, when they would disdain to
+think of such like in their golfing life at home. That comes of the
+influence of the sun; it soothes and satisfies, and it makes
+contentment.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is this good thing to be said for the Riviera golfing way,
+that it yields a very full variety, and it might well be advertised that
+it embraces something to suit all tastes. Not only does it vary in the
+kind of course, but in the way of life that is attached to it. The
+manner of living at Hyères and Costebelle is more of the English country
+kind and more sporting healthily open-air, with less of the flummery of
+fashion, than it is at other Riviera places, not meaning by that that
+there is not enough of good music and social entertainment for evening
+hours. The sea is a distance off, and there is next to nothing of
+promenading. Here we live well and are happy, and the sun is very warm.
+R. L. S. lived at "La Solitude" at Hyères, and he loved it. The golf in
+some respects is as good as elsewhere on the littoral; in some ways it
+is even a little better. There is the course of Hyères flanking one side
+of the quaint old town, and there is Costebelle with the chief hotel on
+the hillside on the other, and its golf course on the plain below.
+Hyères is a gentle course, pretty, smooth and nice, and much improved
+in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> recent times. The turf is good for southern France, and some of the
+holes are remembered, as where we play through an avenue of trees with
+silver bark. Golf is younger at Costebelle and it is quite different,
+but if one were led to make comparisons, as from which we shall refrain,
+it might be said that often youth is no harmful thing. Golf architecture
+had already advanced to a science when this course was first made, the
+first planning being done by Willie Park, and such as Mr. John Low have
+advised upon its improvement since, while M. Peyron has lavished much
+money and attention upon it too. Even if there are still some rawnesses
+apparent, golf at Costebelle comes near to being the real thing. Then it
+is a good point in favour of this end of the Riviera that here we have
+the golf almost at the door of our hotel as it is scarcely to be had at
+any other place. It is something to walk down to the first tee, and
+pluck a rose by the wayside as we go.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>That of Cannes is a pretty course. The Grand Duke Michael has done much
+for it and here he is a king. Society is high at Cannes, the people come
+along to La Napoule, six or seven miles from the town, in their
+motor-cars in a long procession, and it is the proper place for the
+luncheon party and such social entertainments as go well with a
+verandah, sunshine, and the flowers. One would go to the golf club at La
+Napoule even though one did not golf; many do&mdash;perhaps too many. Those
+who eat and chatter, kiss hands and smile, but never take a divot are
+losers of something that is heartening. A river runs through this
+golfing land, and twice we cross it by a famous ferry worked by hands
+upon a rope that is stretched across the stream. On one side of the
+river there are twelve<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> holes laid and on the other there are six; but
+the six may be considered to be better than the twelve for the pleasure
+that they yield. First we play three of the batch of twelve, and then we
+are floated to the precious six. Here there are big sand bunkers of a
+natural kind, and they are nicely placed. The fairway is tolerably good,
+and there are putting greens in pretty places.</p>
+
+<p>If this were all it would be good; but the course of Cannes gains a
+splendid charm from its magnificent situation which cannot be ignored.
+There is a promise of beauties to come when we approach the club-house
+by that long avenue of golden mimosa; later there are glimpses of almost
+heavenly scenes. If the golf at these continental places is gentler than
+at home, such things as scenery may count for a little more. I have
+never had full sympathy with the suggestion that the golfer cares
+nothing for scenery or sparkling air except when he is off his game and
+then falls back upon them for compensation. There is not only hypocrisy
+in this, but in suggesting the player to be scarcely above the savage it
+is unfair to a healthy taste that has had some training in appreciation
+of natural beauties. One does not dwell upon cloud effects nor let the
+mind loose upon a panorama when the strokes are being done and there is
+a man to beat, but sunlight and sweet scenes have always their strong
+effect subconsciously, and it would be a pity if they had not. I shall
+not place the course of Cannes at La Napoule in that warring and jealous
+company, many clubs strong they are, each of which claims that it is the
+most beautifully situated in the world. I have played upon three or four
+of such courses, and indeed their claims have appeared to be strong. It
+is enough that Cannes is very beautiful. It will be well if there are a
+few moments for waiting caused by a slow-going match in front when your
+ball has been placed on its little pinnacle of sand on the fourth teeing
+ground, for spread<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> out in the distance there is a glorious panorama of
+the snow-capped Maritime Alps, on whose last spur there lies glistening
+white in the sunshine the little town of Grasse where sweet perfumes are
+distilled and where, as they say, twelve tons of roses are crushed to
+make a quart of essence. Grasse rests on that hillside like a linen
+sheet dropped there by the gods. When we have done this hole and face
+about, there are the pearly-tinted Esterels ahead. Hereabouts the holes
+are chiefly laid out through avenues of fir trees, and here and there,
+especially when one is approaching the eighth green, the picture is one
+that bears some suggestion of an Italian charm. Elsewhere in the round
+the Mediterranean is presented, as once when we look across the bay in
+which Cannes is placed to Cap d' Antibes at the opposite corner from La
+Napoule. By comparison some of the concluding holes are a little dull in
+looks; but when we play them in the afternoon the sun is setting behind
+the Esterels in front, and then there is indeed a sunset to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the course of the Nice club is at Cagnes some miles out from the
+town. It is different from the others of the Riviera, and it has its
+special advantages. I recall an example of one of them which was the
+more impressive since it was made on the occasion of my first visit to
+the course. That was years ago, and we had been held up at Nice for five
+days and five nights by continuous and heavy rain during the whole of
+that long time, and it was in February too. Such a spell of Riviera wet
+seems almost incredible, but it happened, the oldest inhabitants, for
+the credit of their country, declaring that such a thing had never been
+before since the world as they knew it had begun. When this kind of
+thing happens on the Riviera there is only one thing to do, and that is
+go to the casinos; and it was bad for us in every way that this rain
+came down like that even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> if it was good for the Casino Municipal and
+the others at Nice and for M. Blanc at the adjacent Monte Carlo. When
+the five days and five nights had been endured, when the heart had grown
+sick of what happened at the tables, when our thoughts had turned to
+Sicily and Egypt&mdash;for during this period of the flood I had made one
+voyage (we should call it a voyage though the journey was done by
+motor-car along that glorious Grand Corniche) to the Riviera of Italy,
+and there at Bordighera and San Remo (and what a pretty little course it
+is at Arma di Taggia) found it to be raining still&mdash;the sun came out
+again and the question of golf arose to life. But surely, it seemed,
+golf would be impossible for some time; courses would need to dry.
+However, we argued that a stroke with a driving mashie is better than no
+play, and so we took the car at the Place Masséna and soon were out at
+Cagnes, and there we played on a course that was as dry as any course
+need ever be though the rain had been pelting down to within three or
+four hours before. In one or two hollow places there were little pools
+of casual water, but otherwise the state of things was such that we
+might sit upon the grass when the opposition was badly bunkered and
+needed time for his recovery. Others knew that Nice recovers quickly,
+for when we were out in the middle of the course we espied some figures
+a couple of long holes away, and about the attitude of one of them there
+was something strangely familiar. There was a manner of walking on the
+course not so much stiff as small and quite precise, and there was a
+club being carried vertically, head high up as if it were a gun and the
+carrier were one of a line of infantry. I can recall only one man who
+sometimes walks with his club like this&mdash;not that there is anything
+against it&mdash;and, knowing him, I still regret that opponent had not
+courage to accept a wager of anything from five francs to fifty that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> I
+could name the man at that distance of seven hundred yards, having no
+knowledge that he I had in mind was on the Riviera at all. It was Mr.
+Arthur Balfour, ex-Prime Minister, who, chafing for lack of golf after
+his own five days' shutting up, had motored over from Cannes at the
+moment that the rain held up.</p>
+
+<p>There is a certain plainness about many of the holes at Nice, but others
+are interesting. The first is appetising, the eighth is a mashie shot
+over a belt of trees, and the ninth is one of the longest I know, quoted
+on the cards at 605 yards and stretching away to the west, parallel with
+the sea-shore, and quite close to it so that a highly extravagant slice
+might deliver one's ball to the Mediterranean. However, we get there
+very quickly, and the hole is not so long as figures make it seem, for
+there is much run on the ball at Cagnes. One of the prettiest holes
+follows this one. The sociabilities here are excellent, and Nice itself,
+being rather a place of tumultuous excitement and very much within the
+Monte Carlo zone and influence, you may find it a beneficial thing in
+many ways to get out to the golf club as frequently as you can.</p>
+
+<p>In recent times they have effected a great improvement to the course at
+St. Raphael, and up at La Turbie, overlooking Monte Carlo, and in one of
+the finest situations conceivable, they have made a new one with
+considerable luxury of appointment. The climatic difficulties which they
+had to encounter here, at a height of nearly two thousand feet, were
+such that they had not dreamt of, much less reckoned upon, and for a
+time an appreciable portion of the money was being lost on the greens
+that was being gained through the reds and blacks in the casino down
+below, the two organisations not being without association with each
+other. The construction of this course stands out as one of the great
+engineering feats of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> golf. The top of the mountain on which it was
+determined that it should be made was a bare rocky waste. There was not
+even the necessary soil to grow the grass on. It was determined to take
+up the soil from a neighbouring valley, and three hundred men were
+employed to do the work. There was no railway, no horse or mule traction
+would get the stuff properly up that hillside, and so it was carried in
+baskets on the backs of those three hundred men. Next, rocks were
+blasted, the soil was spread, seeds were sown, and a result was awaited
+with anxiety. Then came down some tremendous rains, and down the
+hillside that soil was washed away, and most of the carrying up had to
+be done all over again. But labour and perseverance conquered, and at
+last the grass was made to grow, and the plain truth is that here now
+they have a course that for the Riviera is quite passably good, and most
+extraordinarily beautiful in its situation, the Alps being in the
+picture on three sides of it, and the Mediterranean down below on the
+fourth. On a fine day Corsica can just be seen. Now it is clearly
+indicated that the man who would demonstrate a perfect alliance with
+happy fortune must accomplish a grand double event. He should break the
+bank at Monte Carlo in the morning, and he should hole in one at La
+Turbie in the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>This course and that of Sospel are a new and separate feature of Riviera
+golf. Formerly the whole strength of the golf of the littoral lay at its
+western end, and it was down near to the level of the sea. Now Monte
+Carlo and Sospel, chiefly Sospel, have moved the balance a little nearer
+to the east. Sospel is agreeable; and here again the construction of the
+course and its improvement to its present good state stand for a great
+triumph of skill and perseverance. Sospel is some thirteen miles behind
+Mentone in a valley<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> of the Alpes Maritimes, and it is a quaint old
+place. If one never golfed at all, the journey there with all its
+thrills and excitements, and the picturesque little town that is at the
+end of it, are well worth a day of the time of any man. That journey may
+be made by motor-car, or now by tram, and one may safely say that there
+is no other golfing journey of its kind that can compare with it. As to
+the course, it possesses turf which is as good as anything to be found
+in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, and though the round is only a
+trifle over five thousand yards, and there is no hole of so much as four
+hundred, it is nice golf for all that, and the wooden club is needed
+frequently for the second shots.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there by this Mediterranean sea new courses are being made.
+They have one at Grasse. There will be others soon. The truth is that
+dawdling on the Riviera has gone quite out of fashion, and it has come
+to be understood at last that this wine-like air and the golden sunshine
+are better than the dim light and dank atmosphere of the gaming rooms. A
+few persons who go to the Riviera in the winter seem to be nervously
+afraid of giving up much of their time to golf. I have heard them say to
+themselves and others: "Is not the golf of London better than anything
+by the Mediterranean, and why then do we pay hundreds of francs to come
+here merely to play golf, and almost forget that we are in the south of
+France?" You will not forget that you are by the blue sea to the south
+of Europe. Not only is the glory of this part of the world in winter
+better understood and better appreciated by those who golf than by those
+who don't, but by far the most is made of their time by the players of
+the game. I do not see what is the use of going to the Riviera unless
+one golfs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>It may seem a strange reflection, but it is the truth, that when at the
+Riviera for any length of time in the winter, and especially when at
+such a place as Hyères, one is inclined more to a thorough overhauling
+of one's game, a study of its weaknesses and a determination upon
+certain improvements, than at any other time. A good explanation is,
+however, possible. At holiday time like this one has the play
+continually. One is detached from all the workaday considerations of
+life at home. And then again one is thrown among new golfing friends
+from all parts of the world, people of infinite golfing variety and all
+charged with their own new ideas. We see every kind of style and every
+degree of skill, and if much of the style is bad and the skill is often
+deficient, there is something always to be learned or suggested. And it
+has been found as a matter of practical experience that at such places
+the majority of people fall to thinking of their ways of driving, often
+because their driving at the beginning out there is very bad, and that
+in turn is often due to the difficulty at first of sighting the ball
+properly in the pellucid atmosphere. But the whole system of driving is
+overhauled, and one would dare to suggest that proportionately to the
+number of players involved there are more conversions made from the
+plain grip to the overlapping on the Riviera in the season than anywhere
+else. Only this very morning as I write&mdash;a bitter cold morning when I
+shiver in proximity to an east coast links, and sigh for the passing of
+a few days more when the Channel shall be crossed and a glad journey
+south made on the P. L. M.&mdash;a letter comes up to me from a friend at
+Hyères demanding that all possible information printed and otherwise<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+shall be transmitted on the subject of the grip, for there is a drastic
+revolution to be made in the case of one anxious golfer! In this matter,
+one of the most important in all practical golf as it surely is, there
+is a suggestion of great value to be made.</p>
+
+<p>The advantages of this grip as they are being discovered by more
+converts than ever before, are greater driving power owing to wrist work
+being easier, and also the fact that the left arm and hand pull the club
+through better and drive the ball as it ought to be driven, the
+overlapping reducing the right hand to a low subjection. No matter how
+good and careful the player may be, he who uses the two-V grip is
+certain sometimes to be in trouble with his right hand, which will
+constantly attempt to establish a lordship over the left, which when
+done is fatal to the good swing and the straight ball. Straight driving
+along a good, low trajectory, getting a ball with plenty of run on it,
+might almost be said to be characteristic of the overlappers, who are
+certainly off their drive less frequently than their brethren. These
+being the advantages of overlapping, how is it to be gained by those who
+have all along been addicted to the plain two-V way of gripping, and now
+find it impossible after many trials to convert themselves, these trials
+having been made in the most obvious way by hard practice on the teeing
+ground and with a brassey through the green? This is a good question to
+ask, but the answer is too often disappointing. Those who have started
+their golfing lives as old-fashioned two-V men seem fated to remain as
+such. As it happens, I believe I have come by the simplest and most
+effectual way of making the conversion; at all events, it is one that
+has never failed, though it has been tried in very many cases. It is
+simplicity itself. Nearly every man who tries to adopt this grip does so
+with his driver. It is natural, because it is for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> driving that he
+most wants the grip, and he never thinks about it for anything else. In
+these experiments, however, he feels in constant danger of missing the
+ball&mdash;and sometimes does miss it&mdash;is most extremely uncomfortable,
+entirely lacking in confidence, and sooner or later comes to the
+conclusion that the overlapping grip, whatever its merits, is not for
+him. The sure and certain way is to begin with the putter, which is easy
+and also valuable, because the experience of the best players is that
+the overlapping grip improves one's putting at least as much as it does
+one's driving. You may become accustomed enough to this way of gripping
+the putter on the first day to try it in the most important match or
+competition. After two or three weeks of this way of putting, let the
+grip be tried for short running-up approaches, which will be
+satisfactorily accomplished after a very little practice, and then,
+after another week or two, let it be used for short lofted shots. The
+crisis comes when a swing of such length has to be made that the head of
+the club has to be raised more than elbow-high. A difficulty will be
+experienced at this stage, but it will soon be overcome, and when it is
+the way to overlapping with the driver is opened. Within a week the man
+is a complete and happy convert.</p>
+
+<p>On the general question of grips and gripping, which is high in the
+minds of golfers preparing for their season's campaign and setting their
+bags in order, one does feel that points of detail are not generally
+considered as they should be. In many cases the grip has really more to
+do with the effectiveness of a club than the head thereof, and yet
+perhaps not more than one golfer in four is properly suited. In general
+the grips are too short, too thick, and their thickness is too uniform.
+A very thick grip tends to take weight from the head, to spoil the feel
+and balance of the club, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> to reduce the sense of control over it,
+but thickness in moderation is good for weak hands and fingers. Thin
+grips throw the weight into the head, give extra control, and improve
+the feel, but in excess need strong hands and fingers. The professionals
+nearly all use quite thin grips, their hands and fingers being very
+strong. But remember that the right hand and its fingers are stronger
+than the others, and also that that hand has less work to do in
+gripping, while as it is mainly concerned with steadying and guiding it
+is best suited by thinness of grip. Clearly, then, the grip should be
+thicker for the left hand than for the right, should, in fact, taper.
+This morsel of theory is overwhelmingly justified in practice, and that
+is what we mean when we say that most grips are too uniform in
+thickness, for they are nearly as thick for the right hand as for the
+left, and end suddenly with a kind of step just beyond the place where
+the right forefinger is applied. For hands of moderate strength let the
+circumference at the top for the left hand be 2-11/16 in. in diameter,
+and at the place where the right forefinger holds on let it be 2-1/2 in.
+From this point let it taper off gradually for about 4 in. until the
+leather has nothing underneath it, and then half an inch of wrapping on
+the bare stick brings the grip, as it were, to fade away into nothing.
+The full length of a grip of this kind may be about 12-1/2 in., and the
+tapering conduces greatly to the improved feel of the club and to a look
+that somehow makes for confidence. In the case of iron clubs the length
+and the decreased thickness towards the bottom are very good when taking
+a short grip of the club.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Matters appertaining to ladies' golf also come more prominently before
+the average male player of the game when he is on the Riviera with the
+sun than they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> do at other times. He sees more of it for the reason that
+his home exclusiveness cannot be tolerated there, and he sees much to
+make him think, even though the best lady players of the game do not
+often go that way. After watching a ladies' championship for the first
+time I left the place with some deep reflections. The idea that men have
+anything whatever to learn from ladies in regard to golf may seem
+preposterous, but it is not so. There may be a thousand times as many
+good men golfers as there are lady golfers who are as good, but there
+are just a few of the latter who are very good indeed, far better than
+they are generally supposed to be, and their style and methods are very
+well worth studying. When great events are stirring in golf the leading
+Scottish newspapers regularly print leading articles upon them, of so
+much general importance are they considered. After the ladies'
+championship in question, I read a leading article in a Glasgow daily
+newspaper, and it said that it was evident that if Miss Ravenscroft and
+Miss Cecil Leitch were to enter for the Amateur Championship and were to
+maintain their best Turnberry form the result would be disconcerting to
+those who hold that the scratch man can give the equally competent woman
+golfer half a stroke or thereabouts. With this I agree. The game of
+girls who can drive 250 yards, who can win 330-yard holes in threes to
+other girls' fours, who can do nine holes in 37, and so forth, needs to
+be taken quite seriously. The real importance of the matter is just
+this, that the best of these girls have arrived at a result which is
+superior to that attained by the average man golfer, and they have
+reached it by a system and a method which are practised by comparatively
+few male players. Their golfing principles and styles are quite
+different. Is there nothing we can copy from them? Surely.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now we hear very much about 300-yard drives, which one is half given to
+understand have become the regular thing with the most modern balls; but
+we know, as a matter of fact, that the average man does not drive
+anything like this distance, and that he would give a part of his income
+to be able to drive as far as some of the very best girls do at the
+championships. They achieve their distance not at all by hard hitting,
+for they hit quite gently, but by long, free swinging, perfect timing,
+and especially by full following through, that is to say, they swing in
+just the same way as it was necessary for the best men players to swing
+in the days of the gutty ball. They finish their swings with the club
+head and shaft right round their backs and their hands well up; I saw
+some of them who made nearly as perfect models of the golf swing as
+Harry Vardon does in the picture made of him by Mr. George Beldam and in
+the statuette by Mr. Hal Ludlow. Their style was most excellent and it
+was a fine thing to see. Necessity has caused it. These girls have not
+the strength of arm, wrist, and fingers to get a good length in the same
+way that men get, or try to get it now; the rubber-cored ball has not
+made the game so easy for them that they can dispense with an inch of
+the fullest swing that they can make. They seem to use their wrists but
+little, and all their movements are as smooth and harmonious as they can
+be. In this way they drive many yards farther than the average man
+golfer does. In the Amateur Championship you will not see one man in
+three drive the ball in this way now. Short swinging, imperfect
+following through, and a jerky, snappy kind of hitting have become
+almost general now that the balls can be so easily driven by the
+exercise of mere wrist power. The result is that good style in driving
+has become very rare among men. From the point of view of results
+obtained this is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> well enough for men who play in championships; they
+drive much farther than the best girls do, though I do not think that
+they are generally so straight. But the average golfer, consciously or
+unconsciously, copies his superiors, and most of them have now no style
+and do not know the sensuous pleasure that is obtained from a full
+swing, a clean hit, and the complete finish which seems to give a thrill
+to every nerve in the system. Then, if these men with all their jerks
+and wrist strain still do not get that length to which they may think
+they are entitled&mdash;as most of them do not&mdash;would it not be worth while
+to go back to the old way of better style and practise most assiduously
+at the full swing until they get it right? The very best girls show
+evidence of fine schooling in this matter. They hit the ball with
+marvellous cleanness. In a large proportion of cases the advice to male
+players in these days to swing short and hit hard is sound so far as
+mere results are concerned. But all men are not so strong in the forearm
+as they may think, and they do not get the length they seek, while
+another thing to remember is that the long complete swing when once
+mastered is less frequently thrown out of gear than the short one, which
+is a very difficult thing to keep in order.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is something to notice also in the preliminaries to the drive
+as the really good girls go through them. Not all players suspect what a
+deep influence the preliminary waggling of the club has on the
+subsequent swing. The influence is enormous, and the way that the
+majority of male players waggle is one that directly encourages jerky
+hitting. You will find that they tighten their wrists as they lay the
+club to the ball and move the head of the club back in two or three
+short, quick movements, rarely letting the head go forward over the
+ball. This is strongly conducive to a fast back-swing, a fast on-swing,
+and no follow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> through. It makes for the hard hit pure and simple. Now
+many girls who get long balls by big swings keep their wrists very loose
+in the waggling and allow the head of the club to swing easily backwards
+and forwards like a pendulum two or three times, four or five feet in
+front of and behind the ball each time, so that when the real swing is
+entered upon it is almost a continuation of the waggle and is made at
+much the same pace. This is a direct encouragement to the long swing,
+long follow through, and smooth rhythm of the entire movement. Between
+the man's waggle and his swing when done in the manner described there
+is no sort of connection whatever, and the driving is always much the
+poorer for the fact.</p>
+
+<p>Again, in the putting the ladies' play is full of morals for men. I do
+not hesitate to say, after an immense amount of observation, that the
+putting of many of the girls at their championship is quite as good as
+most of that we see in the men's Amateur Championship. They are deadly
+with the short putts up to two yards, and they hole the long ones with
+astonishing frequency. They come to their conclusions speedily as to
+what is the proper thing to do, and, having done so, they make their
+strokes with no further hesitation. We see very little tedious and
+laborious examination of the line, and, we may be sure, that they are
+the gainers for it. In the men's Amateur Championship the wearisome ways
+of some of the competitors are notorious. They study the line
+meditatively from north, south, east, and west, convince themselves of
+the existence of influences which do not in reality exist at all, next
+they hang over the ball with their putter addressed to it until one
+suspects them of having fallen into a cataleptic state, and then they
+miss the putt. The girls putt with a great confidence and accuracy. Of
+course these eulogiums refer only to the best of the lady golfers;
+between them and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> the others there is a very big gap, and it would be
+ridiculous to pretend that the average championship girl is yet within
+miles, as it were, of the corresponding man. But she has ways that the
+average man might often copy to advantage. Miss Cecil Leitch, who is
+surely the finest mistress of golfing method and style that her sex has
+ever yielded to the game, and is splendidly worthy of the championship
+that at last, after much waiting, she won at Hunstanton in the summer of
+1914, comes as near to being a perfect model as any one I can think of.
+She has graced a masculine way in golf with some feminine delicacy, and
+there is art, there is science, and there is rhythm in all her golfing
+movements. And she is splendidly accurate. Her iron play is a thing to
+be admired, and one might say of her as one cannot of all players who
+have been many years at the game, whatever may have been their success,
+that she is indeed a golfer.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>And whoever is the champion of any particular period may be interested
+to know that at no time and place is he ever so much appreciated as away
+from his own country during the time when it is so wet and cold at home
+that people play comparatively little&mdash;less perhaps than they should do.
+As masters indeed they are properly regarded, and most dissectingly
+discussed are the champions when their disciples are abroad; and it is a
+good thing too, for if there must be influences on the game of humble
+players, let them come from the heights. In this matter many of us have
+always regarded John Henry Taylor as quite one of the best of models,
+despite what any one may say about a lack of beauty in his style.
+Taylor, five times champion, is indeed a very great master of this game,
+and he has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> special advantages as a model in that first he is deeply
+practical and can explain everything he does correctly (I know some of
+the greatest players who explain, but incorrectly, that is, they do not
+even know what they do themselves), can reason, and is almost, as one
+might say, a medium between the inspired play of Vardon and the
+mechanical way of Braid. He is one of the most thoroughly practical
+golfers who have ever played, and perhaps he has taught more other
+golfers than any one who has ever lived. I believe that to be the case.
+Taylor plays his wooden clubs with a round swing, and to-day some great
+authorities are disposed to condemn that style of swing utterly and
+declare that only the upright one is the real thing. But what about
+Hoylake in 1913? Then Taylor won his fifth championship, and he did it
+chiefly, as I believe, by his magnificent driving, done in such
+circumstances of terrible weather as would have made it next to
+impossible for any ordinarily good player to drive at all. Above
+everything, Taylor's golf is effective, and it is effectiveness we want.</p>
+
+<p>Once he explained in an interesting way how he viewed his own driving
+and how he gained the power that he does with his comparatively short
+swing. He is what we may call an open-stancer, and he insists that
+stance and character of swing must be adapted to each other in a special
+way, that for the open stance only a round-the-body swing is suitable,
+and that when a man plays an upright sort of swing with a square stance
+his right elbow must inevitably leave his side, and that is one of the
+worst and most frequent faults in driving, though one often little
+suspected or appreciated. If he stood square, says the champion, he
+feels he would lose direction; if his swing were upright he thinks he
+would lose distance, and if his right elbow were allowed to leave his
+side, then he is sure he would lose power; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> direction, distance, and
+power are the three essentials of good driving. So he is all for the
+open stance and flat swing, and one of its chief merits and necessities
+is that in the back-swing the wrists do not permit the head of the club
+to move outwards and backwards in the line of flight behind the ball as
+it has been preached they should do, but begin to circle the club round
+at once, and by this means the right elbow is kept to the side. The
+importance of this elbow movement is very great. It might be safe to say
+that more than half the golfers of to-day do it wrongly and suffer
+accordingly. Taylor urges, of course, that the initial turn of the
+wrists at the very beginning of the swing is extremely important; and
+then as to the arm movement, he emphasises that the right elbow should
+be kept close to the side and should move round the side irrespective of
+any movement of the body. That makes for a smooth flat swing, and a
+sense of enormous gain in power is certainly the result. He says that he
+feels a gain of half as much power again by this movement in comparison
+with an upright swing. The initial wrist movement induces it. He warns
+those who think of trying to flatten their swing, and so gain some of
+the power which he certainly has, against allowing excessive body
+movement to which they will be very liable.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>ABOUT THE PYRENEES, AND THE CHARMS OF GOLF AT BIARRITZ AND PAU, WITH
+POSSIBILITIES FOR GREAT ADVENTURE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is not a bad thing to be at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris on a night in
+early February, seeing a porter attach to one's baggage a scarlet label
+with the words "Pyrenees&mdash;<i>Côte d'Argent</i>" printed diagonally across it
+on a bright yellow band. It indicates a journey southwards to the sun,
+to a corner of the Bay of Biscay where there are Biarritz and St.
+Jean-de-Luz and Pau, and the Pyrenees queening over all. Golf was played
+in these parts some ages back; indeed it was here that the foundations
+of continental winter golf were laid long before any stir was made
+elsewhere. It is not always warm at Biarritz; often it is windy;
+sometimes it is very cold; but generally it is genial and pleasant,
+constantly sunny, and there is something about the place that conduces
+to a strong and healthy sporting feeling. It is a matter of taste. I am
+not here to write down that from the golfing point of view it is either
+better or worse than the Riviera. They are not the same. They have bad
+holes at each, and some good ones at both. Biarritz, which is one of the
+most popular golfing winter resorts in existence and retains its great
+popularity in spite of its rivals (really when I was there lately in the
+month of February they told me they had already taken £700 in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> fees that
+month, though there was then still a week to go), has some holes which,
+as we think upon them at home in England, seem quite shockingly bad.
+They are not so much bad as nearly improper. And yet when we are at
+Biarritz we do love these holes, as do the great players without
+exception, and as lief would we suggest the filling up of the Cardinal
+bunker at Prestwick and the flattening of that range of Himalayas at the
+same glorious golfing place as touch an inch of the face of the Cliff
+hole at Biarritz. The course has the gravest faults, but it is very
+enjoyable to play upon in February, and in the winds that blow there one
+needs to be playing uncommonly well to get round in figures reasonably
+low. On the other hand, the golf at Nivelle by St. Jean-de-Luz and Pau
+is among the winter's best in Europe. There is indeed much difference
+between the coast of silver and the coast of blue, and the contrast
+comes out strongly in the golf. There is less of music and flowers and
+softness of life, less languor at Biarritz than at Cannes and Nice and
+other Riviera places. The games are everything, and the easy strolls and
+the social dalliances are much less. In the morning we seldom see the
+young ladies in fine costumes bought in Paris. They flit fast about the
+streets and along up the Avenue Edouard VII. in short skirts and the
+simplest <i>semi-négligé</i> dress, each with a brightly coloured
+jersey-jacket of a very distinctive colour&mdash;a brick red, a sulphur
+yellow, a cobalt blue, something that does not hide itself. Every one is
+keen and openly admits it. And the golf club beyond the lighthouse is a
+great institution, and it is splendidly governed by Mr. W. M. Corrie,
+the honorary secretary.</p>
+
+<p>Biarritz golf is distinctly peculiar. The course is a short one; it
+offers a generous continental supply of holes that can be reached with a
+good shot from the tee (but they must be good and well-directed shots,
+for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> guards of the greens are exacting), and the turf and putting
+greens are as good as one has any right to expect them to be in the
+south of France. These are generalities. Now the course, like the old
+Gaul of Caesar, is in three parts. We begin the play and go on for some
+seven holes on a flat tableland; then we plunge down over the cliffs to
+the level of the sea, come up again to the tableland at the thirteenth
+hole, and so finish on the level. One may leave the first part of the
+play out of consideration. It is neat, but one often feels the desire to
+be "getting down below," where there is better sport and much scope for
+skill and enterprise. At last we come to a teeing ground on the edge of
+the steep white cliff which is some hundred and thirty feet in height.
+It is a drive-and-iron hole that is before us, and quite a pretty thing,
+a hole that for feature and natural beauty it would not be easy to
+improve upon. To a part of the underland, where the drive must be
+placed, has been given the name of "Chambre d'Amour," and tales for
+sorrow and weeping are told of it, of lovers being caught by the tide
+and dying there. The green is away in a corner of the course, tucked up
+in the shadow of a towering lighthouse, and the bounding waves of Biscay
+come rolling almost to its very edge. If we are not convinced that it is
+technically perfect, this is at all events a charming hole, one of the
+most picturesque we can find in France, At the lighthouse we turn about,
+play some plainer things along the level of the sea, and then come to a
+piece of golf which is famous all over the world. The ascent to the
+higher surface has to be made at the thirteenth, and it is done at what
+is known to every one as the Cliff hole.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly all who have never even seen it have heard of the Cliff hole of
+Biarritz, have studied pictures of it, and speculated upon its peculiar
+difficulties. No hole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> on the continent of Europe has nearly such a
+reputation; indeed, it is perhaps the only one with a special celebrity.
+I have been asked questions about it in America. I have seen and played
+it, examined it thoroughly, and thought it out. It is a queer thing,
+quite different from any other hole I know. It needs such a shot to play
+it properly as is not demanded elsewhere. And yet it requires absolute
+skill, the proper shot must be played and played thoroughly well, and it
+is practically impossible to fluke it. Why, then, should this not be
+reckoned a good golfing hole? The circumstances are these: The teeing
+ground is on the lower level, and it is only some fifty yards from the
+base of the cliff. The ground in between is rough and stony. The cliff
+here is about forty yards in height, and, if not vertical in the face,
+bulges outwards frowningly at the top, while a thin stream of water
+trickling down at one side seems to add a little more to the
+fearsomeness of the thing. At the top edge of the cliff there is grassy
+ground sloping quickly upwards for about a dozen yards until a line of
+wire is reached, and there the green begins. The fact that the green
+(which is tolerably large and in two parts, an upper and a lower) then
+slopes downwards away from the player does not make matters easier.
+Beyond it is another precipice, but wire netting is there to save the
+ball from this, and there is some wooden palisading to keep it out of
+trouble on the left. Then there is a local rule saying that if the ball
+reaches the top of the cliff, but does not pass the wire, it must be
+teed again, with loss of distance only, the man not being allowed to
+play it from the tee side of the wire. (He would do so at peril of
+toppling over the cliff!) But all these things do not make this awful
+hole much easier in the play. One day I sat on the edge of the cliff and
+watched the people playing it, and the ball that reached the green and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+stayed there was a rarity. It can be done. Braid and Taylor and Vardon
+would do it all the time, and it is no trick shot that is wanted. You
+might hit hard at the ground in front of the wire and make the ball
+trickle on, but that would call for more than human accuracy. Or you
+might sky your ball up to the heavens and let it fall straight down on
+to the green, and that would be superb. But champion Taylor would take
+his mashie and play, perhaps, some fifteen yards above the cliff with
+all the cut that he could put upon the ball, and then he would be
+putting for a two. A difficult hole follows, but after that the work is
+easier.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>With a pair of prism glasses looking Spainwards to the left, we may just
+discern the quaint and quiet little town of St. Jean-de-Luz. It is one
+of the best of the winter places for golf, for health and sunshine, and
+no nonsense. The little town is thoroughly Basque, and the player in his
+hours away from the game will have a good satisfaction in wandering
+about it and peering into such places as the old thirteenth-century
+church which is a perfect specimen of the religious architecture of the
+Basques, and such a thing in churches as you would not see elsewhere. It
+was here that Louis XIV. came for his wedding two and a half centuries
+back. And in this locality we have three courses to play upon&mdash;three!
+There is the old one of St. Barbe, which is a nine-holes affair, and has
+one hole&mdash;the third&mdash;called the "Chasm," which is a very strong piece of
+golf, for the drive is over a deep fissure in the rocks, with the sea
+running in below. St. Barbe is the second oldest course in France&mdash;Pau
+being the oldest&mdash;and there are some fears, perhaps exaggerated, that it
+may not be in existence for many years more. Another of the three is the
+course<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> of the St. Jean-de-Luz club at Châlet du Lac, and this also is
+one of nine holes. Until a little while since there were twelve, but
+then three were captured by the terrible builders, who seem to oppress
+the golfers all over the world; but the club received some compensation
+in having a new and neat little club-house erected for them at the
+landlord's expense. And here also they make the claim that "the scenery
+surrounding the course is probably the finest to be obtained from any
+course in Europe." Certainly it is very good. The nine holes are very
+tolerable in golfing quality. Here and there the driving must be very
+straight. A pull, for instance, at the third, will deliver the unhappy
+ball to the Bay of Biscay, and the sea will bang it about the rocks for
+a long time after. At the fifth, again, one must respect the ocean when
+approaching. Generally, however, the holes are somewhat easy, and do not
+worry so much as to hinder appreciation of the surrounding views, which
+are indeed magnificent. Out one way is the grand panorama of the
+snow-topped Pyrenees, and the light and colour effects upon them change
+at nearly every hour throughout the day. Below is the pretty harbour and
+town of St. Jean-de-Luz. Away to the west is the great expanse of the
+Atlantic, framed here at the course with a wildly rocky coast, and up
+along to the north is a rough fringe of shore, the innermost corner of
+the Bay of Biscay, which leads the eyes out to the most distant point,
+where a cluster of buildings gleams in the sunlight, and the tall, white
+lighthouse beyond them indicates that the place is Biarritz.</p>
+
+<p>But Nivelle, the course that rises up from the bank of the broad river
+of that name, is the chief course of the group and quite a wonder of
+golfing France. When I first saw it and inquired upon its origin I felt
+that here was something which was undoubtedly among the best in Europe,
+and yet only five or six years ago all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> land, except a small piece
+which is occupied by two of the eighteen holes, was bare soil on which
+cabbages, turnips, and other edibles were being grown. Listen to the
+story of the creation of Nivelle. One day Mr. Frank Jacobs, the
+secretary of the St. Jean-de-Luz Club, and a Spanish doctor, went
+exploring the country round, and they hastened to Count O'Byrne to tell
+him that there was ground on the banks of the stream Nivelle which
+looked to have the possibilities of such a full-sized golf course as was
+needed then. He agreed with them. They were men of keen discernment; for
+even then while a little of that land was pasture the rest was under
+cabbages and other growths. It was ascertained that a hundred and sixty
+acres could be bought for six thousand pounds, but such a sum of money
+was not at hand. Count O'Byrne told the local hotel-keepers the truth
+that unless there was a first-class golf course there St. Jean-de-Luz
+would lose in the race for winter popularity, and he asked them to
+guarantee the money in the first place, a company to relieve them
+afterwards. They did so accordingly, and the land was secured; but the
+farmers could not be turned off at once, and some time was lost thereby.
+When they came to make the course they followed an interesting and, as
+we would think, an extraordinary procedure. The farmers, recovering from
+their grief and resentment, gave up to the incoming golfers a priceless
+secret. They said that if they would leave the bare land alone to look
+after itself it would from its own sources grow for them the most
+beautiful grass for their purposes that they could ever dream of on the
+happiest summer's night. So the Count and his comrades gathered their
+men about them, the land was raked and smoothed out, and then they
+borrowed the town roller, being the heaviest thing of the kind in the
+district, to flatten it down. And so they left it and waited. Sure
+enough up came the tender<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> blades of grass, and in a season there was a
+thick coating there, fine, beautiful turf, and I can answer for it that
+it is nice to the touch of the feet and excellent for the game. The
+climate in these parts is most times a little moist and better for the
+production and preservation of golfing turf than that of the Riviera.
+The hotel-keepers were soon relieved of the full responsibility by a
+company floated for ten thousand pounds, the capital afterwards being
+increased to twelve thousand, but they were so much enamoured of the
+project, believed in it so utterly, that they and the tradesmen took up
+as many shares as they could get. But some great personal driving force
+was needed, and it was found. A Dundee gentleman, a keen golfer and a
+great lover of this sweet spot in France, Mr. W. R. Sharp, came forward
+and increased his commanding interest in the club and the course, and he
+has done wonders for them. That he is president of the club is a good
+thing for the club. Now there is a charming club-house; Arnaud Massy,
+once open champion, has a pretty villa for himself close by, some
+hundred and forty golfers are playing on the course at the busy
+time&mdash;and play goes on all through the year&mdash;and only four years after
+the course was opened the company was able to pay a dividend. So I say
+that this is a miracle of golf.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the story is not complete at this. Fine turf and a prosperous
+club do not necessarily make good holes. But St. Jean-de-Luz has holes
+as good as most in Europe. They would even be good on a first-class
+inland course in Britain. They are, thanks to the broad undulations of
+the land, good in character. The round is opened with a fine two-shotter
+of a full four hundred yards, with an incline against the player from
+the tee. The drive must be properly placed, and that is the case nearly
+all the way round. The second is a pretty short hole; the third presents
+a fearsome drive across a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> yawning quarry; at the fourth the return over
+it is made in the progress to the longest hole, one of five hundred and
+fifty yards, and so on to the end, some of the middle holes being very
+good, the seventeenth a fine full one-shot hole, and a good drive and
+iron of three hundred and eighty yards downhill to terminate. The view
+from the seventeenth and eighteenth tees, the town of St. Jean-de-Luz
+shining in the sun, the Nivelle pressing itself into it, and the pretty
+harbour white-flaked with the waves, is peaceful and pleasant, and it
+gives that sense of "going home" which one always likes to have when
+playing the last holes of a round.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The game itself is not everything in the golfing life; it attaches other
+occupations and diversions as necessities to itself which are all added
+to the sum of "a day's golf" and make of it a thing of adventure and
+time packed with variety of deed and thought. There is the meeting and
+the parting; the lunch time and&mdash;everything! Chiefly there is the
+journey, and has it been properly considered how golf and the car have
+been linked together for a magnificent combination of sporting joy? In
+the remembrances of every player there must be happy and stirring
+episodes of motoring to and from the game. I have hundreds of them,
+apart from all those countless pretty spins on the outskirts of London
+town. Motoring for golf is an entirely different thing from motoring for
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The golf-motoring out from Paris to Fontainebleau and the other places
+round the capital of France is unforgettable, and always will there be
+clear cut in my mind the details of an expedition I once made to this
+Nivelle, St. Jean-de-Luz, at a time when lounging golfless in the north
+of Spain. It is not frequently that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> we go crossing frontiers in
+motor-cars and having our clubs examined with wonderment and irritating
+inquiry by officers of the <i>douane</i> twice in the day, going and
+returning, for just two rounds of the best of games. Nor is it a common
+thing that in one day English golfers should speed along in a German car
+from Spain to France and from France back again to Spain to play on a
+splendid course with French and Scottish opponents&mdash;a considerable
+mixture, if you like. I was idling at San Sebastian when the aforesaid
+Mr. Sharp, with such thought and kindness as golfers display towards
+each other, gave greeting and said, "Come to Nivelle again for a day of
+play." But how? It was thirty miles away, and those trains, with changes
+at Irun and Bayonne, would be most fearfully slow. "Bother the trains!"
+said Sharp, "what are motors for, and particularly what may be my own
+car for? Say the time when you will have risen and bathed and taken your
+<i>café complet</i>, and it will have gone over to San Sebastian by then." So
+it came about that it was waiting at the door of my hotel at eight
+o'clock in the morning. Coats were buttoned up, pipes were lighted, and
+when the first quarter was being chimed from the church steeples we were
+already doing our thirty to forty miles an hour through the hilly
+suburbs of San Sebastian. There are such hills in Spain and France
+between San Sebastian and St. Jean-de-Luz as you can hardly think of;
+but the speed dial showed that we flashed up some of them at thirty and
+darted down the other side at sixty-five. Great hills to the left with
+jagged skylines and strange formations as go by such names as "Camel's
+back"; and such sweet vales with mountains framing them over on the
+right! Hereabouts is some of the prettiest scenery of Spain, and I hope
+not to forget how on that glorious morning the mists of the new day
+dissolved in the warming sunlight, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> opalescent gossamer that had
+clung about those peaks of Spain gave place to strong blues and greys,
+and then to shimmering rose. At Irun, on the Spanish side of the
+frontier, the car's papers had to be shown, then we bowled over the
+dividing river, and at Hendaye the Frenchmen asked their questions and
+did their looking into things. Then up a steep hill for the last, and in
+a few minutes we were gliding down into St. Jean-de-Luz, all of this
+heartening business done within the hour. At the end of the day, two
+rounds done, when the sun was setting, I was swung again over those
+Spanish tracks, and just when the light had completely failed and a few
+spots of rain came beating upon the glass the sixty horses in the Benz
+had done their duty. I opened the casement of my room at the Maria
+Christina; soft sounds from the sea floated in, and soothed one to a
+pensive mood.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>The case of the golf of Pau is curious. Here, so far away from Britain,
+far from Paris, four hours even from the coast at Biarritz, inland and
+hugging closely to the Pyrenees, we have positively one of the oldest
+golf clubs in the whole world. At the beginning there was Blackheath,
+and then there were the Edinburgh Burgess, the Honourable Company, the
+Royal and Ancient, Aberdeen, and two or three other clubs. Golf, growing
+up, made its first leap across the seas to Calcutta in 1829, and
+seventeen years afterwards it settled in Bombay. It first landed in
+Europe in 1856, and was definitely and thoroughly established at Pau,
+and has remained there flourishing ever since. This circumstance is the
+more curious when we reflect that at that time there was no golf about
+London except at Blackheath. The Royal Wimbledon and the London Scottish
+Clubs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> were then unborn. Such great institutions now as the Royal
+Liverpool Club at Hoylake and the Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! were
+undreamt of, and a boy child might have been born to a golfer at Pau and
+grown almost to middle age before the Royal St. George's Club at
+Sandwich was begun. Scots, of course, were at the bottom of all this
+pioneering work. The early Blackheath golfers were Scots; they carried
+the game to Westward Ho!; they fostered it in India, and some of them
+went off with it to Pau, where they liked to spend the winter in the
+warm sunshine and in air which for sweet softness is almost
+incomparable. Over the fireplace in the smoking-room of the club-house
+is a picture of three of the founders of the club, who were still living
+in 1890&mdash;Colonel Hutchinson, Major Pontifex, and Archbishop Sapte.
+Another of those founders was Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Lloyd-Anstruther.
+Thus it happens that the charm of age and long settlement hang upon the
+golf of Pau as they do upon no other golf club in Europe. Here, as not
+elsewhere, you feel impressed upon you the dignity of golf, realise that
+it is not a thing of to-day or of yesterday, and there are almost the
+same deep pleasure and elevation of spirit and feeling when you come to
+such a place after wandering among newnesses elsewhere as there are in
+abiding for a while at St. Andrews or North Berwick in October, the
+crowds then being gone away, after a course of southern golf of the most
+recent preparation.</p>
+
+<p>The club-house at Pau is of the kind you would expect to discover at a
+good club of long and honourable standing up-country in England. The
+attributes of age and tradition are to be found within it. On a wall is
+a painting twelve feet long depicting the leading golfers of Pau in
+1884, assembled on the course, and it was done by that Major Hopkins who
+did such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> work, now celebrated, concerning the earliest golfers at
+Westward Ho! gathered by their iron hut. In this picture of Pau there
+are some eminent golfers shown, such as Colonel Kennard, not long since
+dead, who was field-marshal of the Royal Blackheath Club; but the artist
+leads the eye to the gaunt figure of Sir Victor Brooke, a tam-o'-shanter
+on his head, addressing the ball on the tee in the way of a determined
+man. Sir Victor, for four or five years captain of the club, was the
+lion of the golf of Pau in those days, and when a match book, now lying
+musty in a corner, was started his was the first entry that was made in
+it. The course is beautifully situated on the Billère plain, a mile or
+so to the west of the middle of the town; and in the unusual absence of
+a friendly car it is a pleasant walk through a shaded avenue of lofty
+beeches in the splendid Parc du Château.</p>
+
+<p>One is a little puzzled to estimate the quality of this course, being
+faced with a kind of semi-official printed statement that "Pau is
+undoubtedly the best course on the continent" which to some degree is
+intimidating. The turf, grown on a dark, sandy soil, is excellent, and
+more than fifty years of play upon it have given it the firmness and
+crispness that we miss elsewhere. The holes are of good length, well
+arranged, and not easy. Yet pancake was never flatter than the central
+part of the course, and with the very dullest and plainest kind of
+mid-Victorian bunkering&mdash;three low, straight grassy banks in line with
+each other right across the fairway&mdash;the golf hereabouts is less good to
+the eye, at all events, than it is to the spirit in the play. The first
+hole, a long one, with a road running diagonally across near the green,
+close to which there is a little cottage, somehow by its surroundings
+recalls memories of old "Mrs. Forman's" at ancient Musselburgh, and the
+second is a short hole of quality. From the fourth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> tee the line of the
+course bends round to the right, and for half a dozen holes we are away
+from that central part; there are ups and downs in the land that give
+more colour to the golf, and here and there are clumps of bushes that
+need consideration. All the time we are close to the bank of the River
+Gave, and at length, near to a point where a wild stream plunges into
+it, we cross to a spit of land between them and play a few holes there.
+They are nice holes. The ground heaves and rolls, and there must be good
+calculation and accuracy in approaching. Another stream runs through
+this isolated part of the course, and the green of the fourteenth hole
+closes to a point where two running waters nearly meet and there is a
+rutty road alongside. It is a pretty green, the situation is cunning and
+delightful, and that fourteenth hole is one of the best in France. Not a
+doubt about it&mdash;Pau is very good in parts. But we turn up a note on the
+golf in a little guide to Pau, and read: "Owing to the nature of the
+soil and their admirable preservation, the links at Pau compare
+favourably with the course at St. Andrews, in Scotland, where the
+conditions are almost ideal." O, Pau!</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Now Pau is one of those places where the golf, excellent and admired, is
+not domineering, as one might say. You take it, you enjoy it, and yet
+you live in an easy contentment after your game without raving about it.
+It is a delightful little of a most happy and contenting whole. That is
+because Pau of all places on this planet makes one feel rested,
+contented, peacefully, languorously happy, and that is a most blessed
+state at which to arrive after a long season's course of tubes and
+taxi-cabs, noises and disturbances, crushes and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> crashes, late nights
+and far too early mornings, and, yes&mdash;for they also come with the burden
+of the Londoner&mdash;heavily bunkered five-hundred-yard-holes near our
+excellent London town. The air is famous for its sweet soothing
+properties. It wraps itself round your tired limbs, it steals into your
+nervy senses, and it comforts you. Pau lets you quietly down, rests you,
+gives you sleep, stills those jagged nerves that twitched so much in
+town. Every one says so, and it is true. One morning I gossiped on the
+course with Mr. Charles Hutchings, the wonderful man who won the Amateur
+Championship at Hoylake in 1902, and who has known what nerves are
+since. He told me he has now been wintering at Pau for the last twenty
+years, and it is the only place that is any good to him. "Before I come
+to Pau, and even when I am at Biarritz," said he, "my nerves are like
+this"&mdash;and he slowly passed his right hand up along his left arm from
+the hand to the shoulder&mdash;"and when I am at Pau they are like this," he
+added, and he smoothed the arm back again from the shoulder to the
+fingers. It was as if he had been stroking a cat the wrong way and the
+right one&mdash;that was the idea. Biarritz, so very bracing, certainly makes
+you jumpy, and many of us have played far better at Pau than at
+Biarritz; in fact, we find that at Pau we can hit the ball as cleanly
+and with as much confidence as anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>That reflection leads us when gazing abstractedly upon those Pyrenees,
+which are so good for thought, to consider the effect of climate upon
+one's game. Undoubtedly the effect is great, and yet it is neither
+appreciated nor properly considered. After working hard for a spell in
+town we say we will go for a weekend's golf, and, when we can, we choose
+a highly bracing place, because we believe it is good for us and "bucks
+us up." But do you remember how often the golf<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> that we play at such
+places is so extremely disappointing? The "bucking up" seems to have
+failed. Take Deal, for example. There is hardly a course in the world
+that I like and admire as much as this; but that strong air of Deal
+upsets the game of nearly every man at the beginning. Pau is supposed to
+be a little relaxing, but, except for the fact that we do not eat so
+much as at Biarritz, we hardly notice it. It soothes us, quietens us
+down, reduces our boiler and engine arrangements to low pressure, and
+<i>voila!</i> our game comes on, and it does so because the question of
+playing well or ill by a man who knows the game is nearly always a
+question of the steadiness of his nerves, and there are fine shades of
+this steadiness that we do not always realise. That is why we play well
+at Pau, and it makes us think sometimes that the relaxing places have
+not had full credit for their golfing quality hitherto.</p>
+
+<p>There is a general conspiracy among all things at Pau to rest and soothe
+the tired man. There are the bells. How can they affect the golf? you
+ask. See, then. We know of the fame in song of "The Bells of Lynn" and
+those of Aberdovey too; but it seems to me that the bells of Pau should
+have an equal celebrity. They are excellent. Alongside the hotel at
+which I stay at Pau a fine church steeple towers up, and there is in it
+a splendid belfry with skilful ringers to use it. Sometimes their
+performances wake us before our proper time in the morning, which is the
+first effect. Then on some days and nights the ringers practise a kind
+of bell music, which holds one spellbound. It begins slowly and quietly
+with a few hesitating notes in the bass. Soon there is an answering echo
+in the treble, and then it all gradually increases in time and volume
+until in three or four minutes a veritable torrent of stormy music is
+crashing out from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> the tower and flinging itself out to the Pyrenees.
+And then it is as if the crisis passes, the bell music dies away again,
+and at the end there is but the thin little tinkle of a treble bell
+sounding lonely in the night. There are other fine belfries in the town;
+but, more than that, there are little churches all along the hill that
+frames our course on its northern side, and these have good bells as
+well, and they all chime the hours and the quarters&mdash;and all at
+different times! When one set of chiming begins just as you reach the
+green, you know that listening for the others will so much distract you
+that three or four putts may be needed, while the other man, being very
+phlegmatic, is down in two for a win again. There is one of these
+churches with its bells which has cost me many holes; its chime for the
+quarters is exactly the first four notes of the good old tune, "Home to
+Our Mountains." It strikes once for the quarter, twice for the half,
+three times for the three-quarters, and four times for the full hour,
+and, with the other two quick notes of the line missing, it always seems
+incomplete, and always irritates. If I am just about to swing when these
+bells begin to chime I see a catastrophe before me.</p>
+
+<p>If there were no Pyrenees there would be no golf at Pau; I doubt if
+there would be Pau. Those glorious hills, beyond which are the castles
+and gold of Spain, make an almost matchless view, and they are so
+strong, so insistent, that they seem to dominate us in every
+consideration. If you should tell me that mountains that are more than
+twenty miles away can have nothing to do with the golfer's life and
+game, I ask you to go to Pau and be surprised. Those far-away hills give
+us rest, and they calm us to those moods of reflection to which, as
+golfers, we are so well inclined. From the window of my favourite room
+at Pau, I look right out on to the majestic chain, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> have the best
+view of it that is to be had. Below is the Boulevard des Pyrénées, more
+than a mile in length. Beyond there is a valley, and beyond that the
+Pyrenees rise up to one long wonderful white-topped line. Looked at in
+this way they seem so very near, and yet their nearest point is more
+than a dozen miles away, and there are peaks four thousand feet in
+height which seem within easy walking range, and yet are distant forty
+miles. From one end to the other we look out upon a length of some
+thirty miles of these peaks, and indeed the effect is most enchanting.
+This is the view that I get at its very best from my little window high
+above the boulevard, and it is the view that brings scores of thousands
+of pounds of English money to be spent in the winter and the spring at
+Pau. It is a view that never palls, for it is never the same. To our
+eyes those great Pyrenees are always changing&mdash;kaleidoscopic in variety
+of shapes and colours. There are mysteries of the light and atmosphere
+about them which make for perpetual curiosity and wonderment. In the
+morning when we rise our first thought is as to what the Pyrenees will
+look like to-day, and gazing out from our little window we see them all
+done up afresh in new colours and shapes by Nature. They change as the
+hours pass, and then one is curious to know what new surprise the sunset
+will have in store. Sometimes in the morning they stand out bold in
+black and white, just as if they were plain and simple Pyrenees. In the
+middle of the chain two great points of peaks rise up from all the rest,
+and they are in the straight line out from the lofty window where I sit.
+They are the Grand Pic and the Petit Pic du Midi d'Ossau, and they are
+the pet favourites of all of us who gaze out southwards to the range
+beyond which the Spaniards dwell. The greater peak curls over a little
+at the top towards the lesser one, that seems<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> always to be snuggling up
+close to it, and they look to us always to be like a lover hill and his
+timid lady. Another morning all these mountains will be of a sapphire
+blue. Next day they may be rosy red. But the best effects are those of a
+phantom kind. Now and then those Pyrenees seem to have gone away to a
+hundred miles beyond, and we see them rather dimly, but still with their
+outlines well defined. They look like ghost mountains, and in
+imagination we can peer through them to a nothingness beyond. Yet more
+curious, there are mornings, fine and bright in Pau, with everything
+shining in the sunlight, when there are no Pyrenees at all! There is
+that little low range of hills in front, with the chalets and the
+chateaux all plainly to be seen, and the light seems as good as ever it
+was in southern France; but the Pyrenees, where have they gone? Not a
+trace of them is left, and we are lonely, disconsolate. It is as if a
+jealous Providence had wrapped them up in the night and carried them off
+to another land where their eternal solitude would not be hindered by
+the touring man and woman. But they come back again by night, and their
+gradual reappearance is a thing for happy contemplation. Yet for the
+greater glory and richness of colour the evening sunset effects are the
+best of all. Then from the corner at the right the setting sun shines
+along the hidden valley between the little hills and mountains beyond,
+and it is as if in that unseen place below, millions of fierce lights
+had been set burning and shining up the Pyrenees as rows of hidden
+electric bulbs are sometimes used to throw a soft, weird glow upon a
+ceiling and cause it to be reflected back again beneath. Then the
+Pyrenees are as an ethereal vision; their base is like a golden band and
+their tops like filmy gossamer, so that these seem to us to be not
+mountains of the world at all, but high hills of heaven itself. And away
+in the west the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> sun sets in a burning Indian red, and the thin crescent
+of a new moon, with an attendant star, rises in the firmament. It is
+this that I look upon from my own crow's nest at Pau when my tramping of
+the day is done.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>One day at Pau a voice was raised in our little party and it said, "Let
+us get up closer to those splendid Pyrenees"; but another said, "Where
+should we get our golf?" It was answered that there was golf everywhere,
+and there must be some right alongside those white-capped peaks.
+Argelès! We remembered. It was advertised and well recommended as a good
+course, "open all the year round," and laid in the most delightful
+situation, the Pyrenees going up from its very edge. The prospect
+sounded well. We decided at night that on the morrow we would proceed
+with our bags of clubs to Argelès, and the porter at our hotel gave full
+directions for getting there, which made it seem a very simple business.
+It appeared that it was about thirty miles from Pau to Lourdes, and with
+the journey two-thirds done we were to change trains there. But, short
+as the distance was, it was to take us two hours. Our train would start
+at twenty minutes to nine in the morning. The match of the day, with
+four golfers implicated, was accordingly made overnight, and
+anticipation of the joys of Argelès became keen. All this was well, but
+when three of us had slept and were mightily refreshed, certain hitches
+and accidents began to happen. The fourth party to our contract still
+slumbered heavily at a quarter-past eight, and being then reminded, by
+sundry taps, of the prevailing circumstances, he muttered indistinctly
+that he was not to be tempted from his situation by the opportunity of
+playing two rounds on any course in Paradise. So<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> we left him snoring,
+piglike, there, and we were only three.</p>
+
+<p>We got to Lourdes and descended from the train. Troubles arose
+forthwith. The station-master blandly observed, and as it seemed with a
+hardly hidden smile (how is it that non-golfers of all classes always do
+seem to be made happy upon the contemplation of a golfer being suddenly
+robbed of his game?), that there was no train from there to Argelès
+until the afternoon, the service which the hotel porter had in mind not
+beginning until three days later. By the same token the return train
+which we reckoned on was non-existent, and he expressed doubts about our
+sleeping that night at Pau if we persisted in what he could not help
+regarding as a very mad enterprise born of too much enthusiasm. We
+thanked him, and went out into the streets of Lourdes to see what could
+be done. Truly, we were only ten miles from Argelès, even if the road
+was through the mountains. And it was a fine day.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, and as it seemed from nowhere, up came carriages from all
+parts of the compass, each drawn by a pair of horses, the coachmen all
+loudly soliciting the favour of driving us to Argelès, which they
+explained was fifteen miles away&mdash;a deliberate exaggeration. The first
+man to whip up to us asked for twenty francs for the single journey, and
+the others were amazed at his impudence. Another offered to take us for
+fifteen, and a third cabby came down at once to twelve. Then they all
+did so, and the market seemed to settle at that price, a great gathering
+of coachmen surrounding us and expatiating on the superior merits of
+their various horses and the comfort of their vehicles. It was a great
+spectacle, this golfers' carriage market at Lourdes! At last the first
+man to make an offer to us, suddenly, in a mood of desperation, came
+down to ten francs, and we closed with him, not so much because of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+saving of an odd franc or two, but because his pair of bays certainly
+did seem to have more fast trotting in them than any of the others. It
+was such a glorious journey down the valley of Argelès as golfers seldom
+make, huge, rocky, snow-capped mountains rising up from either side of
+the winding road. Leaving Lourdes there were two high hills on the left,
+one surmounted with a single cross and the other with three crosses of
+"Calvary" standing out clearly against the sky. Then, later, from the
+bottom of the valley a stumpy hill suddenly rose up in the middle, an
+old keep of mediaeval times on the top of it, and after that the great
+peak of the Viscos, with the pass to Gavernie on one side of it and that
+to Cauterets on the other were presented. Soon afterwards we rattled
+down the little main street of Argelès, and lunched at the chief hotel.
+There was then a ten minutes' drive to the course, and our coachman&mdash;a
+local fellow, and not the one who drove us from Lourdes&mdash;stopped at
+various cottages on the way and shouted out inquiries as to whether
+Adolphe or Marie or Jeanne was at home. He was getting caddies for us,
+as he explained there would be none otherwise. Eventually from different
+places we picked up three&mdash;two little girls and a boy&mdash;who hung on to
+the back of the vehicle and proceeded with us to the appointed place.
+The course has great possibilities, but as yet they are thinly
+developed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GAME IN ITALY, AND THE QUALITY OF THE COURSE AT ROME, WITH A SHORT
+CONSIDERATION OF THE VALUE OF STYLE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The other day, when we sat on the deck of a little steamer plying on the
+lake of Como, contented in warm spring sunshine with a sublime panorama
+of blue water and white-topped Alps, I was led to recall some of the few
+remarks which a shrewd and pungent commentator on life and men, the late
+Henry Labouchere, had made about our game, and, as he was not himself a
+golfer, and not the most tolerant of men despite his certain breadth of
+mind, it may be guessed that they were not complimentary to the game. We
+had left Varenna, and the little ship was paying its dutiful respects to
+Bellagio and Menaggio and such like places of an Italian fairyland.
+Hereabouts, as I remembered, Mr. Labouchere had lived in the proper
+season, and it came about some seven years back that a golf course&mdash;and
+a nice course too&mdash;was established near by, and the local hotel-keeper,
+in proper enterprise, ran a conveyance each day regularly at a certain
+time from his door to the club-house. Radical as he was&mdash;if he really
+was&mdash;Mr. Labouchere disliked this disturbance of the old peace and
+harmony of his lakeland retreat, and affected to see something vulgar in
+it. This wit and cynic, who once, answering an inquiry, said that he
+liked a certain lady of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> acquaintance well enough but would not mind
+if she dropped down dead in front of him on the carpet, certainly wished
+that golf had never grown into the human scheme of things, and he
+complained loudly of its invasion here. He suggested that Italy was now
+passing to the dogs. Had he lived a little longer he would surely have
+played at Menaggio, and we could have assured him then that golf in
+Italy was long before his time, and would certainly be of good help to
+the country for long after. It is one of the curious facts of golfing
+history that the game was played in Italy before any golf club, except
+one, was definitely established in Scotland, the only exception being
+the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, and lo! it was played there by a
+Scot, and a Scot so good as the bonnie Prince Charlie himself. When I
+first went to the Villa Borghese in Rome, I remembered, on approaching
+it through the park, that when Lord Elcho went there in 1738 he found
+the Prince playing in the gardens. Many courses now exist in different
+parts of this beautiful Italy, and the country has begun to take its
+place in the great forward movement in European golf. It has begun
+slowly; but now, as I have seen it, does really advance.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>A little fable is quickly told. A wise father had sent his son, for the
+good of his mind, to Rome, and when the boy returned he asked him what
+he thought of the city that is called eternal. Harold then answered, "I
+think, sir, that the lies at Rome are very good." Do not judge Harold
+harshly upon this answer, as you may be inclined to do. He might have
+come to know less of Rome had he not discovered that the lies on the
+Campagna were so good, and that the legions of mighty Caesar which were
+exercised there had left no enduring<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> marks of their galloping behind
+them. He might not have gained so many good Roman friends to tell him
+helpfully of the wonders of the city. And if golf is a little thing, and
+the contemplation of Rome is so enthralling, yet, be it murmured, the
+golf of Rome is one of the wonders of the golfing world. I have found it
+so. As it was to me, so it will prove a revelation to all golfers who go
+to Rome and have as yet no knowledge of the course that is there. For
+the full-bodied character of the holes, caused by natural land
+formations, and for their variety and interest, I do not hesitate to say
+that there is no course on the continent of Europe which is better, and
+I support this statement with another, that while I can hardly recall
+any hole where a bad shot will go unpunished or a good one without
+reward, yet in the whole round there is not a single artificial bunker.
+Nature has seen to all the tests and difficulties. Of what other course
+can this be said? Golf at Rome was begun in 1898, and ever since then
+there have been some fine golfing men working to what they were sure
+would be a successful end, chief among them being Mr. R. C. R. Young,
+who in the capacity of honorary secretary has been largely responsible
+for the general management of the club. Lately the round has been
+extended from nine holes to eighteen, Mr. Young and Doig, the
+professional, having done the planning of the new holes, and with this
+the golf of Rome enters upon a new era. The club flourishes, the golfing
+community, partly Roman, partly British, and partly American, is
+zealous, and the people there have come to believe that even the most
+serious, studious, and high-minded folk who go to Rome to steep
+themselves in living history of the past need for their refreshment some
+antidote to ruins. "St. Peter's, and the Colosseum, the Forum and the
+baths of Caracalla," said one of them to me, "will bring the foreigners
+to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> Rome, but only golf will keep them there!" Count this for weakness
+in man, and for his utter modernity if you like; but it is the truth.
+Consequently the golf of Rome is entering upon a new forward movement. I
+think that when the public in distant places comes to realise that the
+golf of Rome is half as good as it really is, thousands and thousands
+more will go to Rome than do so now, to play upon the Campagna, and
+during the time to gather to their souls a scent of the glory of the
+ancient mistress of the world. I have a vision of Rome becoming a
+headquarters of continental golf in the near future.</p>
+
+<p>On a morning after some days among the ruins&mdash;such a glorious morning,
+with the Italian sun burning gold amid a heavenly blue&mdash;two noble Romans
+came in their chariot for a barbarian wanderer at his hotel at half-past
+nine. They were not real Romans, but Augustus could have played their
+part of host no better, and a forty-horse-power car moved us towards the
+Campagna more speedily than the best of chariots. Away we went by the
+foot of the Equilinus, down the Via Emanuele Filiberto, through the gate
+of St. John Lateran in the Aurelian wall, and then straight on. In a few
+minutes we were at Acqua Santa and inside the club-house. Of all the
+club-houses in the world, this is surely one of the most curious and
+interesting. It is an old farm-house, skilfully adapted to its purpose,
+and we shall be sorry if in the course of time and a grand extension of
+the golf at Rome it is given up for anything more palatial and
+conventional. Here in an upper room we take the necessary nourishment in
+a simple way, and among other liquid refreshments there is the real
+<i>acqua santa</i> itself, a pleasantly bitter and quite delicious water that
+is drawn from a spring by a farm-house at a corner of the course. In
+days gone by the water was considered, perhaps not without good<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> reason,
+to have splendid curative properties, and popes of Rome came to it and
+blessed it accordingly. I believe that one of them derived some healing
+benefit from it. And now, as we think of popes and cardinals, we recall
+that one of the latter, Cardinal Merry del Val, had some kind of a
+course in his private grounds, and so far he has been the only cardinal
+golfer. Once before he died a scheme was afoot for a visit by him to the
+course at Acqua Santa. In a good and sensible and honest way the golf
+club of Rome is already a considerable social centre. Perhaps some day
+the King of Italy&mdash;already patron of the club&mdash;will join himself to the
+majority of kings and become a golfer too. A leading member of the
+famous historical family of Colonna, Don Prospero Colonna, is president,
+and a number of the most eminent people of Rome are among the members.
+Princes and princesses, counts and countesses, ambassadors of nearly all
+countries, and American millionaires may be found playing the game
+regularly at Acqua Santa. The keenest golfer of them all is Dr. Wayman
+Cushman, who is handicapped at plus 4, an American who spends half his
+year in Maine and the other half in Rome, where he plays golf nearly
+every day. The Americans are strong in the golf of Rome, and some of the
+young Italians are showing excellent form. There is one of them, Don
+Francesca Ruspoli, educated in England and son of a Roman father and
+American mother, of whom great golfing things are expected.</p>
+
+<p>Really this is an excellent course; but the full merit of it will hardly
+be appreciated in the first round or the second, for the wonderful views
+and the special points of interest in them will constantly interfere
+with concentration on the strokes and thought upon the scheme for
+reaching the putting green. Standing upon the first teeing ground and
+pondering for a moment upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> the carry to be made across the little
+valley in front, the panorama begins at once to suggest its superior
+claims. Leftwards are the Apennines, opalescent in the morning mist,
+capped with snow upon their peaks. There are the Alban Hills, where the
+shepherds were born who followed Romulus on the Palatine, and at the end
+of the range is Monte Cavo, on the top of which are the ruins of the
+temple of the god of the Latin races, living in the Latium, the ground
+between the mountains and the sea. On the wine-yielding bosom of these
+shining hills there lies sparkling white in the morning sun the village
+of Frascati. There are the Sabine Hills with Tivoli, and away in another
+direction there is Mount Soracte, well said to look out there like a
+wave in a stormy sea. Up into our middle distance on the left-hand side,
+on the fringe of the course, are the splendid ruins of the Claudian
+aqueduct which stretch right across the Campagna, one lonely pile coming
+close up to our sixteenth green alongside which the Via Appia Nuova
+stretches, with two famous umbrella pines helping on the scene.</p>
+
+<p>There is so much for a beginning, and more views press upon us as we
+advance along the course. The play is opened with a good hole of drive
+and iron length, the second brings us back again with a drive and a
+pitch, and then away we go to the left with one of the cunningest
+seconds to be played across twin streams, making this third hole of Rome
+one of the most exacting in the way of approach that is to be found in
+Italy or even in the whole of Europe. When we come to the sixth we play
+up to the summit of a high tableland, and as we ascend the hill we pluck
+from the turf some of the freshest, prettiest crocuses that have ever
+grown, the course being as nearly thick with them in March as North
+Berwick is with daisies in the month of May. And from these heights what
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> view again over towards the city of Rome! Out along that way there is
+the tomb of Cecilia Metella, Crassus' wife, and away on the boundary
+there is the church of St. John Lateran and the great dome of St.
+Peter's. If golf is a royal and ancient game, here is a setting for it.
+Near to the eighth hole we turned aside to the ruins of an ancient Roman
+villa, and Santino, my little Italian caddie, with finger excavation,
+gathered some morsels of polished marble which may have touched the feet
+of Roman ladies in those great days of old. The line of the tenth comes
+close to one of those deep-cut streams that flow to feed the hungry
+Tiber, and in some ways this hole reminds us of the fourth at Prestwick
+where the Pow Burn insinuates itself close to the golfer's way. At our
+backs when we stand on the eleventh tee is a cave that might serve for
+robbers but which really makes an excellent shelter, and it was related
+that a few weeks before my time in Rome three ambassadors, being the
+British, the American, and the Austrian, were seen to sit in there and
+shelter. And who then shall say that, if "only a game," golf has no
+possibilities and powers in such high crafts as diplomacy? The twelfth
+is an excellent hole, and so are they all. The sixteenth takes us
+winding round a big bend between a hill and a stream and then faces us
+full to the putting green, which has the Claudian ruins for a
+background. The play concludes with a seventeenth which has a putting
+green very shrewdly placed, and an eighteenth where the second shot is
+played through a little valley, these ending holes abounding in golfing
+beauty and character.</p>
+
+<p>There is to be said of this course, and in the most sober and
+well-considered judgment by one who has seen golf in many lands, that
+there is scarcely an inland course anywhere that seems more naturally
+adapted to the game. Each hole has strong character of its own;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> I could
+remember them all after but a single round. Some time soon they will
+make an attempt at Acqua Santa to carry their putting greens on from one
+season to the next, and then they will get a thickness and trueness and
+quality that greens can gain in no other way. The golfers of Rome are
+keen, and they have energy and enterprise. A great future awaits this
+club and course, and I believe that when more money is spent on it, as
+will be soon, it will be in nearly every thinkable way the most
+attractive course on the Continent. The mood that gathers about one when
+in Rome tends to taking the game rather more seriously and thoughtfully
+than at the Mediterranean resorts; it becomes a real recreation, the
+refreshing change. The club's nearness and convenience to the city are
+very good. It is but a few minutes' journey by either train or tram from
+the heart of Rome to the club-house, near which there is a special
+golfers' railway station.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>A Franciscan friar was the first to point out to me the situation of the
+nine holes of Florence&mdash;nine plain fair holes, though they have nothing
+of architectural beauty in them, not a trace of feeling, nothing of the
+mediaeval glow of spirit that separates this city from all others in the
+world, hardly a touch of imagination in their two or three thousand
+yards. Yet they serve their modern purpose well. For six days and six
+nights the rain had poured down upon the dripping Firenze from
+inexhaustible clouds; the saucer in which the city is laid emptied its
+floods into the Arno until, dirtier and more turbulent than usual, the
+big stream tumbled itself violently through the bridges. We wandered
+through the Uffizi Galleries and the Pitti Palace and the Bargello of
+courtyard fame. There is nothing in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> the world like sweet Florence, and
+it is a hopeless soul that feels no spark of artistic fire crackle for
+at least one inspiring moment when the glories of this city that was
+born and lived to the human expression of beauty are contemplated. But
+an incessant rain provokes a bold defiance; there almost seemed to be a
+weakness in such constant shelter, and I remembered a suggestion that
+was sent to me from a far distance&mdash;"Go up to Fiesole if you can." So in
+the car I went to Fiesole. We went out of the town and by San Gervasio,
+and wound past San Domenico, and twisted our way up the hill until, with
+five miles done, or it may have been a little more, the old Etruscan
+town, with the fragment of an ancient wall, was reached. At the very
+summit, where once a Roman castle stood, there is the Franciscan
+monastery. A brother in his umbrian gown looked meditatively outwards
+from the porch, and he was gracious and friendly when I told him I would
+like to go inside. From a loggia within we looked out upon one of the
+finest panoramic views of its kind. The rain had ceased. Grass was seen
+upon the Etruscan hills, tentacles of the Apennines came clear again
+through dissolving mists, and a golden light flamed up in the western
+sky. And in its peaceful hollow there lay Florence, the palace of art, a
+mediaeval jewel glistening there like a mosaic in white and terra cotta,
+with its great duomo in many-coloured marbles lording it over the
+lowlier piles. Florence! Sweeping the valley with a glance, the monk
+turned towards the north-east and, leaning upon a wall, he pointed with
+his right hand and said, "Pisa!" Over there was the city of the leaning
+tower and the baptistery with the amazing echo. But in the nearer
+distance there was a square patch of vivid green, and I traced its
+situation along there by the course of the Arno, by the Cascine, and
+other landmarks, and made nearly sure of what it was. The thought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> was
+incongruous at the time, nearly inexcusable, but yet there is little in
+golf that is vulgar after all, and it could not be denied that there was
+the golf course out that way. By some careful questions I gained
+confirmation from the friar. I told him I looked for a place, a special
+place, whose locality I described precisely. And he held out his hand
+again. The golf course was nearly in the line of Pisa.</p>
+
+<p>While so many things in Florence are four or five hundred years old at
+least, the golf course is only fifteen. Still, fifteen years makes a
+good maturity in these times, and Italy, if its courses are few, has
+some distinctions among them. Many continental courses depend for their
+attraction on their setting. Those of Florence and Rome have the most
+perfect setting conceivable, but while the course of Rome could live on
+its merits had there been no Rome, the course of Florence never could.
+Yet the city helps it out, and, though poor be the holes, here we have
+indeed one of the most enthusiastic little golf communities one might
+ever wish to mix among. The club is captained by Mr. J. W. Spalding,
+head of the great athletic business firm, who has ceased to live in
+America and lives now wholly in Florence, which he would hardly do were
+it not for this golf course, on which he plays nearly every day. Mr.
+Spalding is a fine example of the keen and determined golfer. A few
+years ago, in a terrible motor-car smash in Italy, he lost completely
+the sight of one eye. As soon as the surgeons and the doctors let him
+loose again he hurried to his favourite course at Florence and&mdash;think of
+it!&mdash;at once he won the scratch gold medal. He is a scratch man now, and
+plays as well as ever.</p>
+
+<p>These and many other things I learned on the day after the monk had
+pointed out to me the direction of the nine holes of Florence, when I
+went along to San Donato to make a closer view of them, to drive and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>
+putt at them. The golfers of Florence are a good company, managed with
+zeal by Signor Mavrogordato, in the capacity of honorary secretary. They
+are as keen and interested in their game as if they were at Sandwich,
+and they have a miniature club-house situated on a spot of land that has
+a cemented water-filled moat all round it, those who would enter having
+to pass over a little rustic bridge. The holes are plain with artificial
+cross bunkers, and the architecture is of what might be called the low
+Victorian school. One of the features of the course is a couple of tall
+trees that stand up in the middle with thin straight trunks parallel to
+each other, looking for all the world like Rugby football goal-posts.
+One great advantage that this course has is that it is splendidly
+convenient to the city. Take a tram-car No. 17 labelled "Cascine" from
+one particular corner of the cathedral square, say "Golf" to the
+conductor, pay him a penny for the fare, and the rest is inevitable. In
+a quarter of an hour you will be deposited at a junction in the roads by
+the barrier of Ponte alle Mosse, and two minutes' walk from there takes
+you to the iron gates which give admission to the course.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>There is the beautiful bay at Naples, and Pompeii, and a short voyage on
+the steamboat to the sweet isle of Capri; but golf has not yet come to
+Naples, though it will do so soon. When we travelled down there from
+Rome we were aboard a train that was taken by many of the Naples members
+of the Italian Parliament who were going home for the week-end&mdash;the
+"deputies' train" they often call that six o'clock from Rome. They had
+been having a fearful week of it, wrangling about their recent Libyan
+war and the cost of it, and their nerves were in rather a jagged state.
+I fell into conversation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> with one of them, and he said that he wished
+he were a golfer, as from all that he had heard and understood it was
+the real and only thing for the soothing of a deputy after such
+scrimmaging and scratching as they had been having in the Chamber that
+weary week. He asked questions about our Parliamentary golfers, and was
+informed about Mr. Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and all the
+others. I told this honourable member for Naples that nearly all our
+Parliamentarians played the greatest game of all, and that the Mother of
+Parliaments was all the better for it. He was impressed. He said there
+should be golf at Naples by the time I went there again&mdash;even if it was
+set there for the benefit of the tired members only!</p>
+
+<p>Above all things, Venice is a place for reflection, and when we are
+there we think of all things we have seen and done in Italy, and shape
+exactly the impressions that have been made. One time there were two or
+three of us in a gondola. The crescent of a seven days' moon hung among
+the stars in the Venetian night. The gentle regular plash that was made
+by Giovanni Cerchieri, our gondolier (and be it said that his gondola is
+the blackest and smartest and most finely dignified of all that glide on
+the Grand Canal), as he swung backwards and forwards to his work behind
+us, with a sigh or a murmur that might have swollen to a real boat-song
+had we encouraged it, was nearly the only sound on the still waters. And
+in this Venetian night, an hour after the coffee, we were in the mood of
+men who feel that they are soon to return to the cold hard facts of
+life. The rest of Venice might go to glory; we, soothed amid such ease
+and comfort as might have satisfied a doge, turned our thoughts to the
+links of home. There was nothing incongruous in the association of ideas
+and facts. Venice we found to be splendid for meditation, and any place
+with such a quality, like the top of a mountain,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> or the side of a
+purling stream, is a fine one for golfing consideration and conjecture.
+One man would talk of art, of pictures, and of sculpture; another would
+stupidly keep to golf. And then a compromise was suggested, when it was
+said that a question had once been asked as to whether there was such a
+thing as style in golf!</p>
+
+<p>Any thoughtful player who ever had any doubt upon this matter&mdash;but, of
+course, no thoughtful player ever could&mdash;would have it dispelled if he
+went to Italy even though he never played a game, did not take his
+clubs, and never saw a golf course there. It were indeed better for his
+education in this matter that he should not play when on Italian ground,
+for one would not expect to find on the courses there the best examples
+of golfing style. The fact of style in golf would come home to him when
+he wandered through the galleries and looked upon all the magnificent
+sculptures that are among the matchless treasures of the country, though
+there is no study of a golfing swing among them. I do not see how any
+player of the game who is thoughtful and contemplative can go to Italy
+and fail to be enormously impressed with the lessons that are silently
+delivered from the sculpture in the galleries and museums of Rome,
+Florence, and other cities. In hundreds of pieces here we see the
+suggestion of beauty put forward in every movement and exercise of the
+human body, and particularly when the frame is being brought to some
+considerable physical effort, when the limbs are being placed upon the
+strain, are grace and rhythm and style exhibited to us, and with them
+there is the suggestion always of the extreme of power. There is
+indicated the close relationship between exact and graceful poise,
+perfect balance, and supreme controlled and concentrated force. The very
+utmost efficiency is always suggested in all this artistic balance. As
+the art is better and more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> appealing, so the suggestion of power is
+increased and the marble almost seems to break with life.</p>
+
+<p>Considered in this way, what a fine thing is the "David" of Bernini in
+the Borghese Gallery! But for our golfing suggestion some of the
+discobolus models serve us better. Without ever having attempted to
+throw a discus, one may very well understand that success at such an
+exercise depends almost wholly upon perfect balance and accurate
+concentration of force and true rhythmical movement, and in the models
+in the Vatican and the National Museums in Rome and elsewhere we see how
+it might be done. The discobolus of Myron, reconstructed as it has been,
+and with the head made to face in the wrong direction, so they say, is a
+magnificent thing. In the National Gallery of Rome they have made a
+reconstruction from a fragment of another, and they have made the figure
+to look sideways and half upwards to the discus held at arm's length
+behind him ready for the throw, whereas in the Myron the face is to the
+front and the eyes are down. (Though one may know nothing at all about
+the ways in which the discs were really thrown, or what is the best way
+to throw them, one is hardly convinced of the desirability of disturbing
+the head in the back-swing of the arm and letting the eyes follow the
+object in the hand. Surely concentration would be impeded and balance
+suffer.) But in these images we see the intensity of the relation
+between style and power, and we realise that if there were no style in
+golf there ought to be, and the next moment, that of all modern games
+golf is a game of style and nothing else. Perhaps you may play it
+without style, but then it is not the same thing, and it can never be so
+thoroughly effective and precise. Unconsciously, perhaps, James Braid
+had style in his mind when he said that at the top of the swing the
+golfer should feel like a spring coiled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> up to its fullest tension,
+straining for the release. That is just what the discobolus suggests,
+and the golfer gets the fullest enjoyment from the game, the supreme
+physical thrills, when he feels this high tension for a moment and then
+its even, smooth, and quick escape, and he cannot feel it so when he has
+no style and all his movements and positions have not been made in
+perfect harmony. Some may say that the actions of the discobolus were
+probably not so very fine as the sculptors have made them out to be, and
+that much of the shape is merely artist's fancy, but probably they are
+fairly true to life. If they are not, one cannot contemplate them for
+more than a few moments without feeling that life ought to be true to
+them. The golfer in the suggestion of grace and power, as in the models
+that have been cut of Harry Vardon at the top and end of his driving
+swing, reaches some way towards the discobolus.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN
+MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>"When we were in Madrid&mdash;&mdash;" I have sometimes begun in conversation, and
+then invariably from one or more in the company there has been a quick
+interruption with&mdash;"But there can be no golf in Madrid! You do not go to
+Spain for golf!" But one who knows may answer that there is as good
+reason to go there for it as to most other places out of Britain, that
+in different parts of Spain there is fair golf to be had, that in Madrid
+there is a new course which is excellent and embraces some of the
+prettiest holes we would ever wish to play after passing by the
+Pyrenees, and that I have found there Spanish gentlemen to play with who
+have been among the happiest and most agreeable companions and opponents
+I have encountered. In a reflection upon my own experiences I dare to
+say that I would recommend a doubtful stranger to go to Spain only if he
+is a golfer, for by the agency of the game will the life and facts of
+the country be best presented to him, and mysteries be explained. The
+magic passport of golf is indispensable in all such circumstances. The
+truth is that it was golf that led me to Spain on my second visit to the
+country, and I had then one of the most interesting and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> instructive
+holidays I have had in my travelling life, during which I had the
+opportunity of seeing something of the inside of Spanish life and
+government, of discovering truth about the forces that work in the
+regeneration of this old country, for really an awakening is taking
+place, and one dares to say the firm establishment of golf is a symbol
+of it. I had some interesting conversations with the Count Romanones,
+who was then the Prime Minister, with his brother, who is the Duke of
+Tovar, a man of broad sympathies who takes a leading part in many social
+movements of high importance in Madrid, and with other persons of much
+importance. These talks, with the open sight of all that was passing in
+Madrid, made a deep impression.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a golfer, and we of Spain may give you some good golf to play!"
+said the Prime Minister cordially when by invitation I called upon him
+at his palace in the Paseo de la Castellana. He is a man of forcible
+appearance and manner. The face is thin, and its lines of character are
+strong&mdash;cold and strong. The aquiline features have something of
+Spanish&mdash;no Italian&mdash;fierceness about them, and the Count makes a
+piercing look which is considered discomforting to nervous strangers.
+But he is a very attractive companion in talk; his verve, his vivacity
+are wonderful. When discussing a subject in which he is interested his
+whole being becomes aflame; eyes sparkle and features quiver; he beats
+his fingers in the palms of his hands; he leans over towards you and
+gesticulates like an artist in enthusiasm. A man of hot nervous energy,
+one of keen purpose and determination is this statesman of Spain. He
+suggested that the new sports of his country were symbolic of her great
+awakening, of which he said he would talk to me that I might tell others
+what Spain is now and what she would be. "Europe does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> understand my
+country," he remarked, "True, there has been little occasion to
+understand her. But a change occurs. Spain at this moment is passing
+through a most remarkable process of transition. You are right in a
+suggestion you have made to me; unsuccessful wars do not cause
+interminable loss and disasters. The war with the United States was not
+all bad for Spain. We may have lost Cuba, but the development that has
+taken place since then in our country at home, in its agriculture and
+its mining, and again in its healthy natural feeling, has been enormous,
+and is a good substitute for many islands." And then he went on in a
+deeply interesting conversation to tell me of the great awakening of
+Spain indicated in many different ways, and of all her political,
+social, and other ambitions.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of Tovar, who is also coming to take an interest in the golf of
+Spain, smoked his cigar on a divan in his palace, and a Moorish boy
+brought coffee to us. The Duke travels much, and brings things and
+people back with him. I see that he has been an ambassador-extraordinary
+to the Pope of Rome and has received the most gracious papal thanks. A
+little of a statesman, he is much of an artist, and a marble bust of
+Alfonso <i>rex</i>, his own sculpture, casts a shadow beside us. In
+innumerable ways this Spanish nobleman associates himself with the life
+of the people, goes among them, attends their meetings, and he began
+telling me that one of the secrets of the new Spain was the important
+fact of the nobles taking to business, becoming the promoters and
+managers of industrial companies, as they were. He told me of dukes who
+were doing things. One of the new movements, in which he has assisted to
+his utmost and thoroughly believes in, is the boy scout movement, which
+has caught on like wildfire in Madrid. Three thousand Spanish boys were
+enrolled within a few weeks of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> establishment of the system in the
+city, and the Duke became a president of a section. All class
+distinctions are avoided in this matter. "My son is going with the son
+of the porter," said the Duke of Tovar. And he most certainly believed
+in golf for the people, and would tell me stories of its beginning and
+its development.</p>
+
+<p>As to Madrid, never was such a quick transformation accomplished in any
+city of the world, save when 'Frisco perished and was made again, as is
+being done here in the city on the plateau of Castile. The Spaniards
+having decided on the regeneration of their country and on persuading
+foreigners to come to it, have determined they must have a capital
+befitting a first-class power. The result is that Madrid is being torn
+to pieces and rebuilt. Everywhere there is a fever of building raging.
+Think of it: but three years ago and there was not a single first-class
+hotel in Madrid; now there are two fine ones. The Alcala, where the
+Madrileños stroll and mount up the hill to the Puerta del Sol, the great
+bare square where the idlers lounge, where the bull-fighting papers are
+sold, where there are many offices for the sale of lottery tickets,
+where there are cafés and yellow tramcars (run by Belgian companies, if
+you please!) and much life but no gaiety until very late at night, is
+soon to be deposed from being chief street of Madrid, for they are
+making a new ideal street, very wide and one mile long, which is cut
+straight through the heart of the city and is to be called the Gran Via
+when it is done. Millions and millions of pesetas' worth of property
+have been demolished to allow for the straightness of this street, which
+is to ask for comparison with a part of the Fifth Avenue across the
+water. Thirty-seven millions of pesetas were lately voted by the
+Municipal Council for the removal of the cobble stones of Madrid, their
+places to be taken by asphalte and wood. The cobbles of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> Madrid are
+picturesque; they make good harmony with those antique watchmen who seem
+to have been reincarnated from our own eighteenth-century London,
+walking the slumberous streets at night, lanterns in their hands and
+jangling bunches of giant keys suspended from their girdles, their
+business being to open the outside doors of blocks of flats for
+late-returning occupiers who in an unthinking languorous way of Spain
+would carry no keys, but leave the affair of their homecoming to the
+fortune of the night, the vigilance of the watchman, and the blessing of
+Providence. But the cobbles are not convenient. They are seldom
+repaired, and even in such a spacious public place as the Prado, which
+is a kind of Hyde Park Corner, there are sometimes deep holes which fill
+with water when it rains and make such pools as ducks might like and
+dogs would drink, but which take a leg of mine some way upwards to the
+knee when the night is dark. There was an old Madrid of which trills of
+love and passion have been sung. Fevered lovers sang to ladies whose
+lips were red, and whose skin was dark, as their hearts were
+gay&mdash;voluptuous women. Guitars and flowers; blood and life. That Madrid
+has nearly passed away. A few steep and narrow streets and some dirty
+open spaces, with little of the delicate charm of age to recommend them,
+are most of what is left of it in a quarter near to the royal palace.
+The city of later times, the Madrid of to-day, is already and quickly
+giving way to a third Madrid which will soon be made.</p>
+
+<p>In this that I have written I may seem to neglect my theme, and yet the
+state of Spain does most closely concern the strange case of golf in the
+country. Here is an answer to interrupters who are quick to say that one
+does not go to Madrid for golf. When Spain was all romance and colour,
+all dirt and laziness,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> it was no place for games like this. Bicycles
+were not popular then because they had to be pedalled ceaselessly, or
+the riders would fall: they, being as symbols of action, did not permit
+of lounging or a little slumber. In the days of the first and second
+Madrids, athletics could not be contemplated; the corrida was supreme
+and solitary for Spanish "sport." Now there is an athletic movement.
+There are many football clubs; there is a national cup competition and
+the King has given the cup. Still the corrida flourishes, but it is
+threatened. In the new movement for the third Madrid there are social
+clubs such as we have in London. There is an inclination for strong,
+healthy sport, and the King encourages it with all his royal might and
+influence. Don Alfonso has been the good leader of the royal game in
+Spain. The main point is that golf in these days is a token of a
+healthier disposition and a new progress, and it is a strong influence
+upon character. In the old Spain such a sport as this was quite
+impossible; now it grows, and, to me as one who has considered the birth
+and rise of golf in many countries, the case of Spain is deeply
+interesting. When I went there I remembered what some of the thoughtful
+and candid Americans had said about this game exerting a needed and
+subtle influence upon their own national character. It is such
+influences that are needed in Spain, and I shall go again among the
+Madrileños to see this one in the working. Already they have courses,
+nice and tolerable, in Barcelona, Bilbao, and many other provincial
+places. When I went to San Sebastian, one of the most beautiful and
+fully equipped seaside resorts in the whole world, the municipal
+authorities assured me that they felt a fear that the bull-fights were
+becoming a doubtful attraction to foreign visitors, and they were giving
+their attention to the establishment of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> municipal golf course. It
+will be the first municipal golf course on the continent of Europe.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Let me plunge to my revelation and state that Madrid, in New Castile,
+land of the toreador, country where so much of the Middle Ages does yet
+survive, where games till lately have been almost unknown, this Madrid
+comes now to be possessed of such a first-class course as might be the
+envy of many a British seaside resort. While I lingered in the city
+Señor Fabricio de Potestad, one of the most active members of the
+general committee of the Madrid Golf Club, and of its green committee
+too, was a kind counsellor and guide. Just as might happen at home,
+while at breakfast at the Ritz there came to me notice that the car was
+waiting. Señor de Potestad, his clubs and mine inside the car, had the
+golfer's expectancy upon a genial Spanish countenance, rubbed hands, and
+declared it was a fine day for the game. We sped away from the Prado,
+and considered handicaps and odds as golfers must. But first we went for
+object lessons in the progress of Spanish golf. Three or four miles out
+we reached the hippodrome where some nine years back the game was born.
+Don Alfonso had been learning golf in England; he had striven with it in
+a left-handed way while he wooed a British princess in the Isle of
+Wight, and he gave a Spanish decoration then to the professional who
+showed him how to hold his hands and where to put his feet. Then nine
+simple stupid little holes were laid out in this hippodrome, and there
+they still remain as relics of the earliest age in the golf history of
+this country, the uncultured time when the ball was missed, the days
+when a hole in nine might have been considered good and a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> seven enough
+to make the soul of a great grandee quiver with a new found joy. Three
+Spaniards stood forward with the King as the pioneers of Spanish golf,
+and still they are among its leaders. There was a great sportsman, the
+Duke of Alva, president of the club; there was the Marquis de Santa
+Cruz, and there was the Señor Pedro Caro, perhaps the only Spanish
+golfer of early times besides Don Alfonso himself who learned his
+strokes and swings in England, where he was schooled, and who with the
+Count de la Cimera and the Count Cuevas de Vera, cousin of my guide, is
+one of the three best players of Spain. Two of them are Spanish scratch,
+and the Count de la Cimera lately achieved the distinction of being the
+first of his land to rise to the eminence of plus one. Thus you may
+perceive that the golf of Spain is helped by the best people, and that
+is not because it is fashionable, and it is not only because the King
+has shown a liking for it, but because the Spaniards have found in it a
+quick fascination, an awakening pastime, such a strong diversion from
+the often heavy life of their country as they had not imagined. Had you
+seen, as I did, the Duke of Aliaga bunkered one afternoon before a high
+steep cliff in front of the eighteenth green on the second oldest course
+of Madrid; had you seen him pensive as he felt the extraneous sorrows of
+a Spanish nobleman of riches and high station; had you seen the gleam of
+gladness in two Spanish eyes when the ball was heaved somehow to the top
+in one (the gods may know how he managed it; but we said to him that it
+was a splendid shot, and I do believe it was!) you would not doubt that
+golf was meant for Spain as these people declare it was&mdash;"the thing of
+all others that we needed," so they say.</p>
+
+<p>This second oldest course, the "old course" as they begin to call it
+now, marks the transition period of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> Spanish golf. It is not the
+primeval course of the hippodrome, but one which was made in 1907 at a
+place apart and a little farther along the road. The land is worth a
+million and three-quarters of pesetas now when Madrid has become so much
+bigger than it was, and the course falls within the city zone; and as
+the players became educated they yearned for something better, and they
+moved again. But fond memories will cling for long enough to this old
+course of Spain; with a little help from fancy one may look upon it even
+now as a kind of old Blackheath of Spanish golf. There is a small
+club-house with dining-room, dressing-rooms and all complete, in quite
+the English way, on a spot of rising ground, and from the verandah we
+may look over a part of the course, with a short hole to begin with and
+some curious bunkering here and there, with a highly modern attempt to
+adopt the system of humps-and-hollows bunkering that has been so well
+established on inland courses at home. Somehow one gathers the
+impression that the Spaniards have been striving all the time towards
+some kind of indistinct ideal, realising that the sport they had
+discovered was a great one and trying to improve their practice of it.
+And I recall that it was J. H. Taylor, the old designer, the old
+constructor, the quintuple champion, who was pioneer in the planning of
+courses in Madrid, and he laid out this one of eighteen holes very well
+for the early Spanish golfers.</p>
+
+<p>One of the curiosities of the course is the putting green at the
+eleventh hole, which is quite round and is surrounded by an evenly
+shaped earthen rampart. On seeing it for the first time the average
+Englishman observes to the Spaniard who is with him, "How like a
+bull-ring!" The remark is justifiable and it seems appropriate; but the
+Spanish gentleman has heard it many times. Playing the bull-ring hole is
+a satisfying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> experience, most exceedingly contenting. We play what we
+shall consider a perfect approach shot to our Plaza de Toros hole. The
+ball is pitched into the ring just over the near side of the barricade.
+A big bound and it is by the hole side, a smaller skip and it is away to
+the other side of the circle, and then there is one nervous little jump
+up towards that enclosing height. The perplexed ball seems in our fancy
+to claw up the steep slope, which is about four or five feet high; it
+nearly reaches the top. We, the player, feel a little pitter-patter in
+the heart. Is that little white bull of a ball of ours going to get over
+the fence and spoil the thing? It should not; we pitched him as nicely
+as human skill could ever pitch. He is vicious; but he is spent. The gay
+life which he had at the beginning of the stroke is flickering out. He
+cannot escape. Our cuadrilla of one, the little Spanish lad with the bag
+of clubs, advances and hands the putter, taking back the mashie which
+has done its business. The ball comes trickling back from the bank&mdash;back
+and back, and it comes on to within some seven or eight feet of the side
+of the hole. Then it falters and stops, done for. Meanwhile there is
+another white bull of a ball only four feet away; this also had come
+back from the bank, but a little more. I, as an espada, take my steel
+putter for the finishing touch. I see the line, I have the momentary
+hesitation, the nerves are tightened, and then I make the stroke, and
+happily it is a good one. The ball has gone down. In truth both balls go
+down, and "Four, señor!" and "Four&mdash;a half, <i>amigo</i>!" and the play to
+the eleventh hole of old Madrid is done. Even if there is a slope to the
+hole and there is the bull-ring rampart round it, we say that a four at
+this piece of golf is good. We also argue out that bull-ring with our
+consciences. I have seen nothing like it. It was clearly the object of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+those who made it to pen the ball up towards the hole, to make the golf
+a little easier, for it was found to be hard enough (as you and I have
+found it hard enough at home) to catch the ball and keep it and lead it
+to its hole. This hole, the rampart, seems to be a concession to the
+frail humanity of man. Conscience murmurs chidingly, "You know, you
+English golfer, that you should never have been so near to that Spanish
+pin! You should have been bunkered, my friend, perhaps badly bunkered,
+beyond the green!" But being in Spain, and doing as Spaniards do, we are
+a little independent, have a freedom of idea, and with some peevishness
+of manner, an arrogance, a way as of telling conscience to attend its
+other business and get back to London&mdash;where in some places they do
+place bunkers and hills upon the greens to keep the golfer, as it seems,
+from holing out at all&mdash;I retort, "I played a good shot anyhow; I only
+just pitched over the bull-ring fence; I pitched the ball up high and
+let it drop straight down, and cut every leg from it that it ever had.
+No man could do better with the ground so hard. It was right that the
+ball should come back."</p>
+
+<p>I shall hope that with their attachment to a new love that is so
+beautiful and good, the Spaniards will not give up their old course here
+that has served them faithfully and brought on their game. Besides, it
+is a course that is pretty in its situation. Away beyond, many miles
+away, are those snow-topped Guadarrama Mountains, fine rough things.
+Though it was March, and untruths are told about the wickedness of the
+Spanish climate, we lunched with Señora Elena de Potestad in the open
+outside the club-house in warm sunshine glistening on a pretty scene.
+Señora Elena is quite the best lady golfer of Spain; but writing the
+truth as she told it, the charming wife of my friend is not Spanish, but
+is a Russian lady from Khieff. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> suspect her of being the best Russian
+lady golfer and the best Spanish too; it is curious. She has done the
+first nine holes here at Madrid in something less than bogey. Next to
+her on the championship list is the Marquesa de Alamoncid de los Oteros,
+six strokes behind. Queen Victoria sometimes plays, and I have seen that
+extremely popular lady of Spain, the Infanta Isabella, golfing here with
+the professional and a maid of honour. The game is doing well with the
+ladies of the peninsula; they like it. I had a gentle argument with the
+Señora Elena, who seemed a little doubtful whether golf were quite a
+ladies' game, for all her own skill and love for it. She pleaded the
+other feminine occupations and interests, even the distractions, and the
+difficulty of surrendering to the tyranny of golf. In her view it seemed
+to be of the ladies' life a thing apart, while we have known it to be a
+man's complete existence.</p>
+
+<p>As our speedy car skimmed the road on the way back to Madrid that night,
+Señor Fabricio would talk of the good influence of the game, and the
+special benefits that it might and did confer upon his hopeful
+countrymen. "Twelve years ago," he reflected, "I might meet all my
+friends at the corrida. All were for the bull fight&mdash;and the ladies too.
+But now&mdash;if I went myself, as I do not&mdash;I should see none. They are all
+for golf. At my club in Madrid we say one to another about the time of
+lunch, 'Do you go to golf this afternoon?' It used to be, 'I suppose you
+go to the corrida, eh?'" One thinks and wonders.</p>
+
+<p>I took tea in the lounge at the Ritz, and gossiped with a man who had
+just come along from Portugal and told me of some exciting times they
+had been having there. They had decided on having more golf, and were
+about to make a municipal matter of it near Lisbon. Hitherto, as I knew,
+they had had only one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> golf course in the whole country, and that was at
+a place called Espinho, some eleven miles out from Oporto, and it was
+said that bulls intended for the fights were fed up there and did their
+roaming exercise on this course. It is not a comfortable idea. The new
+course is out at Belem on the banks of the Tagus near to Lisbon, and
+this is the exact place at which Vasco de Gama landed on returning from
+his greatest voyage of discovery. It is an eighteen-holes course; it has
+been well planned; and much money is being spent on it. The Portuguese
+having started a new form of government and begun a new national
+life&mdash;as they hope&mdash;have come quickly to the conclusion that they need
+golf and much of it, for already a second course for Lisbon is being
+arranged, and there are to be others in different parts of the country.
+If King Manoel goes back, he will be prepared for them, for he has
+cultivated a fair game at Richmond.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>In the evening we went to stroll among the cafés of Madrid, and
+presently peered into the old parts of the city, where life is simple
+and strong, where the humbler Madrileños resort, and there are dancing
+entertainments of a strange kind. On a little stage there is some
+jingling music worked out from a bad piano, and a troupe of girls with
+some gypsies among them will make a dance that, for all its art and all
+its naïveté, is somewhat coarse. Other girls will sit round them in a
+semicircle and keep up a kind of barbarous wail, occasionally bursting
+into a mock shout of approval. A song will follow, and a chorus with it,
+and by and by the entertainers will descend and drink wine with the
+people in the café, and all this will continue until the night is very
+late. But out in the Puerta del Sol the lights are bright and there is
+more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> gaiety than there has ever been. So we wandering golfers, reckless
+of the game of the day that follows (after all we are to give a bagful
+of strokes to these Spaniards and can beat them yet&mdash;but not always, one
+remembers), turn in to one of the music halls which have three shows a
+night, the third beginning at midnight, and we see La Argentinita dance,
+see the rumba done. Then down the Alcala and over the Prado home. We
+shall insist that this is a part of our golf in old Madrid; it is not
+the conventional golfing holiday, as I try to show. Another day we will
+run out for many miles to El Escorial (thanking the Duke of Tovar for
+the offer of his car) and ruminate in this most sombre architectural
+creation of the great Philip&mdash;palace, monastery and tomb in one&mdash;and
+another day out to Toledo, a grand dead city of a long past of many
+phases and eras, a mummified city it seems to be, with halls and places
+that look sometimes as if they had but just been left by the rich grand
+caballeros of the time when Spain was great. You can nearly see their
+ghosts, gay in satins and crimson silks, leaning over flowered
+balconies, singing, kissing, laughing, and always living.</p>
+
+<p>I dislike the corrida. It is horrible. Its time has gone. I had enough
+of it once when south at Algeciras. But a Spanish golfing companion said
+that it was a very special day, and for the experience, and as a matter
+of being guest, I should go. There were eight bulls done instead of six,
+and horses in proportion, and a county councillor of Madrid took us
+behind all the scenes, into the hospital, into the matador's chapel, and
+explained everything. He was a courteous gentleman. He said they would
+have golf in Madrid, that the corrida would leave in time, but for the
+present the people must have the corrida. It takes time to make great
+changes, he said, even in Madrid&mdash;where it does<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> take more time for
+movements than anywhere else. But the point of this reference is the
+harsh contrast that is indicated&mdash;our peaceful game of golf in which
+nothing is killed, no blood spilled, nobody hurt, and yet, as we think,
+the greatest, fullest sport of all, stirring the emotions better than
+any corrida in Madrid or Barcelona, and this awful feast of blood and
+death. I have seen golf in many places, but never in one where its
+setting seemed so utterly impossible as here. And yet golf in Madrid is
+strengthening, and by ever so little the corrida, so they tell me, is
+weakening. That the game can begin and can hold and grow in such a place
+is surely the utmost testimony of its power. Games like golf have some
+work to do in Spain. It is because of such considerations, because of
+the extraordinary environment in which this peaceful, excellent sport is
+set, that I have found golf in Madrid such a remarkable and interesting
+study, and have dwelt upon it and provoked the contrasts when I might.</p>
+
+<p>See contrast now again, yet more wonderful. The next morning broke
+bright and blue, and Señor Fabricio was round betimes in the Prado with
+his car. We were to go to the new course that day. We sped away on the
+Corunna road for some four or five miles from Madrid, and then turned up
+towards the higher land. All this was King's land; El Pardo it is
+called. Here is the new golf course of Madrid, which takes the place in
+the Spanish golfers' hearts and plans of the other one of which I have
+already written, that with the bull-ring hole. This of El Pardo is part
+of a great new sporting establishment, embracing a magnificent polo
+ground, tennis courts, and all the advantages and appurtenances of a
+thorough country club in the manner of those which began in America and
+have since been copied in England, and more recently at Saint-Cloud near
+Paris.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Considered in some ways 1 am a little disposed to count this new golf
+course of Madrid as the eighth or ninth wonder of the whole golfing
+world, just as the Spaniards themselves set up a claim for El Escorial
+to be ranked as the eighth of the world at large. There are sound
+reasons for the nomination. I have shown that it might well have been
+held that the Spanish people's character and dispositions were a soil in
+which no good game might grow, and yet that it was being urged and
+proved that there was a great process of regeneration going on and that
+golf indeed had been given a very good start. Now we come to the
+astonishing climax for the time being in this little story of contrasts.
+Here, if you please, at El Pardo on the estates of Don Alfonso is just
+one of the nicest, best, and most interesting courses for golf on which
+the excellent game might ever be played. It is quite new and it is most
+thoroughly up to date. It is a course of which good clubs in Britain
+might be exceedingly proud. You and I would be glad to play there nearly
+always, and we should have little fault to find. When I was there it was
+only just being finished. Its history is a nice romance. The golfers of
+Spain had risen to that state when they felt they needed something
+better for the improvement and the enjoyment of their play than the
+rough primitive course with the bull-ring hole which had ceased to
+satisfy their needs and tastes. They were restive. Came Don Alfonso to
+their comfort and their happiness. At El Pardo was the ideal golfing
+land&mdash;wide undulating sweeps of lovely country, majestic undulations,
+grand environment, with the splendid Guadarramas in full view. It was a
+scene sublime. The land was wooded, trees would have to be felled, the
+ploughshare would have heavy work to do; but that is how courses are
+made to-day. Not in Don Alfonso's power was it to give the ground<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>
+outright, but he passed it to the golfers for a nominal rent of a
+thousand pesetas a year, which, being converted to English reckoning,
+would be some £37. There was land for the polo and the tennis hard by.
+Estimates were procured, and it was discovered that to do the work of
+felling and ploughing, sowing and construction, building and finishing,
+a sum of just about twenty-two thousand pounds in English money would be
+needed, and most of the money would go to England too. Then with zest
+the golfers and other sportsmen of Madrid came forward, each one
+subscribed according to his means and ability, and in a very little
+while all that great fund of money was obtained, and it was in the bank
+before the work was started. That was a splendid achievement; the golf
+of Madrid deserves to prosper now.</p>
+
+<p>It was determined that with such a beginning everything should be done
+most thoroughly afterwards. Thousands of trees had to be cut down, the
+ground cleared, ploughed, and raked, and the putting greens sown. On
+hardly any course in any country has the work of construction been done
+more thoroughly. Then Mr. Harry Colt was brought from England to design
+the holes, and he gave of some of his most cunning, most artistic work,
+having a fine field for his quick imagination. The result is eighteen
+holes as good and rich as Spanish holes need be. Some of the short ones
+are as good short holes as I have seen. One with the green on a hog's
+back, the seventh, is a most appetising thing. At the third there is a
+quick slope on the left of the green and the approach is one of those
+twisty things that are a strong feature of the Coltian style of
+architecture, demanding a skill and calculation from the player that
+many bunkers would not exact. There is a dog-leg hole for the fifth that
+leads to a green partly framed in a corner of trees.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> Parts of Spain are
+treeless, the great plain above which Madrid is placed, the long lone
+sweep of land that you look down upon from the palace, down to the
+Manzanares and beyond to a far horizon, is one of the most desolate
+countries that my eyes have seen. But here at El Pardo there are trees
+enough. Chestnuts and cork are everywhere, and the course has a look of
+our sweet Sunningdale at home. Harrows, rakes, and spades have done
+their work most wondrous well, and the nicest gradients have been given
+to the putting greens. But there is something even more remarkable still
+that has been done. Make it as you would, tend it as you might, but if
+Nature were to be depended upon the loveliest course in all Spain would
+have to perish, for the climate forbids. So the climate had to be
+foiled. Water was needed, water everywhere, water always, always. The
+Madrid golfers, wise beyond all British example, determined they would
+have their water at the very beginning of things. Some way distant there
+was a river or canal, and it was tapped for their supply. Great cemented
+aqueducts were built to carry it across valleys; it was piped through
+hills. The water in abundance was brought up here to the course; and it
+was laid on to every teeing ground and putting green and to the entire
+fairway so that everywhere, always, the water should be poured on, the
+fine grass that grows should be kept always green, and the turf, which
+is of full sandy kind, should be always golf-like and moist. That was a
+splendid achievement. I enjoyed the round of the new course, delighted
+in a pretty valley hole towards the end, and admired the enterprise of
+the Spanish golfers exceedingly. They have golf in Madrid. As the
+express climbed with me upwards back to France I reflected again on
+these wild contrasts, and the struggle for light by Spain.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>As a pursuit golf differs from all others in that there is no
+exclusively right way and no utterly wrong way of doing anything
+connected with it. Those engaged with it are constantly, to use their
+own expression, finding out what they are "doing wrong," and then with
+great eagerness and activity and newly revived hope are setting forth to
+repair their errors and place their game upon a new foundation. Yet
+despite this eternal discovery of faults and remedies, only a little is
+ever found out of the full truth that is hidden somewhere, by even the
+very best of players, and herein lies the consolation of the humbler
+people in that, if they know little, their superiors, being champions,
+know only a little more compared with all that there is to be known.
+Thus upon every disappointment an encouragement ensues. If these points
+are considered it will appear that there are deep truths in them, while
+at the same time they convey morals and point the way to a betterment of
+one's game. And the most important point is that there is no one
+exclusively correct way of doing anything, and this, with all the
+circumstances surrounding the proposition, leads us inevitably to the
+conclusion that this is no game for narrow-minded and conventional
+people, who would always do as others do, and have not the will to
+exercise their own convictions which, along with their admiration for
+some of the tenets of the political party to which they do not belong,
+are stifled in their consciences and put away. Golf is indeed a game for
+extensive individualism, for the free exercise of convictions and for
+continual groping along unknown channels of investigation in search of
+the truth. Those who do not investigate and explore in this way miss a
+full three-fourths of the intellectual joy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> of this pastime. And the
+investigators must have the courage to reject things of information that
+are offered to them, even when conveyed with the very highest
+testimonials for their efficacy from the best champions of home and
+foreign countries, while at the same time they should have the will to
+put into exercise even the most fantastic scheme of their own
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>All dogmatic teaching in golf is wrong. There are two or three essential
+principles as we have called them&mdash;the keeping of the still head, the
+fixed centre in the body, the eye on the ball, and such like&mdash;which must
+be obeyed under the certain penalty of failure, because these might be
+said to be the laws of Nature as applied to golf, and have nothing to do
+with the eccentricities of human method. But, these being properly
+respected, there are innumerable ways of building upon them structures
+of golf which, in the goodness of results in the matter of getting
+threes and fours and winning the holes, are much the same at the finish.
+One of the structures may be precise, another may be plain, a third may
+be ornate, and a fourth may be rough and vulgar. Yet in efficiency and
+in results they may be just the same, and in most cases the man is led
+to his style of golf building largely by his own temperamental case. So
+long as the essential principles are observed in each case, being the
+same always but kept hidden in the recesses of the building, many things
+may be done that the books do not teach. The books are valuable to the
+utmost for their suggestions and for bringing the player back to his
+base, as it were, when he has wandered too far in his explorations,
+piled theory on theory and got his game into the most hopeless tangle.
+For corrective purposes they are in this way quite essential. They stand
+for the conventions and for the middle ways; they enable us to make a
+fresh start. And the golfer is always making fresh starts. What is the
+cherished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> belief of to-day is abandoned next week, the discovery just
+made and looked upon as solving the last problem that keeps the handicap
+man away from scratch, is found later to be a temporary convenience only
+and to be dependent on something else in the system of a highly fleeting
+and uncertain kind. These beginnings, this starting over again with
+increased hope, add always to the pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>What players need to remember above all things is that the games of no
+two men are quite alike, any more than the men themselves are quite
+alike, and that among the very best the widest dissimilarities exist,
+that the best game that any man can possibly play is not one copied from
+others, but that game which is his very own, the one built up on his
+physical, intellectual, and mental peculiarities. Every man has a game
+of his own somewhere which is quite different from any other, and that
+game, when he can play it, will be more effective than any other that he
+could play. What he has to do, therefore, is to find out that game in
+all its peculiarities, and this is what the explorer and investigator is
+constantly trying to achieve. He is finding out the mysteries not of the
+game in general, as he sometimes imagines, but of his own game, and the
+more he discovers the better is he as a golfer. Surely there is proof
+enough of the absolute soundness of this proposition in the fact that
+the discoveries as they are made, meaning not those which are found
+later to be worthless, but those which become established in the
+permanent system and are invaluable, are often absolutely opposite to
+those made in another case and which become permanent in the same way.
+Why, even the champions differ more widely than any others&mdash;yet one
+remembers that this should not be a matter of surprise, but something
+that by this argument is quite inevitable. The champions have been
+marvellously successful in the mining of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> own golfing seams, and
+that is the chief reason why they are champions. And all this helps to
+make golf the game it is&mdash;the eternal finding out, the progress, with
+its occasional set-backs, towards the discovery, the completion of the
+golfing self. I have only met one man in my life who has golfed and
+never found anything out, and that was Mr. John Burns, the Minister of
+State, who assured me that once in the old days of the Tooting Bec
+course he was persuaded by a number of political persons to go with them
+to play the game there one day. He had never handled a golf club in his
+life, but having some practical knowledge of cricket, felt that golf
+could not offer any serious hindrance to him. Consequently he agreed to
+take his part in a foursome, and in the progress of this match usually
+drove the best ball, with the result that his side was well victorious.
+There seemed nothing in his game that needed improvement. Herein we
+observe Mr. Burns displayed many of the qualities of the highest
+statesmanship, but he rose majestically in his determination that from
+that day he would never play golf again, much as he liked it, and he
+never has. He has these three distinctions&mdash;that he has played golf once
+and once only in his life; that being a golfer, as all are who are once
+initiated, he has never lost a match; and that he has never found
+anything out. I shall hope to be present at the second game he plays,
+the resolution having broken down, and then we shall see discoveries
+made.</p>
+
+<p>But once again, "Golfer, know thyself" is the supreme moral drawn from
+the experiences of the players who have golfed and studied most. Every
+golfer worth the name has found out hundreds of things and hopes to find
+many more; some of them are quite different from any of the other things
+that have been found out; he has his own private collection, and in it
+almost any person might find something that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> might with a little
+alteration be added to his own. So I remember that when we came up out
+of Spain, where the golfers are in that happy state that they have at
+this present stage almost more to discover than any other golfers in the
+world, a new spring season was beginning in the homeland of the game and
+all players were looking over their stock of knowledge and seeing what
+they had found out in the most recent times. It occurred to me then to
+send out a demand to a number of good players whom I knew for their
+enthusiasm, for their individualism and their strength of mind, and for
+their conscientious investigations, and ask them what they had lately
+discovered in an original kind of way which had beyond question
+materially improved their game. The answers were enlightening, and some
+of them, which I may quote, are worth pondering upon. One of the best
+players of my acquaintance sent to say that he had made a discovery,
+which, applied as a resolution, had done him more good than any other
+half-dozen he had ever thought of. The essence of the new idea was that
+on the teeing ground especially, and when approaching his ball through
+the green, he would see to it that the stepping of the feet, the
+movements of the arms, hands&mdash;everything involving action&mdash;should be as
+slow and deliberate as possible, even the very speech itself, for the
+reason that this slow sureness created an irresistible tendency in the
+golfing action that was to follow, the back-swing was then slow and
+deliberate, and the whole movement was harmonious and precise. The
+probable value of this idea is suggested by the fact that the man who is
+slow and deliberate in his waggling&mdash;not meaning one who prolongs it
+unduly or does it in a hesitating way&mdash;generally does his swinging
+better. Another player said the best discovery he had ever made was the
+idea of imagining his weight during upswinging to be on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> his left foot
+without really throwing it there, at the same time holding his legs a
+little more stiffly than had been his wont and keeping his heels on the
+ground as long as he could. By these things, which could all be grasped
+in the one general idea of making himself conscious of his legs all the
+time, he has come by a firmness and steadiness of system that have added
+enormously to his driving capacity; in fact, it has converted him from
+being a man who could not drive at all to a very good driver indeed.</p>
+
+<p>I remember that once I was watching Taylor teaching a scratch man and
+giving him hints for curing some considerable cutting and slicing to
+which he was addicted. The champion turned round to us and said that one
+of them was the best tip he had ever suggested in his life. It is the
+simplest thing. In addressing the ball he would have the patient turn
+over the face of the driver until that face is positively hanging over
+from the top, pointing to the turf, at such a fearsome angle&mdash;no limit
+to it&mdash;as to make it seem impossible to do anything but smother the ball
+when coming down on to it. The back-swing has to be begun with the face
+in this threatening situation. The truth is that the nervous fear that
+it inspires is the secret of the success of the method. The man believes
+that if he comes down on to the ball like that there will be a horrible
+disaster, and all the time in the down-swing he is subconsciously
+(another to that long list of most important subconscious movements)
+making corrections and allowances, and his wrists are doing a twist to
+get the club right by the time of impact. It is this wrist action, with
+the left hand managing it, that is wanted, and the arm action that it
+induces. The club reaches the ball properly, and the ball goes off
+without a slice. If sometimes it is smothered it does not matter; the
+cure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> will take effect in time. But, you say, you do not want to go on
+for ever addressing the ball in this seemingly grotesque way. No; but,
+again subconsciously, when the ball is being hit and driven properly and
+the arm and wrist action become natural, there is a sure tendency
+towards a settling down to normal ways, and without the man bothering
+about it any more the club will gradually get itself straight.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SUPERIORITY OF BRITISH LINKS, AND A MASTERPIECE OF KENT, WITH SOME
+SYSTEMS AND MORALS FOR HOLIDAY GOLF.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The chief and essential difference between golf in Britain and all other
+places in the world, as everybody feels on coming home to it after
+wanderings with clubs abroad, is that here in the home of the game it is
+"the real thing" as nowhere else. Climate, soil, history and sentiment,
+and the temperament of the people have combined to make golf here a
+thing that foreign people who have never seen and enjoyed it cannot
+imagine. It is not only that its excellence is so great, but its variety
+so infinite; and perhaps it is because of that excellence and variety
+that, human nature being in such a constant state of discontent, our
+people in these days are so much concerned with problems of architecture
+and the attainment of ideals which vary much with individuals and cause
+incessant wrangling. It is when we are far away that we think most of
+the magnificence of the courses on the western seaboard of
+Scotland&mdash;Prestwick, Troon, and Turnberry among them, with Machrihanish
+and Islay in more lonesome parts&mdash;of the wealth of golf in that East
+Lothian district that is so amazingly crowded with fine links, of the
+splendid strength of such as Hoylake and others in Cheshire and
+Lancashire, of our own east coast with such jewels as Brancaster<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> set in
+it, of that marvellous trinity of courses on the Kentish seaboard, which
+as a golfing land has surely not its match in the world&mdash;Sandwich, Deal,
+and Prince's, in the group&mdash;of Littlestone and Rye along the southern
+coast, and then in the west such a glorious golfing ground as Westward
+Ho! And there is Wales with its pretty and excellent Porthcawl,
+Ashburnham, and many more, and Ireland also with its great Dublin
+courses, Portmarnock and Dollymount, and then sweet Newcastle in county
+Down, and bold Portrush.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed there are no others like the British courses, and it is always a
+tremendous speculation with any golfer of experience as to which he
+likes the best. When he comes to make it he has to separate in his mind
+the feelings of admiration and those of affection, for it commonly
+happens, if the judgment is reasonably good, that one may have the
+utmost admiration for some particular course, for its unimpeachable
+architecture based so well on perfect theory and the attempt always to
+make the punishment fit the crime and award stern justice, and yet not
+greatly delight to play upon it because in a way that sometimes he can
+hardly understand it does not give him his utmost pleasure. Here again
+the inexplicable emotions settle it. But in that matter of "justice"
+which seems so much to be the ideal of new architects, there comes the
+reflection in the ordinary golfer's mind sometimes as to whether golf,
+not really being a game of justice now, would be better if it were one,
+whether with so much that is unfair and tantalising removed from it the
+game would be half so good. Surely in no fine sport is there always
+exact justice done, and if it be made an ideal is it not possible that
+the nearer such ideal is approached the poorer may become the sport, not
+perhaps in regular proportion but in approximate effect? Golf is a game
+of Nature after all, and Nature in some ways does<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> not always stick to
+justice. One may ponder upon what Anatole France once said about this
+justice. "In the vulgar sense," he wrote, "it is the most melancholy of
+virtues. Nobody desires it. Faith opposes it by grace and Nature by
+love. It is enough for a man to call himself just for him to inspire a
+genuine repulsion. Justice is held in horror by things animate and
+inanimate. In the social order it is only a machine, indispensable
+doubtless, and for that reason respectable, but beyond question cruel
+since it has no other function than to punish, and because it sets
+jailers and executioners at work." And perhaps it may be said that golf
+has little enough in principle to do with justice either; and we have
+seen into what perplexities the good authorities of St. Andrews have
+fallen by their vain endeavour to make a code of laws that would settle
+the just dues of every golfer in every circumstance. Nature in her
+variety has contrived to beat them all continually. Perhaps it may be
+the same with the construction of courses, but the end of all golfers'
+endeavour, however much it may be criticised, is the good of the game,
+and it is generally achieved.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Those who in the most dispassionate frame of mind have considered
+carefully all the points that should count the most and detached
+themselves as well as they might from their private and inexplicable
+preference have generally come to the conclusion that there are three
+courses in this great golfing country of ours that are somewhat better
+than all the rest in their golfing quality. One of them is old St.
+Andrews, another of them is middle-aged Westward Ho! and the third is
+the youthful Prince's at Sandwich. Considered as the perfect course,
+weighing point against point, a jury of the best critics might have
+difficulty in coming to any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> other decision than that architecturally,
+for the real magnificence of its golfing value, the great creation of
+Mr. Mallaby-Deeley on the golfing land by Pegwell Bay is supreme. Here
+ten years ago there was nothing but a barren waste of sandhills, just as
+they had been, as it seemed, since the very beginning of
+things&mdash;lonesome, useless, forgotten. Then it was realised that what was
+good for nothing else was best of all for golf. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley saw
+it and understood, and now hereabouts the land is comparatively
+priceless so much is it coveted by the golfers, who also now understand
+as they see. Other great courses have been the productions of a long
+period of time, improvements continually on an original structure of the
+crudest kind. Westward Ho! was not made in a season, nor in many
+seasons. Only recently some of its most delightful touches have been
+added to it. St. Andrews was the work of generations. But Prince's,
+though it has been appreciably changed from its original design, was
+like one great flash of inspiration, and as such is surely the most
+amazing achievement in the architecture of golf. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley in
+other ways has shown himself to be a man of immense imagination; but was
+it ever better illustrated than in his making of Prince's? Our
+admiration for the course may be not the less but greater because we
+cannot play her properly. For my own humble part I love most the
+championship course of the Royal Cinque Ports club at Deal near by. Here
+there are charm and variety, and holes of the most splendid character.
+If some find fault with them, what does it matter when they are so good
+to play? The Royal St. George's course at Sandwich, again, is a most
+beautiful thing; surely there is no other which gives such an infinite
+pleasure to a greater number of capable players. But for sheer golfing
+quality, Prince's truly is the queen of all.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>I have asked Mr. Mallaby-Deeley to tell me what his ideals are in this
+matter, and in response he has made a statement of such interest and
+value that it should be given at its length. He said that, premising
+that for purposes of consideration we should regard "ideal links" as
+having reference only to the sequence of holes, both as to ranges of
+length, difficulty, and beauty of design, he submitted that the making
+of such an ideal course, given suitable ground, depended then on three
+things only, being knowledge, time, and money. St. Andrews and his own
+Prince's come nearest to this ideal, but the former fails in that it is
+too straight in and out, and also because one can pull all the way out
+and all the way home again without falling into any trouble, the truth
+being that the more one pulls the greater the possibility of safety in
+doing so. Some say that if you do thus pull you cannot reach the greens,
+but in these days that is not so. We have seen them reach those greens
+after the most exaggerated pulling. Then he thinks that the set of St.
+Andrews in the matter of prevailing winds is far from ideal, for so
+often the wind is at one's back all the way out and against the player
+all the way coming home, or the other way about. Again, no one can deny,
+he says, that St. Andrews has three if not four very ordinary and
+commonplace holes. Prince's, as now laid out, has in general opinion not
+a single commonplace or uninteresting hole in the whole course, but it
+has had the advantage of being laid out many years after St. Andrews,
+and after the introduction of the rubber ball. A course comes nearer to
+the ideal as its holes are placed to every variety of wind. In the early
+days of Prince's at Sandwich the disadvantage of an in and out course<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>
+were soon discovered and an enormous amount of money was spent in
+altering it to its present form, in which, with the single exception of
+St. George's, it is the best in existence, the old course at Sandwich
+being ideal in this respect. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, looking upon his
+Prince's in the supercritical way of a pleased but still insistent
+creator, can see only one blemish in it, and that is that the two short
+holes, being the third and the fifth&mdash;though the fifth is longer than
+the third&mdash;come too close together. Any two holes on a course may
+separately be extremely good, but coming together lack something of
+perfection because of the repetition that instantly arises. He would
+have the pin visible for every approach shot on his ideal links, and the
+only exception he would make would be in the case of a full second shot
+with a long carry over a high bunker to the end of it, for this to his
+mind is a most interesting shot. Such an one, he points out, is that
+presented at the sixteenth hole at Littlestone, and he would be
+surprised to know that any one would ever think of altering that hole in
+order to enable a player in the distance to see the pin. He also would
+not agree to placing a bunker immediately at the back of the green,
+which punishes the man who dares to be up and encourages "pawkiness."</p>
+
+<p>The visible pin is imperative at short holes; he will admit no
+exceptions. But all who have been to Prince's have been most impressed
+with the beauty and golfing perfection of the dog-legged holes there, a
+couple of which are presented at the beginning of the round, immediately
+introducing the stranger to some of the best delights of this course. He
+would have dog-leg holes of both shapes in his round, those bending to
+the right to worry the slicer, and those angled towards the left to help
+the long driver who greatly dares. The first hole at Hoylake and the
+second and eleventh at Prince's are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> dog-leg holes that he likes best.
+But, he will tell you, by far the most vital matters to consider in
+making any course with pretensions to being ideal are the position of
+the greens and the bunkering through the course and near the hole, and,
+though it is a consideration that is too often overlooked, it is nearly
+as important to bear in mind from which quarter the prevailing wind
+blows. He believes every shot from the tee to the hole ought to be of
+equal importance, but in the case of the majority of the courses this is
+not so. Despite the fact that on the tee the man has everything in his
+favour, a perfect stance and a teed-up ball, he is given more space to
+play into and a greater margin for inaccuracy than in the case of any
+other shot. This, says the architect, is wrong. Surely it should be as
+necessary on the ideal course to place the tee shot as any other. He has
+turned the subject of ribbon bunkers very thoroughly over in his mind.
+In a general way, he does not like them because of the varying winds. He
+says, "<i>Tutiores ibis in medias vias</i>," is a safe and golden rule of
+life, and it applies equally to ribbon bunkers which while they make
+some holes mar many more. Most frequently on account of wind and other
+things this form of hazard fails as a fair guard to the green for a hole
+that is meant for two full shots. It is then wrongly placed, and would
+generally be improved by the substitution of ear bunkers to catch sliced
+and pulled shots thereto. The push shot is one of the most difficult in
+the game to play, but it is one of the prettiest and most satisfactory
+in accomplishment; but the ribbon bunker is often unfair to the man who
+plays it. Yet the absence of such ribbon bunkers does not prevent the
+man who likes to play his high mashie shots from still playing them.
+Thus the absence of this form of bunker is fair to all, while if placed
+very near the green its presence penalises the push-shot player.
+But many a tee shot would be tame if it were not for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> ribbon
+bunkers some way ahead. In epitome he says to the student of
+architecture&mdash;"Bunker your course so that every bad shot is punished;
+place your bunkers so that every shot must be played and played well;
+make the length of your holes such that if a shot is foozled it costs
+you a stroke; guard your greens right and left, and even to the very
+edge and into the green itself, if necessary, but this must of course
+depend on the length of shot to be played; and at one-shot holes make
+the green a very fort of surrounding bunkers, and guard the tee shot. Do
+not leave it open as at the famous short hole at St. Andrews, a much
+overrated hole. But above all things, make your bunkers fair; don't make
+them impossible to get out of except by playing back."</p>
+
+<p>As to the lengths of the holes on his ideal course he would have about
+twelve two-shot holes varying from 380 to 440 yards, and there should be
+three one-shot holes of about 165, 180, and 200 yards respectively.
+There would be two or three drive-and-iron holes of about 350 yards
+each, but a drive-and-iron hole should be so constructed that if the
+drive is missed it will be impossible for the man who missed it to sail
+on the green with his next. There is a good example of this in the
+fifteenth at Prince's, for although this hole is only a drive and an
+iron the penalty for missing the drive is that it takes the player two
+more shots to reach the green because of the nature of the ground in
+front of the tee. And then he would have it a condition that the last
+three holes should average about 400 to 420 yards each, and the
+seventeenth and eighteenth should be made specially testing ones. This
+is the ideal course, and, being such, it is not a place for foozlers.
+But if it is properly and fairly constructed it will be easier and
+pleasanter to play on than a course which is made difficult by the
+simple method of making it unfair, for example by putting bunkers in the
+wrong places, by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> cutting the hole in a ridiculous position on the
+green, by punishing the man who is "up" (a new-fangled and absurd idea
+of course construction) by placing the hole immediately in front of a
+bunker at the back of the green, and by leaving the approach to the
+green from a long shot rough or broken, and so unfair. It is easy to
+make any course difficult, and so conducive to high scoring, by making
+it unfair. This induces pawky play because the punishment for bold play
+may be too severe. He is also of opinion (and there is a constantly
+growing tendency to agree with him) that there is too much premium on
+putting, and that it plays far too important a part in the game,
+especially among first-class players and in first-class matches. He
+thinks the hole should be six and a half inches instead of four and a
+quarter. Under present conditions a putt missed by half an inch bears
+the same punishment (although the rest of the hole through the green may
+have been played faultlessly) as a hopelessly bad shot by one's opponent
+through the green.</p>
+
+<p>Prince's supports its creator's arguments very well indeed, and one
+enormous fascination of it lies in the fact that it is always suggesting
+to you, always inviting you, always tempting you to do the more daring
+thing, and hinting that, even though you failed, the suffering might not
+be too much. In that, it seems to me, lies the chief charm of this
+masterpiece of architecture.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>So when we come home from other lands, let us think of golfing holidays
+in our own, and moralise from old experience. It is an aggravating
+circumstance that while there is hardly anything in the way of change
+and holiday that is so splendid as a golfing holiday, there is hardly
+any kind that is so easily spoiled. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> golfer is not dependent on the
+weather, only to a small extent on his friends, he seldom knows limits
+of time or space, yet he fails oftener in his pursuit of the perfect
+happiness of a summer vacation than do the unsophisticated people who
+kill the time of August and September in other ways, and that happens
+because of the very fascination of the thing, and the enthusiasm and
+excess to which it leads him on. In our working days limits are imposed
+upon us; when we are loose and unrestricted all system and wise
+restraint fly to pieces. It is not only that we often play too much on
+holidays, but that during play and in the intervals between those spells
+of action the imagination is at work too fast and makes riot upon
+settled methods which have raised the game of the individual to some
+more or less agreeable sort of quality. Excess and experiment are the
+two evils that shatter so many golfing holidays, and yet the
+contradictions of golf are such that we find there is something good to
+be said both for excess and for experiment. But be all this as it may,
+it is not until a man has gone through twenty golfing holiday campaigns
+that he fully realises he has an education to serve in this matter, and
+after twenty more he is able to start out on the forty-first in the
+strong confidence that from the days and weeks before him he will
+extract the full available supply of rich golfing delight. These remarks
+do not well apply to the person of the thick phlegmatic temperament who
+plays now with the same set of clubs that he started with ten years or
+more agone, the which have not had their shafts varnished, nor their
+grips attended since the time of their first swinging. This man is
+without imagination, without feeling, and, with no blessing upon him, we
+may let him wander away to play wherever he will, knowing that he will
+always derive some great satisfaction from his pursuit and gain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>
+mightily in health. He is not like most of us; he is as the man without
+any religion; he is very material. He eats, he plays, he rests, he
+sleeps. And he does very well in it all; and yet we of the majority who
+think always, ponder deeply, worry exceedingly and are wracked with
+doubts and conflicting theories, disappointed ever in fruitless
+experiments, do not envy him. The material person does not go down into
+the depths where we grieve and are in pain (how often do we go and
+grieve!), but neither does he ascend to the heights of pleasure that are
+scaled by successful experiment, by the sudden discovery of some
+wonderful secret that seems to have unlocked the gates of the higher
+golf and rendered us immune from failure for evermore. (Never mind what
+happens in the morning!) We may suffer the depths for those hot moments
+of life on the summits.</p>
+
+<p>This preamble is needed for warning. Golf is the great game of emotions,
+and at holiday times those emotions are quickened, strung up and, flying
+loose in riot, play the devil with our game. I am sorry to believe that
+many young men who come back to their homelands from the golfing holiday
+grounds in October do so with inward sighs and stifled sobs. They tell
+us that they have had the most glorious time; they may foolishly give an
+account of a round said to have been done in 74, and of many of the
+longest holes that cost them only four strokes apiece, and we forgive
+them for their words which we know are false, realising the pain of
+their case and that their dissembling is in a small manner for the good
+of the game. Their emotions have led them astray; they have been weak
+and foolish; they have done the wrong things and they have left undone
+all those which were recommended to them as right. They have played
+three rounds a day, and they have bought new drivers and putters. And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>
+some of them have actually changed their stances and had an inch cut off
+a favourite shaft! Truly their emotions have led them wrong. Player! if
+you would pass the placid holiday, kill those emotions and cast them
+off. You may then take a golfing holiday from which you will derive that
+magnificent material comfort and refreshment that your butcher and baker
+do when they walk upon the promenade at Margate and, well fed, sleep at
+times on the sunlit sands. You will really believe on your return to
+labour in the town, that you have had a splendid time, but soon you will
+cease to talk of it for you will find that there is very little to
+remember. Time was passed; that was all. The man whose emotions played
+old Harry with him does not forget. He has something indeed to remember,
+for he lived very much in his month of play. So you will see that in the
+scheme of golfing things as jointly ordained by Nature and kind
+Providence, with the petty meddling of the man himself, there are
+different processes of holiday, and each in its way is the best. As in
+so many other affairs of golf there are contradictions abounding. But
+let us, after such philosophy, move to some definite considerations, and
+consider life and facts as they are presented to us.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>One of the doctors' papers was well laughed at a little while since for
+suggesting that, on account of the nerve strain that it makes, golf is
+not an ideal game for everybody, especially busy folks with few hours
+and days for recreation. To quote: "If he takes his failures to play a
+good game to heart, it is doubtful whether his health gains very much.
+He has had, it is true, the advantage of a change of scene and
+occupation, and has lived for a while in a healthier<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> atmosphere, and,
+if he had only been satisfied with his game, all these things would have
+conspired to send him back to his work cheered and braced up. But he may
+play very badly and become unduly worried thereat. A game that is
+calculated to increase an irritability which has arisen out of a trying
+week's work can hardly be said to be recreative, at all events to the
+mind." The medical writer concluded impressively: "The game of golf, if
+it does not go smoothly, presents so many points of analogy with the
+tiresome eventualities of life that there can be little doubt that
+persons of an irritable, gloomy, and worrying disposition would be
+better if they did not seek their recreation on the links." The common
+people sometimes look upon these pronouncements from the columns of the
+professional paper as being like the essence of the wisdom and knowledge
+of the whole of Harley Street. I remember, however, that when this was
+published the golfers ridiculed and condemned it, and agreed to take
+more golf and less medicine. It is not my function to advocate the
+playing of less golf than is played, much less the stoppage of any of
+it, but I dare to suggest that there was a germ of truth in what the
+medical paper said. There are kinds of players who should take their
+golf with restraint and caution, especially at holiday times. The truth
+is that a vast proportion of golfing holidays are completely ruined
+through a bad plan of campaign, or over-doing it, or both&mdash;commonly
+both. We would say nothing to a doubter now about the selection of his
+friends for his party; he should know that it is a matter demanding the
+extremest care. A golfing holiday <i>à deux</i> may expose all the least
+beautiful parts of each man's character, and those who are not such
+friends that they can comfortably bear each other's infirmities might do
+better even to go on their golfing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> way lonely and without a partner.
+There is much to be said for the freedom of this latter holiday
+existence, and odd indeed would be the golfing place where there were
+not many games for the solitary stranger to play.</p>
+
+<p>The night before the opening of the campaign, the eve of the journey
+outwards, is a trying time to many men. I think of those who take loving
+interest in their clubs, and have many of them, including a first-class
+reserve, and perhaps a second-class reserve also, to the original set
+that is in full commission. The man who has only seven clubs in the
+world, and seems to take a pride in telling you that he has had them all
+since the beginning of his golf, is in no difficulty. But with others
+the trouble is how many clubs to take, and how many to dare to leave
+behind. After the first selection it is seen that about five or six
+drivers are put in the list, very many irons, and a large assortment of
+putters. All the ex-favourites are to be tried over again and
+experiments to be made with a number of others. It is found then that
+too many clubs have been selected; but after the most painful and
+difficult weeding out there may still be some twenty left, and these are
+taken. It is a mistake. From the day of arrival at the holiday place the
+man is in doubt as to what he will play with, and he mixes up his game
+into a bad state of confusion through using different clubs almost every
+day. It is a good rule, to which every golfer subscribes after twenty
+campaigns, if not before, to take away the regular clubs as used every
+day at home, not one less and only two more, being a spare driver and an
+extra putter. In that way happiness and contentment lie. I would leave
+out the driver did I not know the case of a man who so much grieved for
+one he had left behind that he travelled three hundred miles back home
+to get it!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The little truth that there was in the indictment against the game by
+the doctors' paper is that it is possible for some men, many of them, to
+have too much of it, when it becomes bad for the men and bad for their
+game, and holidays are rendered failures. There was a time when really
+good golf could only be had at the seaside, or very far away from the
+great centres of work and business. That is no longer the case, and the
+situation is that the golf we are having all the time at home is hard
+and strenuous, demanding great ability and thought. The golfing holiday,
+then, might very well be made an easy one on a links where the holes are
+simple, and&mdash;remembering another scare that was made by a doctors' paper
+some time later&mdash;I believe that there is as happy golf to be had up on
+the hills, and in the lonely country places, as on the margin of any
+sunny sea.</p>
+
+<p>But it is the excess of golf that is played on holidays that spoils
+everything in the case of the man of a somewhat nervous temperament, and
+one who may not be as strong and beefy as the John Bull of the pictures.
+Too many of these people seem to think that, as they have gone away for
+golf, they should have as much of it as they can get, and play to excess
+accordingly. Three rounds! Three rounds! One of the reasons why some men
+play so much&mdash;as they put it to themselves&mdash;is that they wish to improve
+their game, and they conceive that the holiday time is the best of all
+in which to achieve that end. But experience shows that very seldom
+indeed is a man's game improved at such a time; very frequently it is
+injured, and that through the excess. When so much of it is played,
+weariness, though half unconsciously, is induced, proper pains are not
+taken at every stroke, carelessness becomes constant; then, with
+deterioration, too many experiments are tried, and worst of all, that
+terrible, and for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> the time being incurable, disease of staleness sets
+in, and there is then an end to all happiness and enjoyment. There is
+hardly any cure for staleness except complete abstention for a time. It
+needs some strength of mind to carry out such a resolve, but he who
+severely limits his golf at holiday times enjoys it the more, and he and
+his health and his game are the better for it. A holiday system based on
+wise restrictions is a splendid thing. Men of long experience have tried
+many of them, and the best of all is this: Play two rounds on the first
+day of the week, one on the second, two again on the third, one on the
+fourth, two on the fifth, one on the sixth, and take a whole holiday
+from the game on the seventh day. That is not too much nor too little.
+Another point for remembrance is that on the days that are warm and long
+the old convention of one round before lunch and another afterwards is
+not a good one for the best and most enjoyable employment of the day.
+Much better is it to play in the morning, rest pleasantly&mdash;sleep,
+perhaps&mdash;in the afternoon, and play again in the cool of the evening,
+when golf is the best of all&mdash;always provided your course is not laid
+out in a straight line from east to west and back, for playing full
+against a setting sun is a very tantalising thing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Mention has been made of staleness. In our minds there is awakened an
+unhappy thought with which something had better be done for good
+contentment's sake ere we pass along to the pleasant consideration of
+this holiday golf. Staleness is the canker that kills many of these
+expeditions that are planned with the happiest promise. It is a dread
+golfing disease that rages on the links almost like an epidemic during
+August and September. It spoils the game and happiness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> of every player
+whom it attacks, and sometimes it cuts holidays short. It is nearly safe
+to assume that when on holiday one golfer in every half-dozen is
+afflicted with it, and some of the others are in danger. It consists in
+the absolute incapacity of the player to produce a game that is within
+very many strokes of his real form; in truth the game of a good man may
+fall to the twenty-handicap level or lower, and each new effort on his
+part to raise it up again only results in a worsening of the case. There
+is no certain cure except isolation from the game and long rest. A
+trouble that has the power, then, to ruin the golfing holiday, and often
+does, must be considered very seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the progress of a case for the details of which I can personally
+vouch. I was a sympathetic witness of it. The man was playing well at
+the beginning of the holiday season and went for a month to a fine east
+coast links where there was no town, no village, and no society but that
+of golfers, and nothing to do but golf, which was what he desired. For a
+week he played well, doing two rounds every day, and sometimes three.
+The weather was hot. At the beginning of the second week there were
+signs of a failing game. His first anxiety soon increased; he changed
+his ball, then began to make alterations in his stances and swings, and
+at the end of the second week was all foozles, and getting worse. Soon
+afterwards it was obvious that the cause of the whole thing was
+staleness. The man tried the heroic remedy of loafing about his
+quarters, golfless, for a couple of days, reading novels and pretending
+to play bowls against himself. He also studied the stones in the old
+graveyard near by. On the third day he went back to the links very
+hopeful, but the case was as bad as before, and, desperate, he gave his
+game a three days' rest after that. This also<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> failed. Neither of the
+resting spells was long enough. This being a man of keen nervous
+temperament, who took his game very seriously and was very miserable, he
+did the wisest thing by giving up his holiday and going home to work in
+London.</p>
+
+<p>The primary cause of staleness is excess of play, resulting in
+exhaustion of nervous and physical energy, which in turn produces
+carelessness, decreases the capacity for taking the infinite pains that
+are necessary to the game, and&mdash;important&mdash;brings about a failure in the
+subconscious working arrangement between the mind and the physical
+system that has everything to do with the proper accomplishment of the
+various strokes. The movements of every golfing swing, as we have
+agreed, are extremely complicated; they consist of hundreds of little
+movements amalgamated into one great system, and while one is conscious
+of the system, it is impossible for the parts of it to be anything but
+subconsciously done, and they are made perfect by training and practice,
+and by getting the brain and the physical construction to work together
+exactly and with harmony. When staleness comes on, this working
+arrangement breaks down and the player attempts the hopeless task of
+trying to do consciously what can only be done the other way. I believe
+that this is the true explanation of staleness.</p>
+
+<p><i>Note 1.</i>&mdash;The exhaustion of the nervous and physical energy is often
+unsuspected, and is covered up by the enthusiasm for the game. <i>Note
+2.</i>&mdash;Excess of play does not mean only a frequent playing of three
+rounds a day. Two rounds every day, as a regular thing, may be excess in
+many cases. Much depends on the individual. A man of highly-strung
+temperament will become stale much more quickly than a beefy, phlegmatic
+person, who is commonly immune. <i>Note 3.</i>&mdash;Staleness is very much more
+easily induced, and develops<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> more quickly and dangerously, in hot
+weather than at other times, because the tax on the nervous energy and
+the eyesight is so much greater then.</p>
+
+<p>Now here are the common symptoms and the results of staleness. Almost
+the first real sign of it is swaying of the body. This is very slight at
+first, and is rarely suspected; but it brings about a general collapse
+of the swing and the entire golfing apparatus. A very hopeless sort of
+tap is given to the ball on the tee, and it is driven perhaps only a
+hundred and fifty yards. As everything seems to have been done properly,
+the player is mystified, begins to experiment, and then worse troubles
+come on. Shakiness of the legs, and much exaggerated knee and foot work,
+often resulting in collapse of the right leg and the player getting up
+on his toes, make up the next symptom; and another one that is a common
+accompaniment of the beginning of staleness is falling or lurching
+forward as the club is brought down on to the ball. Anything like a
+proper swing is, in such circumstances, impossible. Bad timing begins
+immediately; then there is overswinging and too fast swinging; and, of
+course, the moving of the head and the taking of the eye from the ball,
+those two faults that never miss an opportunity of coming in to add to
+the woes of the worried golfer.</p>
+
+<p>What must the stale golfer do for his salvation and happiness? In the
+first place, if he has had this thing before, he should be on his guard
+against it and catch it in time. If taken at the very beginning an early
+cure is quite practicable. The golf should be stopped at once for a few
+days, and a rest and change, as complete as possible, taken. Then the
+game should be resumed warily&mdash;one round a day. In addition to this,
+some men will insist on having alterations made in their clubs. They
+deceive themselves. One of the greatest champions of all times once, in
+intimate conversation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> laid down a rule to me with great seriousness,
+and it is one never to be forgotten. He said: "Never make a change in
+your regular clubs, and never buy a new one, unless it is a putter, when
+you are playing badly. Only make changes when you are playing at your
+very best. You may then play even better, knowing so well what you
+want." Yet, warn them as much as you may, many men will make extensive
+changes when they are stale and desperate. One plea to them then&mdash;the
+change having failed, go back to the old clubs before changing again.
+Never get far from your base, or you will be lost in doubt and
+confusion. Let it be the same with methods as with clubs. If a new way
+fails, let the sick man go back to the old one before experimenting
+again. He should remember that that old one has served him well, and the
+possibilities are that he will have to stand by it after all. Then the
+stale golfer should try to encourage himself; he should try a new set of
+opponents, play with men of longer handicap than himself, who normally
+would never outdrive him, and so on. A change of links often works
+wonders, but if the staleness has gone very far, and it matters little,
+it is often wise to give up the golfing part of the holiday if one is in
+progress. We have seen the advice given to play through a period of
+staleness. This is a heroic measure, but it would not succeed in one in
+six cases, and the suffering would be too great for the ordinary mortal.
+We tell him to take few clubs away with him, and to be faithful to them,
+and they will serve him well. And we tell him when his golf is ill not
+to fly to the dangerous stimulant of a new club. And yet, where is the
+man who does come back from his holiday without a new one in his bag,
+one fond relic of those days that were so tightly packed with golf? We
+bring them back with us, the names of their nativity upon them, as
+hunters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> and explorers bring trophies from distant lands. Mutely they
+testify for us. Sometimes when the holiday is done they are added, for
+their merit and fine service, to the clubs in commission in the bag;
+oftener they fall into the reserve; frequently they are given a purely
+honorary office and sent off with a title to the golfer's own private
+House of Lords as magnificent relics.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>A diary should be kept during the golfing holiday; indeed it should be
+kept at all times. More such are made than the golfing world realises,
+because they are often, to the uttermost degree, secret and private, and
+that not merely for the reason that some diarists place themselves in
+the confessional when they make their entries, but because, alas! they
+are conscious of serving their own vanity by exaggeration of their best
+achievements. It may be kept for one of two distinct reasons, or for
+both of them, though the latter is not generally done. The two different
+objects are entertainment and instruction. For the former, the small
+things that are sold in shops will do. You write down, each time you
+have been playing, where the game was had, who the other man was, and
+what you beat him by; or the extent of the disaster if it was the other
+way about. In the column devoted to "Conditions" you exaggerate the
+force of the wind; and under "Remarks" you say you were driving and
+putting splendidly when you won. If you lost, the space is left blank.
+This record is in its own way valuable, because at a future time it will
+refresh the memory concerning great golfing days of the past, and thus
+furnish a real enjoyment. When a game of golf is played, and finished,
+it is not done with. It is lodged in a great store of remembrance, with
+full particulars attached to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> it, ripening with time, so that the
+player's memories are among the best happenings of his golfing
+possessions. All of us know that this is so, and it is as a kind of
+catalogue that the little diaries serve their purpose well.</p>
+
+<p>The diary of analysis or instruction is a very different thing. The
+object is to make a serial record of ideas and successful experiments,
+faults and tendencies&mdash;most particularly tendencies&mdash;in order that on
+periodical examination of it the player may derive useful lessons and
+improve his game. One should get a good exercise book, bound nicely and
+strongly, with morocco corners, and just enter up one's performances on
+the plain paper according to any system that one may choose, giving
+prominence to a line at the top of each entry, naming the day, the
+place, and the man. I have seen diaries kept in this way, and they have
+been very serviceable. But the man who is starting anything of this kind
+must come to a definite agreement with himself to be absolutely honest
+and sincere; and he must also be very introspective, and have keen
+discernment for his own faults and constant observation for all that he
+does at every stroke. Otherwise it were better that he merely kept the
+diary of glorious remembrances.</p>
+
+<p>Let him, if he keeps a diary of fact, hold it secret from all the world;
+but every night after his play put down in it the plain, real truth
+about what happened; and let him see to it, after much thought upon
+recent events, that he does properly know the truth. This point is
+emphasised because men may be short with their putts, say on sixteen of
+eighteen greens in one round, and yet not notice the frequency of the
+same fault; or they may be pulling or cutting their putts all the time
+and be oblivious, in the same way, to the circumstance. Or they may be
+pitching their approaches too short of the greens, or slicing most of
+their drives. The point is that the golfer's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> memory for his own
+misdeeds is an exceedingly short one, and he rarely gets them tabulated
+and analysed as he should. If he made an analysis of his play at the end
+of the day, stated the truth about it in the book, and then examined
+that book carefully once a week, he would learn something about the
+causes that were preventing him from getting on in the game, and the
+next step would suggest itself. Some would say that the making of
+personal statistics in this way would be a very troublesome matter, and
+they would be certain to tire of it soon. It is not so much a nuisance
+as might be imagined; it becomes interesting, and it helps one's game.</p>
+
+<p>But if you are doubtful about this idea, do keep a diary of sorts
+anyhow, for it is such a pity to let the golf that has been played die
+out of memory. You may gather a notion of the value and interest of what
+might be called played golf by reading through the match-book of another
+man, like that of the late F. G. Tait, which is included in the
+delightful and pathetic memoir that Mr. John Low wrote about him. Tait,
+model of golfers, always filed the facts about his matches, but briefly.
+Not many words were wasted in the "Remarks" column; what was said there
+was the plain truth. Often it was "F. G. T. in great form," but the
+recorder knew how to denounce himself. It does one good to read through
+this diary of one who was soldier, hero, golfer, and darling of the
+game.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>But not every man departs on a golfing holiday for a strenuous time of
+continuous match-play with keen rivals who might be fine companions, and
+who would keep him up at night with bridge, after a day's work on the
+links was done. All sorts and conditions of men are included in this
+comprehensive golfing world of ours;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> and some have most contemplative
+moods, love solitude, and, alone with themselves and the game, probe
+deeply into its mysteries and into their own weaknesses. It is to the
+credit of the pastime that it accommodates itself most splendidly to
+every disposition and mood and manner; and men of a lonely way have gone
+solus on their holidays, and held themselves solus all the time, and
+have come back again, well refreshed and satisfied. They have often
+enough had fewer disappointments than the others. They have practised
+extensively, and they have improved themselves as golfers. Practice is
+indeed a feature of many golfing holidays. Here at such times we have
+the full game at our disposal and nothing but the game, and now, if
+ever, we can make ourselves to be better golfers. That is how we reason.
+It is a matter to be considered carefully.</p>
+
+<p>Practice fails in most cases because the golfers concerned do not
+concentrate upon their efforts with that keenness, thoroughness, and
+determination they exhibit when playing a real match. The game is not
+the same to them; they do not try so hard, however much, as one might
+say, they try to try, and the result is there is such an excess of
+looseness, carelessness, about their methods, that bad habits are born;
+and these persons then had really better not be practising at all, for
+thus they do harm to their game. This is one reason why one-club
+practice is better in small quantities than in large ones. It is not
+sufficiently interesting when kept up. What we should do, therefore, is
+to make the practice interesting, and fortunately the circumstances of
+the game afford wide scope for doing so. There is no other game that is
+half so good in this way. Golf to many people's minds is not merely a
+game to be played with others and against them; it is a study, a subject
+for meditative research and exultant discovery. If others should regard
+such terms as immoderate,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> golfers anyhow know they are fairly employed.
+The essential difference that the presence of a man as opponent makes is
+that a real game, hard and according to the law, has then to be played,
+and there can be a winning or a losing of it.</p>
+
+<p>Well then, it is our business, in order to make solitary practice
+interesting and valuable, to create a game for ourselves. It is easily
+done, and there are some wise men who say that they would rather play
+their solitary game, going round the links alone with all their clubs or
+nearly, than they would play a match with a stranger who happened not to
+turn out to be the right kind of golfing man. Many who start systems of
+solitary competitive play against themselves in this way fail with them,
+did they but know it, because they are not honest with themselves.
+Having become very badly bunkered, and having taken three for recovery,
+they must not call it one because they should have got out in one, had
+they played the shot just right; nor, having missed a foot putt, must
+they consider it as holed because if they had tried their uttermost they
+could have holed it. We must see that it is of the essence of solus
+play, and making it valuable, that the man should try his best and
+should know and feel that he has no second attempt at the same stroke,
+just as he has none in the real game when others are there. If he
+permits himself second drives and putts, all the strokes are done
+without the sense of responsibility, and the player then were better
+indoors writing letters to his friends to come and match themselves
+against him. Therefore let the first and the most inexorable rule in
+one's solitary golf be that the shot once made must count, no matter
+what its quality. What may be permitted&mdash;and this does not operate as an
+exception to the rule&mdash;is that when a shot has been badly done another
+ball may be played from the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> place. One may learn something in this
+way, but always must it be understood that the first ball must count;
+and it is a good maxim that there should be no attempted repetition of a
+successful stroke, for if it were done well again the man would be no
+better off in mind or skill, and if it failed there would be an
+unnecessary disappointment and uncertainty.</p>
+
+<p>Now, to consider ways of competing against oneself that will make
+interesting the lonely game, and lift it to value too, every man of
+thought might quite well devise some suitable system for himself; but we
+may tell him of some that have been successful with many players, and of
+a good principle to embrace in any new one, which is never to make the
+test or competition too severe. I believe that golfers are improved more
+by coaxing and flattery than by harsh measures and heavy defeats. It is
+often said that the best way to improve is to play against better
+players than ourselves, but there are limitations to that advice which
+are not always sufficiently emphasised. The superior party ought not to
+be too much superior, the different points of the game of the two men
+should not be very widely contrasted, and the better player should be
+giving to the inferior one so much allowance that the latter ought to
+win as often as he loses, never letting it be forgotten that, when
+handicaps are right and three-fourths of the difference is allowed, the
+odds are really always in favour of the better player, as has been
+proved over and over again. Even when a man is of long experience and
+has been fashioned by nature in the heroic mould, it is impossible to
+play his very best golf, and be improving on it, unless he "has his
+pecker up." The pecker properly set makes happiness and confidence, and
+it is only when such moods are engendered that the man is led on to
+higher things, perceives the absence of limitation to his prospects<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> of
+improvement, and likens himself to the chrysalis of a Vardon or a Braid.
+Above everything else, as we have agreed so often before, golf is a game
+of hope. Crush the hope by setting the man a task that is beyond him and
+you take away the joy of the game and kill the happy prospects. The
+golfer who is winning will win again and play better.</p>
+
+<p>In these observations there have been some principles for practice laid
+down that are seldom emphasised, but are of the most vital importance.
+To make exact systems to suit them is, after all, a simple affair. Now
+many men play round after round, counting their strokes, as if they were
+playing in a medal competition, and comparing results at the finish,
+always trying to break their own records. They may gain some benefit
+from this play, but it often fails in interest, and consequently in
+value, for the same reason that medal competitions do&mdash;because of the
+continual occurrence of the one, or it may be two, very bad holes. The
+percentage of cards that are turned from good to bad merely by one
+disastrous hole must be very high, and when a man is playing a practice
+round and does a nine at the second hole, it is difficult for him to
+treat the remainder very seriously or be keen about them. The remedy is
+simple. Let this system of playing and comparisons be that his aggregate
+shall always be for sixteen or seventeen holes only, leaving the worst
+to be eliminated. There is nothing unfair in doing so. The one bad hole
+is frequently more the result of accident than of inability. At the
+beginning of a system of practice play three holes may be dropped
+regularly from the reckoning, then a week later two, the week after that
+one only. Comparisons of form are more accurate and reliable when the
+worst hole is eliminated, than when all eighteen are totted up. Then the
+man may play the bogey game; but instead of opposing the set bogey of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>
+the course and complicating the business with handicap strokes, let him
+make a bogey of his own of such a kind that it represents not the
+scratch man's proper game but his, so that when he is playing well he
+ought to beat it, and it should be a tolerable match. In constructing
+such a bogey, he might make allowance for his own special likes and
+dislikes in regard to particular holes. Again, I have known men to
+derive pleasure and improvement from a system of practice against the
+ordinary bogey by which they merely reckoned the number of holes at
+which they equalled or beat the phantom's figures, disregarding the
+losses. There is a little difference between this and the ordinary
+reckoning, and it is in the direction of encouragement if the player is
+coming on.</p>
+
+<p>And then there is the interesting system that was first set forth by a
+most eminent player who has been amateur champion more than once, by
+which the practiser wins half-crowns for his good play and loses them on
+his off days. He plays against bogey on terms that give him an equal
+chance. Then he establishes a money-box with two sections in it, one
+being for bogey and the other for himself, and into each section he
+deposits four half-crowns, which is very little to pay for all the
+enjoyment he is about to gain. When bogey beats him one of the
+half-crowns is lifted out of the man's section into the ghost's, but
+when flesh and blood prevail the coin comes back. The course of practice
+is ended when one side or the other has got all the half-crowns. If
+bogey has them there is something wrong with the game of the man, and he
+had better start another series; but when the man is triumphant he may
+depart for a holiday exultingly and spend the money on it, in the doing
+of which he will probably win some more, his form being so much bettered
+by his lonely practice.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE OLD DIGNITY OF LONDON GOLF, AND ITS NEW IMPORTANCE, WITH A WORD FOR
+THE CHARM OF INLAND COURSES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Perhaps in the middle ages of the game some rare old conservative of a
+player at one of the great Scottish seats of golf was told by another
+that a gentleman had just arrived by the coach from London and would
+like a match in the morning, and it is distinctly possible, if he was
+the excellent man we picture him, that he ejaculated, "And where, sir,
+is London?" The manner would have been Johnsonian, if not the sentiment.
+Should any one now be disposed to regard such lack of knowledge&mdash;though
+I think you would find it was only what might be called judicial golfing
+ignorance&mdash;or narrowness, or whatever it was, as merely stupid or a
+little culpable, he may hesitate. The pride of dignity, arising from
+conscious strength and superiority, was a fine thing among the Scottish
+golfers, and certainly was to be admired. That spirit, that sturdy
+consciousness of personal value, have helped to the making of a British
+empire. And sometimes a golfer would wander in the north and be
+discovered by the players there to have a wooden club with a brass sole,
+and thereupon he might be good-humouredly mocked for being the
+Blackheath golfer that he was, since it was on the famous course by
+London that the brassey<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> was first used. Since then London has given
+other good things to golf, including many courses that are unequalled
+among their kind and a number of players of high championship rank. And
+sometimes there is more golf played in a day within twenty-five miles of
+Charing Cross than there is in the whole of Scotland in a week, and much
+of it is very good golf. But this is not a place for comparisons, and
+particularly it is not meant for one in which the English gratitude to
+Scottish benefactors for the gift of this remarkable game is to be
+lessened from the full. It is only suggested that London golf is now a
+thing of great account. That is coming to be understood; but one doubts
+if the Londoners properly realise that the game in the metropolis has
+rich history and traditions which make a match for those of nearly any
+other place. Except that the great players of the game of different ages
+were so little acquainted with it, Blackheath has golfing land as
+historic as any, and the Royal Blackheath Club, with its origin in 1608,
+is the oldest in the world. That is London. Some time since there was a
+fashion for open-air shows of pageantry, and if the golfers had then
+been so disposed they could have put forward a pageant of London golf
+that would have embraced most picturesque and impressive tableaux. There
+is King James the First of England and the Sixth of Scotland, keen
+golfer indeed, playing the game at Blackheath in the company of some of
+his nobles when the court was at Greenwich, and there is a charming
+scene to be imagined in which the monarch gives his royal sanction and
+authority to the Society of Golfers that is established at this place in
+1608, as it is well believed to have been, and in varying forms to have
+maintained its existence ever since, being to-day the Royal Blackheath
+Golf Club, and highly respected. I think we should regard this King
+James as being the very first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> of our London golfers, and he makes a
+fine figure of a player for the distinction, keen enough in all
+conscience. Five years before the reputed beginning of the Society at
+Blackheath he appointed William Mayne to be the royal clubmaker, and a
+few years later gave one named Melvill a monopoly of ball-making at four
+shillings a time. Altogether this makes a good scene of golf.</p>
+
+<p>Here in the earliest days the course of Blackheath consisted of but five
+holes, which was then considered the proper number, and was the same as
+the Honourable Company had at Leith. Later there were seven holes
+arranged, and though they are played in a different order, those seven
+remain much the same to-day. It is to the discredit of London golfers as
+a body, those golfers who make the most reverential pilgrimages to
+northern shrines, that they have not, to the extent of one in a hundred,
+ever been to the scene of the old Blackheath golf, or played a game
+there on this hallowed ground, as they may at their will. It is the
+story again of the prophet in his own country, the same failing as that
+by which the majority of Londoners might be condemned for never having
+visited the Tower of London. I believe I have met more golfers in
+America who have been to Blackheath than I have met in England, for I
+have encountered several who told me they had not cared to sail back
+home until they had made the short journey down from Charing Cross to
+the famous common.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the sense of history and the sentiment of pilgrimage,
+Blackheath, as a practical golfing proposition still surviving, should
+interest every golfer intensely. Surely it is one of the most
+interesting courses, one causing the deepest reflections, and one which,
+even by play upon it, might have some good effect on a man's game. For
+it is a chastening course, is our old Blackheath; one that makes
+humility if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> course ever did, and one that gives us the best contentment
+with our modern lot. Men who have played at Blackheath do not so
+constantly complain of the weak effort of their greenkeeper, and his
+governing committee, at their most favoured club. A little while since
+the cry was raised that golf had become too easy&mdash;too easy! It was said
+that the improving of the fairways and the smoothing of the putting
+greens had taken all its early viciousness from the game. Conditions
+have certainly changed, but when champions tell me that this maddening
+game from time to time brings their nerves to the state of piano wires,
+it may be reckoned as sufficiently difficult for the ordinary mortal.
+But Blackheath is extraordinary and most educative. It is certainly hard
+enough, though the modern bunker scientists have done nothing with it,
+and in the ordinary sense it has no bunkers. New theories of bunkering
+and the changing necessities of new kinds of balls trouble the
+Blackheath golfers not at all, for the course belongs to London and not
+to themselves, and they cannot do any engineering work upon it, as is
+being accomplished continually on other courses. Of the seven holes that
+are played the shortest is 170 yards, there is another of 230, a third
+of 335, another of 380, another of 410, a sixth of 500, and the longest
+is 540. The two very long holes come together, and though they are
+virtually bunkerless you may be assured that they take an uncommon
+amount of playing, and that he who gets them in five strokes each is
+skilful and fortunate too. Here, as nowhere else, is one made to feel
+that inferior shots bring their own punishment with them without any
+artificial hazards.</p>
+
+<p>The common is quite flat, but it is intersected by various roads and
+paths, and the greens are generally near to these walking ways. Variety
+is given by the great gravel pits which are here, as they have been for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span>
+ages, although they are now smoothed and grassed over, and the biggest
+of them has to be played through at both the long holes. What is known
+as "Whitfield's Mount," a little clump of enclosed trees, is almost the
+only relief from the bareness and flatness of this golfing common. The
+lies are better than they used to be, but however kindly they may think
+of them at Blackheath&mdash;and we must respect them for doing so&mdash;they are
+not good. How could they be? The common is open for the children of
+London, or any other place, to play upon, and for the grown-ups to
+lounge about or walk over, which in abundance they do. It is primarily a
+public common and only secondarily a golf course, and the vast majority
+of those who walk upon it know nothing of the great game, except what
+they occasionally see as they pass along. The golfers have no rights.
+They have the greens, as they are called for compliment, smoothed a
+little and made in some way to resemble greens; and there are holes of
+sorts but not generally with flags in them, and there are no teeing
+boxes. The fairway is as hard as might be expected, and consists for the
+most part of bare places and tufts. There is no smoothness and evenness
+of proper golfing turf about it. But one does not say this in an
+unappreciative way. Not for a million balls or a permanent increase of
+drive would we have Blackheath anything but what it is, for if it were
+changed the charm would be gone.</p>
+
+<p>Let us go there and try the game. We must decide in advance that, like
+Vardon, Braid, and Taylor we can play our real game before any gallery
+in the world, and let our nerves and self-confidence be braced
+accordingly, for those who play at Blackheath must undergo great
+ordeals. A number of children, usually accompanied by a small dog,
+discover us soon after our appearance on the course, and gather close
+while our stroke is being made, very close. There is a little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> boy,
+perhaps, one or two little girls, the baby, and the dog. We consider
+most the baby at Blackheath. The boy, occasionally relieved by the elder
+girl, is the spokesman of the party, and in tones indicative of complete
+sympathy with the objects of the expedition, which are to strike the
+ball and project it in the direction of the holes, he explains to the
+remainder what is about to be done, what is done, and how we fail to do
+what was intended. He corrects himself whenever he finds his information
+to have been wrong. Willie having told little Liza something about the
+performance that is pending, the child inquires about what will happen
+if the gentleman does not hit the ball, and the gentleman, hearing,
+develops fear. At this moment the dog, which has been lingering quietly
+within a yard of the ball, shows signs of becoming restive, and is
+inclined to smell at it. Finally it favours only a disconsolate bark.
+Somehow we despatch that ball at last, and then Willie, Nell, Liza,
+baby, Towser, and selves move on some way towards the hole, but not so
+far as we should have done, because the ball happened to strike a
+lamp-post; and on the way Liza desires to know if a golf ball would kill
+anybody if it hit them, and wishes Willie to buy one some day. And a
+human sweetness there is in these little Blackheath urchins after all!
+This early innocence is a sublime and splendid thing, and when in like
+circumstances you would scowl, you gentlemen from London, remember, if
+you please, that Liza called you one, and she thinks you are.</p>
+
+<p>And the caddies! At Blackheath they have the most wonderful of all
+caddies. The ways and manners and the character of the St. Andrews and
+Musselburgh caddies are inferior. These Blackheath fellows are not like
+the usual thing. They lean against the wall of the club-house and offer
+their services to the stranger, declaring that it is a nice day for the
+game,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> when a storm is gathering over the common. Generally the caddie
+is given to laziness; they are a shiftless company. But see, though the
+Blackheath caddie looks as indolent as any to begin with, he is in truth
+one of the most active fellows within a hundred miles of Charing Cross,
+as you very soon discover, after beginning the round with him. The old
+red flag of traction-engine law obtains at Blackheath still. The golfer
+is a dangerous person, death lurks in his flying ball, and so a man with
+a scarlet banner must walk before the player to warn all people that he
+is coming on. But we make the caddie do the ordinary work of carrying,
+and teeing up, and red-flagging also, and he contrives in effect to be
+in two places at the same time. He tees the ball, lays down the driver
+by the side of it, and then runs ahead with a coloured handkerchief,
+which is the red flag, and he waves it while on the run and the golfer
+follows. So the caddie, leaving near the ball the club that is needed,
+goes on again, and is always a shot ahead. Reaching the green he stands
+by the hole until the golfer comes near enough to see it, and then the
+man hurries away to the next tee, sets everything in a state of
+preparation (and he carries a supply of sand in his pocket), and at once
+is off again to the distance of a drive before the player has holed out.
+The weakness of this system is that the caddie, by force of
+circumstances, can know little or nothing of the progress of the match,
+he is not one of the party, and he cares nothing at all about our good
+shots. He lacks the sympathy of the real caddie, but he is marvellously
+efficient all the same. If it is true, as we always say, that golf is
+the same all over the world, I would suggest that if there is a place
+where it is not the same it is at Blackheath, and that is why every one
+should go there, and it should cease to be the fact that more London
+golfers have been to Fifeshire than have been to play upon that historic
+course.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Take a glimpse into the rich past of Blackheath golf. Look into the old
+bet-book of the club and see some entries there, and do not forget that
+all bets were made on the understanding that all members of the club had
+a share in the gains of the winner no matter whether the bets were made
+in cash or kind. On Saturday, July 9 1791, "Mr. Pitcaithly bets Captain
+Fairfull one gallon of claret that he drives the Short Hole in three
+strokes, six times in ten&mdash;to be played for the first time he comes to
+Blackheath&mdash;after the annual day. Lost and paid by Mr. Pitcaithly, the
+10th September." A little while later "Mr. Christie bets Mr. Barnes one
+gallon of claret that he drives from the Thorn Tree beyond the College
+Hole in three strokes, five times in ten, to be decided next Saturday."
+Mr. Christie in due course performed his driving feat and won his bet.
+Then "Captain Welladvice, having left the company without permission of
+the chair, has forfeited one gallon claret"; and "Mr. Turner bets Mr.
+Walker one gallon claret that he plays him on Wednesday, the 12th inst.,
+four rounds of the green, and that Mr. Walker does not gain a hole of
+him." Again, "Mr. Longlands bets Mr. Win. Innes, Sen., that he will play
+him for a gallon of claret, giving Mr. Innes one stroke in each hole.
+Four rounds on the green. Out and in holes to be played." One may well
+understand that all the good claret that was thus available from these
+gallant bets, together with what was bought and paid for in the ordinary
+course, had a heartening effect upon those old golfers, with the result
+that in the fine fancies that floated in the dining-hall of the "Green
+Man" after dinner, drives seemed all endowed with unusual length, and
+direction was always good. Again it is recorded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> that on an evening of
+June "Captain MacMillan bets a gallon with Mr. Jameson that Captain
+Macara in five strokes drives farther by fifteen yards than any other
+gentleman Mr. Jameson may name of the Golf Society now present, to be
+determined next Saturday"; and no sooner had Captain MacMillan
+registered his bet than there came along Mr. Callender, who "bets Mr.
+Hamilton one gallon that Mr. R. Mackenzie drives in five strokes farther
+than Mr. H., to commence at the Assembly Hole and go on five strokes
+running." Then Mr. Innes gets into a sporting mood, and he "bets Mr.
+Wilson a gallon (a guinea) that he beats him, allowing Mr. Innes the tee
+stroke with his wooden club, and after with his irons. Out and in&mdash;four
+rounds." All these were in the latter days of the eighteenth century,
+and all the time the happy golfers were filling up the bet-book of the
+club, not with golfing bets any more than, or as much as, with bets
+about events of the great war that was in progress; as, for instance,
+when Mr. Satterthwaite "bets Mr. Callender a gallon of claret that
+Admiral Nelson's squadron does take or destroy the French transports in
+the harbour of Alexandria, or the major part of them."</p>
+
+<p>In the Knuckle Club and the Blackheath Winter Golf Club, forerunners of
+the Blackheath Golf Club, the same happy state of affairs prevailed. The
+Knuckle Club was a very remarkable institution. In form it was a secret
+society. Each member had to be initiated, and had to learn certain signs
+and answers to questions by which he would know brother members from
+strangers. Also, the members wore orders or a kind of regalia, and there
+were heavy fines if they allowed themselves to be seen outside the
+club-rooms with these special tokens of their community about them. On
+one occasion we have a member, named James Walker, heavily fined in
+claret for being so thoughtless as to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> take home his order. The holder
+of the golfing gold medal for the year was termed the Grand Knuckle, and
+was the chief of the club, which boasted also a "Registrar," and various
+other officials of much dignity of title. As the mystic element of the
+club decreased, so the golfing strength and enthusiasm of it increased,
+and it was by this process of evolution that in course of time the
+mystery lapsed and the name was changed. Before the competitions of the
+club took place advertisements were always inserted in the <i>Times</i> and
+the <i>Morning Chronicle</i> of the period, and it must be remarked that play
+in these competitions was usually conducted on the strictest lines. One
+record in the minutes reads: "28th March, 1795. Medal Day. It being
+stated to the club that Mr. Innes, one of the candidates for the medal
+played for this day, lost his ball; the opinion of the club was desired
+whether the loss of the ball put an end to the candidate's chance for
+the honours of the day." The club determined that it did. So more than a
+hundred years ago their medal rules were stricter than ours, in this
+matter at any rate. "Scrutineers" always examined the medal cards after
+dinner, and announced the winner. In the early part of last century
+there seems to have been rather less of betting and a little more of
+feasting. There were gifts of venison and turtle from the members, and
+the supply of claret, varied now and then by champagne and choice
+spirits, was very copious. Each time a child was born to a member, he
+contributed a pound's worth of claret to the weekly or monthly dinner;
+and whenever a member was married, the same thing was done. The golf of
+Blackheath, and all connected with it, was then a highly picturesque
+thing. The course was yet only a five-holes affair. The clubs of the
+players were carried by pensioners of the Royal Naval Hospital,
+Greenwich, in their quaint uniforms, and an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> allowance of beer was
+regularly made to them by the club until 1832. The pensioners were
+caddies until 1869.</p>
+
+<p>The Royal Blackheath Club was, and still is, most original and
+interesting in many points of its constitution and government. To be
+captain of this club, small one comparatively as it is now, is to fill a
+high office, the honourable nature of which is duly impressed upon the
+holder at the time of his election and installation, for he is elevated
+with much ceremony and in much the same way as the captain of the Royal
+and Ancient Club. The retiring captain sits in his chair at the meeting
+for the last time, and thanks are offered to him by grateful members for
+the good things he has done in his year. And then the captain-elect is
+called by name by the secretary, who takes in his arms the silver club
+which is the equivalent of the mace in Parliament, the symbol of power
+and active authority, and places himself at the head of a procession
+which is formed. The field-marshal, conducting the newcomer to the
+chair, follows behind, and so they make their way to the head of the
+chamber, where the field-marshal presents the new captain to the old
+one. There are various little forms of ritual to be gone through; the
+new captain makes a solemn declaration of loyalty and fidelity to the
+club and his office, and, particularly, expresses his anxiety to
+maintain its dignity, and then he commits himself irrevocably and
+awfully to an undying oath&mdash;he kisses the club! All this is to-day just
+as it was in the ancient days. Mention has been made of the
+field-marshal of the club; no other club boasts a field-marshal, who
+fills an office of most ineffable and incomparable dignity. Captains may
+come and go, year by year; they do their work well; and they lay down
+the club. But the field-marshal is above all captains, and he is in
+office till he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> dies. He is a prince over captains. He is essentially a
+golfer&mdash;not a mere ornament&mdash;and a good golfer, and one strong in the
+true spirit of the game. Because a good field-marshal is not easily
+found, he is made much of. The installation of a new one is a fine
+ceremony. There is a solemn gathering, all the famous trophies and bits
+of regalia are furbished up; there are speeches, forms, declarations,
+questions, answers; and if it were a very coronation the thing could
+scarcely be more serious. The silver club is held before the
+field-marshal elect, and he is presented with the special medal of his
+office, when he is finally addressed thus: "We expect and ask that you
+will wear this medal at all golf meetings as your predecessors did; and
+we have further to ask that you will in all time coming, while you are
+spared in health, do all that in you lies to maintain and support the
+rights and privileges of this ancient club; to maintain the honour and
+dignity of the club; and should any attempts be made to interfere with
+the rights of the club, that you will aid the executive in endeavouring
+to put down such interference, so that the club may maintain the high
+and honourable position that it ever has done, since its institution in
+1608. Kiss the club!" The field-marshal kisses it, and thus he is
+exalted among the highest in the whole world of golf.</p>
+
+<p>There are many eras with marked features to be noted in the history of
+the club. Even now many of those features are still perpetuated. Dinners
+are still held; dignity still is high. We have now heard much of the
+old-time Blackheath golfers; but an era of vast consequence, not only to
+Blackheath but to the game, is one that can still be remembered by some
+old golfers, that of great activity which began just before the middle
+of last century, and is only just now reaching its climax in the great
+and universal "boom" in golf.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> It has already been suggested that
+Blackheath led the way, and led it most effectively. For long after it
+had done so it was still the premier club in England, and in playing
+strength was the best. The club itself has few solid possessions&mdash;just a
+few fine old club heirlooms&mdash;but many great memories. In a very modern
+sense it is poor, having a comfortable but not a magnificent club-house,
+and no splendid links of eighteen holes. But the Royal Blackheath Golf
+Club is like a fine old English gentleman of the very best kind,
+ignoring all new ways of thought and life, eschewing all sordidness,
+clinging to the fine simple principles of wise fore-fathers. That is
+just what it is, the fine old English gentleman whom the age has
+outstripped. It is the Colonel Newcome of the clubs.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>And in that pageant of London golf that we suggested there are many
+other picturesque and significant scenes. If we cannot be sure of the
+places where the holes were cut, nor of the situation of the teeing
+grounds, it is still certain, from documentary evidence, that a golf
+course that was made at Molesey Hurst was only second, in point of
+seniority, in England, to Blackheath itself, and it was very high up in
+the list of the golf clubs of the world. Manchester came next in 1818.
+There are concerned in the only existing record two people of no less
+credit and renown than David Garrick, the actor, and the eminent Dr.
+Alexander Carlyle, of Inveresk, who witnessed the Porteous riots, saw
+the fight at Prestonpans, and amid these many excitements cultivated his
+game to a fine point, was one of the keenest golfers of the eighteenth
+century, and won the Musselburgh medal in 1775. Carlyle was like many
+others of the Scottish parsons of those good times and the present,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> who
+would take their golf clubs with them wherever they might wander, on the
+chance of opportunity presenting itself. He came to London, and knowing
+of Blackheath, the clubs came with him. Garrick at that time had a house
+at Hampton which in recent days was occupied by the late Sir Clifton
+Robinson, the organiser of the London electric tramway system. Garrick
+asked John Home and a number of friends, including Carlyle, to dine with
+him at Hampton and bring their golf clubs and balls with them that they
+might play on the course at Molesey Hurst. When the six of them, who
+were in a landau, passed through Kensington, the Coldstreams, who were
+changing guard, observed their clubs, and gave them three cheers "in
+honour of a diversion peculiar to Scotland."</p>
+
+<p>There might be a railway train in the pageant of London golf, one of the
+early trains with engines of the Stephensonian style. The period would
+be just after the accession of Queen Victoria, and there would be two
+gentlemen travelling together from London to Aldershot, one of them
+being Sir Hope Grant, a keen golfer, a member of the Royal and Ancient
+Club, who held a military appointment at Aldershot, while the other
+would be the Duke of Cambridge. It has been recorded that in matter of
+companionship this journey was a very dull affair, for Sir Hope Grant
+was moody, and failed to respond to the well-meant attempts of the Duke
+to open conversation. He seemed troubled. But suddenly after long
+silence he jumped up from his seat, rushed to the window of the
+compartment and opened it. At this stage the Duke of Cambridge felt that
+things could not be well with his companion, and jumping up after him,
+grabbed him by the tails of his coat. A moment later they both sat down,
+and looked at each other. "Well," said Sir Hope Grant, in the manner of
+a man recovering from a great surprise,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> "that is a thing that you
+seldom see near London; there were two men playing golf in a field out
+there."</p>
+
+<p>And then in the pageant there would be represented the starting of golf
+at Wimbledon in 1865, with the Blackheath emissaries all on fire with
+the zeal of their enterprise. Wimbledon with its Royal Wimbledon and its
+London Scottish, its famous holes and its windmill, and all the rest of
+it, has played no small part in golfing history. At the beginning seven
+holes were made as they had them at Blackheath, and did you ever hear
+that at Wimbledon once there was a round that consisted of nineteen
+holes, the longest round in number of holes in the world? Tom Dunn, who
+was responsible for the extension of the course about 1870, told the
+story, and so far as I am aware he only told it in America. We may
+repeat it here in the words he used. The committee had asked him whether
+he thought they might make a full-sized course on their land, and,
+coming to the conclusion that they might, he was told to go on with the
+work, and eventually was satisfied that he had made a good job of it.
+The secretary of the period is said to have been somewhat imperfectly
+acquainted with the game in general just then, and went to Dunn with the
+inquiry as to how many holes they had on the old course at St. Andrews,
+and was told. "The secretary thought a moment," said Tom, "scratched his
+head and began to look wise. Then he approached very closely, and
+nodding his head for me to bend my ear, he whispered in a hoarse voice,
+'Tom, let us have one more!' 'Oh, that is impossible,' I replied. 'It
+cannot be, for eighteen is the orthodox number.' 'I care not for that,'
+replied the secretary, who was accustomed to have his own way, 'we will
+have one more!' I was very young at the time and I would do anything
+rather than offend the gentleman, for he had much influence, and I
+wanted his goodwill;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> so I reluctantly submitted to the demand. The
+committee met the next day, and I was asked if I had succeeded in making
+an eighteen-holes course. I replied, with some hesitation, that I had
+made a nineteen-holes course, and explained why I had done so. Well, you
+never in your life saw a more excited lot of men. There was an uproar in
+a moment, and all made a dive for the poor secretary, who never heard
+the last of it."</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>Within sight of Wimbledon now there is Coombe Hill, one of the best and
+most recent achievements in the new metropolitan golf. Here is a
+contrast indeed! One may sometimes wonder how those ill-tempered people
+who grumble that golfers in these days take their game, and all about
+it, too richly, and that fine club-houses do not make plus players&mdash;such
+complainers still being eager for all the most modern comforts
+themselves&mdash;would like to live their golfing lives for a season after
+the early Wimbledon manner in all its great simplicity. The first
+club-house those golfers ever had, if you would call it by the name, was
+the old iron "shooting house," and it measured only eight yards by six.
+It served the purposes of club-room, clothes-room and others. If its
+floor space was small, its roof was high, and the members' clothes were
+hung up on hooks, to the very top; and were lifted up to their proper
+places, and reached down again by a pole. Most of the numerous members
+had their private hooks, and a boy who worked the pole had a most
+marvellous memory for the garments and their proper owners, so that when
+a member, coming in suddenly, called for his jacket and his stockings,
+up went the pole, and down came the goods without a moment's delay, and
+all correct. This remarkable young person has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> his proper and
+highly-developed successor in Gibbon, the house-steward at the present
+Mid-Surrey club at Richmond, who, though he has nearly a thousand
+members to consider, knows so well the particularities and possessions
+of them all. Tom Dunn had his workshop in this iron shooting house, and
+here he kept a fair stock of clubs and balls, and did his own repairs.
+Presently some of the members suggested to him that it would be
+agreeable if he stored some eatables and drinkables in his shop for
+their sustenance and comfort, before and after rounds; and so he laid in
+a stock of wines and spirits, sandwiches and eggs, and so forth, which
+had of necessity to be laid out on his bench where there were varnish,
+shavings, sawdust and pitch as well. Behold here the early London
+golfer! It is an interesting historical fact, that when a few years
+after its establishment, and just before the Tom Dunn era, the club
+first thought of engaging a professional, the committee set it on record
+that "they took a very favourable view of young Tom Morris's application
+for the post."</p>
+
+<p>The people who accuse the moderns of being over fond of prizes in
+competitions&mdash;and a nasty name they call them!&mdash;might be told the tale
+of the old golfing baronet of Wimbledon, now dead, who once won five
+shillings, being his half share of the third prize in the sweepstakes
+attached to the monthly medal competition there. It was the first prize
+that this keen but unfortunate golfer had ever won, and he begged the
+permission of the committee to be allowed to add more money for a richer
+keepsake. The consent of the authorities was graciously given, whereupon
+the prize-winner purchased for himself a golden-eagle writing stand for
+which he gave a hundred sovereigns, adding ninety-nine pounds fifteen
+shillings to the prize-money. Friends, not being golfers, who called
+upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> him had the prize exhibited to them, and they said, "Goodness,
+what a fine player you must be!" He felt he was, and that the prize was
+worth the money.</p>
+
+<p>When the 'nineties of the last century were reached golf began to spread
+in London, and such clubs as Northwood with its "Death or Glory" Hole,
+Tooting Bec, and Mid-Surrey laid the foundation for the great London
+golf that was soon to come. This Mid-Surrey club with its thousand
+members, its financial turnover of thirty thousand pounds a year, its
+hundred thousand rounds that are played on that excellent course in
+twelve months without its showing hardly the wear of a blade of grass,
+the twenty thousand lunches that are eaten by their members, the four
+thousand pounds that were spent in one year lately on the improvement of
+the course, is, I believe, the busiest golfing institution in the world.
+It is well said that there is nearly always a couple driving off from
+that first teeing ground near the rails in the Old Deer Park. And one
+might add that as a place where golf is played in a plain but excellent
+spirit, without any fancy trappings, the club here is one of the best
+organised and managed in the world, and is a vast credit to the
+secretary, Mr. J. H. Montgomerie, while the course, whose putting greens
+are a match for any in existence, is a fine testimonial to that prince
+of greenkeepers, Peter Lees, who was lately captured by the Americans
+for a great new course on Long Island. Lees has been a great influence
+in the development of modern golf in England, and I know that he will
+make a great difference to American courses. And there is champion J. H.
+Taylor as the club's professional. In a special way Mid-Surrey stands
+for London golf.</p>
+
+<p>It has come to this, that we no longer fear to speak and write of the
+great excellence of the London golf courses. Sunningdale at the
+beginning of the present<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> century opened up a new era not only in London
+golf but in golf in general&mdash;the period of the inland courses of a far
+higher class, better and more interesting in every respect than anything
+that had ever been dreamt of before. Sunningdale was followed by
+Huntercombe and Walton Heath, of which Sir George Riddell has assisted
+to make such a magnificent success. There have come after them
+Worplesdon, Burhill, Bramshot, Stoke Poges, Sandy Lodge, Coombe Hill,
+St. George's Hill, and many others all belonging to the same class. Many
+of us hold to the fancy that Sunningdale, the mother of the new sort of
+courses, is still the best and most charming of them all. She is the
+Berkshire jewel; magnificent. But comparisons are not easily made, for,
+most remarkably and happily, these new modern inland courses that are
+setting an example to the world and which the world is following
+wherever it can afford it, vary enormously in character, in appearance,
+in the precise sort of golf that they present and offer, whereas at the
+beginning of inland golf we had the fancy, and the fancy truly led to
+fact, that in the main all inland courses must be the same&mdash;plain, flat,
+one cross bunker here, another there, and then the green. Not only the
+architecture, but, far more than that in its beneficial effects, the
+greenkeeping has been improved, soils are understood, they are fortified
+and seeds are adapted to them, and results are achieved which not ten
+years ago would have been regarded as impossible. The result is that we
+have fairways and putting greens on some of our best inland courses near
+London which are rarely excelled at the seaside, although nothing can
+ever give to inland turf that firm springiness&mdash;a term slightly
+paradoxical but one easily appreciated&mdash;which is the characteristic of
+good seaside links. No longer is good inland golf to be despised. It has
+charms all its own, and it has the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> distinction that golf as we know it
+to-day would never have existed if it were not for the inland courses.
+There are fewer hedges on them now than once there were, and no more
+ditches than there should be.</p>
+
+
+<h4>§</h4>
+
+<p>To a section of old conservatives it may seem a dreadful thing to say,
+but it is the truth that one of the reasons why we love our golf of
+London, praise it and rejoice in it, is because of its glorious trees.
+We know courses on the coast where there is never a tree or a bush to be
+seen, and never one to be avoided in the playing. The golfers who live
+and play and die in those parts know nothing of the splendour of trees
+and the leaves that come and go, and knowing nothing they will even
+sometimes wrongfully say that no golf course ever should have a tree
+about it. Golf is a game of Nature; allow it then all the best effects
+that Nature can supply. Permit it the trees that the townsmen otherwise
+so seldom see; cutting them down, hewing them away will not bring the
+ocean nearer nor liken the course more to seaside golf. Trees belong to
+the inland game as much as sandhills to the other, and when a question
+of removal arises, let constructors and committees reflect that a golfer
+can be made in a season and he perishes some time later, that a new hole
+can be made in a week and may be altered the week after, that some shots
+which are thought of might be hindered by the tree but that only one
+shot in a dozen is likely to be of the kind that is considered&mdash;and that
+the tree has taken ages to grow, and will live ages on, being more of
+eternity than many generations of golfers.</p>
+
+<p>They may not always be conscious of the fact, but the people who live in
+towns and are cooped in them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> constantly, abiding in flats, working in
+gloomy chambers and travelling in underground railways, derive more than
+half their golfing enjoyment from the vision of Nature, less adorned
+than in the public parks, with which they become associated in their
+golf&mdash;grass to tread upon, surrounding trees through which soft breezes
+croon, and timid clouds creeping slowly underneath the blue. There is
+nothing so good as the golf of the true seaside links; there could not
+be. In this, the real thing, we have land formations that are impossible
+on inland flatness; there are the wildness of dunes and bent that cannot
+be reproduced artificially away from the coast; we have the perfect turf
+that is ideal for the game and which has never yet been completely
+imitated away from shore, and above all, through the rich variety of
+situation and possibility, we have the course springing surprises on us
+all the time. This is golf in the highest, the stern, cold, enthralling
+game. London golf is a gentler thing, a little softer, but it has charms
+that are all its own, and they are the charms of green Nature and the
+delights of changing seasons. By the sea it is warm or it is cold, and
+there is little difference else from the beginning of the year to the
+end. But in London the golfer notices the seasons as he does nowhere
+else, and they are everything to him and his happiness. And the trees
+best tell him of the seasons, and it is then that he might exclaim, as
+Ruskin did, "What a great thought of God was that when He thought a
+tree!"</p>
+
+<p>In this way the two most beautiful seasons of the year, spring and
+autumn, touching nearest the heart, creating inspirations and causing
+reflection, the germinal and the fall, are the most splendid times for
+golf in London, and at other inland places, and they are surely the best
+seasons of all for the enjoyment and happiness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> the game. But
+particularly they are London's seasons. In the spring there is the time
+for preparation, when all golfers are keen in a new life. Then the
+leaves of the trees are opened, and are there prettier scenes on any
+course than on some of those near London then? There is hardly to be
+fancied a better day than could be had at St. George's Hill or on the
+New Zealand course at Byfleet when the golden gorse is in bloom and
+gives out its rich perfume, while the trees that line the fairway all
+about are full to life again. Think, when May is come, of the glory of
+Sudbrooke Park, Cassiobury, of Sunningdale, even of Neasden, Northwood,
+and a hundred more. Then there comes the holiday time, and the seaside
+links, and the golf of London rests until the autumn, and then it is
+alive again; and let the faults of London golf be whatever they may, the
+players are few who are not happy to return to the old courses of home.
+Be they ever so poor they are their very own.</p>
+
+<p>This of all others is the most delightful golfing season. The white sun
+of summer has been toned to gold, and the air is sweet and cool; the
+turf is moist again. It is soothing; but there is a pathos in it all
+that the golfer, sensitive and sympathetic observer as he has become,
+must always feel. One may tramp a country lane and notice little, but
+the men of this game have been trained to notice. Here present is the
+season of the fall, the rest after achievement, when Nature closes in
+upon herself and lapses to her sleep. She has done her season's work,
+done it wisely, ever well. So the fires of heaven burn low again. Green
+of the world turns russet and bronze, with flashes of scarlet and gold.
+A smell of earth that is moist with autumn dew rises in the morning air.
+When the round begins the sun warmth is not enough to dry away the
+little globules of the dew, tears of the sobbing night,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> and the course
+has a glittering sheen upon it. From drooping branches of beeches and
+sycamores that half surround a putting green in a corner of the course,
+crackling leaves are falling and some must be moved before the intruding
+ball can be putted to its appointed place. As the little golfing company
+moves along to the adjoining tee more of these spent leaves come
+fluttering sadly down. But, a little sad as this may be, the golfer of
+the towns, with summer memories of mountains and hills and deep lanes
+still lingering in his mind, hearing the crooning of the summer seas and
+the lapping of waves near northern putting greens, has his consolations.
+He is grateful for the coppery leaves and the early dew, though they may
+hinder play a trifle. They are as echoes from the north and east and
+west. We see no dew in Piccadilly, and there are no mountains in the
+Strand.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOKS ON GOLF</h2>
+
+
+<p>THE SOUL OF GOLF. By <span class="smcap">P. A. Vaile</span>. Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>GOLF ILLUSTRATED.</i>&mdash;"We can only say that we read it through without
+finding a dull page, and that in our opinion it is a book which will
+give hope to the duffer and new light even to the advanced player."</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>THE MYSTERY OF GOLF. By <span class="smcap">Arnold Haultain</span>. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Mr. <span class="smcap">Henry Leach</span> <i>in the EVENING NEWS</i>.&mdash;"Mr. Haultain's book answers to
+all the tests to which it may be submitted, and I am strongly disposed
+to regard it as the best book of its kind that has ever been written."</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>TRAVERS' GOLF BOOK. By <span class="smcap">Jerome D. Travers</span>. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 8s.
+6d. net.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>FRY'S MAGAZINE.</i>&mdash;"Mr. Travers' book is a valuable contribution to
+golfing literature, and it should be bought and read by every golfer."</p></blockquote>
+
+
+<p>THE ART OF PUTTING. By <span class="smcap">W. J. Travis</span> and <span class="smcap">Jack White</span>. Illustrated. Crown
+8vo. 1s. net.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>GOLFING.</i>&mdash;"Into little space Mr. Travis crowds many valuable hints to
+the willing student.... It's a big shillingsworth, and those of you who
+invest will find that is so."</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>GREAT LAWN TENNIS PLAYERS: <span class="smcap">Their Methods Illustrated</span>. By <span class="smcap">G. W. Beldam</span>
+and <span class="smcap">P. A. Vaile</span>. With 229 Action Photographs. Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.</p>
+
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+With 600 Action Photographs. Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>GREAT BOWLERS AND FIELDERS: <span class="smcap">Their Methods at a Glance</span>. By <span class="smcap">G. W. Beldam</span>
+and <span class="smcap">C. B. Fry</span>. With contributions by <span class="smcap">F. R. Spofforth</span>, <span class="smcap">B. J. T.
+Bosanquet</span>, <span class="smcap">R. O. Schwarz</span>, and <span class="smcap">G. L. Jessop</span>; and 464 Action Photographs.
+Medium 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>LAWN TENNIS, ITS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. By <span class="smcap">J. Parmly Paret</span>. With a
+chapter on Lacrosse by <span class="smcap">W. H. Maddren</span>. Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 8s.
+6d. net.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span></p>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<h2>BOOKS ON SPORT</h2>
+
+
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+8vo. 7s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>THE MAN-EATERS OF TSAVO, AND OTHER EAST AFRICAN ADVENTURES. By
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+<span class="smcap">Frederick Courteney Selous</span>. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. Also Globe 8vo. 1s. net.</p>
+
+<p>IN THE GRIP OF THE NYIKA. Further Adventures in British East Africa. By
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+
+<p>A HUNTER'S WANDERINGS IN AFRICA. Nine Years amongst the Game of the Far
+Interior of South Africa. By <span class="smcap">Frederick Courteney Selous</span>. Illustrated.
+Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>AFRICAN NATURE NOTES AND REMINISCENCES. By <span class="smcap">Frederick Courteney Selous</span>.
+With a Foreword by <span class="smcap">Theodore Roosevelt</span> and Illustrations by <span class="smcap">E. Caldwell</span>.
+8vo. 10s. net.</p>
+
+<p>A COLONY IN THE MAKING, OR SPORT AND PROFIT IN BRITISH EAST AFRICA. By
+Lord <span class="smcap">Cranworth</span>. Illustrated. 8vo. 12s. net.</p>
+
+<p>SPORT ON THE NILGIRIS AND IN WYNAAD. By <span class="smcap">F. W. F. Fletcher</span>. Illustrated.
+8vo. 12s. net.</p>
+
+<p>NOTES ON SPORT AND TRAVEL. By <span class="smcap">George Kingsley</span>. With Introductory Memoir
+by his daughter, <span class="smcap">Mary H. Kingsley</span>. Extra Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.</p>
+
+<p>AN ANGLER'S HOURS. By <span class="smcap">H. T. Sheringham</span>. Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.</p>
+
+<p class="center">LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Golfer, by Henry Leach
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+</pre>
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Golfer, by Henry Leach
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Happy Golfer
+       Being Some Experiences, Reflections, and a Few Deductions
+       of a Wandering Golfer
+
+Author: Henry Leach
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2011 [EBook #37136]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY GOLFER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Bergquist, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             THE HAPPY GOLFER
+
+                 _BEING SOME EXPERIENCES, REFLECTIONS, AND
+                  A FEW DEDUCTIONS OF A WANDERING PLAYER_
+
+                              BY HENRY LEACH
+
+   AUTHOR OF "THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS," "LETTERS OF A MODERN GOLFER," ETC.
+
+
+    MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+    ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+
+    1914
+
+    COPYRIGHT
+
+
+
+
+     CONTENTS
+
+
+     CHAPTER I
+
+     THE SEVEN WONDERS OF GOLF, AND THE ABIDING MYSTERY OF THE GAME,
+     WITH A THOUGHT UPON TRADITIONS AND THEIR VALUE                    1
+
+     CHAPTER II
+
+     THE UBIQUITY OF THE GAME: WITH AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY
+     OF GOLFERS, AND A NOTE UPON THE EFFECT OF ST. ANDREWS SPIRITS    28
+
+     CHAPTER III
+
+     THE TRAGEDIES OF THE SHORT PUTT, AND A CONTRAST BETWEEN CHILDREN
+     AND CHAMPIONS, WITH THE VARIED COUNSEL OF THE WISEST MEN         56
+
+     CHAPTER IV
+
+     OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A
+     SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME                             88
+
+     CHAPTER V
+
+     A FAMOUS CHAMPIONSHIP AT BROOKLINE, U.S.A., AND AN ACCOUNT OF HOW
+     MR. FRANCIS OUIMET WON IT, WITH SOME EXPLANATION OF SEEMING
+     MYSTERIES                                                       110
+
+     CHAPTER VI
+
+     THE BEGINNINGS OF GOLF IN THE UNITED STATES, AND EXPERIENCES IN
+     TRAVELLING THERE, WITH AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CLUB MANAGEMENT   140
+
+     CHAPTER VII
+
+     THE PERFECT COUNTRY CLUB AND THE GOLFERS' POW-WOW AT ONWENTSIA,
+     WITH A GLIMPSE OF THE NATIONAL LINKS                            166
+
+     CHAPTER VIII
+
+     THE U.S.G.A. AND THE METHODS OF THE BUSINESS-MAN GOLFER, WITH A
+     REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT OF MUNICIPAL GOLF                        199
+
+     CHAPTER IX
+
+     CANADIAN COURSES, AND A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AT TORONTO, WITH MATTERS
+     PERTAINING TO MAKING A NEW BEGINNING                            226
+
+     CHAPTER X
+
+     GOLF DE PARIS, AND SOME REMARKABLE EVENTS AT VERSAILLES AND
+     CHANTILLY, WITH NEW THEORIES BY HIGH AUTHORITIES                251
+
+     CHAPTER XI
+
+     RIVIERA GOLF, AND WHAT MIGHT BE LEARNED FROM LADIES, WITH A
+     CONSIDERATION OF THE OVERLAPPING GRIP                           277
+
+     CHAPTER XII
+
+     ABOUT THE PYRENEES, AND THE CHARMS OF GOLF AT BIARRITZ AND PAU,
+     WITH POSSIBILITIES FOR GREAT ADVENTURE                          302
+
+
+     CHAPTER XIII
+
+     THE GAME IN ITALY, AND THE QUALITY OF THE COURSE AT ROME, WITH A
+     SHORT CONSIDERATION OF THE VALUE OF STYLE                       324
+
+     CHAPTER XIV
+
+     THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN
+     MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES                339
+
+     CHAPTER XV
+
+     THE SUPERIORITY OF BRITISH LINKS, AND A MASTERPIECE OF KENT, WITH
+     SOME SYSTEMS AND MORALS FOR HOLIDAY GOLF                        364
+
+     CHAPTER XVI
+
+     THE OLD DIGNITY OF LONDON GOLF, AND ITS NEW IMPORTANCE, WITH A WORD
+     FOR THE CHARM OF INLAND COURSES                                 392
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE SEVEN WONDERS OF GOLF, AND THE ABIDING MYSTERY OF THE GAME, WITH A
+THOUGHT UPON TRADITIONS AND THEIR VALUE.
+
+
+The first of the seven wonders of golf is a mysterious fascination that
+it sets towards mankind, from which, overwhelming and enduring, no
+people are immune. The game seizes men of all ages, of every
+nationality, all occupations, dispositions, temperaments--all of them.
+The charm acts upon men and women alike. Sometimes we have suspected
+that males are more whole-hearted golfers; but there are circumstances
+of quick recurrence to cause a doubt, and even were there none the
+fancied difference would be capable of explanation. It has nearly become
+an established rule that they golf the most who golf the last, for there
+is no man of the links so keen, so simple and humble in his abandonment
+to the game, as he who but lately held aloof and laughed, with many a
+gibe upon the madness of the class. Savages have attempted golf and
+found they liked it, and the finest intellects are constantly exercised
+upon its difficulties. So this diversion, pastime, game has become a
+thing of everywhere and everybody as no other sport of any kind has ever
+done. The number of people who play no golf decreases daily, and events
+of the last ten years have shown that its supremacy as the chief of
+games is sure. It is clear, indeed, that, so far as the numbers attached
+to it are concerned, it is still only at its beginning, in toddling
+infancy. A few years hence its intimate part in general life will be
+better realised; even now you do not so frequently ask a man of movement
+and intelligence whether he plays golf or not as what his handicap may
+be and what kind of ball he likes the best. No other game or sport
+exercises anything like such power of fascination upon its people as
+this. A tennis-player may leave tennis if he must; the cricketer often
+voluntarily gives up cricket for no compelling reason; a man of the
+hills and moors may cease to care for shooting; and one who has made an
+automobile speed like the wind along the roads may sell his car and be
+motorist nevermore. But the golfer will and must always golf, and never
+less but more while strength permits. Men who go to the sea in ships
+take golf clubs with them; I have known golfers carry their materials
+into deserts, and one of the greatest and noblest explorers the world
+has known took them with him to one far end of earth. Surely this is a
+very remarkable thing, a feature of life that is strange as it is
+strong, and it is not nonsense to suggest that this is no ordinary game
+and cannot be considered as a game like others. Somewhere in a
+mysterious way it touches the springs of life, makes emotions shake. It
+grips; it twitches at the senses. Why?
+
+No person has yet answered that question well and with decision, though
+many have attempted to do so in written words, and ten thousand times
+and more have players in their talk touched upon the lasting problem,
+and then, with that natural human avoidance of the impossible, have
+shuffled off to some topic more amenable. Here, it seemed, was one of
+the mysteries of life, and these are such as it is better not to meddle
+with. So through neglect and our timidity the problem has seemed to
+deepen. It has become the Great Mystery. Wonder and awe are thick about
+it. Men who were innocent and have turned to golf do not give a reason
+why; they are silent to the questioner. They say that he too will see in
+time, and then they golf exceedingly. Surely, then, this Great Mystery
+of its fascination is the first of the seven wonders of golf; and it is
+appropriate enough that a game that covers the world and embraces all
+mankind should have special and well-separated wonders numbering seven
+like the seven others of the earth at large: the traditions of the game,
+its amazing ubiquity, St. Andrews, the short putt, the achievements of
+golfers, and the rubber-cored ball are the other six. Each has its
+well-established place, and between the seventh of the group and the
+eighth, being chief of the thousand minor wonders, there is a wide
+separation.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not for one poor atom in a great and complex golfing world to put
+forward with any look of dogma a suggested solution to this subtle
+mystery which the philosophers have probed so long and fruitlessly. He
+will subscribe with others in a consoling renunciation to the view that
+it is not for human mortals, who should be happy with delights that are
+given them, to tear down veils from the faces of hidden gods. But as a
+theory--shall we say?--he may advance an explanation which is
+satisfying to one who has wondered as much as any others and inquired as
+often during many years, while yet it still leaves a place for mystery
+and a suggestion of eternal doubt. And the chief difference between this
+theory and others that have preceded it is that this is what might be
+called Collective while the others have commonly been theories of single
+ideas. Philosophic research towards the solution of the mystery
+hitherto has been almost exclusively based upon the supposition of there
+being one peculiar unknown cause for the amazing fascination, a
+magnificent _x_, something that in our present imperfect state of
+knowledge could hardly be imagined, but which has been vaguely conceived
+to be connected in some ways with the senses--and maybe the spirit. We
+have known that in some mysterious and it has seemed almost supernatural
+way the emotions have been stirred, most deeply shaken, by the pursuit
+of golf, and the case has seemed so inexplicable that the existence of
+an overwhelming unknown factor for the cause has been suspected. Here
+investigation has naturally faltered. I myself for long enough was
+inclined to the possibility of the single-cause theory being correct,
+and with devotion was attached to that "Hope" suggestion which satisfied
+most requirements and went far towards an explanation of all the
+mysteries. That this doctrine, whose merits shall be considered, is
+largely correct, that it does account for much of the mystery, I am well
+convinced; but we who have studied in the latest schools of philosophy
+are now unwilling to believe that it accounts completely for everything,
+that, in fact, this hope, which the circumstances of the game cause to
+flame continually in the golfer's mind like the great human passion that
+it is, is the one and only Force of golf, though it is almost certainly
+the major force of a group and dominates the others. Our new idea for a
+solution to the grand mystery is that there is a number of forces or
+causes of widely different character but associated in complete harmony
+for the production of strong emotional effects in the mind of the
+subject--emotions of the simplest and most natural character, but, like
+others touching at the mainsprings of life, in their action most
+intense. In a simple, unanalytical, and rather unphilosophical way, the
+game of golf has often been compared to the game of life, just indeed as
+other games and pursuits have been pointed for comparisons with the
+process of human existence. So we have been exhibited as starting in
+life at the teeing ground, abounding in hope and possibility. The
+troubles, ills, and worries that have soon afflicted us have been found
+their counterparts, all the analogies made to suit the careful people
+who play short of hazards and enjoy a smooth existence, the bold
+adventurers who brave long carries and like best the romantic road, the
+deep bunkers of misfortune, the constant menace of the rough for those
+who hesitate upon the straight and narrow way, the unexpected gifts of
+Providence when long putts are holed, the erratic inclination of the
+poor human when the little ones are missed. But now we find that in a
+far deeper and more consequential way this sympathy between golf and
+life exists, and that in this gentle play there is a repetition in
+lighter tones of the throbbing theme of existence.
+
+In the strong action upon the emotions which takes place during the
+practice of the game there are effects which are purely physical and
+others which are largely mental and spiritual. The physical thrills of
+golf are above the comprehension of any man or woman who has not played
+the game. We are certain that in the whole range of sport or human
+exercise there is nothing that is quite so good as the sublime
+sensation, the exquisite feeling of physical delight, that is gained in
+the driving of a golf ball with a wooden club in the manner that it
+ought to be driven. This last provision is emphasised, for this is a
+matter of style and action, and the sensuous thrill is gained from the
+exertion of physical strength in such a mechanically, scientifically,
+and physically perfect manner as to produce an absolute harmony of
+graceful movement. It is as the satisfaction and thanks of Nature.
+Sometimes we hear sportsmen speak of certain sensations derived from
+particular strokes at cricket, others of an occasional sudden ecstasy in
+angling, and one may well believe that life runs strong in the blood
+when a man shoots his first tiger or his first wild elephant. But the
+feelings of golf are subtler, sweeter, and that we are not stupidly
+prejudiced or exclusive for the game may be granted if it is suggested
+that we reach some way to the golf sensations in two other human
+exercises, the one being in the dancing of the waltz when done
+thoroughly well and with a fine rhythmical swing, and the other when
+skating on the ice with full and complete abandon. In each case it is a
+matter of perfect poise, of the absolute perfection of co-ordination of
+human movement, of the thousands of little muscular items of the system
+working as one, and of the truest rhythm and harmony being thus
+attained. We come near to it also in some forms of athletics; we have it
+suggested in the figures of the Greek throwing the discus. In golf there
+is an enormous concentration of this effect in the space of a couple of
+seconds--not too long to permit of becoming accustomed to it, not too
+short for proper appreciation. In this brief time, if the driving is
+properly done as Nature would have it, the emotional sensation is
+tremendous. Again one insists on the method and manner, for, especially
+in late years, ways of driving have been cultivated as the result of the
+agreeability of the rubber-cored ball, in which the physical movements
+are restricted and changed, and nearly all of the thrills are lost. It
+is still, even then, a fine thing to drive a good ball; there is
+peculiar satisfaction and a sense of smooth pleasure felt in doing so;
+but it is not that great whole-body thing that is enjoyed when there is
+the long swing and the full finish. That is why, even if style be so
+difficult to attain and there are ways of playing which are far easier
+to cultivate and more certain of their good results, it is worth all the
+pains and study expended in acquiring it, and a hundred times again, for
+the pleasure that comes afterwards. In the winning of holes or in the
+making of low scores the driving may be a comparatively unimportant part
+of the play, as it is said to be, though a certain high standard of
+efficiency is demanded continually; but it will always be the favourite
+part of the game because it appeals so much to those physical emotions,
+stirs them up so violently, rouses the life of the man, and lifts him
+for a moment to a full appreciation of the perfection of the human
+system. Some of these emotions are experienced in a minor key when
+playing the short game, as we call it, particularly in finely-made
+pitching strokes with iron clubs. Here there are restraint and
+sweetness; it is as if we listen to the delicacy of Mendelssohn after
+the strength and stateliness of Beethoven. Undoubtedly there are keen
+physical sensations enjoyed in this part of the play. When it comes to
+the last and shortest strokes, to the putting, only a faint trace of
+action upon the physical emotions remains, and the pleasure and
+satisfaction--if any--that are gained are purely mental. So in the short
+space of five minutes, in playing one hole of fair length, we may run
+along a full gamut of emotions, and herein is a great part of the joy of
+golf.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This, however, would be insufficient. The strong, self-controllable man
+would not, in their absence, crave for these emotions. But other
+influences are at work to kindle and continue the golfing fever in him.
+For the highest and deepest pleasure of civilised and cultivated man a
+combination of the best physical and mental emotions--with a little
+disappointment and grief--is essential; one without the other is always
+unsatisfying. Here, foremost among the mental experiences, so powerful
+as to have a certain physical influence, is our Hope. The major force of
+all life is hope. It is life itself, for without it the scheme of human
+existence would collapse. To look forward, to anticipate, to hope for
+better things, and believe in them--that is the principle of life. It is
+for that reason that the atheist comes so near to being an
+impossibility. An incredible he is. He asserts himself not only as an
+ignorer of gods but as a rejecter of Nature, and his position is
+untenable, impossible. He endeavours to place himself outside the scheme
+of creation. Without hope man could not and would not continue. He would
+give up. Motive would have vanished, and motive is essential to action.
+We strain analogy to no extravagance when we hold that it is the same in
+golf. It is pervaded with hope, lives on it, is played with it, depends
+upon it throughout in its every phase. At the beginning of the day's
+play a man hopes for great achievement. He does not ignore the
+possibilities, and rarely, whatever his temperament and disposition,
+does he wait for events, content in a manner of perfect wisdom to take
+things as they come. He anticipates, and in the human way he builds
+castles made of thoughts, and in his calculations overlooks existing
+facts and past experience. Thus are charm, eagerness, and romance given
+to life and the game. Never yet was golfer who did not believe that now
+his great day might come.
+
+So on the first teeing ground there is hope in the highest. Should the
+first stroke be successful the hope is stimulated; if the stroke is bad
+the hope is intensified. In the one case something more of the human
+power of man, the strong right arm and the fingers deft, is poured into
+the physical and temperamental boiler where the forces are being
+generated. The success has increased probability, the man can a little
+the more stand by himself, his independence increases, and his hope has
+a rock of fact beneath it. In the other event, the first drive having
+been a failure--as, alas! with the wearinesses of waiting and the
+anxieties they engender, first drives so often are--the hope is
+intensified by the addition of highly concentrated faith. The element of
+the practical indefatigable man is slightly reduced, and in its place
+there is filled the sublimer, grander essence of spirituality that is so
+far above the merely human. The hope is not the less. Providence is
+brought into the schemes, and the heart lives well. If the second shot
+is a good one there is more of the human given to the hope and the
+spiritual is a little subdued again; if the stroke should fail there is
+something like another mute appeal subconsciously made to Providence.
+
+These are the hopes of strokes. There are the hopes for holes; the hopes
+for days; the hopes for seasons, each series being units made of
+collections as years are made of months and days are made of hours. One
+who loses the first hole hopes to win the second, and is even insincere,
+for the encouragement of his hope, in saying and trying to believe that
+to lose the first hole does not matter and is often an advantage. If the
+second is lost there is a coming equality in the match imagined for the
+fourth or fifth. Three or four down at the turn, even five, and the man
+still lives and hopes (he is no golfer if he does not), and there have
+been magnificent struggles made when players have been six down with
+seven to play, or have even been dormy five to the bad. He who has only
+lost the first hole holds his hope in a state that is highly charged
+with belief in his own human capacity; he who is dormy down when the
+match is far from home still keeps hope, is buoyed well with it, but he
+does his best in a half-cheerful, half-nervous way, knowing that the
+time for supreme human endeavour has passed, and he gives the matter
+over to kind Providence, submitting that his deserts are good. So one
+who has played badly in the morning hopes for success in the afternoon;
+and where is the man who, having made poor shots all the day and lost
+holes and matches by them, does not fall to sleep at night consoled and
+peaceful in reflecting upon a discovery that will make full amends upon
+the morrow? After the failures of a summer season hopes arise for better
+fare when cool autumn makes the play more pleasant; when there has been
+one whole bad year there is hope enough that the game will mend in the
+time that follows.
+
+In this way it is hope all through, hope always, in the beginning and
+the end and in the small things with the great. Hope is the most human,
+most uplifting of all the emotions. Banish this emotional quality from
+the human mind and the golf clubs would be disbanded, for the game would
+cease to be golf for another day. The charm would have gone completely.
+Only the nature of the hope sometimes varies as we have shown, and the
+most wonderful feature of this wonder of golf is the sublimely simple
+way in which the man of a match, when all seems lost, when the cause
+seems wholly ruined, when by nothing human does it seem that a situation
+hanging upon a thread so thin can possibly be saved, believes in the
+future still. Providence still exists for him. Every human reckoning
+would show that he approaches the impossible, and yet he sees it not,
+but only the narrow way of escape to success beyond. And there is
+infinite satisfaction to the soul, much that is splendidly destructive
+of utter materialism, in realising that often the seeming human
+impossibility is broken and Providence pulls us through. In golf we
+often ask for miracles, and sometimes we obtain them. It seems to me
+that the golfer has one satisfying motto, and only one, and it is _Spero
+meliora_. What is the use of the "far and sure" that the ancients have
+bequeathed to us? Nearly meaningless it is. And if those words of hope
+are emblazoned on his coat of arms, the golfing man should have the
+Watts picture of "Hope" in his private chamber, courageous Hope
+straining for the faintest note that comes from the one lone string that
+remains on the almost dismantled harp.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such strong exercises of emotions, physical and soulful, accounting, as
+we may believe, for much of the fascination of the game, are supported
+by others, subtler but also of large effect. There are the aggravations
+of the game. It suggests an object that no man has ever completely
+achieved and never will do, since none has ever arisen to a state of
+skill and consistency when he plays perfect golf and plays it always,
+though such success may nearly be achieved at other pastimes. And it is
+not given to the player to know why the skill he feels himself possessed
+of does not bear its fruit. He is left in wonderment and aggravation.
+The game goads, it taunts, it mocks unmercifully. Old Tom Morris
+expressed the simplest overwhelming truth when he said it was "aye
+fechtin' against us." It does so from the first hour, the first minute
+of the golfer's existence as such, when he misses the ball which it had
+seemed so easy to strike. Then, his vanity wounded, he attacks, and the
+lifelong feud begins. What always seems so easy becomes the nearly
+impossible. There is always something new to learn, always another scrap
+of explanation of mystery to be gathered, and the player is always
+groping and being taught. But he moves forward only to fall back again,
+and the simple consolation he has from this ever-recurring process is
+that the tide of discovery, when it rolls back, returns a little higher
+up the beach with the next wave and in the long succession there is a
+gain. But this process is not so regular as the running of the tide, not
+so much a matter of calculable natural law, and therein is the
+disappointment and the aggravation. A man retires to his rest at night
+feeling himself a good and well-satisfied golfer with rapid advancement
+certain, and lo! the morning will be little spent when he is shown to
+himself as one of the poorest and most ineffectual players. The mystery
+of this reaction is quite insoluble; only the cold fact is clear,
+convincing. No more tantalising will-o'-the-wisp is there than form at
+golf. It is a game that lures a man, it coquets with him, trifles with
+his yearnings and his hopes, and flouts him. So does it excite him, and,
+hurting his pride, stirs his ambition and his desire to obtain the
+mastery. The spirit of adventure and conquest is aroused, and the strong
+man who has failed in no undertaking before declares that he will not
+fail in this. And so, with his everlasting hope, he perseveres and will
+not give in. But it is the game that wins.
+
+It appeals to the emotions of the primitive man in another way that may
+often be unsuspected. In essence it is the simplest and the most natural
+of games. It is indeed a game of Nature, and it is played not on the
+smoothest surfaces with white lines drawn upon them, but upon plain
+grass-covered earth, a little smoothed by man but still with abounding
+natural roughness and simplicity. Here on the links are space and
+freedom such as are afforded to people, especially those of towns and
+cities, rarely in present times. The tendency in all life now is to
+confine itself closely. We live in small spaces, with many walls and
+low roofs; we move through thronged streets and by underground railways.
+Things are not the same as when there was the Garden of Eden and the
+open world outside it. His confinement is a wearing oppression to the
+modern man, though he may not always suspect it. Because it emancipates
+and gives us back a little of our lost freedom is the chief reason for
+the popularity of motoring, and it was to attain more freedom still that
+man made up his mind to fly and now flies accordingly. We cannot
+entirely escape from this unnatural confinement which modern conditions
+of life have forced upon us, but for a little while at intervals,
+through the medium of this sport, we may experience the sense of space,
+of freedom, of the something that comes near to infinity. Unconscious of
+this cause, a golfer on the links is uplifted to a simpler freer self.
+He has a great open space about him, the wilder the better, and the open
+sky above. He takes Nature as he finds her, accepting her every mood,
+and that is why this game is and must be one for all weathers. There is
+the ball upon the tee. Hit it, golfer, anywhere you please! Hit it far,
+no limit to the distance! Strike with all your strength! Until in the
+game the time for wariness comes, as with the hunter upon his prey, see
+no limitations, accept all consequences. The golfer's freedom has a
+flavour that other people rarely taste.
+
+Emotions serve the human system better than comforts and conveniences,
+for these emotions are the pulse of life and the conveniences are mere
+aids to existence. Golf, being complete, has its advantages of
+convenience as well as its thrilling emotions, and when the players
+reason to their relatives and their friends upon the good of the game,
+shaping their excuses for a strange excess, they exhibit with a limited
+sincerity the real advantages and conveniences. The game may be played
+anywhere and everywhere. It is the same in principle, the same in rules,
+the same in actions; but yet again it is like a new thing everywhere,
+and it is always fresh. There is a golf course wherever a man may go;
+and there is a new experience for him always. He needs only one man to
+play with him; or indeed, if there is no such man available, he may play
+with the game itself as his implacable opponent, fight it in the open
+and without the medium of a human opponent to break the shocks for him.
+If variety is the spice of life, then here is spice enough. Then it
+gives us such companionship as can be gained by few other means, for it
+brings us to inner intimacy with the man we play, bares his hidden
+nature to us, strips from him all those trappings of manner and
+suggestion by which in the ordinary social scheme every person plays a
+part as on a stage and rarely is well discovered. No man plays a part in
+golf; his individuality, in all its goodness and weakness, is unfolded
+in the light. He is known entirely and for his own true self. The game
+gives us fresh air and the most splendid exercise. These are enormous
+advantages in golf, and we extol them in defence of our enthusiasm and
+they are accepted; yet, honest to ourselves, we know that we do not play
+golf because of fresh air and exercise, and indeed we only think of them
+as gain when, in the slavery to which we have been subject, our emotions
+for a day have been shivered and shocked by failure. It has the
+advantage that we can play it when the period of life for other games
+has passed, and we can play while life leaves to us but a flick of
+vigour. Some of the meanest men, who are barely worthy of being in this
+excellent community where the sense of brotherhood is so good, have been
+gross enough to say that golf serves their professional and commercial
+purposes thoroughly well--as indeed it may--by giving them intimacy with
+valuable and helpful friends. These are men who would buy their idols
+and sell them for a profit of five per cent. The advantages of golf are
+there; but they are the accident of circumstances, or not perhaps the
+accident but simply like the scheme of Nature in supporting what is good
+with good itself; but they do not and cannot in any measure explain the
+mystery of the fascination of the game, for that mystery lies in the
+emotional, the spiritual, the psychological, and not in anything that is
+just material. Golf is something of a passion, and passions are of the
+blood and have nothing to do with conveniences and rules of life for
+health and plain advantage.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The traditions of golf are the second of its wonders. All things that
+are old have certain traditional sentiment clinging to them, and it
+makes a good flavouring to life, for it is suggestive of age and time
+and continuity and eternity. Had golf no traditions now, those emotional
+effects in its subjects might be produced the same, but yet the sport
+would not be the same rich colourful thing that we know it to be, but
+something grosser. And again we could stand for golf and say that no
+other sport can testify to its past and present worth and greatness with
+such excellent tradition. Three only can rank in the same class, and
+those are cricket, hunting, and the turf. Their traditions indeed are
+rich, they uphold their sports to-day, and they abound in those rare
+stories which, even if they have lost nothing with time, make fine
+things for the listening now and have the tendency always to promote a
+better sporting spirit. But three things are essential to good
+traditions, the first being acts, the second persons, and the third
+places, and the last of the three is far from being the least important,
+because birds do not love their nests more than traditions do the plots
+of earth where are their homes. They cannot live in space; there they
+would lapse to a state of film and would fade away. Give them abiding
+places, real solid ground upon which their delicate ghostly structures
+may rest, and they have a substance which gives them a fine reality. If
+a character of the past were invented, given a real name, all his
+manners and customs, his feats and follies carefully described, even his
+father and mother most properly identified, and a statement made of the
+provisions in his will for those who followed after him, that would
+still be likely to linger on as a character merely, a possibility of the
+past but a thing of no account, not an influence. He could not be
+placed. If we give ourselves a licence to roam the earth in search of
+golf, we like to think of the good men of the old traditions as being
+comfortably settled, as being at special places where, in our fireside
+fancies on winter nights when the winds are moaning and the rains are
+lashing against the window-panes, we can see them and sit down with
+them. The wandering hero of tradition does not suit. And here is a great
+virtue of the people of our golfing traditions: we can catch them tight,
+nail them fast. We have special plots of land--the majestic links of
+Scotland, the old course of Blackheath, almost every yard of which
+might, if speechful, tell a story of some old golfer of the past. The
+old golfers trod those links some time in their earthly days. We know
+the shots they played, where balls pitched and how they ran, the bunkers
+where they had disasters, their amazing recoveries and the putts that
+they holed and missed--for even the golfers of tradition missed their
+putts at times. We know where those golfers walked, and so the
+traditions are of the links and the men with the links, and the links
+are the same now as once. Let us then hope fervently that they may
+remain the same, though a hundred kinds of new balls, each farther
+flying than the one before it, should be invented, and such courses
+should be declared to be weakened and out of date. It is easy enough to
+invent a character, but it is not so easy to invent a links and then
+declare that by sea encroachments on the coast it has been swallowed up
+and has gone. The tale is weak and unconvincing. But invent your
+character, and then produce your place, and say: "He was here; his feet
+were on this teeing ground; here he took a divot; it was in this bunker
+that he was caught," and there is nothing more that is needed for
+complete conviction.
+
+Having seen a little of the way in which certain potential and probable
+traditions of the future are now being made, I have a suspicion about
+some of the amazing histories of the past that have been reported to us.
+Such suspicions are developed in the minds of those who have themselves
+been parties to some exaggerations of things done on certain links, and
+have lived to see those exaggerations improved upon by further tellers,
+and of a rich story, with scarcely a base of fact, being thus
+established in history and made ready for a monument. Having our plots
+of land, with their permanent marks and milestones, it is easy to do it
+so, and all golfers cannot be commended for complete veracity, though
+their lies are tolerably honest of their kind, being, like their shots,
+made subconsciously, and the cause, being companionable conduct, is a
+good one. Listeners believe in them and so make them three-parts truth.
+Cricket and racing have had their splendid men, and they have had
+certain sorts of places, but nothing homelike, merely round patches of
+smooth land with rails and grand stands, to which traditions can never
+cling like ivy to the crumbling tower. The ghost men of these old
+traditions were fine creatures; well did they do their work; they fought
+and won; but they seem lonesome creatures. They lack location, and they
+have no family histories and traditions of their own. They are mere
+particles of the past. Nearly all the men of our great traditions are
+heroes of fine countenance and rich character, brilliant in their
+individuality, with that proper touch of pride and arrogance blended
+with the finest old conservatism, which all good traditions should
+enjoy. Only the ancients of the chase are good company for them.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It seems to me that our traditions and their associate legends might be
+separated into five periods. There is the primeval, the prehistoric, the
+most royal and ancient, the early Scottish, and the late gutty periods.
+Of the primeval there is no more to be said than there is of primeval
+man. We know the latter was born, that he did work of sorts, that he ate
+and slept, that in his way he lived and perhaps he loved, while
+certainly he died. Of the primeval golfers we are solid in the belief
+that they had clubs and balls, for they must have had, and they had
+holes or marks, for they could not have done without them. We suspect
+them of stymies, for only the weight of tradition has held the stymie to
+us still, and for its power this tradition must be far extended. Almost
+certainly they made their first clubs from the branches of trees, but
+there was nothing grand in that, for Harry Vardon and brother Tom,
+Edward Ray as well, all three beginning their golf in their native
+Jersey, did the same, and they played with stone marbles for their
+balls, played in the moonlight too. There would seem here to have been a
+tendency towards a throw-back in Jersey golf; but Vardon and his
+associates have made an ample advance since then. Good Sir Walter
+Simpson, in his deep researches, leaned to a more exact and defined
+theory or tradition of the primeval golf, and he gaily marked for it a
+beginning and a place. It is attractive and it is reasonable, and this,
+with the theory of the spontaneous and inevitable origin of the game in
+many places in the early times of man, theories with living detail
+thickening on them, come near in quality to real tradition. Sir Walter,
+you may remember, supposed a shepherd minding his sheep, who often
+chanced upon a round pebble and, having his crook in his hand, he would
+strike it away. In the ordinary way this led to nothing, but once on a
+time, "probably," a shepherd feeding his sheep on the links, "which
+might have been those of St. Andrews," rolled one of these stones into a
+rabbit scrape, and then he exclaimed, "Marry! I could not do that if I
+tried!"--a thought, so instinctive is ambition, as Sir Walter says,
+which nerved him to the attempt. Enter the second shepherd, who watches
+awhile and says then: "Forsooth, but that is easy!" He takes a crook in
+his hand, swings violently, and misses. The first shepherd turns away
+laughing. The two fellows then perceive that this is a serious business,
+and together they enter the gorse and search for round stones wherewith
+to play their new game. Sir Walter Simpson was a terrible man, and he
+must needs work into this excellent romance the declaration that each
+shepherd, to his surprise, found an old golf ball, every reader knowing
+that they "are to be found there in considerable quantity even to this
+day." Then these shepherd-golfers deepened the rabbit scrape so that the
+balls might not jump out of it, and they set themselves to practising
+putting. The stronger shepherd happened to be the less skilful, and he
+found himself getting beaten at this diversion, whereupon he protested
+that it was a fairer test of skill to play for the hole from a
+considerable distance. When this was settled it was found that the game
+was improved. The players, says the theorist, at first called it
+"putty," because the immediate object was to putt or put the ball into
+the hole or scrape, but at the longer distance the driving was the chief
+interest, and therefore the name was changed to "go off" or "golf." In
+the meantime the sheep, as sheep will do, had strayed, and the shepherds
+had to go in chase of them. Naturally they found this a very troublesome
+and annoying interruption, and so they hit upon the great idea of making
+a circular course of holes which enabled them to play and herd at the
+same time. By this arrangement there were many holes and they were far
+apart, and it became necessary to mark their whereabouts, which was
+easily done by means of a tag of wool from a sheep, fastened to a stick,
+which, as is remarked, is a sort of flag still used on many Scottish
+courses in much the same simplicity as by those early shepherds. And Sir
+Walter wrote with reason that since those early days the essentials of
+the game have altered but little.
+
+After the time of these first shepherds there were doubtless more
+shepherds, and the bucolics in general would be given to the game. Yet
+it should never be understood that even in its origins this game was one
+that was practised chiefly by persons of low intellectual strength.
+Indeed it was not. In the ancient classics there are references to ball
+games that bear close resemblance to primitive golf, and then when games
+began to appear in Holland and France that had golf in them, even though
+they were not golf, it was not the common people always who were most
+attracted. And in passing, it must be said, that while golf as we have
+it now is British--Scottish, if you like--and there is enough authority
+and substance in the claim for the satisfaction of any pride seeing that
+the laws of St. Andrews have been for ages back the laws of the world at
+large, it is too much to believe that a game so simple in its
+essentials, so obvious and so necessary and so desirable, should have
+had an exclusive origin in any one country, to be copied by the others.
+The elements of golf must have come up spontaneously in many different
+parts of the world, although they were without rule, organisation, and
+might not have been known as a game or anything like that by those who
+employed them. But it was there, as eating and kissing were; and it fell
+to the lot of those canny and most discerning Scots to regularise it, as
+it were, to declare it a game and give it definiteness, and in due time
+to set up laws and a government, all of which were just what they should
+be and the best conceivable. It might not have been such a good game as
+it is now had it not been nurtured at St. Andrews, Leith, and
+Musselburgh, and in those other early cradles of the pastime; but I
+cannot believe that if there had been no land north of Newcastle there
+would have been no golf, and we should be moaning now in vague
+discontent for a mysterious something lost to life.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I may adduce some circumstances from most ancient history and tradition
+which have not been applied to this question hitherto, but should have
+been, for they seem to be apposite and remarkable. In these days
+Ireland, with a fine spirit, is struggling for better golfing
+recognition, and should have it. When a game is for the world, what is
+the Irish Channel? The country has some very splendid links, and has
+produced some players--if few of them--of the finest quality; but a
+people who exhibit frequently a fine appreciation of the spirit of the
+golfing brotherhood, and to the wandering player extend a hospitality of
+which it can only be said that it is Irish, are treated coldly in
+championship dignity being withheld from their courses and their not
+being admitted to the higher councils of the game. I remember with
+gratitude a very early acquaintance with the golf of Newcastle in County
+Down, that glorious course in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains, and
+with Portrush in the north, while about Dublin there are links that fear
+no comparison with the best of other lands. The ordinary records may
+indicate that there was no golf in Ireland until 1881, when what is now
+the Royal Belfast Club was formed; but listen to a story which is
+brought to me in some spirit of triumph by a friend, Mr. Victor Collins,
+a golfer, who practises his game, for the most part, not on any mainland
+but out on the Arran Isles, west of the Irish coast, out on little
+Inneshmor, where he lives when he is not in London, and where he has a
+small course of just a few sporting holes for his own delight, one which
+would have been as agreeable to the golfers of the prehistoric period as
+it is now to a modern gentleman who occasionally becomes a little tired
+of over-civilisation and likes to retreat to simplicity and Nature. It
+is a considerable change from Stoke Poges to Inneshmor, but only a poor
+soul would not like it for a period. In London one evening we talked of
+golf and Inneshmor, and he told me a legendary story, the documentary
+narrative of which he has since produced in the form of an extract from
+"O'Looney's unpublished MS. translation of the 'Tain bo' Cuailgne' in
+the Irish Royal Academy, Dublin." Knowing little of these matters, I
+quote Mr. Collins direct in saying that this is the most famous of Irish
+epics, and describes the war Queen Maeve of Connacht, assisted by her
+vassal kings of the rest of Ireland, waged against Ulster to obtain a
+bull which was reputed to be a finer animal than the one she herself
+possessed. The central hero of Ulster was the famous Cuchullain, the
+greatest of all Irish heroes, in truth an Irish Achilles. Fergus,
+ex-king of Ulster, who had taken refuge with Maeve, tells her who are
+the champions against whom her armies will have to contend, and these
+lines occur in the course of his terrifying account of Cuchullain, whose
+age at the time of this expedition was between six and seven: "The boy
+set out then and he took his instruments of pleasure with him; he took
+his hurly of creduma and his silver ball, and he took his massive
+Clettini, and he took his playing Bunsach, with its fire-burned top, and
+he began to shorten his way with them. He would give the ball a stroke
+of his hurly and drive it a great distance before him; he would cast (?
+swing) his hurly at it, and would give it a second stroke that would
+drive it not a shorter distance than the first blow. He would cast his
+Clettini, and he would hurl his Bunsach, and he would make a wild race
+after them. He would then take up his hurly, and his ball, and his
+Clettini, and his Bunsach, and he would cast his Bunsach up in the air
+on before him, and the end of the Bunsach would not have reached the
+ground before he would have caught it by the top while still flying, and
+in this way he went on till he reached the Forad of the plain of Emain
+where the youths were." This young Cuchullain does appear to have been
+appreciably better than scratch. Apparently he was going to attend
+something in the nature of a club gathering, and his way of getting
+there was much in the nature of cross-country golf with a touch of trick
+in it; for there are professionals to-day who make a show in their idle
+moments of pitching up a ball and catching it with their hands. My
+informer tells me that Cuchullain was not confining his attention to
+golf alone, but doing feats of jugglery as well in order to while away
+the journey. "The description of driving the ball before him," he
+remarks, "evidently contains the germ of golf. Some years ago I saw in
+an illustrated paper a reproduction of a picture of a tombstone from
+some place in Ulster dating to the twelfth century. It was the tombstone
+of a Norseman. On it were a double-headed sword, the sign of his
+profession, and below it the perfect representation of a cleek and a
+golf ball, his favourite amusement. It would be interesting to make a
+serious search in old Irish records for further information on the game.
+'Clettini' is from an Irish word for 'feather.' It was evidently a
+feathered javelin he hurled. 'Creduma' means 'red metal,' that is brass.
+Hurly of creduma therefore comes curiously near the quite modern
+brassey. Bunsach is a very obscure word. In middle Irish there was such
+a word, but it meant a kind of dagger." This discovery opens up an
+excellent speculation.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The periods of the traditions of course impinge upon each other and
+softly blend, so that the game some way or other seems to go back
+continuously from now to the beginning. We have in the most royal and
+ancient period the Stuart kings playing their golf, and Charles the
+First hearing of mighty troubles to his throne perpending while he was
+golfing on the links of Leith; of James the Second with his court
+playing the golf at Blackheath and sowing seeds that were to bear
+amazing fruit in the south at a far-off date; of Mary Queen of Scots
+golfing with her favourite Chastelard at St. Andrews. There was
+Archbishop Hamilton, who signed the authority that was given to the
+Provost and magistrates of St. Andrews to put rabbits on the links,
+which authority recognised the rights of the community to the links,
+more especially for the purpose of playing at "golff, futball, schuteing
+at all gamis, with all other manner of pastyme." This was a kind of
+ratification of a Magna Charta of Golf. There was Duncan Forbes, of
+Culloden, first captain of the Gentlemen Golfers, now known as the
+Honourable Company, in 1744. A marvellous man was Duncan Forbes, Lord
+President of the Council, and we know that he played for the Silver Club
+in 1745--for the last time, probably, because just then the rising of
+the clans obliged him to set out for the north, where he exerted himself
+to the utmost to prevent them from joining the cause of the Young
+Pretender. And here in passing let it be written that there is good
+cause to think that Bonnie Prince Charlie himself was the first to play
+real or Scottish golf on the continent of Europe, for he is believed to
+have had a course made for himself when in Italy, and was once found
+playing in the Borghese gardens, so Mr. Andrew Lang once told us. There
+was the wonderful William St. Clair, of Roslin, so much skilled at golf
+and archery that the common people believed he had a private arrangement
+with the devil. Sir George Chalmers painted a picture of him, which is
+possessed by the Honourable Company, and Sir Walter Scott wrote that he
+was "a man considerably above six feet, with dark grey locks, a form
+upright, but gracefully so, thin-flanked and broad-shouldered, built, it
+would seem, for the business of war or the chase, a noble eye, of
+chastened pride and undoubted authority, and features handsome and
+striking in their general effect. As schoolboys we crowded to see him
+perform feats of strength and skill in the old Scottish games of golf
+and archery." And from there the tale passes on with life and colour to
+the beginnings of the Royal and Ancient Club; to the activities of the
+early members like Major Murray Belshes, and the interest of William
+the Fourth, whose gift medal is played for at St. Andrews to this day;
+to such fine gentlemen of the old school as the late Lord Moncrieff and
+the Earl of Wemyss; to the professionals also like the Morrises and
+Allan Robertson, and old Willie Park. So on along from the ages past to
+such as Frederick Guthrie Tait, who gave to the modern history of golf
+something that glows as well as the best of the old traditions.
+
+Now it may be said that these traditions and all the others, like them
+and unlike, make the game no better, and that they add nothing in yards
+to our driving from the tee. After a consideration I will not agree
+either that they make the game no better or that they add nothing to the
+driving. The spirits of a romantic history are a continual influence.
+They give a dignity to the game which is felt right through it. Only the
+golfer knows how true this is. Men who look upon it lightly as a pastime
+before they know anything of it, learn upon their initiation, and not
+only learn but feel, that there is all that is mysterious, wonderful,
+and awe-inspiring in the game and its past, a new and deep respect is
+created, and there is no more beginner's lightness and nonsense. Age and
+solemnity, and many ceremonies great and small, have given to golf some
+of the attributes of a religion, and with membership of it there comes
+responsibility. When a new Nonconformist chapel has the same exalting
+influence upon the mind and sentiment of a person of intelligence and
+sympathies as an ancient cathedral with all its tombs and relics, and
+the dim pillars among which echoes seem to float and mingle with spirits
+of the past and the great eternity, or when the dining-room of a flat in
+Knightsbridge inspires and dignifies its company like the banqueting
+hall of some ancient castle, I will perhaps agree that the traditions of
+golf are of no practical effect beyond that of merely preserving the
+game from vandalism and giving it a place above the others. Often when
+reflecting thus one feels that in duty to the game one's policy in
+matters should be "St. Andrews, right or wrong." But yet one could wish
+that these mighty traditions were not at times invoked for improper
+purposes. There is too much free and unintelligible talk about them in
+these modern times. They are wantonly applied to base uses; a man will
+urge the traditions in his favour and against his opponent when he
+attempts some vile procedure. When a crafty person is beaten in
+argument, he cries, "The traditions!" and people who speciously, and
+with insincerity, condemn what we may call the modern advancements of
+the game will murmur that the rubber-cored ball and clubs with steel
+faces are not according to "the traditions." Truly they are not, and
+those old traditions had nothing to do with gutties either; but Duncan
+Forbes would have rejoiced in the possession of a modern driver and
+mashie niblick. It is too often and absurdly assumed that the ancients
+used the tools they had because they were the best conceivable and most
+appropriate, just right in practical quality and proper sentiment. They
+were merely the best that had been discovered up to then. The Stuart
+kings might have had a happier time had they possessed some rubber
+Haskells to coax and lead them on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE UBIQUITY OF THE GAME; WITH AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY OF
+GOLFERS, AND A NOTE UPON THE EFFECT OF ST. ANDREWS SPIRITS.
+
+
+The ubiquity of this game--being the third of the seven wonders--is
+remarkable, for it is played everywhere by everybody. No other sport has
+ever achieved such universal favour, and we may be sure that none will
+ever do so, because, apart from the fascination it exercises upon the
+people of different countries and different races, it is so strong in
+its simplicity--the stick, the ball, the mark, and, with them being
+given, the object plainly suggested. It has already been suggested that,
+in its essentials golf being obvious, it must have been practised from
+the earliest times. Everywhere the simpler emotions of man are the same,
+and so everywhere the game must make the same appeal when it is
+understood. So here, strange as it is still, we have a nearly satisfying
+explanation. What is yet wonderful beyond it is the fact that the
+regulated game with the rules and restrictions that have been agreed
+upon and codified by the high authorities at St. Andrews are everywhere
+accepted, and even in such embellishments it is the same game
+everywhere. Nothing can approach it in this universality. Yet that also
+is nearly explicable.
+
+By a process of continuous thought and deduction from observation the
+people of St. Andrews, past and present, have gained a code of
+regulations which seems most completely to satisfy the requirements of
+the case. It has often been urged against the numerous and lengthy laws
+we have that they suffer from too many niceties and too many
+complications, and that they represent a remarkable evolution of
+man-made intricacy from the one simple governing principle that the ball
+shall be struck by the stick, and that if the object be not achieved by
+the first blow it shall be struck again from the place where it then
+lies. In that simple principle there is all golf, and by it the game
+must surely have been played at the beginning. But it is the disposition
+of man to depart from the most absolute simplicity in the direction of
+what he regards as improvement upon it, and therefore bare principles
+get covered up with fancy wrappings, while again there is in the human
+species an immovable distrust of each other and a tendency towards the
+setting up of safeguards and protections--laws. When this is done in
+different places, and by different peoples, the results also are almost
+certain to be widely different; and with the assistance of time and
+further development two peoples might at length produce two games which,
+originating in the same basic principle, might be in appearance,
+materials, and actions quite dissimilar. Nearly all ball games, indeed,
+must have had much the same original principle. Golf, as we know it, has
+had its integrity preserved, and has established its amazing
+universality because, despite the numerous and lengthy laws, the spirit
+of the game has been so completely preserved in them. Between absolute
+simplicity, the one natural law of golf, as we might call it, as just
+enunciated, and a lengthy, confusing, and sometimes even contradictory
+code there can be little compromise, and perfection and completeness in
+golfing law are impossible, because no two courses are alike, no two
+shots are quite the same, and there can be no end to new situations
+until there is an end of the world and man. It sometimes seems that St.
+Andrews, indefatigable, pursues an impossible finality, and thereby
+makes difficulties for itself. That through ages and generations it has
+produced a code of laws, and defined the principles of a game that is
+accepted all over the world, and causes the same game to be played
+wherever the sun may shine, is not merely an achievement in intelligence
+and discernment, but something that suggests a grand inspiration. These
+are times of change, when old systems of the world are being abandoned
+and new ones being set in their places. It may happen, though it is as
+unlikely as it is undesirable, that St. Andrews itself as a governing
+body will fall; but nothing that ever happens to the game in the future
+can equal the marvel of its foundation and establishment by this
+authority and its associates.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is not without good reason that they call golf the world game now. It
+has alighted upon every country, and wherever it has touched it has
+seized. The yellow man likes it; the black man in some places has to be
+kept away from it, because it is found that he grows too fond of it. One
+day when I was golfing at the Country Club, near Boston, they showed me
+a most primitive kind of club that was kept with some other relics in a
+glass case. It had been fashioned from the branch of a tree, and with
+this crude implement a nigger boy in one of the southern states had not
+long previously driven a ball over two hundred yards. Other games are
+for their own countries, like the country's foods, and they would
+neither be suitable nor adaptable elsewhere; but in its nature golf
+will do for all, and it has the same subtle attraction for everybody, so
+that what was once thought to be the "golf craze" of the British people
+only became the craze of the Americans too, then of the French, now of
+the Germans and others, and of really everybody. Its qualities and
+conveniences make it the only possible world game. At present in some
+countries it is confined to a few people of unusual distinction or
+circumstances, but it has been found in old and recent history that,
+following a beginning of this kind, the game in a new land has never
+languished, but that presently it has extended from the pioneers, who
+were probably from abroad, to the native people, and from the upper
+classes to the middle, and then to the lower. In France at the present
+time we see the game being started among the general French, and I have
+news that the statesmen have begun to play; yet a little while since the
+golf of Gaul was carried on by British only.
+
+Recently some of us were looking over the map of the world for odd
+countries that might be golfless, and it appeared then that there were
+but four: one being the Balkan States, considering them in the piece,
+another was Afghanistan, a third was Persia, and, scattering the
+attention over the islands of the earth, one reflected that no golf in
+Iceland had been heard of. But shortly afterwards this brief list of
+lone golfless places was reduced to one. To a little gathering of
+friends one night an adventurous gentleman was describing the
+excitements of a day's rough golf that he had had one time when near to
+Reykiavik, and, if the course was to some extent made for the occasion,
+little enough did that matter then. There were some real holes, and the
+pioneer declared one of them to be the longest and most sporting he had
+ever played; and we knew he had played some good ones. So Iceland came
+into the fold. It was discovered during the recent wars that there was
+golf here and there in those worrying Balkans. Then lo! the land of the
+Afghans was also delivered to the game, and it was the Ameer himself who
+was chiefly responsible, thus emulating the rulers of many other lands.
+He had heard of golf, had seen it, realised it, and had been fascinated.
+Thereupon he had a short course prepared for him in the neighbourhood of
+Kabul, and began to practise with royal assiduity at his driving,
+pitching, and putting. Humble, doubtful, and yet loyal subjects observed
+this done from a respectful distance, and they wondered. After a little
+while they perceived that it was a game, and that the chief of Afghans
+invariably sought with his little ball the holes that were placed upon
+the course. Being practical people, they conceived that they might turn
+the game and their royal master's fondness for it to their advantage,
+and thereupon began to deposit in the holes at night such petitions as
+they had difficulty in getting placed before the royal eyes by any other
+means. They believed that by their new system the Ameer was sure to see
+and read what was intended for him. Yet it proved that he was somewhat
+angered by this manner of approach, and gave orders that all petitions
+found in his golfing holes should be burned unread. The petitioning
+parties had not understood how seriously the game he played was taken,
+nor the deep effect it had upon the mind and the disposition of the
+player, else they would surely have moved craftily and warily with their
+prayers, and then they might have gained imperial favour. Had they seen
+their ruler miss his drive, foozle his second, put his third into the
+pond, slice among the trees with his fifth--even Ameers being penalised
+a stroke for lifting from the water--and eventually reach the putting
+green in nine, three more strokes then being needed, they would have
+been stupid Afghans had they not at a convenient moment taken their
+petitions from the holes, or withheld them if they had not placed them
+there. But when an Ameer hits a good one from the tee, when his ball
+flies fast and straight from his royal brassey (and rulers also laugh
+when a topped ball runs a bunker!), when by enormous luck he lays an
+approach quite close to the hole, and afterwards the putt is truly
+played--why, many an Afghan might pray for the release of a brother from
+prison in Kabul, and the brother, pardoned, might be raised to office in
+the palace, perhaps to be an executioner. Now, if the petition had been
+submitted when the sovereign had done his hole in twelve, the brother
+might have died as arranged, perhaps the petitioner also, and who knows
+but that the neglectful greenkeeper, for not having seen that all holes
+for the day were free of pleas, would not have joined the departures for
+another world. Wandering players may look forward now to some future
+golf in Afghanistan. Have we not heard of the Shah at the game? If it
+cannot be proved, Persia must be left in an Asiatic golfless solitude,
+with the gibe against her that even celestial China has her courses, and
+that they are everywhere save in the Persia where Omar was, and in fine
+worldly philosophy bade us take good pleasures while we may.
+
+Golf's vast ubiquity is illustrated in another case recalled by this
+reference to kings who play. Miss Decima Moore of the theatres has a
+love for roving far which has led her to many raw places of the earth
+for hunting and shooting and adventurous exploration when she has tired
+of the footlights and has longed for Nature with no mask at all. Then,
+being golfer too, she has wandered with her bag of clubs into many
+distant lands, and one morning in London, just back from Central Africa,
+she told me of some strange experiences of a golfing woman. She has
+played the game up in Uganda, and explained the quality of the play of
+King Daudi Chwa, who is a ruler of those parts. Even once before, a
+colonial bishop had informed me of the golf of this dusky king. He had
+had some holes laid out for himself, so I was instructed, and when not
+engaged in duties of his kingly office, which were seemingly not
+onerous, he devoted himself earnestly to the reduction of his handicap
+and to lowering his record for his private course--upon which strangers
+in those parts are always welcome to a game. The bishop said that his
+Majesty drove an excellent ball, played his irons well, and putted with
+a good instinct for line and length, and the actress backed the bishop's
+story. In the region of the Victoria Nyanza there are no Sunningdales to
+be found, but the royal course of nine holes is considered a creditable
+thing. The king, who was lately in England and played a little here,
+will be glad to see any golfers who may go that way, and it may be his
+pleasure to call one of his holes by a name of theirs as, with a good
+African grace, he called one "Decima" when our English lady played it.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These wandering golfers do bring home great stories, and others send
+them. A friend, poor Tom Browne, who is dead, the clever artist in black
+and white, sat with me once at lunch in the Adelphi, and we talked of
+golf in distant lands and many things concerning it, for in the morning
+he was going eastwards to China and Japan. He said he should play as
+much as possible, and he did. While at the table he drew a sketch on a
+piece of paper and passed it to me with a smile. It was a picture of
+himself leaving on a golfing holiday to those very foreign parts, with
+numerous bags of clubs, cases of spare clubs guaranteed for all
+climates, and innumerable large boxes piled up all round him, each one
+labelled "One gross of best balls." Poor Tom always did take his clubs
+with him to foreign lands, and on this occasion he made good, as one
+might say, on that little sketch he drew at lunch by the places he
+played at afterwards, and queer drawings he sent to me of the courses
+and the people at them. He wrote from Tien-Tsin that the one they had
+there was just outside the town and was a flat plain covered with
+Chinese graves, the course being really nothing but one huge graveyard.
+"The Chinamen," he said in his letter, "plant their graves anywhere that
+suits them, and they consist of raised-up mounds which enclose the
+coffins. Off the graves the ball will bounce at all kinds of angles.
+Sometimes after heavy rains the mounds fall to pieces and expose the
+coffins. The golf club can remove any of these graves by buying them at
+four taels a coffin, and when a grave is bought in this way the native
+takes the coffin away, buries it somewhere else, and the grave is then
+flattened down. Fore-caddies are employed on this course. The 'greens'
+consist of baked mud, as is usual in these eastern parts, and are
+generally circular in shape. Chinese caddies do not understand the game
+and think that the foreign devils who play it are surely mad. They
+continually ask the players, 'When will you finish hitting and following
+that ball about?' And they have a local rule at Tien-Tsin that 'a ball
+lying in an open grave may be picked out and dropped without penalty.'"
+
+This graveyard golf, as I know, is not at all peculiar to Tien-Tsin, for
+not long ago I had a letter from a British official at Chiankiang on the
+Yangtse River, in which he told me that they had just begun to play the
+game out there on a course covered with crater-like excrescences, these
+Chinese graves again, and he declared that they made the most excellent
+hazards. It should be added for their credit's sake, golfers being
+considerate people and mindful of others' feelings, that they carefully
+ascertained in this case that no Chinese sentiment was injured by play
+in these cemeteries, if they are to be called by such a name. Again, I
+recall that a little while since the golfers who have a course in the
+Malay peninsula went down to it one morning and found a Chinaman digging
+up the remains of a deceased relative from one of the putting greens,
+intending to remove them to China; because it is a common thing, as I am
+told, when a Chinaman dies abroad, for his people to inter him
+temporarily if they can and give him another burial in his native land
+when opportunity chances. There has been a great move in things in this
+country lately. The Government has changed; the people, according to
+some trade returns that I have seen, are taking extensively to smoking
+English cigarettes and wearing unlovely English clothes. So it is
+inevitable that in their vast multitudes they will one day come into
+golf, for a little advancement towards modern ways often leads to
+strikes and golf. One fears to think that when China has a championship
+her people may compete in such a costume as is favoured by some of the
+oldest and best Scottish professionals (and if asked for a name we shall
+mention good Sandy Herd as a captain of the class), who always wear dark
+trousers and a light-grey jacket to their golf. There must be some
+virtue in this unconventional arrangement of tints; for so many of the
+great are attached to it.
+
+In other parts of Asia there is golf that is peculiar, especially in
+India where it flourishes to the extent of forty or fifty clubs,
+including those of Calcutta and Bombay, which are not merely the oldest
+in India but rank high in seniority among the golf clubs of the world.
+Both were well established before 1860, at which time there were only
+two or three in England, and the game was all but unknown in America.
+Despite the fact that it was born in 1842 and was really an Indian
+offshoot of the famous Royal Blackheath Club, the Royal Bombay remains a
+little primitive in the matter of its course. It is a golf course for
+one part of the day and something else for the remainder, and it is
+perhaps the only course in the world which is dismantled daily. The fact
+is that it is situated on what is called the "maidan," an open space
+near to the European business quarter, and the golfers, having no
+exclusive possession of it, are not allowed to play after half past ten
+in the morning and are required, when they have done, to remove their
+hazards. This obviously necessitates unconventional obstacles, and the
+club has had to resort to movable screens, varying from four to ten feet
+high, which are put up when play begins and taken away again when it is
+finished. Having become accustomed to this sort of thing it ceases to
+annoy, and in Bombay the course is considered good and sporting, and the
+greens are well attended. Then up on the hills at Darjeeling there is
+the highest golf course in the world, for it is situated at an elevation
+of more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea on the
+abandoned cantonment of Seneshal. Scenery often does not count for very
+much with golfers, and the better the golfer the keener he is on the
+game and the less does he care at times about the surroundings of the
+course. Yet, as I am told, it would be a dull poor soul that was not
+moved by the views from the Darjeeling course, with Mounts Everest and
+Kinchinjunga, both nearly thirty thousand feet high, in one direction
+and the plains of Bengal in another. But perhaps the most curious of the
+Indian courses is that of the Royal Western India Club, upon which is an
+idgah, or kind of temple, some thirty feet in height and fifty long,
+with bastions at either end and minarets in the middle. This idgah
+serves the double duty of club-house and a hazard also, for it has to
+be driven over from the tee on the way to the eleventh hole, and many
+are the marks on its walls that were made by balls that were hit too
+low. The course has another peculiarity in that it possesses seventeen
+holes only, no amount of ingenuity being enough to scheme out an
+eighteenth on the land available, so one of them has to be played twice
+over to make up the usual eighteen. This club has its course at Nasik,
+and mention of the idgah reminds one that the Royal Bangkok Club of Siam
+used to have an old and very imposing Siamese temple for a club-house. A
+little while since, when travelling northwards from Marseilles through
+France, I met, in the restaurant car of my P.L.M. train, an officer just
+going home on leave from India, and he assured me that he had found no
+place in the country where there was no golf, and he gave me some good
+examples of the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the golfers there. Thus at
+Multam, for the betterment of their sanded putting "browns" they keep
+them oiled all over, so that the ball runs evenly along them, and at a
+reasonable pace. There is an attendant to each green, who smooths over
+the track that is made by every ball when putted. And my companion told
+me also that in the season at Gulmurg in Kashmir, where they have two
+courses, there is such a crowd of golfers that it is difficult to
+arrange starting times for all of them.
+
+As one would expect, the game is played in Japan, and there is a highly
+flourishing club at Kobe, whose course is on the top of a high mountain
+at Rokkosan. It is a splendidly interesting course when reached, with
+views that can only be second in magnificence to those of Darjeeling;
+but for the occasional visitor the chief pleasure would seem to lie in
+the reaching, rather, perhaps, than in golfing on it afterwards, for the
+players have to 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 at last the tees and bunkers come to view.
+
+Thus it is indicated what great work must have been done by the pioneers
+of golf. They have been fine adventurers and explorers. In their
+strength of purpose, their resourcefulness, their enterprise and daring,
+and in their joy of doing beginnings, they have had some of the burning
+zeal and the quick inspirations of the voyagers of Elizabethan time.
+They too were discovering a world anew. When a golfer reaches a place
+afar where there is no course, his first and most natural impulse is to
+make one. Sir Edgar Vincent, keen player, told me once how he and that
+most distinguished amateur and ex-champion Mr. J. E. Laidlay, had a
+considerable hand in the starting of golf in Egypt, where it is now as
+well established as the Pyramids and Sphinx. Sir Edgar went to Cairo,
+and with him took his clubs, but on arrival found there was no course
+whereon to play, and there was Laidlay disappointed in the same way. So
+they twain obtained shovels and other implements of labour, enlisted the
+service of native helpers, and went out into the desert, making there
+the first golf course of Egypt. But theirs was not the distinction of
+hitting the first golf ball in that ancient land. Long before then a
+Scottish golfing minister did it. There is no better enthusiast than
+these ministers, about whom the best stories are told, as of the worthy
+who was left muttering the Athanasian creed in the lowest depths of
+hell, being the bunker of that name on the old course at St. Andrews,
+and the other who felt he would have to give it up because he played so
+ill and was so much provoked--not give up the game but alas! his
+ministry. And so the Rev. J. H. Tait, of Aberlady, went for a golfing
+holiday to Egypt long before the two gallants who did the spade work
+there, lumbered himself up to the top of the great Pyramid, and then,
+feeling in his pocket, curiously enough discovered an old golf ball
+there. To tee it up, to address it with the handle end of his umbrella,
+and to despatch it earthwards to Egyptian sand with the thwack of an
+honest east-coast swing, was the labour of no more time than would be
+needed to recite a verse of Psalms.
+
+A whole book having been written on Australian golf we may leave it
+unconsidered here. Hardly an island but there is a links upon it. The
+other day, when I had myself but just come back from foreign golfing
+parts, I was mated for the game on a London course to one who told me he
+had only then returned from Fiji, where his last game was at Suva and
+was a foursome in which the local bishop, the attorney-general, the
+chief trader, and himself were engaged. He explained the part that was
+played by _mimosa pudica_, being the "sensitive plant," in the golf of
+the Fiji islanders. When this herb is touched by anything, its leaves
+droop and close upon the object, and, _mimosa pudica_ being all over the
+fairway of the course, balls would be too often hidden and lost but for
+the agile caddies who are sent in front to watch for them. In these days
+one is hearing frequently of travellers' tales like this.
+
+Spain having been captured by the game, as I shall relate in time, there
+is little need to dwell upon the other conquests of golf in Europe. In
+Germany it is fast advancing, and the German Golf Association, which
+publishes a German Golf Year-Book, is an enterprising body. The Kaiser
+has encouraged the game, and has given land for it. At Baden Baden they
+have given the most valuable prizes to professionals; at Oberhof, in the
+Thuringen Forest, there has been made under the guidance of the Duke of
+Saxe-Coburg one of the nicest courses a German need wish to play upon,
+and the girl caddies in pretty uniform are the most picturesque alive.
+In Norway and Sweden, in Denmark, and nearly everywhere there is golf,
+and much of it. It flourishes in Italy, as is to be shown in a later
+chapter. Even in Russia you may golf. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow
+have their clubs and courses, and the Mourino Club, belonging to the
+former, has its place near a small village some dozen miles from the
+capital. The golf is good for Russia, but one does not quickly forget
+the roughness of the road in reaching it. And down at the bottom of that
+side of the map there is golf at Constantinople too! The game is done on
+the _yok maidan_ just outside the city, _yok_ being Persian for "arrow,"
+and _maidan_ the word for "plain," the fact being that it was on this
+land that the sultans and their suites in days gone by were accustomed
+to practise archery, and there are still on the plain many stone pillars
+erected to the memory of great shots that were made. The
+English-speaking colony had some difficulty to gain permission to golf
+on this ground, and, having no exclusive rights in the matter, are
+harassed by many worries. It is used largely for drilling soldiers, and
+is described as being "a favourite resort for Jews on Saturdays, for
+Greeks on Sundays, and for Turks on Fridays." The golfer may need to
+delay his stroke while a long string of camels passes through the
+fairway, and again he may have difficulty in persuading a party of
+Turkish ladies, closely veiled, taking the sun on one of the putting
+greens, to retire therefrom for a little while. Yet the game is much
+enjoyed by the officials of foreign Governments in Constantinople, and
+the turf on the _yok maidan_ is good.
+
+In the rich remembrances of the game there is little that is mournful;
+but one sad moment comes when I read a letter reminding me that golf
+was once played "farthest south," where man does not abide save briefly
+for exploration and adventure, where there is eternal ice and snow.
+Captain Robert Scott, the glorious British hero of the Southern Pole,
+whose friendship I enjoyed, was a golfer too. One of many letters of a
+personal kind I had from him, just before he set out on his last
+magnificent but fatal expedition, was addressed from the Littlestone
+Golf Club. He asked me to send to the ship a certain piece of golfing
+literature, believing that "members of the expedition would read it with
+interest and, I hope, with benefit to their handicaps!" He had taken
+some clubs and balls up there into the Antarctic on his previous
+expedition, when farthest south was reached. On one of the last days he
+spent in London I had some talk with him on different matters, and we
+joked about ways of playing Antarctic shots. We were in his office in
+Victoria Street then. "Good-bye!" he said in parting, "And you must come
+to meet me on my return!" And if none met him coming back, yet we know
+the game he played.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fact that there is golf nearly everywhere on earth will make it
+appear to some minds, reasonably too, that here is a convenient
+diversion for those travellers who like this sort of thing, something
+with which they can fill up time when held up for a while in a distant
+country and being impatient or weary. True, golf is good for that; but
+the unsophisticated who imagine that this is the full relation between
+travel and the game, and that this is the function of the courses
+everywhere, suffer from a poor delusion, which is expensive.
+
+It is a modern necessity to the traveller. In these days we are a people
+of wanderers; railways offer cheap journeys, steamships carry us over
+seas at little cost, hotels are good and comfortable; and why should
+those who like and have the hours not be always roaming and seeing the
+open world? But travelling sometimes has its inconveniences and its
+tedious days. Some wanderers unconsciously exert themselves towards
+loneliness, and they do not love it when they have it. The joy of
+meeting with a friend when one is half a globe away from home! With all
+the travelling that is done in these days there has come a great
+increase of loneliness. Golf has been set to destroy it. There are still
+people who travel and do not golf, but they are fewer daily, and as each
+new travel-golfer is established he wonders how he lived and moved and
+was moderately well contented and satisfied before. His travelling was a
+plain occupation then; now it makes more emotion and thrill, and,
+positively, it is more educative. There was a time, when I was very
+young, when I did not golf as I travelled abroad, partly because there
+were few courses to play upon and no golfers to play with, for it is
+only in recent times that the game has been established in every country
+in the world; and as I look back upon those days it is hard to realise
+that they were in this present life. They should have belonged to some
+other existence, which in the course of time and nature was given up, a
+reincarnation having followed ages after.
+
+The traveller who is golfless has often no friends at the places that he
+visits. Some men and women have good capacity for making them at each
+hotel they stay in; others have not. In any case these acquaintanceships
+are exceedingly thin; the people do not really know each other;
+oftentimes they say not what they think, and they have no common
+interest. This kind of friendship with all its making of artificial
+conversation is poor stuff at times. The golfless wanderer in his
+travelling does one of two things; either he does hardly anything at all
+or he goes to see the sights; and one suspects that much of the peering
+through the gloom of dark cathedrals and the lounging in picture
+galleries is done merely for the killing of time, and for the formal
+recording of places that have been visited and sights that have been
+seen. Some travellers are happiest when they have done their business
+with the churches and the local castles and may leave by the next
+train--one day nearer home and still working well!
+
+The case of the golfing traveller is very different. He has friends in
+every big town in every country, and all await his coming to make
+pleasure and happiness for him. He needs to scheme nothing in advance;
+they are prepared for him always. The automatic management of this real
+society of friends is most marvellously perfect. The wanderer, let us
+say, is advancing towards a new place--one that he knows nothing of.
+From the people about him now he may make inquiry as to which is the
+golf hotel at his destination, for often there is one to which golfers
+most resort, and, with his golf directory containing the names of all
+the golf clubs in the world, and with some particulars and the
+secretaries' addresses, away he goes complete and well prepared. His
+corny hands and his bag of clubs are his passport to every links. By the
+perfect system that we have, every man who is a golfer and a member of a
+golf club is _ipso facto_ a travelling member of nearly every other golf
+club in the world, and is admitted to full playing and other privileges
+without delay on paying the trifling fees of temporary membership,
+sometimes with even less than that. And one golf club seems very much
+like another--just a branch of it; the atmosphere is the same, and the
+men are the same. The stranger reaches his new destination, in England
+or in India, in France or in America; he registers at his hotel; and as
+soon as may be he seeks direction from the manager or the hall porter
+as to the whereabouts of the golf club. There he goes. At once, then, he
+is admitted to the local community of players, and they make much of
+him. They arrange games for him, surround him with the most hospitable
+companions, discover that he and they have many mutual friendships in
+different parts of the world, and linger upon other common ground in
+their memories of the third hole at one and the seventeenth at some
+other place. How the talk goes on! This golfer arrived among the unknown
+at ten in the morning, and at four in the afternoon he is tied to as
+many good friends as man could need. They invite him here and there;
+they take him to their homes; they make much of him. Stranger indeed! A
+thin voice of a petulant cynic may be heard again. "Yes," says he, "but
+in travelling one does not wish to spend all one's time in playing games
+and lounging about golf clubs!" True; and the golfing traveller, though
+he likes to visit courses in other countries, and finds it well to have
+an object always and something good with which to fill the daylight
+hours and keep his health in a well-balanced state, uses the game and
+its people to greater advantage than even that. The golf community of a
+place is always the most active and the most useful. There are the local
+dignitaries, the people of influence and consequence, men who know
+everything about the town, and can do most things. They can open doors
+that are locked, and take you to the most secret places. And so the
+golfing traveller, the first desire for the best of games being
+satisfied, always finds that his new friends wish to help him. Perhaps
+the ambassador is here, and ambassadors are serviceable men. All wise
+people golf a little at the present time. They give their guest letters
+of introduction; they tell him how to go about. They do much more than
+that, for they get out their cars and take him. Places which seem
+unfriendly to others are always friendly to the golfer. There is no
+particular community, no society, no association, no brotherhood in the
+world that is so real in its effectiveness, so thoroughly practical as
+this of golf. A quarter of a million British golfers know that this is
+true, and they know the reason why.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the consideration of this busy world of golf in general it is an
+easy move in thought to the one wee spot of it from which it has to a
+large extent developed, upon which the great scheme continually hangs,
+being the fourth of our seven wonders of golf--ancient St. Andrews. In a
+measure I developed this idea at the beginning of the consideration of
+golf as the world game; but now for a moment regard the capital of golf,
+not as the parliament place where the high statesmen do ponderously
+deliberate and with stern visage that befits their lofty authority most
+solemnly severally and jointly promulgate various laws and ordinances,
+but as the wonder city of the golfing world where one gathers emotions
+from a ghostly past, a city where golf is everything and nothing else is
+anything, where golf is life. This is the aspect of St. Andrews, and the
+only one, in which it is really great. We have much respect for our
+rulers. They are wise men, and we believe that they maintain the spirit
+of the game better than any other body of men could or would. They are
+well born and trained in golf, and the atmosphere of St. Andrews keeps
+them straight in the true golfing way. One who lived in an inland
+manufacturing town or spent his days in the office of a colliery would
+lose his golfing perspective early in middle age. But these excellents
+of Fifeshire play a little, read a little, talk much and deliberate,
+and the social and intellectual atmosphere keeps them strong in their
+golfing sense always. The government of St. Andrews is really one to
+respect and have faith in, but it is not the existing wonder of St.
+Andrews. When you visit the place, such of these rulers as live there do
+not impress you for anything save their good golf, their excellent and
+pleasant manners, their keen wit, their fine sense in matters of
+intellect, their tolerable aestheticism, their shrewd judgment in
+political affairs, their sound advice on financial questions, their fine
+epicurean taste, their kingly cellars, their magnificent hospitality,
+and their charming women. In nothing else that I can think of do they
+excel, and as minor deities, or as a college of cardinals with a captain
+for pope, endowed with powers transmitted from a golfers' heaven, they
+are failures. They are merely human, very good, and excellently
+conservative.
+
+No sort of people make St. Andrews. Only in two circumstances are the
+living humans of the place specially interesting. One is on the occasion
+of the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club, when the cannon on
+the hill is fired, when the new captain plays himself in with ceremony,
+and when all the ancient rites are properly observed until far on in the
+night. The other is in the attitude of the people generally towards this
+game as a thing of life, their seeming feeling that it is nearly the
+beginning and end of all things in this world. This may not be a proper
+view, and it is for something of the kind, but yet long distant from it,
+that the golfers of the south are chided and ridiculed for their
+enthusiasm. That, again, is why the real golfer, heart and soul for the
+game, who, if he would confess it, does let it take a larger part of his
+life sometimes than is very good for him (but who knows what this fellow
+would be doing if not golfing?), feels happy when at St. Andrews, feels
+that at last he has come to his real home. For here the people look upon
+him just as merely right and normal because he is a golfer and nothing
+but a golfer--and a man with a little money to spare. His chief
+peculiarity is not that he stammers or is deaf or is a total abstainer,
+that he is a peer of the realm or mayor of his town or a professor of
+Greek, but that he addresses his ball with the heel of his club or pulls
+a little always. The place is attuned to his feeling of life; it is in
+sympathy with him. It is either a fine day for the game--as most days
+are--or it is no day at all. If we lose our match it does not matter
+what the papers say of politics or Germany; if we win it, the papers
+matter less. The caddies know that you are a golfer and what is your
+handicap; and if you are the real thing that is enough for them. Be not
+a golfer at heart or a namby-pamby person hanging to the game, and their
+contempt is rarely hidden. In the hotels they know what golf means to
+people; the chambermaid on calling you in the morning may tell you the
+direction the wind is blowing, knowing that it matters more than any hot
+water. The men in the club-makers' shops are sorely concerned in your
+domestic difficulties about the length of the shaft of your driver and
+your quarrel with an iron. They know what it is; they are kindly,
+worldly-wise doctors, who are the constant recipients of the confidences
+of poor sufferers. They will try to put you right. All the
+advertisements on the walls are of golf; the notices in the shop windows
+are of golf matches and competitions. The streets are called after golf,
+the taverns have golf names. Yes! golf is in all the air and all the
+earth and all the people of this ancient city with its far-seen spires.
+
+But yet even these things do not give to St. Andrews its ineffable
+charm; if they are all that the wanderer notices he is not the real man
+of the game after all, nor is the splendid quality of the holes on the
+old course and on the new enough either, great as is that quality. The
+wanderer missed St. Andrews if these things were all that were
+discovered. He should understand that here we feel that the Swilcan Burn
+is greater than the Dardanelles; Asia is a trifle when we survey the
+vast extent of the fifth putting green, and little enough do we worry of
+hell when with a fine long shot with the brassey we can carry "the
+devil's kitchen" on the way to the fourteenth green. Here the game is in
+the air; we breathe it, feel it. And the reason why is because the
+spirits are in the air, the spirits of the ancients who at St. Andrews
+laid the foundations of this game, served for its traditions, set it up
+and shaped it to the good service of men, and gave their stamp to every
+inch of this great old course. Do not misunderstand. These men, I do
+believe, were often very ordinary simple human beings; they may have
+been no better than we are. There is a possibility that they were worse.
+They may not have been worthy to be canonised as they have been; but let
+us not inquire upon these matters, for we should not peer too closely at
+the gods. What matters is that in the first place undoubtedly they were
+in at the game before we were, in at it the first of all, were evidently
+uncommonly shrewd people, and for their discovery of golf and their
+presentation of it to us their perpetual dignity was well won. It
+matters also that we have many volumes of good stories about them, and
+none that is in any serious sense against them. On legend and anecdote
+they win well. And, third, whatever they were, we believe them to have
+been these great men, we set them up in our imagination as such, we
+recreate them to our fancies and desires, and they seem somehow to
+respond.
+
+So we imagine, believe, and are well satisfied, and therefore the
+spirits of golf take advantage and seem always to hover in the air of
+the old grey city, brooding upon the links, contented that things are
+moving as well as they are, and that what they began prospers so finely,
+though they wail a little, one would imagine, about what the
+rubber-cored ball has done, and the wraith of old Allan Robertson turns
+round to the ghost of the elder Morris, murmuring, "D'ye mind, Tammas,
+the awfu' trouble that we bodies had wi' ane anither when the gutty ba'
+kem hither to St. Andrews, and I caught ye, ma servin' man, ye ken,
+playin' gowff, as ye wad say, wi' Campbell of Saddell and wi' the gutty,
+and me a maker o' the featheries tae!"
+
+"Aye, I ken weel eno'," croons the shade of Old Tom, "and I'm telling
+ye, Allan, man, that I was fower up on Mr. Campbell at the eleventh
+hole, and I was playin' ma very best, and wi' ma second shot at the
+fourteenth, eh mon alive----"
+
+"Na, na, Tammas, nane o' yer rantin' aboot the shots as ye played at St.
+Andrews, when ye spent the best pairt o' yer time ower theer at
+Prestwick, and ye never could mak' up a scoor from a' yer ither scoors
+as wad come to 56 like mine. Ye ken that, Tom! And dinna forget, ma
+laddie, as I was goin' to tell ye, that when I saw ye wi' that awfu' new
+ba' as wad ruin every bit body o' us I tell't ye straight, ma man, as ye
+must go, and never a bit o' wark did ye do in ma shop again."
+
+And then Tom, good-natured old ghost as he is, and loving his Allan
+still, just answers, "Puir Allan, ye always were a cunnin' body o' a
+man, and a guid man tae, and fun aboot ye a' the time!"
+
+And all this about ghosts and the times they have in the air over St.
+Andrews old links may look like nonsense, but those who do not believe
+it, or do not feel that they believe it by mental adoption, have not
+been to St. Andrews properly, and do not understand her.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The most utterly non-golfing and sceptical person may be convinced in
+another way, by matters not of ghosts and fancies but of laws and
+prisons, that St. Andrews is all golf and is not as other places are.
+There are laws of the town approved by Act of Parliament, by which it is
+made illegal to practise putting on the eighteenth green or to play on
+the course with iron clubs only, the penalty for offences in these
+matters being a fine or imprisonment. Where else is there a place where
+a golfer may get fourteen days for depending for all his long shots on
+his driving iron or his cleek? Clearly, the law is made for the good of
+the precious turf and the teeing grounds of the old course, and that it
+is not law made to be looked and laughed at is proved by the fact that a
+Prime Minister himself was once warned for infringing it. One time when
+at St. Andrews I made an examination of the complete bye-laws in which
+these prohibitions are included. They are embraced in the St. Andrews
+Links Act, which was passed in 1894, and in the Burgh Police Act of
+Scotland, which was made law two years earlier. The regulations for the
+use of the old and new golf courses make up these bye-laws, and they are
+twenty-one in number. Following them are four "general regulations for
+the whole links as defined by Schedule I. of the Links Act," and at the
+finish there is a clause about penalties, wherein it is said that "any
+person who shall contravene any of the foregoing bye-laws shall be
+liable, on conviction, in a penalty not exceeding one pound for each
+offence, and, failing payment, to imprisonment for any period not
+exceeding fourteen days." There it is, the law, and it is that last
+clause with its sting that gives the point to the whole story.
+
+Now let us look at these bye-laws and see how careful we must be when we
+go to the great city of golf, and for what we may be fined a pound or
+lodged in a Fifeshire gaol for a full fortnight, during which our game
+might go to rack and ruin.
+
+In the first place it is set down that "no person shall play cricket,
+football, or any game other than golf upon the golf courses." Surely
+nobody who ever went to St. Andrews would wish to play any other game,
+but here we have it plainly set forth that the golf of St. Andrews will
+bear no rivals, and it must be remembered that the great putting green,
+on which the fifth and thirteenth holes are made, is big enough for
+several cricket pitches, and also that the large flat space along which
+a fairway for the first and eighteenth is situated might be made into
+various football grounds. But what sacrilege! It is well that men may be
+sent to prison if they ever committed it. Then you may be punished by
+law if you do not begin your match at the first teeing ground, but no
+doubt some thousands of people in their time have risked chastisement
+for this offence. "No player shall, in teeing his ball, raise the turf
+of the teeing ground." There is sand there for him who wants it, and he
+must not make his tee in the prehistoric way. After this there are some
+points of etiquette which are made matters of law. Elsewhere, if we
+disregard the etiquette of the game as set forth at the end of the
+rules, we are merely told about it by other people and regarded as very
+badly-mannered golfers, but at St. Andrews the sovereign or fourteen
+days needs to be considered. Thus "no player shall play from the tee
+until the party in front have played their second strokes and are out
+of range, nor play to the putting green till the party in front have
+holed out and moved away." And again, "players looking for a lost ball
+must allow any other match coming up to pass them," and "every caddie,
+and every player unaccompanied by a caddie, shall replace any turf that
+may be accidentally removed by the player's club, and shall press it
+firmly with the foot." Then we may be fined or sent to prison if, when
+practising, we drive a ball off a putting green, that is, within twenty
+yards of a hole, and the eighth clause is that which is known to all
+men--"To prevent destruction of the turf of the golf courses, play or
+practice with iron clubs alone is prohibited." Also, "no practice is
+allowed over the first and eighteenth holes of the Old Course, nor shall
+any practice be allowed over any part of the golf courses so as to
+obstruct or delay players."
+
+Upon all this, it is enacted that when playing with three or more balls
+we must allow those who are only playing two, as in an ordinary single
+match, to pass us on being requested to do so, that we must let a match
+through if we do not play the whole round but cut in somewhere, that we
+must not pierce the ground with any golf club support nor with the flags
+from the holes, nor must we drive towards any person without calling out
+"Fore!" and waiting until he gets out of range. No man when at St.
+Andrews is allowed "to play the short game at the regular golf holes,
+except when engaged in a regular game of golf," and, as said, "no
+practising is allowed on the eighteenth putting green." There are five
+other bye-laws, mostly long, but the only other one which is specially
+interesting is that which is designed to preserve the integrity of the
+Swilcan Burn, which has played its part so thoroughly and drastically at
+times of great competitions. No other golf stream is protected by an
+Act of Parliament in the way that this one is, and its high dignity is
+unimpeachable. We are warned, under the usual penalty of a fine or
+imprisonment, that "no one shall wade in the Swilcan Burn, so far as it
+flows through the Old Course, nor shall any one, except players or
+caddies in search of their ball, do anything to cause its waters to
+become discoloured or muddy." There are surely times when we feel that
+we could not do anything to make the Swilcan Burn appear uglier than it
+does at those times.
+
+Why a distinction should be made between the "bye-laws" and the "general
+regulations," four in number, is not quite clear, but it would appear
+that the penalties of fine and imprisonment may be inflicted if the
+latter are disobeyed as well as the former. If that is so, we begin to
+wonder when we see the warning that "no one shall use profane language
+upon the links to the annoyance of the lieges." Let us then hope, for
+the sake of the law and our respect for it, that the lieges are not
+habitually in the neighbourhood of the putting green when putts are
+being missed that should not be. But it is good to see that there is a
+kind of general warning that "no one shall annoy or interfere with any
+one exercising a legitimate use of the links," which means, of course,
+playing golf. We golfers, according to these bye-laws and the Act of
+Parliament which supports them, may be sent to prison for doing so many
+things that it is excellent to know the common people may be cast there
+also if they meddle with us when we play the game in our own good way,
+and manage by thought and attention to avoid infringement of the many
+cautions which the fathers of St. Andrews have prescribed for our
+welfare and that of their dear old course. The Sheriff of Fife has set
+it down that he "allows and confirms" these bye-laws, the Secretary of
+Scotland has officially approved of them, and the staff employed by the
+Green Committee are authorised to see that they are obeyed, especially
+those about replacing turf, playing with irons only, and practising at
+the first and eighteenth holes. Contemplating these enactments, we
+conclude that St. Andrews is the best and proper place for the
+upbringing of the golfer's son.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE TRAGEDIES OF THE SHORT PUTT, AND A CONTRAST BETWEEN CHILDREN AND
+CHAMPIONS, WITH THE VARIED COUNSEL OF THE WISEST MEN.
+
+
+The case of an earth so well explored by golfing travellers having been
+considered as the third of the wonders of the sphere, and the
+peculiarity of St. Andrews as the fourth, there is a clear suggestion as
+to which is the next or fifth wonder of the series. Inevitably one
+recalls the tearful situation of the mighty hunter in a story which is
+passed in company as fact. He declared he had encountered all the
+manifold perils of the jungle, had tracked the huge elephant to its
+retreat, and had stood eye to eye with the man-eating tiger. It is
+believed that he had done all these things. Then he added, "And never
+once have I trembled until I came to a short putt." For me one of the
+most remarkable things I have seen in golf was at an Open Championship
+meeting at St. Andrews when, watching and musing by the side of the
+eighteenth green, I saw four of the greatest players of this or any
+other time come up to it in the competition one by one and have putts of
+less than eighteen inches at that hole. Three of the four missed! In the
+old days, at all events, when the greens were not quite as they are now,
+but became very glassy and slippery with much wind and constant play
+upon them, I believe there were more short putts missed on the old
+course at St. Andrews than on any other two courses in the world, and
+the task of holing the little stupids on that home green was a most
+tormenting ordeal.
+
+So, with the broken-hearted explorer, and the tragedy of St. Andrews,
+there is pointed to us for the next wonder of the game the missing of
+the short putt. And I do believe, and so must others, that the missing
+of such a short putt as it seems humanly impossible for any man, having
+the control of his limbs and being _compos mentis_, to miss is one of
+the most remarkable features of any game, and one that would be
+completely and absolutely inexplicable did it not in itself offer a most
+splendid illustration of the full effect of strain of mind on physical
+action, of the pressure of great responsibility on an over-anxious man.
+It embraces nearly the whole psychology of golf. The short putt largely
+explains the game, and it is testimony to the soundness of this view,
+and the rightful selection of this as a permanent wonder, that the
+general public would never believe the truth as we know it, that it is
+possible for the greatest players with what is to them, for the time
+being, almost as much as their lives depending on it, to miss putts so
+little that no walking baby properly fed would miss. The general public,
+with its vast stores of common sense, would not believe the fact; it
+would ridicule it and treat the whole suggestion with contempt, and it
+might in a sense be right; but then the general public has not been
+fighting its way round a golf course against another and very truculent
+general public, driving, playing seconds and thirds, getting bunkered
+and recovering, and encountering all manner of difficulties and dangers,
+and then had its fate for the day depending on a short putt at the
+eighteenth green! By psychology of the game, as just mentioned, we mean,
+of course, the way in which the mind and the emotions act and react upon
+the physical system and its capacity, how doubts and fears are
+engendered, and things from not seeming what they are become really
+different, so far as the attitude of the player to them is concerned.
+Thus, as has been well said, a putt of ten inches on the first green is,
+as one might feel, a putt of thirty inches--though still in fact of the
+same length--when that green is not the first but the thirty-seventh,
+and that on which a long-drawn-out match is being finished.
+
+One summer's day, on a course in France, a little party of us were
+discussing the slow and sure methods of certain Americans then in
+Europe--if, really, they were quite so sure as they were slow. Indeed
+they hustled not. The point was put forward by one of us that there is a
+moment in waiting when inspiration and confidence come together, or at
+least come then as well as ever they can or will, and that if the
+hesitation is prolonged beyond that moment, the result is inevitably
+loss of faith, increasing doubt and timidity, and a distorted view of
+the situation arising from fear of fate. Half the difficulties of golf
+are due to the fact that the player has an abundance of time to think
+about what he is engaged to do and how it should be done. In that time
+hopes and fears and many emotions race through his mind, and tasks which
+were originally simple become every moment harder. In no other game has
+the player such ample leisure in which to think, to be careful, to be
+exact, and to decide upon the proper action, and thus responsibility is
+heaped upon him for what he does as it is in no other sport or
+recreation. He is oppressed with a mighty burden. That which he does he
+is entirely responsible for, and it can never be undone. It follows that
+this game has an extensive and peculiar psychology such as is possessed
+by no other. I shall proceed to tell a little story, dramatic in its
+circumstances, abounding in significance. It embraces the meanings and
+mysteries of golf.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The strange case of Sir Archibald Strand is one that caused much excited
+attention among the members of the golf community in general some months
+ago, and it is still discussed in the club-houses. Sir Archibald Strand,
+Bart., is a fair example of the thorough, enthusiastic, middle-aged
+player, who treats golf as something rather more than a game, which is
+as it should be. He is one of tolerably equable temperament, a good
+sportsman, and a man of strong character and physique, who did a long
+term of military service in India. Nowadays he spends an appreciable
+portion of his time in golfing, and a fair part of the remainder in
+contemplating the enduring mysteries and problems of the links. The game
+worries him exceedingly, occasionally it leads him to unhappiness, but,
+on the whole, he feels he likes it. He is a member of several London
+clubs, including Sunningdale, Walton Heath, Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and
+Woking, and of his seaside clubs those he most frequents are the Royal
+St. George's at Sandwich, and Rye. His handicap is 5, and generally he
+is what we consider and call a good reliable 5.
+
+He and his opponent, to whom, as a matter of discretion and confidence,
+we must refer as Mr. A., had just ended their match at Mid-Surrey one
+pleasant day, and Sir Archibald was trying his last putt over again as
+golfers often do. It was a putt of two feet. He had missed it before;
+but now, of course, he rolled the ball in every time. A question arose
+about circumstances altering cases, as they so commonly do in golf, and
+of responsibility weighing heavily on the mind that hesitates; and Sir
+Archibald declared that nobody in good health could be such a fool as to
+miss a two-feet putt like that, if he really examined the line
+thoroughly, and took the proper pains. Just then the open champion of
+the period was passing by the green, and they called him up and asked
+his views upon the missing of two-feet putts. Taylor denied that a man
+was a fool for missing them. He mentioned the psychology of the
+business, and very forcibly argued that a two-feet putt was a very
+difficult thing, that the more important it was the more difficult it
+became, and that the longer one thought about it the more impossible did
+it seem to hole it. "Ah!" said he, with the solemn countenance he
+assumes when discussing the terrors of this game, and the deep emphasis
+he makes when he admits the difficulties it creates for him, "Ah!" he
+murmured, "if I had never missed any putts of one foot, let alone the
+putts of two! I tell you, sir, the two-feet putt, when it has to be
+done--mind you when it has got to be done--is one of the most difficult
+things in the world to do, and never mind the fact that your babies can
+do it all the time! Take that from me, sir!" This was a touch of the
+real Taylor, the true philosopher, one who knows the game.
+
+Mr. A., who is sometimes aggressive in manner, brought the matter in
+discussion to a pretty point at once. "Look here, Strand," said he, "I
+will tell you what I will do. I will place this ball here, so, exactly
+two feet from the hole, and I will give you a fortnight, but not less
+than a fortnight, to hole that putt. You are not to practise it here at
+this hole on this green in the meantime; but you may place the ball in
+position if you like, and look at it. And a fortnight to-day, at ten
+o'clock in the morning, you must make the putt, and I will bet you
+fourteen guineas, being a guinea a day for waiting, that you do not hole
+it. We will have the position of the hole properly marked, so that a
+fortnight hence it shall be in the same place."
+
+The champion said he would tell Lees, the greenkeeper, and that should
+be done. Strand, with a laugh, accepted the wager, and the matter was
+settled.
+
+The events that followed were curious. In the club-house there was then
+little disposition to attend to the accounts of the proceedings that
+were furnished by both parties. The men who had finished rounds were too
+much occupied with their own troubles or joys.
+
+At his club in town that evening, Sir Archibald, over dinner, related
+the circumstances of the wager to a few friends, with an appearance of
+considerable satisfaction with himself, and seemed a little surprised
+that the other members of the party did not at once approve of his
+proceeding as sound and businesslike.
+
+"Of course, you know, Strand, my good man," said Mr. Ezekiel Martin, a
+successful stockbroker, "these putts are missed sometimes, and I don't
+suppose it makes it any easier for you by waiting a fortnight. It's like
+carrying over in the House till one is a very tired bull."
+
+"Nonsense!" exclaimed Sir Archibald, "I could go out now and hole that
+putt nineteen times out of twenty in the dark!"
+
+"I believe you could," answered Martin, "but doing it in the dark, when
+you cannot see the hole and realise all the imaginary difficulties, is
+very different from doing it in broad daylight; and putting now, on the
+spur of the moment, as it were, is very different from putting when you
+have a whole fortnight to think about what you are going to do."
+
+"I don't see it," replied Sir Archibald, yet he began to feel a little
+uneasy. On returning home that night, instead of going to bed at once he
+went into his study, laid a tumbler on its side on the carpet, and
+putted from a measured two feet for about half an hour. He holed most
+of them, and tumbled into bed feeling that Martin had been "pulling his
+leg," as people say. In the morning he engaged a gardener to smooth down
+a piece of his lawn, planting in a little putting-green turf, and he had
+a hole made in it, and a circle with two feet radius drawn round the
+hole, so that he could putt from every point. When this work was done,
+he spent an hour in practising there, and succeeded well. He only missed
+about one in ten. He tried seven different putters, with approximately
+equal results. In the afternoon he went down to Mid-Surrey, played a
+match, and lost it by missing a short putt at the home hole. After tea,
+he went out on to the eighteenth green, found the spot where the hole
+was the day before, examined it carefully, and saw that there were
+slight differences in the texture of the grass round about, and that
+there was a little depression to the left side. He had not noticed this
+before. However, said he to himself, it would be easy to make allowances
+for these things, but he began now to doubt whether thirteen days ahead
+he would use his wry-necked putting cleek or bolt the putt with an
+aluminium putter. Where there are troubles of that kind it is often
+better to make short work of the putt by the bolting way, and have an
+end of it. At home that evening he did more putting practice on the
+carpet, and did not hole them quite so well. Lady Strand, who
+understands her husband thoroughly, and is the sweetest, gentlest
+sympathiser, coaxed him to telling her the trouble, for she saw that one
+existed. With perfect wisdom she suggested that he should wipe the
+fourteen guineas from the current account as already lost, and face the
+task as one who had all to gain and nothing to lose. Of course, her
+husband said, it was not the money, but the frightful jackass he would
+look if he missed the putt.
+
+He went to his club in town the next day instead of going to golf, and
+took with him a book containing a chapter on putting, by Willie Park. He
+stretched himself out on a Chesterfield in a corner of the library, and
+gazed at two spots on the carpet which he had measured as being two feet
+from each other. Eventually, he decided that that was not good for him,
+since equal distances in furnished rooms, as is well known, look longer
+than they look outside. He lunched with a few friends, and brought up
+the subject again.
+
+"Give him the money and have done with it, Strand. You are sure to
+lose!" said the brutish Martin.
+
+"I wish I had not to wait for a fortnight," murmured Strand.
+
+"Ah! He knew! The other man knew!" rejoined Martin. "He knows the game
+of golf! What I cannot understand is why he did not give you a year and
+make it 365 guineas. You would have sold out in six weeks at L200!"
+
+Sir Archibald wrote a letter to Mr. A. that evening, intimating that he
+would probably have to leave town the week after the next. He hinted
+that it might be convenient if they got their wager out of the way
+beforehand, and if he putted a week from then. Mr. A. replied that he
+was sorry it would not be convenient for him to attend then, and that
+the signed terms of the contract had better be abided by.
+
+Sir Archibald bought two new putters on the following day, and in the
+afternoon he had Taylor out for an hour, and they went practising on the
+putting lawn just outside the garden gate. Sir Archibald was putting
+very well then; but he insisted that it would be a good thing to change
+the ball he was using, which was rather lively. After he had done with
+Taylor, he went to look at the place on the eighteenth green where he
+would have to putt, and it seemed that the coarse grass had fattened up
+considerably with the rain that had fallen, and that the sand below it
+was distinctly gritty. It began to seem that he would have to run the
+ball in at the right side of the hole. He asked Lees some questions
+about the grasses on that green, and was sorry he could not take a
+little Mid-Surrey turf home with him. He was feeling a little tired when
+he reached his home that night, and as it was Thursday he suggested to
+Lady Strand that they should go to Folkestone for the week-end, and not
+bother at all about golf, which they did accordingly. He found it
+delightful to linger on the leas and not be worried with the game.
+
+This kind of thing continued and became worse and worse again during the
+days that followed. There was practice, thought, and purchase
+continually, and unfortunately the proportion of missed putts at two
+feet, both on the carpet, on the practice lawn, and on the greens at
+Mid-Surrey, Coombe Hill, and Woking, began to increase. At putts of
+three feet, four, and five, Sir Archibald was marvellous, and, of
+course, he never missed the very little ones; but the two-feet putts
+bothered him all the time. He attributed it to his liver; and he was
+certainly looking worn. Matters were not improved by such inconsiderate
+remarks as were made by Martin, Evans, and others, whenever he had a
+two-feet putt to do, such as "Now, Strand, that's just your distance!"
+It was only a joke; but in the circumstances it was not perhaps in good
+taste.
+
+On the evening of the twelfth day Strand, after deliberation, wrote a
+letter to A. in which he said he feared he would not be able to go down
+to the course at the appointed time, and intimated that, according to
+the terms of the wager, he would hand over the fourteen guineas to him
+when next they met. Before posting this letter he went and did a little
+practice in the dusk on the lawn outside the house. He seemed to get
+them down with some confidence on this occasion, and Lady S., watching
+him, called out cheerily, "Silly boy! as if you could really miss! Now
+what shall I buy with the fourteen guineas?"
+
+So Strand tore up the letter and went to bed for rest.
+
+On the night before the appointed day he slept badly. He was putting in
+his mind until three o'clock in the morning. Then he rose, went in his
+pyjamas into the study, made a line on the top of his aluminium putter
+indicating the striking point, and went back to bed, but did not sleep.
+For some time he tried an imaginary humming of the "Jewel Song" from
+_Faust_, and repeated a few lines from Scott's "Lady of the Lake"--old
+dodges of his for assisting distraction and sleep--but they did not
+serve, nor did a fixed vision of millions of balls falling in an endless
+stream from the mouth of a pump and disappearing instantly through a
+golf hole in the ground.
+
+At five-thirty he rose again and took his bath. He hesitated as to what
+golfing suit he should wear. Finally, for the sake of complete ease, and
+that there should be nothing to attract his eye from the ball, he put on
+some dark-blue flannels.
+
+He looked at his breakfast, pecked at a sole, and at nine-fifteen,
+feeling distinctly unwell, he took a taxi for the course. He had one
+great consolation upholding him. At five minutes past ten it would all
+be over. He felt that he knew how glad a condemned criminal must be that
+at five minutes past eight on a certain morning--or a minute or two
+earlier with a little luck--a black flag would be hoisted on the prison
+pole.
+
+At seven minutes to ten he drank a large brandy and soda and went out to
+the eighteenth green. Mr. A. and a few others were there to see the
+business properly carried out. Taylor placed the ball exactly two feet
+from the hole, which was cut in the proper place. He had his watch in
+his hand.
+
+Sir Archibald bent down and examined the putt with great care. He
+essayed to pick up what seemed to be a "loose impediment" on his line,
+but saw that it was not loose. The putt seemed very difficult now, and
+he wished he had brought his plain putting cleek out with him, but it
+was too late.
+
+At ten o'clock exactly, Taylor said, "Now, Sir Archibald, will you
+kindly putt?"
+
+Sir Archibald Strand looked like a man who had been hunted down. He made
+one swift glance around him, but saw no escape, so he pulled himself
+together, smiled a little sadly, and said to himself, "Don't be a fool,
+Archie!" Then he faced the putter to the ball; the club was trembling
+slightly. He swung it back much too far, checked it in the return swing,
+and came on to the ball in a nervous, stupid sort of way, doing little
+more than touch it. The ball took a line to the right of the hole, and
+did not run more than fourteen inches.
+
+You may have thought that Sir Archibald used unfortunate words and was
+dismayed. He did not. A look of established happiness and placid
+contentment spread upon his countenance, as a streak of sunlight might
+flash across a plain. "Ha!" he sighed in relief. He took from his pocket
+a cheque for fourteen guineas already made out, and handed it to Mr. A.,
+and then joyfully exclaimed: "Thank heaven, it is finished! Now, my
+friends, we will honour this unusual occasion in a suitable manner at
+your convenience, and this afternoon I leave for Sandwich for a week of
+golf. And no letters are being forwarded."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us now enter consideration of this matter in a proper frame of mind,
+seriously and not looking contemptuously upon the problem of holing
+even the very shortest of putts as no problem at all after the affected
+manner of the inexperienced and uninformed general public. Let us
+approach it cautiously and in an analytical spirit. We should take the
+evidence of expert witnesses upon happenings in their careers, in our
+endeavour to discover the real truth. We have already remarked upon the
+case of the hunter who shot tigers and cringed at putts, and of the
+great champions who all missed them on the eighteenth green at St.
+Andrews, when they were playing for nothing less than the championship.
+We have also contemplated the circumstances of the distressed baronet
+who was given a fortnight in which to hole a two-feet putt, suffered
+intolerable agonies during the period, and was only restored to
+happiness when he had failed at the stroke. Now let us pay regard to the
+experience of a little child only six years old, who was completely
+successful at many putts in succession, at distances of from one to six
+feet, all the most perilous situations. This remarkable demonstration
+was witnessed by the proud parents, by a great professional, and by
+myself.
+
+The child is a boy, and not, as has been stated, a winsome little girl.
+There is, if I may say it without offence, nothing remarkable about his
+parents. They are excellent kindly-mannered people, of tolerable
+middle-class education, simple in their manner of life, and of no
+pronounced tastes in any direction. The father is in a large timber
+business in the Midlands, and has probably an income of about six
+hundred pounds a year. His handicap is 14. He is not a very keen golfer,
+and seems to spend a fair amount of his time in his garden. A total
+abstainer, he smokes little, and has no strong tastes in art and
+literature; but he once told me that in addition to much Scott and a
+sufficiency of Dickens he had read one of my books on golf. That is the
+father. As to the mother, she is just one who might be called in the
+north a nice little body. She is a thoroughly good housewife,
+domesticated, affectionate, and if she does not play golf she
+sympathises with it. These are people who are tolerably satisfied with
+their state. They live in a pleasant house, employ two maidservants, and
+have no motor-car. Here, surely, is nothing to suggest the creation of
+genius. Yet they are the parents of this remarkable child who did, with
+no hesitation, with confidence, certainty, and frequency, what the
+mighty hunter, the champions, the bold but misguided baronet, and you
+and I have failed to accomplish.
+
+There is a man of wit and wisdom, Andrew Kirkaldy, who, when you inquire
+of him what is the most difficult thing in golf, responds with no
+hesitation that it is to hole "a wee bit divvle of a putt that long!"
+and so saying he will hold his hands four feet apart. Occasionally he
+may vary the phraseology, not to its advantage, but the meaning and
+effect remain the same. Andrew is solid on four feet. But authorities
+differ a little in this matter of measurement. Some will reduce the
+distance to thirty inches; others have it that the yard putt is the most
+trying; I have heard eighteen inches put forward. But it all amounts to
+much the same thing, that what looks ridiculously easy is very, very
+difficult. Now this tender little child, who knew nothing of the fears
+and dangers of this awful game, placed the ball at a distance of two
+feet from the hole on a curly and slippery green, and with a sublime
+aplomb hit it straight to the middle of the hole--the first putt of his
+life and a good one. Then he putted from a yard and holed it again, then
+from Kirkaldy's distance and played the stroke just as surely and
+successfully, and then repeated them many times, never faltering, never
+failing. We who watched were a trifle sad, and perhaps ashamed. We knew
+that with all our thought and skill and golfing learning, all our
+strength and manhood, we could not do the same when at our games, and
+that, the more we needed to do it by the importance of the golf that was
+being played, the more difficult it was. Our selfish consolation was
+that in time the little child would grow up and then he would not be
+able to hole those putts, for then he would know that it was a difficult
+thing to do, and would be embarrassed and defeated accordingly. For it
+is the golfer's consciousness of imaginary difficulties that makes him
+such a strange coward when this putting business is being done. He knows
+that really the putting is easy, but he knows also that he must not
+miss, that an inch lost here is as much of a loss as two hundred yards
+in the driving--and he fears his fate. It is consciousness of the
+stupidity of missing, nerves, fears, imagination, that make this missing
+of short putts by the cleverest players, champions as much as any
+others, the most remarkable thing that happens constantly in any game.
+There is nothing like it. If it were not so easy, if there were good
+excuse for failure, those putts would not be missed so frequently. In
+putting, said Sir Walter Simpson, there is much to think about and much
+more not to be thought of. "When a putter," he reflected, "is waiting
+his turn to hole out a putt of one or two feet in length, on which the
+match hangs at the last hole, it is of vital importance that he think of
+nothing. At this supreme moment he ought studiously to fill his mind
+with vacancy. He must not even allow himself the consolations of
+religion. He must not prepare himself to accept the gloomy face of his
+partner and the derisive delight of his adversaries with Christian
+resignation should he miss. He must not think that it is a putt he would
+not dream of missing at the beginning of the match, or, worse still,
+that he missed one like it in the middle. He ought to wait, calm and
+stupid, till it is his turn to play, wave back the inevitable boy who is
+sure to be standing behind his arm, and putt as I have told him
+how--neither with undue haste nor with exaggerated care. When the ball
+is down, and the putter handed to the caddy, it is not well to say, 'I
+couldn't have missed it.' Silence is best. The pallid cheek and
+trembling lip belie such braggadocio."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The truth is that the man who golfs will unceasingly think of the things
+he should not think of, and that is what makes this easy putting so
+difficult, and it explains why the innocent child, unthinking, finds the
+business as simple and pleasant as swinging under the boughs of a tree
+on a sunny day in June. While there is one quite easy way of doing
+nearly every putt, there are perhaps a dozen more or less difficult ways
+of missing it, and it is these that are uppermost in the golfer's mind
+when the time of his trial comes, and so once more is vice triumphant
+while angels are depressed. There is the hole, a pit that is deep and
+wide, four and a quarter inches in diameter, and there is the little
+ball, only an inch and a half through the middle, and the intervening
+space between the two is smooth and even. It would seem to be the
+easiest thing in theory and practice to knock the ball into the large
+hole; but how very small does the hole then appear to be and how much
+too big for it is the ball! But the golfer knows that he should hole
+that putt, and that if he fails he will never, never have the chance
+again. Should he putt and miss the act is irrevocable; the stroke and
+the hole, or the half of it, are lost, and nothing that can happen
+afterwards can remove that loss. Should he at the beginning of the play
+to a hole make a faulty drive, or should his approach play be very
+inaccurate, he knows that he may atone for these mistakes by special
+cleverness displayed in subsequent strokes, and with the buoyant hope
+that constantly characterises him he thinks he will. But the hope seems
+often to desert him at the end; confidence lapses. The short putt is the
+very last stroke in the play to that hole, and if it is missed there is
+no further opportunity for recovery. In this way it does seem sometimes
+that there is a little of the awful, the eternal, the infinite about
+that putt. The player is stricken with fear and awe. He knows it is an
+easy thing to do in the one proper way of doing it, but raging through
+his mind are hideous pictures of a dozen ways of missing. Once upon a
+time I put the question to a number of the greatest players of the age
+as to what were their thoughts, if any, when they came to making one of
+these little putts on which championships or other great affairs almost
+entirely depended, and almost invariably their answer was that at the
+last supreme moment a thought came into their minds and was expressed to
+themselves in these words: "What a fool I shall look if I miss this
+putt!" Those words exactly did Willie Park, the younger, say quietly to
+himself just as he was about to make the last short putt of a round at
+Musselburgh, which would or would not give him a tie for the
+championship with Andrew Kirkaldy. He did not say that if he missed the
+putt he would lose the championship. He said he would look a fool.
+
+The other day in a quiet corner of London, away from the game but, as it
+happened, not from the thought of it, I had Harry Vardon with me engaged
+in some serious talk in a broad and general way upon golfing men and
+things. Ten years ago, when we were doing some kind of collaboration in
+the production of a new book, he said to me very impressively and as one
+who wonders exceedingly, "It is a funny game; let us impress that upon
+them all, it is a very funny game," and now, having played perhaps five
+thousand more rounds and won another Open Championship, he went forward
+to the admission, "It is an awful game." He meant it, and one reason why
+we like our Harry Vardon is because he too has always been awe-stricken
+by this so-called game, and because there is no other man in golf who
+sympathises better with the trials and tortures of the moderate player.
+On this morning of spring he was telling me of another new and great
+discovery he had made in putting methods, and in giving to me an account
+of his pains, his sufferings in missing all the short putts he had
+failed at in recent times--how dearly have they cost him!--he said it
+was the two-feet putt that frightened him most of all, and declared
+solemnly and seriously that he would rather have a three-yarder than
+such a putt, and that he would hole the former oftener than the latter.
+He said the two-feet putts frighten him, that as soon as he settles
+himself down to the business of putting in such a case the hole seems to
+become less and less. "I am overcome," says he, "with the idea that in a
+moment it will be gone altogether. Then I am in a state of panic, and I
+snatch at my putter and hit the ball quickly so that with a little luck
+it may reach the hole before it goes away altogether and there is
+nothing to putt at. When I have missed I see that the hole is there, and
+as big as ever or bigger!" Vardon once tried putting left-handed, a
+doctor having advised him to do so, and he found that the idea worked
+splendidly, but he did not like the look of it. He believes after all
+his sorrows that one of the greatest and best secrets of good putting is
+to keep more absolutely still than do most golfers, who seem to think
+it matters less in putting when it matters so much more.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now the golfer in his wisdom, ingenuity, and resource has tried every
+way he can think of to solve this problem of nerves and doubts by
+mechanical and other means. Those who would be successful in
+competitions have retired to bed at nine o'clock in the evening for a
+month, and some of them have sipped from bottles of tonics hoping that
+physic would serve to give them strong nerve, steady hands and courage,
+but such methods have not availed. For no part of this or any other game
+have so many different kinds of instruments been invented, though the
+little child could do the putts with the head of a walking-stick or a
+common poker. Scarcely a week goes by in the season but some new kind of
+putter is introduced to the expectant multitude of harassed players, and
+now and then a thrill runs through the world as they receive a clear
+assurance that at last some special device has been discovered which
+will make their putting ever afterwards easy and certain. There is a
+thrill as if a secret of long life had been found. But the chill of
+disappointment follows quickly. Golfers have now tried all things known,
+and more short putts are missed than ever. Hundreds of different kinds
+of putters have been invented. They have been made with very thin
+blades, and with thick slabs of metal or other substance instead of mere
+blades. They have been made like spades, like knives, like hammers, and
+like croquet mallets. They have even been made like putters. They have
+been made of wood, iron, aluminium, brass, gun-metal, silver, bone, and
+glass. Here in my room I have the sad gift of the creator of a forlorn
+and foolish hope. It is a so-called putter made in the shape of a roller
+on ball bearings which is meant to be wheeled along the green up to the
+ball. Like some others it was illegal according to the rules. To such
+extravagances of fancy the desperate golfers have been led in their
+desire to succeed in this putting that the authorities have had to step
+in for the defence of the dignity of the game to declare a limit to the
+scope of invention in this matter. And yet I once knew a man who for a
+long period did some of the best putting that you would ever fear to
+play against with a little block of wood that had once served to keep
+the door of his study ajar, to which had been attached a stick that was
+made from a broom handle. This improvised putter was a freak of his
+fancy at a time when he thought there might be some virtue in a return
+to prime simplicity. Then Mr. James Robb, who has won the Amateur
+Championship once and been in the final on two other occasions, has
+putted all his life with a cleek that his sister won in a penny raffle
+when he was a boy and gave to him. Likewise Mr. John Laidlay has also
+putted uninterruptedly since he was a boy with a cleek that is now so
+thin with much cleaning that his friends tell him he may soon be able to
+shave himself with it. But these are the grand exceptions after all.
+Such fine settlement and constancy are unknown to the average player. It
+was but the other day that I learned that a friend of mine, one most
+distinguished in the game and of the very highest skill, had used
+fifteen different putters on the day of an important competition--three
+in the morning's play, nine others in noonday practice, and three quite
+fresh ones in the afternoon game. The same good man carried a choice
+assortment of his own putters to a recent amateur championship meeting,
+but at the beginning of the tournament made love to one of mine,
+borrowed it, and used it until he was beaten--not a long way from the
+end of the competition. Sometimes it seems that what is rudest in
+design, almost savage, is now best liked when in our frenzy we have
+ransacked art, science, and all imagination in search of the putter with
+which we can putt as we would. There is the spirit of reaction; we would
+return to the primitive. Putters that look as if they might be for
+dolls, some of those stumpy little things made of iron on a miniature
+aluminium-putter model, which some of the great champions have been
+using, have hardly become popular. The crude and the bizarre, suggestive
+of inspiration, please well. I shall not forget Jean Gassiat, good
+golfer of France, coming up to me one championship day at Hoylake,
+holding forward in his right hand, and with its head in the air, what
+was evidently meant for a golf club, but which was as much unlike one as
+anything we had ever seen. On the face of the player was spread the grin
+of pleasure; wordlessly he suggested that at last he had found it, the
+strangest, the most wonderful. In principle this new club, as it has to
+be called for courtesy, is akin to the affair of the door-stopper and
+the broomstick. It consists of a plain flat rectangular piece of wood
+about four inches long, two inches wide, and three-quarters of an inch
+deep, and its two-inch nose is cut quite square, while for a couple of
+inches at the end of the shaft the grip is thickened to twice its usual
+size. It is weighted and balanced by large and small lead bullets in the
+sole. It is possible to frame a good argument in favour of a putter made
+of anything; nothing is without some advantage. It could be said for a
+ginger-beer bottle that it would insist on the ball being most truly hit
+from the middle of the vessel as the ball ought to be hit, and, given
+notice, one could prepare a statement of claim on behalf of an old boot
+seeking to be raised to the putterage. So there are good things to be
+said for this putter from France, and one of the best is that after
+smiling upon it Jean Gassiat began to wonder, then thought,
+experimented, and fell in love with this putter completely. Some weeks
+later I saw him doing those marvels on the green as are only done when
+man and putter have become thoroughly joined together, and Gassiat has
+always to be taken seriously in these matters, for, like Massy, he is a
+Basque, and, like the old champion, he is one of the most beautiful
+putters, with an instinct for holing. This most remarkable invention,
+without desiring its extinction in the least, one would say, surely
+departs a whole world of fancy farther from the traditional idea of what
+a golf club should be than the poor Schenectady of the Americans which
+St. Andrews proscribed. It was not the idea of Gassiat, nor of any other
+than the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, a French sportsman of
+thoroughness and a very keen golfer. Seeing what Gassiat was doing,
+James Sherlock obtained one of these barbaric tools, and at this the
+public came in.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every thinkable variety of putting method has been adopted. Bodies,
+hands, feet have been placed in all positions, and the stroke has been
+made in every conceivable way. Are there any two players who do it just
+the same, or have the same advice to give? For a violent contrast take
+two of the most able amateurs of the time, both of them long since
+distinguished in the foremost competitions, Mr. John Low and Mr. H. S.
+Colt. The former favours the wooden putter, and he has one of that kind
+to which he is keenly attached, but he putts with all sorts of things as
+the spirit moves him on consideration of special circumstances. He was
+one of the early members of the thoughtful school of golf which has made
+such a strong advance in recent times. Nearly always, however, you will
+find him standing nearly upright when doing his putting, grasping a club
+with a tolerably long shaft somewhere quite near to the top of the
+handle. This erect attitude is that which our fore-fathers of the
+traditions mostly favoured. Those splendid gentlemen, as we have agreed,
+were fine golfers who conducted their game nobly, but it has always
+seemed to me that they were an unimaginative lot. It never appears to
+have occurred to them that because the club has a handle at the top was
+no reason why they should grasp it up there instead of nearly at the
+opposite end, as do a large body of the most enterprising and inquiring
+amateurs these days. Of this advanced party the eminent architect is a
+shining example, for he holds his putting cleek so far down, so near to
+the ironwork, that the shaft seems useless, and in addition to this he
+defies all teaching in putting by planting the heel of the club down on
+the green and holding the hands so low that the toe of the putter is
+cocked up, and with this toe he hits the ball, and, as it looks, he tops
+it. But that putting of his is too much for most of the men who have to
+play against it. When those who do not understand see men putting in
+this way, or something like it, they say to themselves, and perhaps to
+others, that they cannot see why the men do not have the unused part of
+the shaft cut off so that it may not be in the way. But there they show
+their deficiencies of knowledge, though one is not sure that all the men
+who putt with a low grip quite know why they do so. They only know that
+the method suits them, but the truth is often that in these cases the
+balancing piece of the shaft above the hands acts as a steadier for the
+piece below. A few students have carried this idea a point further by
+having a piece of lead attached to the top of the handle to increase the
+weight and the balancing influence of that part. Mr. Hammond Chambers is
+one of them. The amateurs are the most original and peculiar in their
+putting methods. For the most part the professionals, although adopting
+widely different stances, hold themselves fairly well up when doing
+their work on the green, and putt with an easy following-through stroke
+as is recommended by the old masters. Strange that we should realise
+that quite the most impressive, stylish, and beautiful putter of the
+erect school is M'Dermott, the brilliant young American champion, who
+stands straight up with his legs and heels touching, grips his putter at
+the very end, and moving nothing but his club and hands, makes the most
+delightfully smooth swing. The low-grip method is not at all conducive
+to the gentle swinging, following-through putt, but encourages a sharp
+little tap.
+
+All the old original philosophy and instruction in putting can be
+summarised in a very few words, but hundreds of thousands would be
+needed for discussion of the variations, most of which have been used
+successfully at some time. The majority of advisers make a point of it
+that the ball must be hit truly, but they would not all be agreed on
+what that "truly" was except that it was hitting it as they meant to do.
+What most of them have in mind is that there is on the face of the
+putter a proper hitting point, from which the ball will run more
+accurately and with less disposition to slide off the right line than
+when hit with any other part, that being the point of balance or the
+sweet spot which every iron club possesses, and this point should be
+brought to the ball by an even swing from the back, and the swing should
+be continued after impact by the steady smooth advance of the head of
+the club along the line that it was making at the moment of striking.
+Absolute steadiness of the body is quite essential, and lack of it--just
+the most trifling and almost undiscernible lack--is responsible for more
+putting failures than almost any other cause. Most of those who tell us
+what to do in golf advise that we should keep the arms and forearms
+quite still also, and putt entirely from the wrist. And yet even these
+canons, as they are considered, are defied by large bodies of players.
+There are thousands of golfers who putt from the toes of their clubs,
+and believe in the method. They say they can feel the ball better and
+direct it more surely.
+
+I quote again one of the first preceptors, Sir Walter Simpson, because I
+think in most matters of feeling and practice he stands so well for the
+old solid school of golf that has nearly died away. He insists on the
+wooden putter, to begin with, and maintains that no good thing upon the
+green can come out of iron, but therein he was mistaken and time has
+cried him down. And then he writes: "I have just said there are, at
+most, two or three attitudes in which good putting is possible. We are
+nowadays inclined to be more dogmatic, and to assert that there is but
+one. The player must stand open, half facing the hole, the weight on the
+right leg, the right arm close to the side, the ball nearly opposite the
+right foot. To putt standing square, the arms reached out, is as
+difficult as to write without laying a finger on the desk." Had he lived
+on to these more modern days he would not have been nearly so dogmatic
+as that. Some of the very best putters do not play with the open stance,
+but putt entirely from the left leg, that leg thrown forward and in
+front and bearing all the weight, the right being merely hanging on
+behind. Then they have the ball right opposite the left toe, and they
+putt with a sense of strain which they believe in such circumstances is
+conducive to delicacy. Tens of thousands of others could not putt in
+this way, but those who can are very successful, and this is just
+another indication of the danger of dogma in golf. As to the right arm
+at the side, it may be said that there is now a fast increasing practice
+on the part of those who bend down somewhat to their putting to rest the
+right elbow or forearm on the right knee. J. H. Taylor experimented with
+this idea on the very eve of the 1913 championship at Hoylake, his
+putting for some time having been bad. He adopted it, won the
+championship, and gave the new way of putting all the credit.
+
+Now see how high and deeply thinking authorities can differ about the
+ways and means of doing this thing that the little child does so
+thoroughly and well. "A great secret of steady putting is to make a
+point of always 'sclaffing' along the ground," said the baronet. "The
+best putters do this, although it is not evident to an onlooker, the
+noise of the scrape being inaudible. To be sure of the exact spot on the
+putter face which is invariably to come in contact with the ball, is, of
+course, essential to the acquirement of accuracy. If you play to hit
+clean, your putter must pass above the ground at varying heights, as it
+is impossible to note how much air there is between it and the turf. In
+the other way you feel your road. But the greatest gain from treating
+putting as a sclaffing process is the less delicate manipulation
+required when short putts are in question. At a foot and a half from the
+hole the clean putter often fails, from incapacity to graduate inches of
+weakness, whilst the sclaffer succeeds because he is dealing with
+coarser weight sensitiveness."
+
+Now time and experience have showed us all that we cannot be dogmatic
+about anything in golf except that the ball must be struck somehow, and
+least of all may we venture to dogmatise in the matter of putting, and
+we will only say now that the late Sir Walter has a heavy majority
+against him on this suggestion that in doing the short putts it is well
+to let the putter scrape along the grass when going forward to the ball.
+It seems a small matter (that little man child never thought of it, but
+I noticed he did not sclaff), yet a whole world of good and ill upon the
+links is bound up with it. We shall set this happy golfer as he was, and
+friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, against one of the great champions and
+one of the finest putters who have ever handled clubs, and that is
+Willie Park, the younger, who says, "One of the secrets of putting is to
+hit the ball, and the ball only--a sclaffy style of putting is fatal;
+and, with the object of making absolutely certain of avoiding it, rather
+aim to strike the globe just the least thing above the ground. The ball
+should be smartly tapped with the putter, the stroke being played
+entirely from the wrists; and it should be neither struck a slow, heavy
+blow, nor shoved, nor should it be jerked."
+
+Most golfers will be with Willie in this matter, and those who have not
+tried already that way of putting, the sole of the club being kept clear
+from the turf when the stroke is being made, might do so to their very
+likely advantage. It is a point that a player of limited experience
+might never think about, and I know many who have been converted from
+bad putters to good ones by it. Some of the leading players of the
+Hoylake school have long been addicted to a slight elaboration or
+variation of this method. As they bring the club on to the ball they
+lift it slightly so that at the moment of impact a peculiar running spin
+is given to the ball, one that is not quite the same thing as is
+imparted by merely topping it. The way appears to help the hole to
+gather the ball when it arrives, but it is a method that needs natural
+aptitude and much practice to make it quite safe in application. And
+then again, right away to the contrary, I have witnessed in recent
+weeks a way of putting by one or two of the best players in the country,
+which is new, and which they declare to be most effective when dealing
+with the small heavy balls that are now in vogue and which are so
+difficult to manage, especially on very keen greens. We have all heard
+of the push shot, generally done with cleeks and the more powerful
+irons--and many of us have tried to play it as Harry Vardon does, and
+the things that I have seen done and described as push shots by ordinary
+amateurs have been very dreadful. But, no matter; the idea of the push
+shot is to hit the ball a kind of downward glancing blow, the club
+coming to ground after impact, the result being that the ball starts off
+quickly and pulls up suddenly. The players to whom I have referred have
+applied this stroke to their putting, coming on to the ball above the
+centre and gently pushing the club through it, and in the circumstances
+I have indicated there can be no doubt they have succeeded. Balls being
+so tricky now, these matters are worth considering.
+
+You would perceive how boldly dogmatic was the writer of the early
+classic on the question of stance. On that point there is just one more
+word to say. The tendency seems to be increasing in these days towards
+holding the feet closely together. It is a stance to which Harry Vardon,
+after all his putting troubles, has nearly settled down, and many of the
+best men on the green, Tom Ball for one, are given to it. But there is
+no law, no recommendation even, only the most timid suggestion to be
+made to any man in this matter. That way which suits him and gives him
+confidence is the best, and one may find men putting marvellously well
+when their stance and attitude seem to be so ungainly and difficult as
+to cause them pain.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The method of holding the club has, at least, as much to do with good
+putting as anything else, and in this matter one may almost dare to
+dogmatise. The majority of players hold their putters with the two hands
+close together but detached from each other, in much the same way as
+they hold their other clubs. All of them have heard of what they call
+the Vardon grip, or the overlapping grip, by which, when the club is
+held, the left thumb is brought into the palm of the right hand, and the
+little finger of that right hand is made generally to ride upon the
+first of the left hand. Many try this grip for their long shots, but few
+persist with it, as they become convinced either that their hands and
+fingers are not strong enough for it, or that before they could master
+the method they would need to suffer too much in loss of the game that
+they already possess. Therefore they renounce the overlapping grip
+entirely. But if they would try it in putting they would experience none
+of the difficulties with which they are troubled when applying it to
+their wooden club shots, no sort of force having to be given to the
+stroke, and almost from the first attempt they would enjoy an advantage.
+It is a matter of the most vital importance in putting that the two
+hands should not interfere with each other to the very slightest extent.
+One of them should have the general management of the putting, and the
+other, if detached from it, should do little save act in a very
+subordinate capacity as a steadying influence. Everybody is agreed upon
+that; it is absolute. But when we have the two hands separate, as with
+the ordinary grip, there is always a danger of the subordinate asserting
+itself too much, or at all events varying in the amount of work that it
+does. It cannot be avoided; it is inevitable. This, we may be sure, is
+the cause of much bad and uncertain putting.
+
+Join the two hands together, as with the overlapping grip, and we have
+them working as one completely, and the risk of undue interference by
+the subordinate vanishes. This is the best hint on putting that all our
+counsellors have to give, and they one and all declare it will do more
+than anything else to raise a man to the high level of excellence of the
+innocent child. Sometimes we see men putting one-handed, and one may
+believe that for medium and short putts this way is more certain than
+the separate hands. Mr. Hilton once putted that way in the Amateur
+International match, and I have seen many other good putters do well
+with it. But it savours of freakishness, and, as a famous professional
+said to the distinguished player who adopted the method, "God did not
+give us two hands for one to be kept in a pocket while the putting was
+being done." The simple truth is that the one-hand way approximates very
+closely to the two-hand overlapping method. It is nearly the same thing,
+the same principle--all the work being done from one point. Upon
+thought, we often come to realise that what appear to be some of the
+most freakish methods of putting have the same fundamental principle at
+their base. Thus, take the case of Sherlock, who putts extremely well
+and consistently. He almost alone, among players of the game, holds his
+two hands wide apart on the handle of the putter, the left one
+uppermost, of course. This looks very strange, and at the first
+consideration it might seem that surely one hand will upset all the good
+work and reckoning that is done by the other. But the simple fact is
+that the left is so far away that it cannot interfere, and that is the
+secret of the quality of this method. When the left is close up to the
+right we cannot prevent it from meddling; we are unconscious of it when
+it is doing so; but get it far away and we have it in subjection, and
+all that it does in Sherlock's case is just to steady things up a little
+while the right hand does the business of the time.
+
+Mr. Walter Travis, the most eminent American, than whose putting in the
+Amateur Championship he won at Sandwich nothing better has ever been
+seen since time and the game began, long since adopted a slight
+variation of this overlapping grip, specially for his putting, which, I
+think, has something to commend it. Instead of letting the little finger
+of the right hand rest on the forefinger of the left, he reverses the
+situation, and puts the forefinger of the left hand on the little one of
+the right, thus leaving the right hand in full possession of the grip,
+both thumbs being down the shaft. In the other way it is the left hand
+that has hold of the club with all its fingers, and it will now be
+remembered that while the left hand is the chief worker in driving and
+playing through the green, the right is the one that most frequently
+does the putting.
+
+Having thus mentioned Mr. Travis, one can hardly refrain from quoting
+some of his instruction in this matter as he once conveyed it to me. "I
+believe," said he, "that putting should always be done with one
+hand--with one hand actively at work, that is. The left should be used
+only for the purpose of swinging the club backwards preparatory to
+making the stroke. When it has done that its work is ended and the right
+hand should then be sole master of the situation, the left being merely
+kept in attachment to it for steadying purposes. When only one hand is
+thus employed the gain in accuracy is very great. Two hands at work on a
+short putt or a long one tend to distraction. When the stroke is being
+made the grip of the right hand should be firm, but not tight, and after
+the impact the club-head should be allowed to pass clean through with an
+easy following stroke. The follow-through should indeed be as long as it
+is possible to make it comfortably, and, with this object in view, at
+the moment of touching the ball the grip of the fingers of the left hand
+should be considerably relaxed, so that the right hand may go on doing
+its work without interruption. Never hit or jerk the ball as so many
+players do. There is nothing that pays so well as the easy
+follow-through stroke."
+
+Yet we find that there is less than ever of that easy follow-through
+being done in these days, and putting may be no better for the fact,
+almost certainly is not. These are days when old maxims are being
+abandoned and new systems are being proclaimed season by season. Jack
+White, a splendid putter and a magnificent heretic, lately declared that
+it is time to get rid of what has been regarded as the most inviolable
+of maxims, "Never up, never in," asserting that the determination to be
+past the hole in putting, if not in it, leads with these lively balls we
+now play with to far too many of them running out of holing distance on
+the other side. His counsel, therefore, is that the ball should be
+coaxed gently up to the hole with as much drag applied to it as can be.
+Then for years past it has been recommended that one of the best ways of
+managing the putting with these speedy balls is to have much loft on the
+putter, and so in that way do something to create the drag; but lately a
+change of opinion began to be made, and I am finding some of the best
+players using putters that are perfectly straight in the face, believing
+that by their agency they can putt more delicately and with a surer
+judgment of strength.
+
+It is a little bewildering. Arnaud Massy, the French player who once
+won the Open Championship, and who is better at the putts of from six to
+ten or twelve feet than any man I know, says that he has come to believe
+that Nature has planted deep down in us a sixth sense, and it is that of
+putting. In the development of that sense lies the way to success. But
+after all such meditations as this, I go back to the remembrance of that
+wonderful little child who could never miss, and then from it all there
+emerges the only real secret of success in putting. The child has a
+quality which we elders do not enjoy, and never shall have it for any
+length of time. He knows not the hardness of the world. Having innocence
+and faith he looks trustingly upon it, and the old world and its four
+and a quarter inch hole is a little ashamed, perhaps. The child has
+Confidence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A
+SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME.
+
+
+If men who play games are not proud of their champions, of what then
+shall they be proud? If we advance the proposition--which is done here
+and now--that no other game or sport that was ever conceived and played
+has produced such remarkable strength and mastery in its champions as
+golf has done, the cynics will find that with the resources of the world
+and history at their disposal this position of ours can be well
+maintained, even though we have less than sixty years of championships
+for our support. And let it be said also at the beginning that we of
+golf declare to win, not with the Morrises or Parks, as might be
+supposed--good men they were too--but with the moderns, and especially
+with our Harry Vardon, our Taylor, our Braid, and the amateurs, John
+Ball, Harold Hilton, and the Frederick Guthrie Tait of immortal and
+beloved memory. I have long since grown accustomed to the mysterious and
+the inexplicable in golf, and pass them by on their fresh occurrences in
+these days as like the commonplace, something for which indeed there may
+be some explanation and a simple one, but one which the gods, with their
+humour and their teasing, are hiding from us. We who in this game have
+fed so long on wonders are now disposed to overlook phenomena. We tire
+of sensations and the extraordinary, and would revert to a smooth
+placidity of plain occurrence. It is in such mood that we often
+contemplate the records of the past, and then we dismiss them quickly
+with the comfortable judgment that the Morrises were themselves, and,
+being fixed on a permanent pinnacle, must not be disturbed. They have
+become a creed. One might imagine little plaster figures of old Tom, his
+left hand in his trousers pocket, thumb outside, and young Tom in
+Glengarry bonnet all complete, to have been placed in some over-zealous
+golfers' homes along with representations of Homer, Julius Caesar,
+Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Cecil Rhodes, and no questions are to be
+asked about them. It may be right to place them there, those early
+champions of the game, but when sometimes steeled to sacrilege and
+careless of all risk, I set myself to analyse the conditions and
+circumstances in which they gained their immortal glory, I can give
+reasons, ordinary worldly reasons, why they gained it; and can thereupon
+pass them as satisfying every reasonable requirement of human champions
+of the first degree. But with the others it is not at all like that.
+Golf being the game it is, the repeated successes of those three great
+players we call the "triumvirate," Taylor, Vardon, and Braid, at a time
+when competition is so enormously severe, and when--this point being of
+towering importance--the luck of the game, always considerable, is,
+through a variety of circumstances, greater than ever, appear to me,
+having seen most of them accomplished, and now looking upon the plain
+printed records of indisputable fact, to have still some elements of
+impossibility. One has a fear that three or four hundred years from now
+the golfers of the period may not believe that these things did happen;
+they may decide that we of this imaginative and progressive age, a
+little fearful perhaps of greater wonders that might be accomplished in
+the future, had prepared a little trick for posterity and had set forth
+false records of what we had done, so absurd that their falsity was
+self-evident, and so we were to be pitied for our simplicity. In our
+humble way, and by stating the records of achievement in the coldest
+way, admitting moreover that even to us of the time they appear
+incredible, we do our best to gain favour and acceptance with our
+descendants. Fifteen Open Championships to the triumvirate, and eight
+Amateur Championships to Mr. John Ball himself. It is indeed impossible;
+but it is one of those things in golf that are to be described in the
+terms that Ben Sayers (who might have been given a championship by the
+fates for services rendered and skill displayed before the era to which
+he chiefly belonged was closed, as men are made lords when governments
+give up) applied to the victory over him by Fred Tait on his own course
+at North Berwick once by something like seven and six--"It's no
+possible, but it's a fact!" All of us know one man--perhaps more than
+one, but we do know one for certain--who nearly all the time that Mr.
+Ball has been winning those championships might have been winning them
+himself, has been almost good enough to do so. But he has won nothing,
+and after all it may not be a matter of much surprise if we consider the
+enormous odds against victory in a championship because of the luck of
+the game, the fact that it is not like running or rowing, billiards or
+chess, where strength and stamina, knowledge and skill, work out almost
+exactly every time, but a game in which skill has this element of luck
+blended so largely with it. But Mr. Ball, Amateur Champion eight times
+over, and the triumvirate as well!--when "the truth stands out as gross
+as black from white," with my eyes I can scarcely see it. These persons
+have forbidden the caprice of chance that was set to worry them, they
+have overthrown the laws of averages, they have annihilated the
+weaknesses of flesh and blood, and they have laughed at fortune and at
+fate which, defeated, have joined up with them. Then clearly they, with
+the collection of champions in general for their garnishment, are to be
+regarded as the sixth wonder of the game.
+
+It is now too late--as it always was too late--to make any fair
+comparison between the great players of our own time and those who were
+members in the early years of the Open Championship. There is not so
+much argument now as to whether Harry Vardon is better than young Tom
+Morris was, though such argument was common only ten or a dozen years
+ago. How may you compare these men? Young Tommy won four championships
+in succession, but there was only a handful of competitors each time,
+and the opposition was feeble almost to nothing in comparison with what
+it became a very few years later. Vardon, Taylor, and Braid have each
+won the championship five times, and many of these victories were gained
+against their own fellow-champions and the strongest opposition
+conceivable. Yet though such as Vardon produce what are in a sense more
+astonishing results in the way of scores, we are reminded that they have
+far smoother courses to play upon and much improved clubs and balls.
+Also they have better rivals to sharpen their game. From this one might
+argue that it would be strange indeed if they were not better than young
+Tommy was, that it is quite inevitable they should be. But our modern
+champions have done more than fulfil the obligations laid upon them.
+They have established an amazing supremacy at a period when golfers are
+reckoned in the hundreds of thousands; young Tom was champion when there
+were the hundreds without the thousands. His championship, at all
+events, did not mean so much. The championships gained by our
+triumvirate are proof beyond all possibility of doubt or question that
+these men are the most exalted geniuses, that they have such a clear
+superiority over all other golfers of their time as is, seeing the
+circumstances of the case and knowing the waywardness of golf, almost
+incredible. The success of the younger Morris proved, as some will hold,
+only that he was quite the best golfer of a few eligible to compete for
+the championship.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, if comparison is fruitless and not properly practicable, this
+speculation as to the merits of the geniuses of nearly fifty years ago
+and now becomes enticing. One would like to reach some conclusion upon
+it, but cannot. It would be fine material for a golfers' debating
+society. Were I to regard myself as advocate for the moderns I should in
+an agreeable and inoffensive way suggest that time has done nothing to
+hurt the fame of young Tommy's skill. When what they call the golf boom
+began and the great game percolated through the mass of ignorant
+English, there was babble all at once about St. Andrews, and men of
+southern towns just discovering that the right hand on the driver should
+be the lower one whispered of the ancient city in a hypocritical manner
+of respect and awe as if it were high up above the blue instead of a
+day's journey up the northern lines from Euston or King's Cross. The
+name of the place was taken in vain, and to this day there are neophytes
+who lisp of "the Mecca of golf," as they say it, and its eleventh and
+seventeenth holes, though they have never been in Fifeshire and maybe
+never will. At the same time and by the same people there was
+established the vogue of young Tommy Morris, as one might call it. It
+was nearly sacrilege in the circumstances, for more people were living
+then than are living now who had known young Tommy, and fervently
+believed he was the best golfer who ever played the game. But what we
+may call the Morrisian traditions were established in this way, and they
+have laid a shoddy veneer on the really sound reputation of the young
+champion that it never needed. So the proposition is advanced that
+through ignorance and affectation and carelessness we posterity are
+being abundantly generous to young Tom and his father--forgetting Allan
+Robertson, such is the effect of championships, who was before them, and
+of whom it was said when he died that they might toll their bells and
+shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest was gone. We
+posterity are of another golfing world completely from that in which
+those early champions of St. Andrews lived and golfed. I have here in my
+room a driver with which old Tom played, and I see that the other day
+some rash fellows, unafraid of ghosts, took out from their receptacles
+some clubs which had belonged to him and others and played a game with
+them. But the handling of the old clubs and the looking on the picture
+of Tom which he once signed for me cannot bring the feeling of his time
+to ours, and I pass it on as a suggestion to our own posterity that our
+judgment in this matter, as it has been made, is nearly worthless.
+
+It has been coldly stated that lies are told by golfers. That allegation
+may be dismissed with no consideration, but it is certain that fancy
+traditions of flimsy origin gather about golfing history and soon
+establish themselves in the most remarkable manner. I know many
+incidents of the past ten or fifteen years, things I myself have
+witnessed, the truth of which has become completely obscured by masses
+of imagined stuff that has gathered on them. To take a good example,
+more than half the golfers in the world will tell you that Lieutenant
+Fred Tait won a championship at Prestwick after wading into water at the
+Alps to play a shot from there in the final; if they will look at the
+records they will find that splendid Tait did not win that championship
+at all, and they should be told that the shot that Mr. Ball made from
+the wet sand in that same bunker was nearly as difficult and, in the
+circumstances, more trying. Again, the victory gained by Mr. Travis at
+Sandwich, so recently as 1904, is now already described in many
+different ways, but one feature common to all of them is that the
+American holed a putt of twenty yards on nearly every green, that his
+driving was childlike in its shortness, and that he was smoking himself
+to death at the time. Still later, the very next year, there was an
+Amateur Championship at Prestwick, and I remember that Mr. Robert
+Maxwell, after a hard struggle against young Barry--who won the
+championship--had to loft over a stymie on the eighteenth green to keep
+the match alive, and then at the nineteenth the student was left with a
+short putt to win that hole and the match. I saw the play in that match
+and saw the putt, and I believe it was one of about a couple of feet. It
+was certainly too much to give in the circumstances, far too much, but
+Mr. Maxwell, great lover of golf as he is, had even by that time begun
+to tire of the strenuousness and the officialdom and the graspingness of
+championship tournaments, and he waved his club in token of presentation
+of the putt to his young opponent and generously shook hands with him.
+The Scottish spectators did not like it at the time, because "oor
+Bobbie" was their best and greatest hope, and it seemed like feeding the
+devil with chocolates to give putts like this to English golfers. By the
+time that we had returned to the club-house, only three hundred yards
+away, it was being said that that putt was three feet long, by the
+morning it had gone up to three feet six, and increasing gradually it
+even touched the five-feet mark within the next few years. At that point
+there was a reaction and, from what I can gather, the putt has settled
+down in history at four feet. It was half as long.
+
+So I think that golf posterities are fickle bodies, and even the best of
+them are not nearly so responsible and accurate in their judgments as is
+believed by those people who trustingly say that they will await the
+verdict of posterity. I remember that M. Anatole France urged that
+posterity was not infallible, because he himself and all human beings
+are posterity in regard to a long succession of works with which they
+are imperfectly acquainted, and he quotes the case of Macbeth whose
+reputation posterity has murdered, though Macbeth himself did no crime
+at all. Macbeth was really an excellent king. He enriched Scotland by
+favouring her commerce and industry. The chronicler depicts him as a
+pacific prince, the king of the towns, the friend of the citizens. The
+clans hated him because he administered justice well. He assassinated
+nobody. And as M. France remarks, we know what legend and genius have
+made of his memory. It is that way reversed with all our golfing
+traditions, and so we must handle them carefully. It is a principle of
+this game that no man can be a good golfer and a bad man, that those who
+are bad at heart have not the human qualities necessary for being
+golfers at all, cannot associate happily with the rest of the community,
+and so they get themselves properly out of it betimes. Hence it happens
+that of no golfer is there anything that is bad to be told. We have no
+Macbeths in this sport of ours, though it embraces some pensive Hamlets,
+and a number of the moderns would be golfing Romeos if their swings were
+finished in the old free style. But if tradition had indeed given us a
+foul Macbeth who improved his lie we should surely purify the
+remembrance of him, believing that his immediate posterity had almost
+certainly judged him wrong.
+
+This case which the advocate has set up against young Tom, with all this
+blame cast on posterity, will seem a weak thing yet to some. If we were
+counsel for the boy, who made a fine and a lovable figure in his day,
+should we bandy with words like that, or put evidence direct and plain
+before the tribunal, the evidence of those who saw? There are still a
+few of them left, and for myself I should not have far to send to gain a
+willing witness. I have a good and valued friend, Mr. Charles Chambers
+of Edinburgh, member of a distinguished golfing family of many
+generations, and a fine player himself, who was in the semi-final of the
+first Amateur Championship. He saw young Tommy at the game, and played
+it with him. And Mr. Chambers, once answering my plea for some of his
+remembrances, said, "As a youngster at St. Andrews, I was a great friend
+of young Tom, the champion, and on a summer evening often accompanied
+him alone, when, with a club and a cleek, he played out as far as the
+second hole. He was, I believe, the greatest golfer the world has ever
+seen, those giants of the present day not excepted. His driving, which I
+remember so well, was of the long, low, wind-cheating style so seldom
+seen now, with great distance and carry. He never struck a ball anywhere
+except on the centre of the club, and this was reflected in the faces of
+his driving-clubs, which had a clear and distinct impression in the
+centre, the wood above and below being clean and fresh as when last
+filed. His putting was perhaps even more deadly, and in ordinary matches
+I recollect he was seldom or never asked to hole out a yard putt. In
+driving from the tee, his style may be described as an absolutely
+correct circular sweep, with great accuracy and follow-through, and
+this applied equally to his iron play. It was his custom to wear a broad
+Glengarry bonnet, which very frequently left his head on the delivery of
+the stroke.... Without doubt he succumbed to his private sorrows and a
+broken heart." That is strong testimony, and the abiding conviction is
+that young Morris was great indeed, but in the nature of things
+comparisons cannot well be made between then and now, and are better
+left undone.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am glad that we have thus condemned posterity, for we strengthen the
+positions of our triumvirate and Mr. Ball at their only point of
+weakness, which is that their successes have been so marvellous as to be
+incredible to those heirs of ours who, not being of this period, will
+not have witnessed them. Posterity may suggest that such persons could
+not have lived, since none of us will hesitate to say that such
+posterity will not itself produce a man to win three championships. Even
+to win one twice is to make a proof of superiority such as in existing
+circumstances seems nearly impossible. Any man, as one might say, may
+win a championship; that would prove nothing save that he is as good a
+golfer as any other, or nearly so; but to win two championships is to
+prove that he is appreciably better than the others, that he is so much
+better as to balance with his skill the chances of the game--the putts
+he missed and the long ones that his opponents holed--that were flung
+against him. During a period of nearly twenty years the success of
+Taylor, Vardon, and Braid has been so complete, so overwhelming, so
+dazzling, that among them they seem almost to have solved the problem of
+perpetual victory. Each of these men is a genius, a great master of the
+game; each of them, had he lived in an age apart from the others, would
+alone have been enough to make a separate era in competitive golf; and
+it is a strange freak of fate that they should have been pitchforked
+into the arena at the same time. It is as if three Ormondes had been in
+the same Derby, or three Graces at the crease, when at their best;
+indeed, it is more wonderful than those things would have been. They
+were born within thirteen months of each other; Vardon and Braid within
+three months. The last-named is the eldest of the group; he was born at
+Earlsferry, in Fifeshire, on 6th February 1870; Harry Vardon was born in
+Jersey on 7th May 1870; and Taylor was born at Northam, in Devonshire,
+within a mile of where Mr. Ball won his eighth championship, on 19th
+March 1871. They are of different race; for Braid is a pure Scot, Taylor
+is pure English, and Vardon, while, of course, we are proud to regard
+him as belonging to us, is really half-French and half-English. They are
+of different build, different temperament, and of very different style
+in golf; but there they are. Among them they have won the Open
+Championship fifteen times, and when one of them has succeeded it has
+generally happened that the other two have been his most dangerous
+rivals. There must be a limit to the period of success as there is to
+human life, and for years people have murmured that these three are not
+like the little brook that purls down the hill, and they cannot go on
+for ever. And yet at the beginning of each new championship an instinct
+settles in the public mind that they cannot be beaten. Considering what
+the Open Championship is, what a fearful strain it exerts on
+temperament, mind, body, and muscle, how a single slip may mean failure,
+and then how many really magnificent golfers are in the lists, some of
+them old champions themselves, this is a strange state of things. I
+recall that when a championship was played at Muirfield in 1906 the
+sceptics were then loud in their prophecies that a "new man" would
+arise, and that the triumvirate would be cast down. And then? James
+Braid was first, John Henry Taylor was second, and Harry Vardon was
+third, though a hundred and eighty other players had done their best to
+beat them! Taylor, the Englishman, although the youngest of the three,
+was the first to score success. He and Vardon both made their initial
+appearances in the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1893, and on that
+occasion the 75 that Taylor did in his first round stood as the lowest
+made in the competition, although he did not win. At his second and
+third attempts in the championship he took first place each time, and on
+the second of these occasions an Englishman's victory was at last
+accomplished at St. Andrews, the Scottish headquarters of the game. He
+won there again in 1900, and is the only Englishman who has ever won the
+Open Championship on this hallowed piece of golfing ground. A year after
+the others began, James Braid entered the lists, and very quickly then
+did these three establish their triple supremacy. An injured hand kept
+Braid out of the great event in 1895, but since then each of the men has
+played in every championship, and among them have won fifteen times out
+of twenty-one. At the "coming of age" of the triumvirate in 1913, when
+it was twenty-one years after Taylor and Vardon started in the event,
+Taylor, the first to score in it, won his fifth and became "all square"
+with his friends. That was a remarkable occurrence. Since 1894, when
+Taylor won his first championship, there have only been five years when
+one or other of the triumvirate has not won the cup. In 1897 Mr. Hilton
+got it; in 1902 Sandy Herd, playing with the rubber-cored ball on its
+introduction, scored; in 1904 Jack White was the winner, both Braid and
+Taylor having a putt to tie with him on the last green; in 1907 Massy,
+the Frenchman, triumphed; and in 1912 the hope of Edward Ray was
+realised. And in each of these years one of the triumvirate was second.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But if each of the triumvirate is a phenomenon and collectively they are
+super-phenomena, in what terms then are we to describe Mr. John Ball,
+and how shall we account for his eight amazing championships? Mr. Harold
+Hilton, as all the world understands very well, is a great master of the
+game, a magnificent golfer who knows it through and through, and a
+tremendous fighting man. There has hardly been anything in all golf's
+history so splendid as his coming again and winning two more Amateur
+Championships when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly
+winning an Open Championship as well. But if after considering the
+professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs
+in their match-play championship, it is John Ball who is the wonder man.
+The luck of the game that was emphasised in the consideration of score
+play is surely greater in the match. At all events, the professionals
+themselves to a man declare that the score play makes the better test,
+and therefore is the fairer. If that is so, there is, inferentially,
+more luck to be conquered by a good man in the amateur event, and Mr.
+Ball has eight times beaten his fields and beaten all the luck against
+him. Twenty-four years after winning his first Amateur Championship at
+Prestwick he wins his eighth at Westward Ho! and, for all the great
+players that the game has yielded, no other man has gained more than
+half those wins, and only Hilton has done that. Surely it is a mystery
+very profound as to how he has won so often. And yet it is less of
+mystery if we accept the proposition that he who plays golf for the sake
+of golf and fears not to be beaten is the most dangerous of opponents.
+Mr. Ball's early championships were won by his own skill and his perfect
+temperament; undoubtedly some of the later ones, which through
+increasing numbers of opponents have or should have been harder to win,
+have been gained because he cared little whether he won or not, and
+because his opponents feared to lose, and feared the more as they felt
+their impending fate when they had the master of Hoylake laid against
+them. To a little extent they have beaten themselves, and Mr. Ball has
+done all the rest. Has there been more than one of his championships in
+recent times that he has keenly desired to win, that being the one he
+gained at St. Andrews in 1907, because he wished to be victor at the
+headquarters where he lost long years before, after a tie with Mr.
+Balfour Melville? At eight o'clock on the morning after he won his
+seventh at Hoylake I saw him in the garden at the back of his house
+giving his chickens their morning meal. It was as if nothing had
+happened. How many other men would have been feeding chickens so early
+in the morning after winning an Amateur Championship? Has he finished
+winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won
+for his seventh the only championship ever played in Devonshire, and he
+has won the event on all the regular amateur championship courses on
+which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been
+something of a _bete noire_ among courses so far as he is concerned.
+Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the
+international match, and then in the championship he went down in a
+surprising way to a youngster of Dornoch. Shall he not add Muirfield to
+his list?
+
+Despite a certain beauty of his style and the ease and elegance with
+which he plays the game, Mr. Ball's golf is strongly individual to
+himself. There are many pronounced mannerisms in it, and they are of a
+kind that if any one tried to copy them, he might find his game being
+injured rather than improved. They are the ways of the genius who cares
+nothing for convention. Few can drive a better ball. At the outset of
+his career he was a long driver. His first big match away from his
+native Hoylake was one against Douglas Rolland. It was a home-and-home
+affair in England and Scotland, and Rolland was greatly celebrated in
+those days for the length he gained with wooden clubs. Yet he outdrove
+Mr. Ball but little in that engagement. He obtains his length not to a
+large extent from run, as most men get it now, but by a ball that starts
+on a beautiful line, makes a very long carry, and leaves it at that,
+with a little pull to finish with. It has seemed that he has had more
+control over his wooden club play than almost any amateur except another
+of fame who was bred in the same great school. An outstanding
+peculiarity of his method is the way in which he grips his club, which
+is done not in the fingers and lightly as by other men, but by a good
+firm grip in the palms of his hands with the fingers facing up. He makes
+small use of the thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand. His
+stance is an open one. His play with his iron clubs again is
+unconventional. Even for his shortest shots he swings his clubs, meaning
+that he makes less of a jerky hit at the ball than others do, and he
+resorts less to cutting the stroke than other great men. But what a
+master of judging of heights and distance he is! To see him just plop
+the ball over a bunker in the way and then watch it run the necessary
+distance afterwards is to understand what marvellous properties of
+control can be invested in such perfect human golfing machinery.
+Another of his peculiarities is that he carries no niblick in his bag,
+and I think he never has carried one. He has certainly not had one in
+any of his recent championships. And among many other of his
+characteristics is that peculiar gait with the bent knees that, because
+of their climbing over the hilly links, golf seems to develop in men
+(Harry Vardon has it), his extreme modesty in manner, and the splendid
+excellence of his sportsmanship. Some one once set forward a curious
+theory that children born in the winter-time are likely to become better
+golfers than others; their temperaments are supposed to be favourably
+affected by the prevailing rigour of the weather conditions! It is,
+anyhow, a curious fact that a very large proportion of our best players
+were born in mid-winter months, and of them all John Ball is the
+greatest, and he, if you please, was born on a day so far removed from
+midsummer as Christmas Eve.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There has been lately a sort of revival of the game of attempting to
+punch another man so very hard that he can stand up no longer to make
+the smallest punch in answer. He has to be battered and pounded until he
+is made practically lifeless for a period of ten seconds, and then the
+other man is given the money. This is what we call the "noble art of
+self-defence," but, obviously, it is nine parts of such defence to
+reduce the other man to such a jellified condition that no more defence
+is needed. When well played it is a good game. Now golf never has been
+called a "noble" game at all. It is "royal" and it is "ancient," and it
+leaves its qualities to speak for themselves, as most eloquently they
+do. The boast has indeed been made for golf that, while in so many other
+English sports something flying or running has to be killed or injured,
+golf never calls for a drop of blood from any living creature. It is
+then inferred that it is a gentle game, as in some ways it really is.
+Also it has been demonstrated that it is a game at which elderly men may
+play and play quite well, as was proved in a recent year when golfers
+who are becoming older than they like to think of won so many of the
+trophies. But the result of this boom in the noble art of squashing
+another man for a prize of a few thousand pounds and the brave words
+that some of the lovers of this sport sometimes use, telling us that
+things like this made English hearts so strong, nearly giving us to
+understand that Sayers and his like had some influence on the fortunes
+of the British Empire, is that a kind of reflection is cast upon some
+other sports for their mildness and their timidity. Girls do not fight
+in rings and nearly kill each other, but girls can play golf and do, and
+they even play with men.
+
+Let us consider the proposition that golf is a game that needs a greater
+and a stronger heart than any other game. It demands fine manliness,
+such determination as strong Englishmen are made of, and courage of the
+best. The strain of a severe golf competition on the men who win, or
+nearly, is enormous. No weakling has ever won success at golf, and never
+will. The truth is that it is such a game that if the charge is made
+that it is a brutal sport we can barely stand for its defence. For there
+is cruelty in golf, cold hurting cruelty in this game. If now you
+hesitate, consider. The difference between the effect of boxing and the
+effect of golf on the human system is that golf hurts more and the pain
+is more enduring, for it is psychological. That may seem like an
+attempted escape from the proposition, because it may be suggested that
+maiden aunts can and do bear such psychological pain at golf, and bear
+it well. But we discuss real golf of the championship kind, and match
+play wherein two good and keen players are really playing against each
+other, parry and thrust as it is in championship golf, with the issue in
+even balance most of the time, not taking sevens and eights and so being
+nearly indifferent to what the other may do until the clerking takes
+place on the putting green and the state of things is calculated.
+
+Golf, as we know, is a game for the emotions. We agree that it plays
+upon them continually, and chiefly through the medium of the supreme
+emotion, hope. While this hope is the most uplifting of emotions, it is
+also, with the strain it makes, by far the most exhausting. Now every
+golfer knows that in the real game if a good stroke is made by one party
+the gain is not only in the extra nearness to the hole that his own ball
+obtains, but also by the "moral effect" the shot has on the other man.
+This other may have been in a good state of hope before; now he receives
+a sudden shock--and it is indeed a shock sometimes when in a second, as
+the result of the other's effort, his hope is reduced to fear or
+complete dejection. Do you think the man who made the shot does not know
+that? He knows it well. There! he knew! The dejected man has foozled,
+and the hole has gone. This bout is ended. There is a rest of a few
+seconds, and then the contestants start again and smash each other on
+the mind, just as they did the other time. Some may suggest that the
+effect of these mental hurts is small, that they draw no blood, and that
+they are not to be compared with a left hook on the jaw which sends a
+boxer toppling. To that there are replies to make. In the first place it
+has to be remembered that a match at golf between two good players (we
+do not now write of habitual foozlers in whom the golfing emotions
+cannot, in the nature of things, be well developed) is taken very
+seriously indeed, and therefore the emotional effect is greater than
+might be supposed by one who does not play. Second, the effect is
+cumulative, and every golfer knows again how intensely depressing is the
+continual fight against a relentless opponent who scores with nearly
+every stroke and never lets one's hope burn bright again. Bang goes
+every shot of his on the sensitive temperament of his foe, and that is
+exactly why temperament has all to do with success at golf. It is the
+man who can stand punishment who wins; no other sort ever has won in
+greater golf, or ever will. And then again, if it is suggested that
+mental pain is after all not such a hard thing to bear with courage as
+pain of body, let us ask which has the longer effect, remembering also
+that, with full respect to boxing people, the golfer is a man of keener
+feelings. In championships how often has a man who has had a punishing
+match in a morning round, one that has gone to the nineteenth hole or
+after before victory has come to him, won again in the afternoon? Not
+frequently. If you had merely with a fist blow knocked that man
+senseless for a little while before his lunch, he might have been
+readier for his golfer opponent in the afternoon. It is notorious that
+some of the finest play in championships has been accomplished by men
+who were enduring much physical suffering at the time. And again, how
+exactly is the effect of the winning putt on the defeated man like that
+of the knock-out blow. His last hope is extinguished with the suddenness
+of vanished consciousness. So this psychological pain is a very
+discomforting thing. The law recognises it, and herein the law is surely
+not an ass. We have the legal cruelty of the divorce court. Husband who
+tells his wife he dislikes her new hat or gown is held to have been
+cruel as though he had smacked her pretty face, or something worse than
+that. He could kiss away a red mark from a dimpled cheek, and surely if
+permitted he would do so, but nothing could change the judgment on the
+hat. And in golf the mental injury is more real than that.
+
+Never was more absurdly untrue suggestion made against this game than
+that it is not like others where men play directly against each other
+and foil each other's shots, that it is a game in which each man plays
+his own ball independent of the other. Each stroke we make has effect on
+the stroke made by the opponent. That effect may be discounted by the
+opponent's own strength and resource, but yet it is produced. In no
+other game does a man play right and hard on to his opponent as in
+match-play golf, for it is a game in which the whole temperamental
+strength of one side is hurled against the strength of the other, and
+the two human natures are pressing bitterly and relentlessly against
+each other from the first moment of the game to the last. It is the
+whole man, mind and body. That is the meaning of the temperamental
+factor in golf, and that is why a great match at golf is great indeed.
+
+Yes, it is a cruel game, one in which the primitive instincts of man are
+given full play, and the difference between golf and fisticuffs is that
+in the one the pain is of the mind and in the other it is of the body.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A climax in our wonderment has been reached, and though a volume could
+be written on the romance of the rubber-cored ball, the seventh of the
+wonders of the game and the most modern, the story after all is known.
+Golf would have gained on its old degree of popularity if there had been
+no such invention and men had continued to play with gutties; but that
+the golf boom as we know it would have been created, that the game
+would have risen to be the enormous thing it is, giving pleasure to
+hundreds of thousands of people all the world over, there is much reason
+to doubt. One night in the early summer of 1898 Mr. Coburn Haskell sat
+at dinner with a magnate of the American rubber industry, at the house
+of the latter in Cleveland, Ohio. They were both golfers, and naturally
+they talked golf during their meal. They agreed that a kindlier ball
+than the harsh and severe gutty was needed, and they thought that surely
+it might come through rubber. Eventually they settled on the idea of
+rubber thread wound under tension to give the necessary hardness, and an
+experimental ball was made accordingly. With the very first shot that
+was made with that first of rubber-cored balls a professional player to
+whom it had been given to try carried a bunker that had never been
+carried before! From that moment the great revolution was begun, the
+most extraordinary that has ever taken place in any game. There were
+set-backs, it was a little slow in starting, but its success was sure.
+In 1902, when Sandy Herd won an Open Championship with the new ball,
+after prejudice had held it back in Britain previously, the gutty was
+done for, and it quickly disappeared from the links.
+
+And oh, the ravings and the riotings of argument there have been about
+that ball since then! And the hundreds of thousands of pounds that have
+had to be spent on courses to make them suit it! Never was there such a
+giant commotion nor such a costly one caused in any sport before. We
+need not argue any more whether it has improved the game or spoiled it.
+These discussions are for the schools. It has anyhow made the game in
+the modern popular sense, and now we are informed that of this little
+white ball, that was first invented at the dinner-table on those Ohio
+summer nights, half a million are used on British courses in one week
+in a busy season, and a million pounds' worth are bought and consumed by
+golfers in a year. Then you may be sure that more than a million
+dollars' worth are driven and putted on the courses of the United
+States. Marvellous little ball! Indeed you are the seventh wonder of
+your game.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A FAMOUS CHAMPIONSHIP AT BROOKLINE, U.S.A., AND AN ACCOUNT OF HOW MR.
+FRANCIS OUIMET WON IT, WITH SOME EXPLANATION OF SEEMING MYSTERIES.
+
+
+Abiding wonders of the past, perplexities of the present, the greatness
+of the game where it is still greatest, have been among recent thoughts;
+and yet one is conscious all the time that something which sure enough
+comes near to being the eighth wonder of it all has lately happened, and
+will for long enough be high in the minds of this community, something
+that will never cease to be discussed and will always be regarded as a
+matter for argument and speculation. Only because it is so very new, so
+utterly modern, so contrary to much of our olden faith, so inharmonious
+with the smooth story that we have learned and liked, has a witness
+hesitated to give it a forward place well won. Yet do we not know that a
+hundred years from now, when so much of golfing history yet unmade will
+have been piled on to the dusty records that we hold, this new wonder
+will still be a theme for club-house talk, and if by then matches are
+played with the people of other planets, will they not wish to know in
+Mars how this strange break came about? Then there shall be as many
+readings and explanations of the mystery of Brookline and of Ouimet as
+there have been of the moods of sad Prince Hamlet. So from the old
+traditions, the famous players, the ancient links, the scene may move to
+new America.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To the Fourth of July there shall now be added the Twentieth of
+September. In the year of nineteen hundred and thirteen it fell upon a
+Saturday, and that day at Brookline, near Boston in Massachusetts, was
+dripping wet. Clouds had run loose for two whole days and nights before,
+unceasingly, and still sent their torrent down. When, dull and
+splashing, the morning broke, with expectation in the air, it seemed
+that this had been planned by fate for a day of wretchedness and misery,
+one that might with convenience afterwards be blotted out from memory
+and considered as a _dies non_. But good Americans will now recall no
+clouds, no rain, no damp, no mud when they remember the Twentieth of
+September. I too, though my feelings then were more of wonder and real
+admiration than of joy which my own patriotism could not sanction, shall
+be glad to remember in time to come that then I was at Brookline and was
+one of only two or three from Britain who saw the amazing thing that was
+done that day, the most remarkable victory ever achieved in any golf
+championship anywhere at any time. It was something to have seen; it is
+a distinction to have the remembrance. On that day Francis Ouimet, a boy
+of twenty, bred to the game on the cow pastures of Massachusetts, played
+Harry Vardon and Edward Ray, great champions of British golf, for the
+championship of the United States--and won. They three had come through
+the great ordeal of a full championship and tied for first place
+together. They played, not against blank possibility as men, knowing not
+the exact nature of their task, have to do in Open Championships where
+the test is play by score and each is against all others, having then
+some fears stilled by sweet hope which is ever the golfer's sustenance,
+but in sight of each other, together, one with another, man against man,
+ball against ball, seeing what was being done, knowing what had to be
+accomplished next. Could there ever again be such a three-ball golf? It
+is one of the compensations of having been so very wet at Brookline on
+that awful day that one knows that for the wonder and the drama of the
+thing it can never happen more, not ever. If such facts could be
+repeated, the wonder would be missing and the drama gone.
+
+An American and two Englishmen. These championships are mainly matters
+for individuals after all; the "international element," of which we read
+so much in newspapers, is not generally so deeply felt as we try to
+think it is. Golf, not being a game of sides as other games are, and, if
+it comes to that, not generally a game in which national peculiarities
+exert an influence, hardly lends itself to international treatment.
+Players who feel internationally before a contest relapse to
+individualism completely when they are pitching to the green and putting
+to the hole. Do not tell me that in the throes of a six-feet putt that
+shall win or lose a day a man thinks of his trusting country and not of
+his tortured hopeful self. It is not possible in the combination of golf
+and human nature, and there is no blame to the men. But on the Twentieth
+of September international feeling in the game of golf did for once rise
+high, and became a very real thing. What of individualism had been
+maintained by Vardon and his companion during that week had nearly
+disappeared on the nineteenth, when the tie was made, and there was
+hardly a trace of it when the curtain went up on the fifth act of the
+amazing drama of Brookline, none at all when it was rolled down again.
+This point is now emphasised because when I write of the wonder of the
+thing I have to show that not only was this Brookline boy, of no
+championship whatever save one of Massachusetts, pitted against two of
+the greatest golfers of the home country of the game, but that, the
+international feeling being now alive and intense, he for America was
+opposed to those two of England, and therefore in a very full degree he
+was playing their better ball. The boy was playing the better ball of
+Vardon and Ray! He beat them! A long time has now elapsed since the
+dripping day when I saw him do it, and wonders have a way of softening
+with age, yet to me now that achievement is as wonderful as it was when
+new, and so it will remain. The American golfers are justified in their
+pride and their exultation upon the result of that event, and there is
+nothing whatever to be said against it. No such feat had ever been
+performed before, or has been since. I shall describe the circumstances
+which led up to this amazing triumph, and what ensued.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Only once before had British players gone across the Atlantic to take
+part in the Open Championship of the United States, and that was in 1900
+when Harry Vardon and J. H. Taylor did so. At that time Taylor was the
+Open Champion, Vardon having finished second to him in that year's
+tournament at St. Andrews. American golf was then comparatively a baby,
+and practically all the opponents of the British pair were players who
+had been born and bred in the home country and had gone out to America
+as professionals there. Good as some of them were, they were no match
+for their visitors, who had the competition comfortably to themselves
+and finished first and second, Vardon becoming champion. Much happened
+in the next thirteen years. Most significant was the breeding of an
+American champion on American soil, a "native born," in J. J. M'Dermott,
+who tied for first place in 1910, but then lost to Alec Smith on playing
+off, and tied again the next year when he won, and again in 1912. About
+the same time two other native players in Tom M'Namara and Michael Brady
+came to the surface from the raw mass of rough golfing material that was
+taking shape under the American sun. Both are good men, and from my
+knowledge of them I like their manner and their style; but M'Dermott,
+despite some serious faults of which he has been made aware, is
+undoubtedly a marvellous golfer for his age. I think he has to be
+considered as the most wonderful prodigy the game has so far known. At
+twenty years of age, when he came over to Muirfield as American champion
+to compete for the great Open Championship, he was even then a most
+accomplished golfer, high in the topmost rank. Not tall in stature but
+well and lithely built for a golfer, he has a full, easy, and graceful
+swing. It is round like most of the American swings--but not so round as
+it used to be--and M'Dermott is often afflicted with what is commonly
+known as the American hook, being a most persistent tendency to pull the
+ball. It is remarkable also that he has been in the habit of using
+wooden clubs of most abnormal length, and it has been a wonder to me how
+he has controlled them as well as he has done. The history of the Open
+Championship, marked with so many crosses for tragedies and the
+blighting of fair hopes, embraces few incidents more pathetic than the
+driving of three balls into the Archerfield woods by M'Dermott in the
+event of 1912 at Muirfield, and his failing to qualify in consequence.
+But he was only twenty then. The first expedition made by a native
+American to this country in quest of Open Championship honours
+consequently failed. In the following year we saw him again at Hoylake,
+and with him his brother natives, M'Namara and Brady, and some of the
+Scoto-Americans also. M'Dermott did the best of the three, and his play
+for nine holes one morning was very nearly perfect. His swing was a
+little more compact than before; it was beautifully timed, and his
+straight-up style of putting with his heels touching and his grip upon
+the end of the shaft was most attractive. He found the conditions on the
+last day too severe for him, as nearly all except Taylor, the champion,
+did; but he made a fine display and became the first real American
+player to get into the prize list of the Open Championship, which he did
+with a score of 315--eight more than Taylor--which made him tie for
+fifth place. M'Dermott undoubtedly excels in temperament.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here was a menace. It was felt that America was making very good in
+golf. And there came vaguely into the minds of British golfers the idea
+that a demonstration of their strength should be made in this new
+country, for satisfaction and for the sake of national pride. Yet, with
+their conservatism, our British golfing people are slow to move in
+matters of this kind. They are content with the game, and perhaps wisely
+so. But there was the feeling that something should be done. With
+initiative demanded, Lord Northcliffe, who had become a keen lover of
+the game, made a characteristic movement unobtrusively, as the result of
+which Harry Vardon and Edward Ray were sent across the Atlantic to test
+the strength of American golfers in their own Open Championship. Vardon
+was then five times Open Champion of the world; Ray was the holder of
+the title. Two other Europeans sailed the seas with the same object in
+their minds, one of them being Wilfrid Reid, the clever little
+professional attached to the Banstead Downs club near London, a man who
+had gained international honours constantly and has much fine golf in
+him, and the other Louis Tellier, the professional of the Societe de
+Golf de Paris at La Boulie, Versailles. Four good men; two great
+champions; one the greatest golfer the world has known. They seemed to
+be enough. Their design was to win the American championship.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those who were not at Brookline during the week that followed, and only
+received a result that was amazing and inexplicable, were ready enough,
+perhaps not unnaturally, to suggest that this course of the Country Club
+could not have afforded a proper test, that it was so far different from
+a good British course, so mysteriously American, that the native players
+must have been favoured by it, and the superior skill that the British
+golfers possessed had no opportunity for an outlet. As I say, this was
+not an unreasonable supposition in the light of the amazing events that
+occurred; but it was entirely wrong. There are few courses in America
+that are better than this one, and to this judgment I would add that
+though there are inland courses in England that are superior there are
+not many. Judged upon the best standard of inland courses in Britain I
+would call it thoroughly good.
+
+It has seven holes of over four hundred yards each, one of them being
+five hundred and twenty, and, the total length of the round being 6245
+yards, it was good enough in this respect. It has three short holes,
+well separated, and some of its drive-and-iron-holes are quite
+excellent. The Brookline course differs from many others in America in
+the quick and varied undulations of its land--heaving, rolling, twisting
+everywhere--and thus calling for adaptability of stance, and careful
+reckoning of running after pitching at every shot. By this feature the
+play is made as interesting as it should be, but often is not. Only two
+of the holes on the course are quite flat and plain, and these are
+novelties. They are the first and eighteenth, which take straight lines
+parallel to each other through the great polo field alongside the
+club-house. Polo is a considerable feature of the scheme of the Country
+Club, and its comparatively small territory is not to be interfered with
+for the sake of the golfers who have so much more of Massachusetts for
+their delectation. Yet it is necessary to play through this polo field.
+Consequently we start the round at one end of it and play a hole of 430
+yards right along past the grand stand. Then away we go out into the
+country, over the hills and along the dales, and through the trees and
+cuttings where rocks were blasted, and, after many adventures, return to
+the smooth plain land of the polo field as to the straight run home at
+the end of a steeplechase, and play along positively the plainest
+410-yard hole I have ever seen. The tee is at one end of the polo field,
+with the grand stand in the middle distance on the left. There is not a
+bunker along that field, but there is rough grass on the left of the
+part designated for the fairway, and there is the same with a
+horse-racing track as well on the right. At the far end of the field,
+near to the club-house, the race-track, of course, bends round and comes
+across the line of play. Just on the other side of that track the ground
+rises up steeply for three or four yards, and then up there sloping
+upwards and backwards is the putting green. Thus the race-track becomes
+a hazard to guard the green, and the green is on a high plateau with big
+trees all round it. The hole is there all complete, with hardly a thing
+done to it by man, and it is one of the most remarkable examples I have
+seen of a piece of ready-made golf of the plainest possible description,
+resulting in something fairly good. It is 410 yards long, and if the tee
+shot is a little defective the attempt to reach the green with the
+second is going to be a heartbreaking business. With a good drive that
+second shot, played with a cleek perhaps, or the brassey may be needed,
+has to be uncommonly well judged and true. The margin for error is next
+to nothing. At the first glance at it I thought that this eighteenth
+hole was very stupid, but it is a hole that grows a little upon you, and
+the original impression has been withdrawn from my mind. It was the last
+hope of Vardon and Ray, and it failed them. The fairway at Brookline is
+far better than on the average American course, and if one says that its
+putting greens are among the very best in America, the greatest possible
+compliment is paid to them.
+
+There have been many touches of romance in the history of golf at the
+Country Club, but none more remarkable than that associated with the
+construction of the comparatively new ninth, tenth, and eleventh holes,
+two long ones with a short one between them, which are among the nicest
+holes in all America. For some years after the beginning of this
+century, when golf at Brookline had become a very big thing, these holes
+did not exist, their predecessors being embraced in the other parts of
+the course. But, for the crossing that they involved, those predecessors
+had become dangerous, and it was determined to take in a new tract of
+land, and to make three new holes upon it. It was a tremendous
+undertaking, for "land" was only a kind of courtesy title for the wild
+mixture of forest, rock, and swamp into which a man might sink up to his
+neck, but for which about 25,000 dollars had to be paid, while another
+thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars had to be spent in making it fit
+for golf and preparing the holes, so that these three cost an average of
+about thirteen thousand dollars a hole, or roughly L2500 as we may say
+if we are English. At the ninth as much rock had to be blasted as some
+one afterwards used to make a wall two hundred yards long, and the best
+part of a yard in thickness. The tenth hole is a very delightful short
+one, with the green in a glade far below the tee. They call it "The
+Redan," because Mr. G. Herbert Windeler (long resident in America, but
+English in nationality still, despite his past presidency of the
+U.S.G.A.), who is largely responsible for the golf at Brookline, and
+designed and superintended the construction of these holes, had the
+famous piece of golf at North Berwick in his mind when he planned this
+one, but before the end he departed far from the original conception,
+and all for the good of the hole. When it was being made the place for
+the green needed raising from the swamp, and nearly two thousand loads
+of broken rocks were deposited there; and after soil to a depth of
+eighteen inches had been laid upon the stone foundation a splendid
+putting green was made. With all its variety, this is not a course of
+such intricacy and such mystery as St. Andrews is, to need long weeks of
+study and practice to understand every shot upon it. You may play St.
+Andrews from childhood to old age and yet be puzzled and mistaken
+sometimes, but Brookline is more candid than that, and it is to its
+credit that with all its variety you may be completely acquainted with
+it in a very few days. Let me say then that the suggestion that Mr.
+Ouimet had a distinct advantage in a knowledge of the course obtained in
+his childhood, and maintained thenceforth by frequent practice on the
+course near to which he lived, is quite nonsense. He had no advantage
+whatever. Vardon and Ray had practised there for several days in
+advance, and if they did not know all about it that there was to know it
+was their own fault. They did know, and local knowledge, which counts
+for far less with great golfers than men a little their inferiors, had
+nothing to do with the issue.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now consider the other circumstances, that the proper meaning and
+significance of the result may be understood, and that neither too much
+merit shall be awarded, nor too much blame. There were about a hundred
+and sixty competitors, and I would call the field a strong one, but of
+course not nearly so strong as the field for our Open Championship. Such
+men as two of the triumvirate were missing, and a highly respectable
+company of past champions, while there were no such English amateurs in
+the list as Mr. Graham, Mr. Lassen, and Mr. Michael Scott to make an
+occasional disturbance. But there were other amateurs. Compared to a
+British open championship field it was weak at the top and weak in the
+middle. Everybody who goes to our open championships knows that there,
+for three parts of the trial, there are comparative nobodies bobbing up
+from nowhere and creating all kinds of excitement by breaking the
+records of the courses, and fixing themselves up elegantly at the top of
+the list. There they sit like civilians on an imperial dais, but always
+they topple off before the end. Not one of them has ever remained to the
+finish, so that if the American entry was weak in this respect,
+Americans might argue that it did not matter anyhow since this middle
+part was not the one to count. Yet it always has its effect. But then
+the Americans may also point out that they too had their middle men who
+came to the front and created disturbances, only quitting the heights in
+time to make room for the winner and his attendants. There was young
+M'Donald Smith, and there were Barnes and Hagin, who had come up out of
+the wild west--and one of them, saying it respectfully to his splendid
+golf, looked a cowboy too--and were distinct menaces until the last
+rounds came to be played. Then in estimating the strength of this
+American field remember that M'Dermott, who is undoubtedly high class,
+and was in the prize list at the Open Championship at Hoylake, was not
+nearly a winner here, and remember also that imported players of the
+high quality of Tom Vardon and Robert Andrew were not in it either.
+Altogether it is my judgment that the field was stronger than imagined
+in England, yet not nearly so strong as ours. Following a favourite
+American practice of reducing to percentages every estimate, however
+necessarily indefinite, such as even the comparative charms of wives and
+sweethearts, I would give the strength of a British field the hundred,
+and I would give sixty-five to this of America. I knew that I should
+fall to that percentage system some time, and now I have. For its strong
+variety, and for its flavour of cosmopolitanism, it was an interesting
+entry. The professionals all over the States--and the amateurs, too, for
+that matter--came up to Brookline from north, south, east and west, for
+what they felt was a great occasion, and over the border from Canada
+they came as well. Up from Mexico came Willie Smith, the Willie who was
+teethed in golf at his Carnoustie home, and whom we never shall forget
+as he who broke the record--and holds it with George Duncan still--for
+the old course at St. Andrews in the very last round that was played at
+the beginning of an Open Championship meeting there a few years ago. It
+was really a wonderful field, and its units presented a wealth of
+material for study and contemplation in matters of style and method
+during the first day or two. And yet for all the variety of players I
+doubt whether there was so much difference in ways as we see in a big
+championship at home. The American golfing system is a little plainer, I
+think. Of course it was by far the largest entry that had ever been
+received for the American open event, and this fact necessitated a
+departure to some extent from established American custom, and one which
+we of Britain with unenviable experience of many processes in qualifying
+competitions could not congratulate the Americans on having to make.
+However, the numbers were not so large as to cause such trouble, even
+with a qualifying competition, as we experience in England and Scotland,
+and consequently a two-days' affair worked it smoothly through, the
+field being divided into two sections, and each man playing his two
+rounds off in one day and getting done with it. It was settled that the
+top thirty players in each section, and those who tied for the thirtieth
+place, should pass into the competition proper for the championship,
+which, as here and elsewhere, consists of four rounds of stroke play,
+two on each of two successive days.
+
+The United States Golf Association always manages its championships very
+well indeed with no more red tape than is necessary, but with an
+exactness of method which might serve as a fine lesson to some other
+great golfing countries that I have in mind. In this present case Mr.
+Robert Watson, President for the year of the U. S. G. A., after all his
+splendid work as secretary of the Association, was in charge of all the
+arrangements and as administrator-in-chief was the most energetic man
+during the whole of the week at Brookline. It was fitting that in his
+year of presidency, so well deserved, there should be this ever
+memorable happening to mark the season out from all others. Mr. Herbert
+Jacques, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, and Mr. John Reid, the new secretary
+of the U. S. G. A., were in the nature also of generals of the
+headquarters staff, and they laboured constantly in an upper room late
+at night working out the details of business when other persons on whom
+responsibility was more lightly cast, with cocktails to help, might be
+pondering over the tense problem as to what was going to happen next.
+The general idea of the system was much the same as we have it in
+Britain, as there is hardly much scope for variety in matters of this
+kind.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now--Ouimet. It is easy for the Americans and others to compose anthems
+about him now, but little enough did they know or think of this
+Massachusetts boy until they saw that he was really winning, and then
+the remark that I heard of an ex-American champion to him in the
+dressing-room shortly after it was all over, "Well done, Francis, and
+there are lots more in the country like you!" was not only lacking in
+compliment and taste, but was not true. America is by no means full of
+Ouimets, and never will be. I had met him at Chicago in 1912, and heard
+of him next in a letter that I received just before starting for America
+in the following summer, which gave me particulars of what happened in
+the match in the closing stages of the Massachusetts State Championship
+between my old friend, Mr. John G. Anderson, and Mr. Ouimet, in which it
+was stated that Mr. Ouimet had done the last nine holes in that match as
+follows--yards first and figures after: 260 yards (4), 497 yards (3),
+337 yards (4), 150 yards (2), 394 yards (3), 224 yards (3), 250 yards
+(3), 320 yards (3), 264 yards (3). So he did the last six holes in 17
+strokes, and no wonder that poor John remarked, "I have never played in
+any match in my life where I did the last six holes in three over 3's
+and lost four of them, as I did on this occasion!" Of course Mr. Ouimet
+became State champion, and I determined to have a good look at him as
+soon as I got on the other side of the Atlantic. On the day after my
+arrival in New York I was down at the Garden City Club, the Amateur
+Championship taking place there the following week, and at lunch time
+Mr. Anderson, who was at another table with Ouimet, called me over.
+"Well, Mr. Ouimet, I suppose you have a big championship in your bag
+this season," was just the proper thing to say, and he answered
+something about doing his best, but feeling he might be better at stroke
+play. "Then," said I, "there is the Open Championship to take place in
+your own golfing country," and with that we tackled the chicken. He is a
+nice, open-hearted, modest, sporting golfer, and was only twenty years
+old in the May of his great championship year. Tall, lithe and somewhat
+athletic in figure and movement, he takes excellent care of himself in a
+semi-training sort of way. He abstains from alcohol entirely, and though
+he smokes a few cigarettes when "off duty" he rarely does so while
+playing, having the belief that the use of tobacco has a temporary
+effect on the eyesight, such as is not conducive to accuracy of play. He
+agreed entirely with a suggestion I put to him, in conversation, that
+most golfers make the mistake of playing too much and lose keenness in
+consequence, and he thinks that the American players in general are by
+no means at such a disadvantage as is sometimes imagined. The winter
+rest gives them extra keenness in the spring and summer, and that is
+everything. He does not play at all from November to April, but keeps
+himself fit with skating and ice hockey, while during the season he only
+plays one round three times a week, and two full rounds on Sundays.
+Business considerations--he is engaged at a Boston athletic store--have
+something to do with this system, no doubt, but he thinks it sound. I
+looked at his bag of clubs; there are no freaks in it. It comprises ten
+items, an ivory-faced driver, a brassey, six irons including a jigger
+and mashie niblick, and two putters, one being of the ordinary aluminium
+kind and the other a wry-neck implement, the latter being most used. As
+to his style of golf, its outstanding characteristics are three: it is
+plain, like the style of most American golfers, and free from any
+striking individuality; it is straight; and it is marvellously steady
+and accurate. A marked feature of most of the American players is that
+their swing is very round and flat, and that they get a pronounced hook
+on their ball. Mr. Ouimet's swing is rather more upright than that of
+most of the others, he keeps an exceedingly straight line and has full
+length--as much as Vardon. I said he had no peculiarities, but there is
+just this one, that he grips his club with what is called the
+interlocking grip. This is a way of grasping the club that some
+professionals employed during the early period of general transition
+from the plain grip to the overlapping. Mr. Ouimet's little finger of
+the right hand just goes between the first and second of the left hand,
+while the left thumb goes round the shaft instead of into the palm of
+the right hand. Such a grip may suit a man who uses it, but it can
+hardly have any advantages. I note as a further peculiarity that the
+right forefinger is crooked up away from the shaft, so that the tip of
+the finger only comes to the leather at the side. This has to some
+considerable extent the effect of throwing that finger out of action,
+and as a means of reducing the right hand's power for evil is not to be
+condemned. Many other players have sought some such method of crippling
+the very dangerous hand.
+
+But after all it is not the shots he plays, good as they are, dependable
+as they always seem to be, as the qualities of temperament with which
+they are supported. He has a golfing temperament of very peculiar
+perfection, wanting perhaps in imagination but remarkably serviceable to
+his game. He seems to have the power to eliminate entirely the mental
+oppression of the other ball or balls; he can play his own game nearly
+regardless of what others play against him. From the mere sporting point
+of view he misses something in the way of emotions perhaps, those rare
+emotions which some of us derive when we are fighting hard to keep our
+match alive and at a crisis become hopelessly bunkered; but he gains
+enormously in strokes and successes. When he settles down to his match
+or round, he can concentrate more deeply than any other man I know or
+have heard of. He sees his ball, thinks what he should do with it, and
+has the course and the hole in his mental or optical vision all the
+time, just those and nothing else. The other balls do not exist, and the
+scores that are made against him do not exist either. He has told me
+that in important golf, and indeed in that most mightily important
+play-off against Vardon and Ray, he was wholly unaware until it came to
+the putting what his opponents had done, and generally he had not seen
+their balls after they had driven them from the tee. Vardon and Ray
+pounded away as hard as they could, but their shots had no more effect
+on Ouimet than the patting of an infant's fist would have on the cranium
+of a nigger. He just went on and did better. Andrew Kirkaldy once said
+of Harry Vardon at the beginning of his career that he had the heart of
+an iron ox, and that is like Ouimet's. This championship will always be
+something of a mystery; but in this statement about the Ouimet
+temperament there is the nearest thing to a solution of it that can ever
+be offered. I know that what I say is the simple truth, partly from
+observation, partly from inquiry, and partly from Mr. Ouimet's
+statements to me. He said he was unaware of the presence of the crowd on
+the fourth day when he made the tie until he was in the neighbourhood of
+the seventeenth green.
+
+See how interesting he becomes despite the plainness of his game. When
+such achievements as his of the 20th of September are made they rarely
+suffer from any want of added romance. On the day in question Mr.
+Ouimet, champion as he had become, told me in a talk we had, how he
+began the game when he was about four years of age. He was a French
+Canadian by blood, but his parents had come over the border and their
+little family settled at Brookline close to the sixteenth green of the
+Country Club. His elder brothers played a kind of golf, and he watched
+them and began to practise himself on some pasture land near his home.
+Then he became a caddie at Brookline, played the game more seriously
+than before, with three clubs that a member of the Country Club gave to
+him, and at sixteen years of age won, at the second attempt, the
+championship of his school. They make a feature of school championships
+in America. This story was attractive enough, but the next day, reading
+the American papers, one gathered that there was some of the romance of
+a Joan of Arc about this boy of Brookline. His mother said that when
+Francis was a little boy of six or seven he would cross the road and sit
+for hours fascinated by watching the members of the Country Club at the
+game. Then he wanted to become a caddie, and maternal objections did not
+avail. He became a caddie. His mother also said that he learned much of
+the game then, and would always try to get engaged by the strongest
+players, and he would copy as well as he could their best strokes. He
+passed from the grammar school to the Brookline High School, but his
+mind was more on golf than on his books. The mother used to hear noises
+up in his room at night. Once she was frightened by what she heard, and
+went to his room at midnight fearing that he was sick. She found him
+putting on the floor, and he then confessed that he had often done that
+kind of thing before. On that occasion he had thought while in bed of a
+new grip and wished to try it. He did not care to wait until the
+morning. The parents desired their son to get all advantage from
+education that he could, but after two years at the high school he
+insisted on leaving and was engaged at a Boston store where golf goods
+are dealt in. All that and more was said of him.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a narrative of this kind circumstances and reasonable deductions are
+everything, and shots are next to nothing, for there is little enough to
+be said about a ball in the air or its place of stopping. Only one man
+knows the truth about a golf stroke as it is played, and that is the man
+who plays it. Very often even the most expert observers are quite wrong
+in their inferences and judgments. I have explained most of the
+circumstances already. On the first of the two qualifying days, Mr.
+Ouimet came very near to taking first place in the list, for he had a
+score of 152, and only Harry Vardon beat him, and by one stroke only, as
+the result of a long putt on the last green of all. The weather was fine
+and the greens were fiery on that Tuesday. Next day there was more wind
+and there were indications of a change of weather coming. Autumn gusts
+were breaking the leaves from the tree-tops. That day Ray headed the
+qualifying list with 148, Wilfrid Reid was next to him with 149,
+M'Dermott was 161 and Mr. Travers was 165. This was good business for
+England, even though it yielded nothing but a little temporary prestige.
+Then came Thursday, and in the early morning and up to a little while
+after play began there was much rain, and the greens were considerably
+slowed down. They were, indeed, reduced to a soaking state in time, and
+Tom M'Namara told me that once or twice he had actually, instead of
+putting, to root his ball with a niblick out of the greens, into which
+they had buried themselves on pitching. But Brookline stood the weather
+test very well.
+
+First rounds are seldom eventful; the value of the play done in them
+seems to be discounted by the circumstance that there are three more
+rounds to come. M'Dermott did a 74 in this round, Vardon and Reid 75's,
+Mr. Ouimet 77, and Ray 79, but even M'Dermott was three strokes behind
+the leaders. In the afternoon round Ray recovered brilliantly with a 70,
+Vardon and Reid both did 72's, and Mr. Ouimet 74; and at the end of this
+first proper day Vardon and Reid were at the head of the list with
+aggregates of 147, Ray was next with 149, while Mr. Ouimet was seventh
+with 151. Again the British invaders looked well in their place, and
+that night they were strong favourites for the championship. "America
+has a fight on hands," "Little left but hope," and such like, were the
+headings in newspapers. As I lay in bed at the Country Club that night,
+I heard the rain pour ceaselessly down. It rained all through the night
+and alas! all the next day as well, and the great events of that Friday
+were watched through a heavy downpour. In their third rounds Vardon did
+78, Ray 76, and Mr. Ouimet, who was playing nearly a whole round behind
+the others, and with wonderful steadiness, did a 74: and so it came
+about that with the competition three parts done, all these three were
+at the top with aggregates of 225. Now was the time for the Englishmen's
+efforts if they were to be made. To their own chagrin they could not
+make them when they needed. Ray took 43 to the turn, in his fourth
+round, Vardon, whose putting all the week was distinctly moderate, and
+the chief cause for his inefficiency, took 42, and though both finished
+better, their two 79's were bad and seemed to have cost them the
+championship. Vardon certainly thought they had, and took a very gloomy
+view of things. I spoke to him a little while after he had finished, and
+he said he was sorry and that they could not win then. His putting had
+let him down, he said, as he had been afraid it would, though he felt
+that the rest of his game had never been played better. "There are three
+or four out there who will beat us," said the melancholy Vardon. It
+looked like that, but the American hopes one by one failed to
+materialise. Hagin fell out; Barnes fell out; M'Dermott fell out.
+Goodness! it was going to be a tie between Vardon and Ray after all, and
+these two Englishmen would play off here at Boston for the American
+championship! Hereupon said Englishmen came out to see what was
+happening, and looked happy again. They smiled. Then men came running
+and breathless from distant parts with tidings of Ouimet. He had had a
+worried way to the turn, but had improved afterwards, so rumour said. I
+went along with our British champions to pick him up at the fourteenth
+green, and there when he came along, we found that if he did the last
+four holes in a total of one under par he would tie with the leaders,
+or, in other words, if he did the miraculous and practically impossible
+he might be permitted to have a game next day.
+
+I shall never forget watching that boy play those last four holes; that
+was the real fight for the championship. Their respective lengths and
+par figures are 370 yards (4), 128 yards (3), 360 yards (4), 405 yards
+(4). They were stiff pars, too, you will see, with nothing given away,
+especially as the turf was soaking. At one of those holes he had to gain
+a stroke on par if he were to tie, and the others must be done in par. A
+slip anywhere would surely be fatal. It seemed that that slip was made
+with the second shot at the fifteenth, for he was wide of the green on
+the right and had to pitch from the rough, but he was dead with his
+third and got the 4 after all. At the sixteenth he holed a three yards'
+putt for the 3 and still was level with par. The much-wanted stroke was
+given to him at the next hole, which is a dog-legged thing bending to
+the left, with rough and bunkers to be avoided. He played it with good
+judgment always, and this time, on the green with his second, he holed a
+nine-yards putt for a 3. Thus he was left to get the home hole in 4 to
+tie, and by holing a five-feet putt with not a second's hesitation, just
+as if everything in golf had not seemed to depend upon it, he tied.
+Jupiter!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+According to American golfing law and precedent the tie had to be
+decided by one extra round, all three playing together. I have no fault
+to find with this arrangement; perhaps the result would have been the
+same if two rounds had had to be played. I know, however, that Vardon
+thought it would have been better and proper if each had played
+separately, with a marker. Most people thought that as Ouimet was almost
+playing the better ball of the two Englishmen he could not possibly win.
+Theoretically he was sure to have slept badly overnight and to be in a
+terrible state of nerves in the morning. They might see him top his
+first tee shot and be three strokes to the bad on the first green.
+Really I had no such ideas, and when I saw him hit his first drive as
+well, cleanly and straight as any drive ever need be made, I had no
+doubts about his having slept. Vardon drove the straightest ball and
+then deliberately played short of the muddy race-track in front of the
+green, but Mr. Ouimet boldly took his brassey, went for the carry, and
+just did it. The hole was done in 5 each, and the second in 4 each; but
+at the third Ray, who had driven too much to the right and had a bad
+stance below his ball, only just got to the corner of the green, a long
+way from the pin, with his second, and then took three putts, thus
+dropping a stroke behind the others. At the fourth and fifth, at the
+latter of which Mr. Ouimet put a spoon shot out of bounds through his
+club slipping in his hands, but recovered splendidly with the same club,
+the score remained the same. Then at the sixth, a drive and pitch up a
+hill, Vardon approached to within three yards, and the others to within
+six yards of the pin, Vardon holing his putt and Mr. Ouimet (who decided
+on consideration to concentrate on his 4) and Ray just missing. So
+Vardon was then one stroke better than the American, and the latter
+still one less than Ray who, by a better run up from the edge of the
+green at the seventh, scored over both his opponents. At the eighth
+there was a dramatic episode, for Mr. Ouimet laid a low approach
+stone-dead and holed for a 3, while Ray ran down a twelve yards' putt
+for another 3, Vardon being beaten here though getting a perfect par 4.
+All were level and the excitement and suspense intense. Something was
+expected to happen at the ninth, the longest hole on the course, and a
+great, romantic piece of golf. It is a long, heaving hole carved through
+rock, and partly built on a swamp, and away in the far distance is a
+high plateau green which, seen through the rain and mist, looked like a
+ghostly thing in the clouds. Here Vardon slashed out for length, but
+with a hook sent his ball into the woods. Yet he recovered well, and
+after stress and strain by all three this tortuous hole was done in five
+each. The parties were all level at the turn with 38 strokes each.
+Immediately afterwards Mr. Ouimet went to the front, and was never
+deprived of the lead. The tenth hole is the short one named "The Redan,"
+with a heavily bunkered green low down in a valley below the tee. Each
+tee shot was right, but Vardon and Ray were poor on the green and took
+three putts, while the American was down in one less. Vardon looked
+serious now, and Ray was fidgetty. There were three 4's at the eleventh,
+and then Mr. Ouimet reached the twelfth green with his second, four
+yards from the pin, Vardon and Ray being just off on opposite sides.
+They both took five to hole out. Mr. Ouimet, by boldness, might have
+gained two strokes here, but he was a trifle short with his putt and was
+satisfied with a profit of one. This was followed by Vardon holing a
+three-yard putt and getting a point back, but at the fourteenth there
+were ominous signs of the British game collapsing, for Vardon went into
+the woods again, Ray shot off wildly to the right with his second, and
+they were both well out of it with 5's, like Mr. Ouimet whose brassey
+shot went too low to clear properly a bank in front. Mr. Ouimet told me
+that at this stage he felt he was going to win. Not one of the three had
+been bunkered so far, but at the fifteenth Ray was caught and, needing
+two strokes for recovery, was virtually done for.
+
+The last stage of the struggle lay between Vardon and Mr. Ouimet. Both
+got 3's at the short sixteenth. Vardon was looking anxious and worried,
+for most brilliant play on his own part could not save him now, and he
+could only hope that Mr. Ouimet would come by disaster. Instead of that
+he himself, trying to cut the corner of the dog-legged seventeenth too
+finely in an effort to gain distance, was bunkered. Ray, in wild
+desperation, had hurled himself with terrific force at the ball on the
+tee in an impossible attempt to carry straight over the bunkers and the
+rough in a straight line to the green. As to Mr. Ouimet, he just played
+an easy iron shot to the green dead on the line of the pin and holed a
+six-yard putt for 3 and a gain of two clear strokes. It was really
+finished then, and in the circumstances the playing of the last hole was
+a formality. Mr. Ouimet did it steadily for par 4; Vardon was caught in
+the race track before the green and took 6, and Ray holed a fruitless
+putt for 3. Mr. Ouimet was champion, and there was an end of it. Seeing
+that history was made, let me set down the scores:--
+
+    FIRST HALF
+
+    Ouimet        5  4  4  4  5  4  4  3  5--38
+    Vardon        5  4  4  4  5  3  4  4  5--38
+    Ray           5  4  5  4  5  4  3  3  5--38
+
+    SECOND HALF
+
+    Ouimet        3  4  4  4  5  4  3  3  4--34--72
+    Vardon        4  4  5  3  5  4  3  5  6--39--77
+    Ray           4  4  5  4  5  6  4  5  3--40--78
+
+Mr. Ouimet's score exactly equalled that of the better ball of Vardon
+and Ray.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I shall say no more about what happened immediately afterwards than that
+the American crowd gave a hearty demonstration of the fact that they
+were very pleased indeed. A considerable sum of money was raised by a
+collection for Mr. Ouimet's little caddie, Eddie Lowry, who was a
+wonder of a mite and inspired the new champion throughout the week with
+all sorts of advice. He would tell him in the mornings to take time over
+his putts as it was then only ten o'clock and he had until six at night
+to play; would remind him again at a suitable moment that America was
+expecting great things from him, and, above all, whispered gently to him
+on handing him his club for each shot that he must be careful to keep
+his eye on the ball! It is declared, moreover, that at the beginning of
+the tie round he assured his master that a 72 would that time be
+forthcoming. Little Eddie Lowry had his share of glory.
+
+And now what about it all? How is it to be explained? Vardon and Ray
+generously and properly admitted they were beaten fairly and squarely on
+their merits. They could not say otherwise. I believe that Vardon came
+to the conclusion at the end of his American tour that he played worse
+golf at that championship than anywhere else, but on that final day on
+which everything depended he did not play so badly as he may have
+thought, and his putting was better than usual. I would not like to
+guarantee either Englishman to do much better in the same conditions at
+any time. On the other hand, Mr. Ouimet was blessed with no special
+luck, except that negative kind of luck that kept his ball out of
+trouble always, and made two putts invariably sufficient. His driving
+was as long as Vardon's, and he was the straightest of all, while he
+missed some putts by half-inches. He played a bold game too, and the
+only semblance of timidity was in occasionally being a trifle short with
+long putts, while Vardon and Ray, desperate, but in proper principle,
+were giving the hole every chance and often running past it. Mr. Ouimet
+seemed to general his own game so thoroughly well. Talking to me
+afterwards, he explained completely his policy at every shot in the
+match, and showed himself to be a thinker of the finest strain. He was
+all for running approaches instead of pitched ones that day, because he
+feared the ball embedding itself in the soft turf, and also felt that
+when running it would be more likely to shed dirt that it picked up and
+leave him a clean putt. Everything was considered and well decided, and
+in his argument one could find no flaw. And he insisted that he just
+played his own game and never watched the other balls. "Looking back on
+it all," said he, "I think it was just this way, that Vardon and Ray
+rather expected me to crack, not having the experience for things like
+this as they had, and when the time went on and I did not crack but went
+along with them, I think it had an unfavourable effect on them. That is
+the way I reason it out, because when you expect a man to crack and he
+doesn't, you lose a little of your sureness yourself. I began to feel
+that the championship was coming to me when we were about the fourteenth
+hole, for Ray then seemed to be going, and he was swinging rather wildly
+at the ball." I think that Mr. Ouimet's explanation was tolerably near
+the truth. Some of the secret history of this championship may never be
+written, but I know that Harry Vardon realised when it was too late that
+he had been paying insufficient attention to what Mr. Ouimet was doing,
+and what the possibilities were in that direction. At the beginning he
+felt that the real contest lay between him and Ray, never dreaming that
+Mr. Ouimet could hold out against them. Therefore he concentrated on
+Ray, as it were, and when he had Ray beaten he realised too late that
+there was some one else. It may have made no difference, but a thousand
+times have we had demonstrated to us the capacity of our champions for
+playing "a little bit extra" when it is really needed. Anyhow it was
+Vardon's own mistake, if it was one, and he is very sorry for it.
+
+A consideration of great importance is the way in which this victory was
+confirmed, as it were, by the other events of the week. It does not
+generally happen that the men who distinguish themselves in preliminary
+qualifying competitions go through winners of championships afterwards.
+Men can rarely play their best for six rounds in succession, and, the
+law of averages being at work all the time, they would rather perform
+indifferently in the first test, so long as they qualify, than beat all
+the others. I do not recall a case where the champion would have been
+champion if all six rounds had been counted in, instead of the four of
+the competition proper. But this time at Brookline we had seven rounds
+played, and the astonishing fact is that, if all seven rounds were
+counted in, Mr. Ouimet would still be at the top with a score of 528
+against Ray's 530 and Vardon's 532. I think that this is a point which
+has not been much realised, and it is one of importance in dealing with
+the idea that a fluke victory was achieved. You can hardly have a fluke
+victory in four stroke rounds; much less can you have one in seven. Now
+I would suggest that if Vardon and Ray had dropped behind in the
+scoring, and had occupied other places than they did in the final
+aggregates, there might have been some good support for the fluke
+theory. Their defeat by several people would have needed far more
+explanation, because it would have been clear that, for some reason,
+they were beaten by golfers inferior to themselves. Conditions and
+climate would have become considerations of greater importance. But
+merely the fact that these men finished second and third in such a big
+field indicates that there was little fluke anywhere, for this was a
+marvellous vindication of form in competition, in a game where form is
+so much affected by fortune. And, finally, the fact that Mr. Ouimet beat
+these men in the play-off when he had them both there in sight, playing
+stroke against stroke with him, and not an invisible field without any
+definite menace as in the previous play, was quite enough to stamp him
+as the most thoroughly deserving champion of that week. British golfing
+pride will force the suggestion to many minds that such a thing, proper
+as it was on this occasion, could never happen again; that if the
+championship were replayed in the same conditions Mr. Ouimet would be
+beaten. But of how many champions could it be said that if they had to
+play the event over again a week or a month later, the luck of the game
+being what it is, they would repeat their triumph? Reflecting once more
+that this was but a boy of twenty, and the real greatness of our players
+being what it is, I am more amazed than ever at what has happened. It
+was an American victory and America takes the credit, but, again, the
+United States are by no means full of Ouimets. I look upon him as a
+first-class prodigy, such as the game has never known before, produced
+in the country where such a golfing prodigy was most likely to make his
+appearance. He accomplished what had never been done before, and what I
+feel sure will never be done again, and because it was such an historic
+happening, and there were so few from England there to see it as I did,
+I have told the tale in full. Nobody believes that Mr. Ouimet is as
+great as Harry Vardon and Edward Ray. He could not be. But also I do not
+think that any one else could do what he did at Brookline on that
+occasion. I found, a long time after the occurrence, that many wise
+American golfers, reflecting dispassionately if still proudly upon it,
+gave a certain satisfaction to their reason by suggesting as a final
+explanation that a miracle had happened. That is a good way out of our
+difficulties, and for my own part I accept it, for it is the only
+explanation that will stand all tests. A miracle happened at Brookline
+on that Twentieth of September.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF GOLF IN THE UNITED STATES, AND EXPERIENCES IN
+TRAVELLING THERE, WITH AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CLUB MANAGEMENT.
+
+
+There is little done to solve the mysteries of golf's beginning by
+pressing into the farthest recesses of American golfing history. Only by
+such little twinklings in the darkness of the almost prehistoric period
+of the game do we begin more to suspect that, being such a natural and
+simple thing, an almost inevitable kind of pastime despite its man-made
+intricacies and laws, and all its heartenings and maddenings, it came up
+of itself in different places, when man had reached full intelligence
+and the desire to play properly other games than such as bowls. Those
+Indian braves who wandered and hunted and fought over that magnificent
+land when in its virgin state must have tried to knock something like a
+ball, or a stone, in the direction of a particular mark, and that would
+be a game for them. I remember hearing that several years ago a visitor
+to one of the reservations found several of the red men playing golf of
+a kind, with real clubs and balls. "Purple Cloud" was the champion of
+the braves. Then in the autumn of 1903 another white wanderer looked in
+upon the Indians in the reservation at Montana and reported that he had
+witnessed a very spirited game. Golf, said he, is much better suited to
+the Indian of to-day than his old game of lacrosse. He noticed very few
+subtleties in the game. When the champion, "Spotted Horse," drove off,
+there was a long stretch of clear prairie, with only here and there a
+shrub, so that the game resolved itself into a chase of the ball for a
+couple of miles and a return, the one who did it in the fewest strokes
+being the winner. He saw some really capital drives, several well over
+three hundred yards, he thought. The only thing that was very new and
+characteristic about these red men's golf, so far as he could see, was
+that the spectators "made a most infernal row all the time that the play
+was in progress." When a brave took his stance for a tee shot, it was
+looked upon as the signal for a perfect bedlam of yells and howling,
+which should have disconcerted the player but did not do so. And with my
+own eyes have I seen the modern Indians playing for the American
+championship, and it might be claimed that though laws be made at St.
+Andrews, and interpretations thereof in the council chamber of the white
+men at New York, this after all, in essentials, is a game that is native
+of the soil. Yet the history of such a game down the Indian line must be
+hazy as the history of the braves themselves, and we must leave it now
+with this ample recognition.
+
+But though in names and other matters there is a Scottish flavour in
+some of the records of the earliest American golf, and when it became a
+real and growing thing it was obviously imported, one is sometimes
+inclined to think that the Simpsonian theory of the spontaneous
+generation of golf, or what approximated in essentials to golf, must
+have applied to America as to other countries. A stick, a ball, a mark,
+and there is the principle of golf fully indicated.
+
+In a primitive way also it was played in America in the seventeenth
+century, and, as in the homeland, some of the earliest references to it
+that remain take the form of warnings of the punishments accruing to
+players who departed from such severe restrictions as were imposed. It
+was not proclaimed what advantages would be yielded men who played, as
+is done to-day, but what grievous penalties they should suffer if they
+played it when and where they should not, and alas! the times and places
+that were forbidden appeared to be many in proportion to those when the
+game might be enjoyed by those who liked it. Then as now, and in America
+as in happy England, those who were not of golf were against it, and
+bitterly. There were jealousies then as ever since. There were those
+often-quoted Laws and Ordinances of the New Netherlands of 1659 in
+which, because of a complaint by the burghers of Fort Orange and the
+village of Berwyck about the damage done to their windows and the danger
+to which they were exposed of being wounded by persons who played golf
+along the streets, the golfers were threatened of consequences to come.
+Then clearly the game was played in South Carolina in 1788, for at that
+time an advertisement appeared in a local newspaper thus: "Anniversary
+of the South Carolina Golf Club will be held at Williams's Coffee House
+on Thursday, 29th instant, when members are requested to attend at 2
+o'clock precisely, that the business of the Club may be transacted
+before dinner." Here there is a clear indication of the close connection
+maintained between the playing of the game and the social ceremonies
+about the dinner-table that were held by the golfers on the same day in
+the way that was practised by the early golfers of the Scottish centres
+and of Blackheath. For many years afterwards these meetings of the South
+Carolina Golf Club were held at the club-house on what was known as
+"Harton's Green," which is now in the heart of Charleston. Perhaps this
+was the first golf club-house in America, and if that were so it shared
+the fate of pioneer establishments in many other places where towns have
+widened and gathered in the outlying lands. There is also preserved in
+the archives the form of invitation that was sent to Miss Eliza Johnston
+to attend the ball of the Savannah Golf Club at the Exchange hall in
+that city in December 1811. And then American golf seems to have lapsed
+and slept like Van Winkle in the Catskills until the time of the great
+regeneration came near the end of last century. One does not come now to
+make a history of American golf, but only to indicate that new and
+republican America also has something in the way of golf traditions.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The real beginning of American golf was made, as you may know, out at
+Yonkers up the Hudson, and Mr. John Reid, the elder, is rightly regarded
+as the father of American golf. Such recognition being of long standing
+and his claims being incontestable, he was again publicly and officially
+proclaimed as such at the silver jubilee celebration that was held in
+New York on November 19, 1913. That was twenty-five years from the time
+when the game was really set going in the States. One night I sat over a
+log fire in a club-house in Massachusetts and heard the story of the
+foundation by his father from the lips of Mr. John Reid, the younger,
+secretary of the United States Golf Association. He told me how his
+father and Robert Lockhart, who went to the same school in Scotland,
+came to America together; how Lockhart who, as a buyer of goods, had to
+pay periodical visits to his homeland, talked of the strange game that
+was played there; how Mr. Reid became interested and asked for clubs and
+balls to be brought across the water; how he tried the swings and
+strokes in a field by their house at Yonkers, the son "fielding" for
+the father; how the captain of a steamer was persuaded to bring another
+set of clubs over with him, and how irons were thereafter cast in
+America. Then he told me how other people, few but keen, were attracted
+to this new pastime that the Reids were trying, and how the first little
+club was formed here at Yonkers in November 1888, and called the St.
+Andrews Golf Club. They were as the golfing fathers. I learned how the
+members came to be known as the Apple Tree Gang because of the tree near
+to the first hole on which they hung their coats; how six holes were
+laid out at the beginning on Mr. Reid's land, his house being used as a
+club-house; how he gave a medal which was the first prize ever put up
+for competition in America--and it was for an annual thirty-six holes
+stroke competition--and how it was won for eleven years, three in
+succession, by Mr. George Sands. Those were days of consequence. From
+that little beginning the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, after many
+changes and enlargements, has risen to a place of importance and honour
+in American golf.
+
+These little histories and traditions of American golf do become
+attractive as one probes more deeply into them. It was in Massachusetts
+that the most remarkable thing that has ever taken place in the history
+of the game on the other side of the Atlantic, or anywhere
+perhaps--meaning, of course, the Ouimet triumph--happened lately, and I
+have been much attracted to the story of the beginning of golf in that
+part of the American world, and not less so when I see that the start
+was made such a very little while before the birth of the boy who won
+that great championship at Brookline. American golf and Ouimet have
+grown up together. One finds that in the summer of 1892 a young lady
+from Pau went on a visit to Mr. Arthur Hunnewell, at Wellesley, Mass.,
+and took with her a set of golf clubs and balls. They had been playing
+the game for a long time past at Pau, but it was only just being started
+in other parts of France. After Yonkers it had been reproduced at
+Shinnecock and one or two other places, but so far Massachusetts had not
+known it. The girl showed Mr. Hunnewell how the clubs were used, and
+some relatives of his, owning adjacent estates and being fond of outdoor
+pastimes, watched and were won quickly to the game. On the first of June
+Mr. Hunnewell wrote down in his diary, "F. B. arrived to-day from
+Europe"; and on the fifteenth of September, "We are getting quite
+excited about golf." A fortnight later he wrote that "J. B. is here and
+plays golf all day." I calculate it as a coincidence worth remark that
+twenty-one years afterwards, to the month and to the week, Mr. Ouimet
+won the great championship.
+
+Many of Mr. Hunnewell's friends were invited to come and attempt the
+game at his place, which they did accordingly and fell in love with it.
+He had fashioned a course of seven holes of moderate length over
+undulating lawns and some park-land. The actual holes consisted of
+five-inch flower-pots sunk in the turf, and the hazards were avenues,
+clumps of trees, beds of rhododendrons, an aviary, a greenhouse, and an
+occasional drawing-room window, as it is facetiously remarked by Mr.
+Lawrence Curtis, who became the first secretary of the golf committee of
+the Country Club, and to whose account of these happenings I am indebted
+for my notes upon them. Mr. Curtis, seeing the fascination that the game
+exercised upon all who became acquainted with it, wrote a letter to the
+executive council of the Country Club informing them of it, suggesting
+that it was a pastime that might very well be brought within the scope
+of the club, and that the cost of an experimental course need not
+exceed some fifty dollars. The suggestion was backed by several members
+and the council agreed, the course being laid out in the spring of the
+following year. The home hole was placed on a lawn in front of the
+club-house which was soon discovered to be a very dangerous place for
+it, so that it had to be removed. Almost immediately the game became a
+strong attraction at the Country Club, new members came along in droves
+because of it, and it has flourished ever since. The example of this
+powerful club was followed at the Essex County Club at Manchester, then
+just being begun. Mr. Herbert Leeds, now so closely and honourably
+associated with Myopia, won the Country Club's championship in 1893 with
+a score for eighteen holes of 109, Mr. Curtis being next with 110; and
+that summer a Country Club side won a team tournament that was played at
+Tuxedo against the St. Andrews and Tuxedo Clubs. And afterwards all went
+very well indeed.
+
+And while I write in this way of the grand pioneering work that was done
+in those days when champions of the present time were being born and
+trained, I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Mr. Edward
+Blackwell, in which he told me of his going out to California in 1886
+and staying there for six years. His people had bought some land in
+those western parts, and he and his two brothers went out there to
+convert it from barley to a vineyard. Mr. Blackwell is a very great
+golfer to-day, but considering the gutty ball and circumstances in
+general, he was, relatively to his contemporaries, as great then. Only
+about a week before he sailed for California a match was arranged
+between him and Jack Simpson, who had gained the Open Championship the
+previous year, and Mr. Blackwell won that match at the last of the
+thirty-six holes that were played. Out in California there was plenty
+of hard work to do on the land and good sport with the gun, but, of
+course, there was no golf. Mr. Blackwell's thoughts frequently turned
+towards it, and he missed it very much. He considered the possibilities
+and found that they were practically non-existent, for the country round
+about was too hopelessly rough for laying out any sort of holes. So he
+never saw a golf club and never hit a ball during those six years, but
+for all that he won the King William IV. medal at the autumn meeting of
+the Royal and Ancient Club immediately on his return. Then he went back
+to California and did not see club or ball for another five years. Some
+of us could almost wish he had made some sort of course out there in
+California and become the first golfer of that far west, for he would
+have been so good to have been a pioneer, and golf has flourished there
+exceedingly since then. California sends men to championships. It would
+have given a special piquancy to that fateful amateur championship final
+at Sandwich in 1904 when Mr. Blackwell was his country's last hope
+against America's Mr. Walter Travis, and as it happened he was not quite
+equal to the occasion, for the American captured four holes at the start
+with his amazing putting, and he won by as many at the end.
+
+That was a great day for American golf, a kind of consummation it was,
+and I shall never forget the queer sensation that filled the atmosphere
+on the St. George's course, nor the dumb feeling, not exactly of dismay
+but of incomprehension, there was at the end. As to the first of these
+sensations I believe that nearly everybody felt--without knowing why
+exactly, for comparatively few had noticed his play until he got to the
+fourth or fifth rounds and was appreciated as dangerous--that the
+American player was nearly sure to win, that nothing could stop him from
+winning. It was a conviction. Certainly Mr. Travis's wonderful putting
+had created a very deep impression, but if he had been a British player
+I think the feeling would have arisen that putting like that, which had
+been continued for the best part of a week, would be sure to give out
+before the end. Take the case, for instance, of Mr. Aylmer in the
+championship of 1910 at Hoylake. He had been putting in the most amazing
+manner all the time, and holing them from everywhere, but nobody had any
+confidence in his ability to beat Mr. John Ball in the final, and he
+collapsed utterly. Of course, Mr. Aylmer then had not the tremendous
+fighting power and pertinacity of Mr. Travis in match play, qualities of
+their kind which I have only seen equalled by a successor of his in the
+American championship roll, Mr. Jerome Travers, and to beat Mr. Ball at
+Hoylake is a different matter from beating Mr. Blackwell at Sandwich.
+But then they were saying that Mr. Aylmer could not go much farther even
+when he was only at about the third round, and as for Mr. Ball at
+Hoylake there was a considerable feeling among golfers about that time
+that the old champion could not go on defying the law of averages any
+longer, and that there could be no more championships for him. I confess
+that I rather shared this view, held in a superstitious sort of way, but
+now that Mr. John has clapped another championship on to that Hoylake
+affair, we have given him up. There is no reason why he should not win
+another eight! However, when the Scot and the American teed up that
+fateful morning there was a disposition to be sorry for Mr. Blackwell,
+and a kind of hope that the end might be painless. In the circumstances
+Mr. Blackwell's performance in losing nothing more after losing four of
+the first five holes was as good as it could be. He kept the pump
+working splendidly.
+
+The truth is that he was by no means so gloomy as his friends about his
+prospects, as he told me afterwards. He said he thought he had a good
+chance of winning, and did not believe he would get beaten. He wished,
+however, that the tees had been farther back so that his long driving
+would have given him a better advantage. Two things about his opponent
+impressed him very much, one, of course, being his astonishing putting
+and the other his silence. But then, of course, one does not work one's
+way into a final of a championship for conversational purposes, or for
+debating the merits of the sixth sub-section of one of the rules of
+golf. When the deed was done completely Mr. Blackwell joined the
+converts who departed from the old prejudice and raided Tom Vardon's
+shop for Schenectady putters, with which they practised, and marvelled
+as the sun was setting on the first day that any but a British player
+had won a British golf championship. With that victory the first era in
+modern American golf, not counting the prehistoric times of golf in
+Charleston and the Indians' games, came to an end. America had made
+good. Now she became a power.
+
+The second era lasted nine years and was one in which she gradually came
+to be taken more seriously. She suffered a set-back of sorts when Mr.
+Harold Hilton won the American Amateur Championship at Apawamis in 1911,
+but there were some circumstances attending that victory at the
+thirty-seventh hole which were rather galling to the Americans, and they
+behaved well in saying so little about them. Mr. Hilton ran away with
+the match in the final, as it appeared, and Mr. Fred Herreshoff in the
+afternoon was offered about the most forlorn hope that golfer ever had
+to lighten his way for him. He brightened it up and made it thoroughly
+serviceable, and was distinctly unlucky in being beaten at the extra
+tie hole when Mr. Hilton's bad second shot cannoned off the famous rock
+to the right and went kindly to the putting green instead of getting
+into a hopeless place. It has been said that even if Mr. Hilton's shot
+was lucky, Mr. Herreshoff played the hole so badly that he hardly
+deserved to win it even if he was hardly treated by losing. But it is
+forgotten that it was match play, and that what one man does affects the
+other's game, and Mr. Herreshoff told me once, long after, that the
+American crowd, which is supposed erroneously to be many shots to the
+advantage of an American playing against an Englishman, on that occasion
+misled and upset him. It cheered for Mr. Hilton at the wrong time and
+for the wrong thing, and led to Mr. Herreshoff making a hash of a most
+fateful stroke. This era of American golf came to an end with the
+amazing victory by Mr. Ouimet at Brookline.
+
+The present state of things is very remarkable, and I have found the
+study of it very interesting during two long golfing expeditions through
+the United States, when I have visited many of the chief American clubs,
+met and made friends with men who are at the head of American golf and
+the most distinguished players, and in every way gained a good practical
+knowledge of the amazing progress of the game in this country. The
+Englishman who visits America and is not a golfer suffers a loss that he
+must regret always afterwards. To strangers in general the Americans in
+their own country are kindly and hospitable. That touch of carelessness
+and arrogance which is sometimes noticed in the wandering American when
+he is "doing Europe" is not in evidence among good Americans when they
+are at home, always provided that the Englishman has the good sense and
+manners--which one regrets to say is not always the case--to remember
+that when in the house of his host it is not good taste to praise his
+own for its superiority in divers ways. Pay the American now and then,
+and with proper delicacy, that little compliment that is so very well
+deserved about the magnificence of his achievement in making a country
+like that in such a short space of time, and about the excellence of
+many of his established systems. It is a compliment that can and should
+be paid with the most absolute sincerity. The American has the right to
+be proud of his own country, and we should be proud of the American, for
+that his blood is much the same as ours--trite observations, no doubt,
+but commonly disregarded. Then with all his fancy hustle and his
+tarnation smartness, the American is at bottom rather a sentimental man
+(perhaps it is because he has to be so very businesslike most times that
+he is liable to a sharp reaction at any good chance) and he is touched
+with signs of genuine good feeling towards him and an appreciation of
+what he has done. Thereupon in a softened voice he will tell of his
+weaknesses, and of his appreciation of the greatness of mother England,
+and he will play the host in a more thorough and warm-hearted way than
+any other man on earth will or can. The ordinary non-golfing visitor may
+find out many of these things, and have his own good time in his simple
+way, but even in the freest countries there are often social omissions,
+accidents, and disasters when there is not good common ground for
+meeting and friends in waiting, and it is very possible to go to America
+and fail in the way of holiday. The man who visits as a golfer, enters
+at once into joys of existence and the most friendly companionship. I
+have visited clubs in many parts of the country, and have made good and
+abiding friends among countless golfers, and it is but a poor expression
+of my feelings to say that I am very appreciative and deeply grateful.
+If, therefore, for anything whatever I should criticise the golf of the
+country I hope that American golfers will believe that in my comments
+there is no trace of adverse prejudice.
+
+It is difficult to estimate how many players of this game there are in
+the country at the present time, and whatever figures were fixed upon
+would soon be made inaccurate through the rapid increase that is going
+on all the time--more rapid by far than is the case in Britain. I have
+seen it estimated that there are six or seven hundred clubs in the
+States at the present time, with a total membership of about a hundred
+and fifty thousand. The Americans say that they will double their
+golfing population in the next five years.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is impossible for a person who has not crossed the Atlantic to
+imagine the United States as the country and people really are. I found
+it easier to imagine Italy and Spain and oriental Morocco before ever I
+went to those places, than I did to conceive a picture of the country
+and the life of our own blood relations in this new America. All the
+fraternising with Americans in London and elsewhere, our reading of
+their newspapers and their books, printed in the words of our own
+language, pictures and photographs of the Statue of Liberty in New York
+Harbour, of the sky-scrapers in the background and the Fifth Avenue that
+glitters on a summer's day, all the pictures of Boston and Washington,
+or of the boulevards and business activities of Chicago, will not help
+any one to preconceive those places exactly. The atmosphere and the life
+and the ways of the people are a little beyond the imagination of the
+untravelled western man. In the same way I do not think that British
+golfers who have not been to the United States can understand the
+American's present-day attitude towards the game; certainly those who
+have not been to America should not judge upon it as they are often
+inclined to do. It is good, sound, and in its every aspect it is
+exceedingly interesting.
+
+Wandering through the country I have visited many clubs and courses. If
+we would have much golf in America we must move quickly as the Americans
+do, and think as little of travelling all night as they think, for it
+would be too much waste of time to make the long journeys that have to
+be made by precious daylight. As a rule the golfer at home protests
+against being asked to play anything like his best game after a night in
+a railway train. I remember Mr. H. E. Taylor, who is not possessed of
+the strongest constitution in the world, told me that he had set off
+from Charing Cross one morning in the winter, arrived at Cannes in the
+south of France at breakfast time on the next morning, cleaned himself
+and put on his golfing shoes, and then gone along to the golf course out
+at La Napoule to win a scratch gold medal. Again I recall that Mr.
+Hilton once travelled all night from Hoylake to Muirfield and broke the
+record of the course there on arrival, playing two more rounds the same
+day. However, men like these are exceptions to most rules.
+
+But a golfer may cure himself of more of his weaknesses and
+susceptibilities than he may think he can--all that are imaginary and
+not really of the temperament. A man who hates wind and avoids it would
+learn to play well and bravely in it if he had always to take his golf
+on an exposed part of the eastern coast. The ability or otherwise to
+play in wind is largely a matter of temperament. So it is with the
+journeys. I had either to golf, and golf for me tolerably well, in the
+intervals of scampering from one part of the country to the other, or I
+had to spoil the whole expedition. I managed it somehow.
+
+Arriving in New York for the first time early on a Sunday morning, I
+fixed myself up at my appointed quarters, rang up a golfer on the
+telephone, and then, according to arrangement, proceeded to track a man
+down at his club on the Fifth Avenue with the object of playing in the
+afternoon. I walked into Fifth Avenue from a cross street, and my first
+glimpse of it is one that will not soon be forgotten. It was a glorious
+morning, the sun shining hot and white, and New York, for the only time
+in its hustling week, was comparatively quiet. There was no traffic and
+few people just then in the Fifth Avenue, quite one of the most majestic
+and wonderful thoroughfares in the world despite its plain simplicity.
+But it was not the whiteness, not the glittering cleanliness, not the
+real splendour of this Fifth Avenue with all its newness, that struck
+the first impression on my mind. Upon the moment that this wandering
+British player of the most meditative of games emerged from somewhere
+round about West 36th or 37th, into the big avenue, there whizzed along
+it, right in front, a motor funeral which was doing a fine fifty miles
+an hour clip along the smooth and open thoroughfare. There was just the
+hearse with glass panels, the coffin plainly exhibited inside, and the
+chauffeur on the seat, with another man beside him who might have been a
+mourner. Holding life a little more cheaply in America than we do, they
+grieve a little less for those who lose it, which is not to say that
+they are heartless or unsympathetic, but more practical. This funeral,
+done with petrol instead of horses, was positively going north at the
+rate of fifty miles an hour. It was moving just as fast as I saw any car
+ever go in the United States, and I could not help reflecting that the
+spirit of the good American, viewing the last journey of its separated
+corpus, must feel a certain satisfaction that it was hustlingly done and
+that no time was wasted. _Finis coronat opus!_ Inspired, I played on
+two different courses in New York on the same afternoon.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+English people hear much about railroad travelling being far better in
+the United States than it is in our own country. It is--and it is not.
+The comfort and conveniences of the cars in the daytime are much in
+advance of anything we have. The men's smoking cars, the observation
+cars, the parlour cars, are delightful and enable us thoroughly to enjoy
+the journeys. Although they standardise so many things in America, they
+cease their standardisations when considerations of personal comfort and
+peculiarities have to be considered. It never occurred to me until I
+travelled my first thousand miles in America that it is a hardship that,
+no matter what our girth may be, nor the length of our bodies and legs,
+we must all of us at home, though we pay for our first-class
+accommodation, sit in standardised seats which are all the same and
+attached to each other. In the American railroad car running on a
+long-distance journey there are seats of different sorts, some are high
+and some are low, and they are detached. This makes much difference. In
+the dining-cars the tables and chairs are all loose, and one does not
+have to squeeze into them with the feeling that one is being locked into
+one's place as we do in England. And the dining arrangements on the
+American cars are far superior to what they are elsewhere. But if the
+American system gains by day the British system makes up for much of the
+lost comfort at night, and that is when the American, golfer and
+non-golfer, does most of his long-distance travelling. The Pullman day
+cars are converted into sleepers by the dark-skinned attendants
+(uncommonly good railroad car servants these niggers make), and by an
+almost magical transformation the lounging car is made into a sleeper
+with about two dozen berths, a dozen on each side, half uppers and half
+lowers, and an alley down the middle. The chief difference between the
+upper berths and the lower is that the uppers have to be reached by a
+short stepladder and are not convenient to fat, gouty, or unathletic
+persons, while those who wake early and like to look upon the prairie,
+or what once was that, have a window at the bottom as the people in the
+top have not. The berths are covered in with thick green curtains which
+button together. We may leave our boots outside for the attendant to
+brush in the morning, but our other clothes and traps must go along to
+bed with us, and be stowed away at the bottom of the berth, or in the
+little netting that hangs alongside. And here I must timidly state in
+evidence that there are not separate cars for the sexes; in America all
+go together, and the ladies and the men occupy the same cars. The ladies
+generally go off to bed earlier than the men. Whether they do or not, we
+all climb into our respective berths, fasten up the curtains, and
+undress in the very limited space at our disposal, a process which seems
+to me must be the same as that by which acrobatic performers wriggle
+themselves out of chains and ropes with which their limbs and bodies
+have been tied up fast. After a time we become expert. What is most
+difficult to become accustomed to is the horrible jolting, and the
+painfully sudden stopping of the trains in the middle of the night.
+Their permanent ways are not laid so finely as the magnificent lines
+along our coasts from London to Scotland. Their rails are not fixed in
+chairs laid on the sleepers, but are pinned down straight on to the
+wood. This makes much difference. The cars shake exceedingly. Then the
+drivers at night have to be wary and stop quickly at times, and no
+doubt they do right not to reduce their speed gradually for the sake of
+the men and women who are asleep behind them, but instead to stop with a
+suddenness that could only be improved upon by a collision. However, I
+say again, that we find ourselves accustomed to it all in time.
+
+I shall not forget my first experience of a thousand-mile golfing
+journey from the New York Central Station to Chicago. A few golfers were
+in a party going westward for the championship at Wheaton in Illinois,
+and we discussed the game from the time of starting in the late
+afternoon until we had passed Albany, about ten, when we moved into our
+sleeping quarters. My bag of clubs had to go to bed with me, and they
+lay alongside all the night; there was no room for them underneath. I
+had to sleep with one hand on the bag to prevent them from attacking me
+or going overboard into the avenue, so much did that wretched train
+rattle and shake as it hurtled its way through the darkness, with the
+big bell in the front of the engine jangling mournfully all the time.
+And what a wild, sad note it is that is struck by the bells on these
+American engines, suggestive of the loneliness of the open country
+through which they speed, now and then making a big noise with a sort of
+foghorn. I am much attached to my clubs, and they are the chosen
+favourites of a vast number that go with their master everywhere, and
+are carefully watched and tended, but the intimacy that was sprung upon
+us then was too much, and I invented another arrangement for the next
+travelling night. James Braid, very wise man indeed, tells me that long,
+deep nights of placid slumber are the best things in the world for the
+golfer who would keep steady his hands and nerves and clear his eyes so
+that he may play the best game of which he is capable. But no British
+golfer could sleep at the beginning of his American experiences in such
+circumstances. I was just falling into some sort of a doze in the small
+hours of the morning when the train pulled up sharply at a station which
+I discovered to be Schenectady, where the famous putter that disturbed
+the peace of two nations was born. Next, one realised that we were
+within a mile or two of the Niagara Falls, and so on with jolting and
+banging and sudden stopping all the night. By and by daylight came and
+then we had a long day of travelling through the heart of America to
+Chicago.
+
+Some may suggest that all this about railroad travelling in the country
+where there is more of it than any other has little to do with golf, but
+it has all to do with it, for the thorough golfer in America, whether a
+citizen or British, must needs spend a large part of his time in the
+train, and if he would have the maximum amount of golf, much sleeping
+must be done behind the green curtains in the darkened cars. The
+travelling done by the American golfer, therefore, is a surprising
+thing, but a few months of it is a fine and valuable experience for the
+British golfer afterwards. No longer, since I have been across the
+Atlantic, do I consider it a far way from London to the links of
+Dornoch. St. Andrews and North Berwick have come pleasingly near to me.
+All the world has shrunk, and I feel I have my foot on every course--or
+soon may have.
+
+Though it be a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and these are
+the two great golfing centres of the east and west, it is a fact, as I
+know well, that the golfers in the two places visit each other for a
+weekend's golf almost as frequently and with as little fuss as would be
+the case with golfers in London who go down to Sandwich. They take the
+"Twentieth Century Limited" from New York on Friday afternoon, and on
+Saturday morning they are at Chicago. They flash out on a local train to
+Onwentsia, Midlothian, Glen View, Wheaton, Exmoor, or one of those
+places, play all day, start play again at eight o'clock on Sunday,
+finish their couple of rounds early in the afternoon, catch the fast
+train back to New York, and are at their office on Monday morning as if
+they had spent the week-end pottering about the garden. I am not
+concerned with the question as to whether they are prolonging their
+lives by these acts; nor are they concerned. In the meantime they appear
+to be in the best of health, and are certainly in the highest of
+spirits.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With this talk of journeys we seem in fancy to be in Chicago now, so let
+us consider the leading club of the busy district in the heart of
+America. The course of the Chicago club is at Wheaton, some twenty-five
+miles out on the North Western line, and this is the foremost club of
+the Central States, and west in the sense of being west of the east, for
+all golfing America is divided into two parts, the east and the west,
+Chicago being the capital of and held chiefly to represent the west,
+which holds some close rivalry with the east, where New York is
+headquarters. The west out California way is just the far and other
+west, and is in another world. The Chicago club is exclusive and
+dignified. The most solid men in the city support it, and they see that
+everything is good. It is not an ancient institution, but it has some of
+the characteristics of solidity and strength of age and sound
+experience. Chicago is not an old city, but, as the proud citizens like
+to tell you, about a hundred years ago there was no Chicago at all, but
+just a few wigwams of Indians and some huts and things round about a
+creek. Since then the place has been once burnt down, and yet it is now
+the fourth largest city of the world, while in its tenseness of
+commercial industry it is the foremost of all. If all the ages past in
+Chicago only amount to a hundred years, then one-fifth of all time as
+known to Chicago history, which represents the life of the Chicago Golf
+Club, is comparatively long indeed.
+
+In 1892 a small golf club was started for the first time round about
+Lake Forest, but the promoters had only about sixteen acres of ground.
+In the following year, when the World's Fair was held, a number of
+foreign visitors were in Chicago and asked for golf, as travellers will
+do, though the great golf boom had not yet then set in. Mr. Charles B.
+Macdonald came in with the movement, ground was searched for, and the
+Chicago Golf Club was organised at Belmont, some twenty-two miles out of
+the city. When the Fair was over in the following spring, only about
+twenty members were left to the club, and the outlook did not seem
+splendid. But once begun, in either place or man, golf is a very hard
+thing to kill. The twenty die-hards asked their friends to come and see
+the place and try the game. They did so, and those men of Chicago knew
+at once that they had discovered the real thing. A hundred and thirty
+members were quickly obtained. The inevitable result followed. They
+wanted more and better golf, and they wanted it to belong to them and
+not to be on leased ground, so in 1894 the club met and authorised the
+purchase of two hundred acres at Wheaton, twenty-four miles out from the
+city, a fine course was laid out, a splendid club-house was built, and a
+really great club was established. Here and now we may gain a very fair
+idea of the difference in cost to the player between American golf and
+British. No better club could be selected for the purpose of
+exemplification than this one. It so happened that a few days before I
+arrived there, its club-house was burnt down, with all its contents and
+appurtenances, and from the wreck only a single one of the club-books
+of rules and regulations was rescued. I took possession of it while I
+made some notes upon the terrace of the only part of the building that
+was saved.
+
+The first paragraph in the book, being Section 1 of Article 1 of the
+bye-laws, states that "this club is incorporated under the laws of
+Illinois as Chicago Golf Club, and its corporate seal is a circular disc
+bearing the words, 'Chicago Golf Club,' the figure of a golf player, and
+the motto, 'Far and Sure.'" To become a member of the club the applicant
+must be over eighteen years of age; he must have not more than one
+adverse vote cast against him by the governing body; and he must pay an
+entrance fee of not less than a hundred dollars or L20. The resident (or
+full) membership of the club is limited to 225, and the annual
+subscription is 75 dollars or L15, half of which is payable at the
+beginning of the year and half at midsummer. Now this subscription is
+much higher than that of any golf club in Great Britain, and the fact is
+only partly attributable to the circumstance that everything in America
+is more expensive than it is in England. The higher subscription is
+necessitated because the membership is kept down so low as 225, and that
+is done in order that there may be no overcrowding of the course. In
+England such a club, being situated within thirty miles of a great city
+and having the best course round about, would probably admit at least
+five or six hundred members, with the result that on the fine and busy
+week-end days the course would be hopelessly blocked and there would be
+no pleasure for anybody. This is certainly so in the case of two or
+three of the most popular clubs in the outer London golfing area, and
+one may come to a speedy decision that in this matter the American way
+is by far the better. Ladies who are over sixteen years of age and the
+immediate relatives of a member are permitted to have the privileges of
+the course, subject to the rules of the Green Committee, on payment of
+ten dollars a year. There is another class, "summer members," who are
+not to exceed fifteen in number, and who pay 150 dollars for one summer
+season's play. There is practically no play in the winter, the climatic
+conditions being too severe. The other rules as to membership are much
+the same as those which obtain in the case of British golf clubs.
+
+Among the "house rules," it is stated that the club-house generally will
+remain open until midnight, and the cafe, which is the British
+equivalent of the smoke-room with bar, until one o'clock in the morning,
+which is a lateness of hour almost unheard of in England, but then it
+has to be remembered that such club-houses in America are mostly
+residential. "Juniors" are not allowed in the cafe. The warning is given
+that smoking and the lighting of matches in the locker or dressing room
+are absolutely prohibited, and that a fine of ten dollars will be
+imposed on any member violating this rule. Fires in club-houses in
+America being so numerous is the cause of this rule, which is rigorously
+applied. Then it is perceived that no member makes any payment
+whatsoever in cash in the club-house. He signs a check or bill, an
+account of his expenditure is kept, and it is served to him fortnightly.
+Payment must then be made within ten days, failing which the member is
+suspended. Some interesting items are to be found among the ground
+rules. One says that in medal play competitions new holes must be
+assumed to have been made on the morning of a competition, unless
+otherwise stated by the Green Committee; and another that a member
+playing a round, and keeping score other than in club competition must
+allow parties playing pure match-play to pass. The Americans are not
+content with merely requesting a player to replace the divots of turf
+that he cuts up in play. They say: "Divots of turf cut up by players
+must be carefully replaced and pressed down. A fine of one dollar will
+be imposed on any member violating this rule. All members are earnestly
+requested to report any member who violates this rule to the Green
+Committee." Caddies are paid "from the time of their employment until
+the time they are discharged, to be determined by an electric clock, at
+such rate per hour as may be determined by the Green Committee." There
+is nothing that is inexpensive about a club of this class, and let it be
+understood that there are few second-class golf clubs in the States
+where the fees are small. A day's golf at a good club is cheap indeed at
+five dollars. When one goes to stay there for a night or two one finds
+that the statutory price for breakfast is a dollar, for lunch 1.25, and
+for dinner 1.30 upwards. When I returned to England it appeared that
+golf and all pertaining to it was cheap, almost to the gift point.
+
+The course at Wheaton is good, although there are some in America that
+are better. It is plain, its holes sometimes lack strength, but it is
+well tended and its putting greens are quite perfect. Its fairway is not
+perfect, any more than the fairways of other American courses are. The
+climate will hardly permit of their being so. It bakes them up and makes
+them hard, and the inevitable result is little knobs and depressions
+which give cuppy lies, and turf which for all its greenness is not by
+any means comfortable to the feet in comparison with the yieldingness of
+our British turf. The Americans cannot help this; if it were practicable
+to treat every inch of their turf for climatic troubles all through the
+day and night they would perhaps do it. It is practicable to treat their
+putting greens thoroughly, and the result is that, taking them all
+round, they have undoubtedly got the best putting greens in the world.
+I mean, without reservation, that the average of the best courses in
+America is higher than the average of the best in our own country, and I
+say it with some regret that they have a score of courses in the United
+States with greens far superior to those on the old course at St.
+Andrews the last time the Amateur Championship was played there, those
+greens being then not what they used to be. I think much of the credit
+for the high quality of the greens at Wheaton is due to the splendid
+work of David Foulis, the professional and greenkeeper there. Need I say
+that David is a Scot, and a very true Scot too, who still loves his old
+homeland better than any other, and is glad when the wandering golfer
+from it gets his way. Chicago may seem a strange place to visit for
+facts of old golf history, and yet here I added some details to the
+histories of the people and their golfing ways of fifty years and more
+agone, for Foulis has his father living with him out in Illinois, and
+Foulis the elder was at work with old Tom Morris in the great days when
+the Open Championship was young, and stirring are the stories that he
+can tell you, as he did to me in David's shop, of old Tom and Allan
+Robertson, and the other giants of those times, carrying one in mind and
+spirit far away from the land round about the big lake of Michigan to
+the old grey city which was old more than a hundred years ago.
+
+I took away with me as a memento from David Foulis a club that he has
+invented, and which for a special purpose I can commend. It is a kind of
+mashie niblick, David claiming to be the inventor of this type of club,
+but it is different from others in that it has a perfectly straight,
+flat sole and a concave face. I, like others, found that by the use of
+this club I saved some dollars, for it enabled me to pitch the ball from
+a hard lie on to the hard greens and make it stay close to the hole
+when nothing else would serve the purpose. The ordinary mashie niblick
+with curved sole is not perfect for baked and iron-hard courses, as it
+is not easy to get well hold of the ball when taking it cleanly as must
+often be done in such circumstances, and the margin for error is
+painfully small. The flat-soled club is essentially one for taking the
+ball cleanly, and somehow that hollow face does impart extra backspin to
+the ball. It lifts it up and drops it dead as no other club that I have
+handled will of itself ever do.
+
+But let me write that the Americans are not given to fancy and freak
+clubs as some people suppose they are. There is nothing freakish about
+this article of which I write, and for the most part the implements that
+the American players employ are the simplest. And just to complete my
+generalising remarks on American courses, which naturally vary greatly,
+let me say that commonly they are not so severely bunkered as are the
+best of ours, particularly from the tee. They do not demand either such
+long or such straight driving as our best courses do, and I think that
+the Americans realise now that this is the case and that they need
+stiffening up. They are doing that already. There are some very good
+holes at Wheaton, and the short hole at the ninth is about the most
+tantalising water hole I have encountered. It is all water from the
+teeing ground to the foot of a high plateau on which the green is
+situated, and it is about a hundred and ten yards across the pond.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE PERFECT COUNTRY CLUB AND THE GOLFERS' POW-WOW AT ONWENTSIA, WITH A
+GLIMPSE OF THE NATIONAL LINKS.
+
+
+Round Chicago there is now a great belt of golf which is thickening
+rapidly. More hundreds of acres are being claimed for the game
+constantly, and one hears in these parts of the most splendidly equipped
+club-houses being built to replace others at the cost of very many
+thousands of dollars. Activity in the increase of golf is feverish. But
+even here maturity has its charm, as it always must have in golf, and
+the most delightful resorts in Illinois are those which are the oldest.
+Such as Onwentsia, Exmoor, Midlothian, Glen View are excellent.
+
+I am glad I went to Onwentsia. Most British golfers who have never been
+and will never go across the Atlantic have heard something, even if but
+the name, of the Onwentsia club. It seems to suggest American golf, and
+there is a look of some mystery about the name. Onwentsia is by no means
+like the others, and there are good reasons why. Here on a wall of mine
+are two feathers of eagles fastened crosswise; below them an Indian's
+pipe of peace with its silken tassel. They were sent to me across the
+sea from Onwentsia by some members a while after I had been there, and
+they are a reminder not only of happy days but of the characteristics of
+Onwentsia, for the name of the place is an Indian one. Here were the
+redskins before all others, and then the white men and golfers came, and
+still it is almost as if the soil were redolent of the Indian trail. The
+club perpetuates in a manner considered suitable the memory and legend
+of the braves; my eagles' feathers are such as a "Running Driver" or
+"Mighty Mashie" might have worn in their fighting days, and they adorned
+our modern Onwentsians on the day of their Indian feast! Let me explain.
+Lake Forest, where is Onwentsia, is a very charming suburb of Chicago,
+at the side of Lake Michigan. Its name suggests its character; it is
+well wooded, and one of the kind friends that I made there, Mr. Slason
+Thompson, drove me in his car in the dusk of a balmy evening for miles
+through the beautiful public grounds. The Onwentsia Club, as it is
+called, is a close fraternity of the best people of these parts. It is a
+country club in a large sense. It is a hunt club, it is a polo club with
+a splendid ground, it is a tennis club, and it is a golf club, and it
+need hardly be said that the golf is a very strong feature, the
+predominator of the institutions. Now the Onwentsian golfers, zealous
+and good, have their own manners and customs, and, particularly they
+have one custom which has a fame all over America, and it has spread
+even beyond the seas. If it be not sin to mention them together
+Onwentsia has one great day of celebration as the Royal and Ancient Club
+has one. Towards the end of September the Royal and Ancient Club calls
+its members together for the autumn gathering at St. Andrews, and there
+on that occasion, as has been related, many ancient and solemn
+ceremonies of great dignity are performed. The captain "plays himself
+in," guns are fired, in the evening at the banquet new members kiss the
+silver club and swear their loyalty, and much more in that splendid and
+time-honoured way is done. America is true to St. Andrews golf in its
+law, but Lake Forest, far out toward the west, is not the same as
+Fifeshire, and the Onwentsia Club at Lake Forest is not like the Royal
+and Ancient. It is not a question of which is the better; they are
+different, and when I was in Illinois, at any rate, Onwentsia was to me
+a very entertaining place. And I do not say this merely because
+Onwentsia, near to Lake Michigan, is so charmingly situated; because the
+club is such a delightful place, perfect in equipment, with a luxurious
+club-house, and inside it a huge swimming pool and many shower-baths,
+making one sometimes a trifle regretful upon the bareness of our British
+golfing-houses. It is just because when I first reached there the great
+golfing gathering at St. Andrews was nearly due and the golfers at
+Onwentsia were having theirs. When I dined with Mr. Thompson that
+evening at his charming house overlooking the great lake, and we smoked
+cigars on the lawn overhanging it, he told me why on everything that
+concerned the club there was the same sign, the head of an Indian brave
+with the big feather in it, and why they were just going forward to the
+great annual pow-wow. If you would do it properly you should pronounce
+Onwentsia in the soft, crooning Indian way. Murmur it slowly and gently,
+and mount the cadence high upon the second syllable; then, after a
+suspicion of a pause, lower the notes gradually to the end. If you said
+it in the right way an old Iroquois brave would know that you were
+referring to "a country gathering," for that is the meaning of the term.
+In days of old the Iroquois trailed over all these parts where now the
+course is laid. Here were their wigwams; here lingered their squaws with
+the little papoose, while the red men hunted and fought. That is why the
+golfers of Onwentsia have their pow-wow once a year.
+
+The pow-wow is an invitation golf tournament lasting two days, and it is
+open only to those members who are of a certain age or over (it was
+thirty-nine when I was there) and their guests, one guest per member. In
+order to preserve complete the familiar friendliness of the gathering
+and to maintain its traditions undisturbed by new influences, the age
+limit is increased from year to year to keep the new and young men out.
+The call to the pow-wow, which is written anew for every festival, gives
+us the key to the nature of the function, and I quote from one of them:
+
+    On the banks of Skokie water,
+    By the water flecked with golf balls,
+    Stands the wigwam, the Onwentsia,
+    The great wigwam of the Pow-wow.
+    Come ye forth, ye Jol-li-gol-fas,
+    Come ye forth and come ye quickly
+    To Onwentsia, the big wigwam,
+    To Onwentsia, the big Pow-wow,
+    In the Moon of Falling Leaflets,
+    Ere the trees are red with autumn,
+    Come in trains, the Puf-choo-choo-puf;
+    Come in motors, Aw-to-bub-buls;
+    In the 'bus, old Shuh-too-get-thah,
+    To Onwentsia, to the Pow-wow.
+    Here's the bartend, Wil-lin-mix-ah,
+    The head waitress, Goo-too-loo-kat,
+    The great golfer, Hoo-beets-boh-ghee,
+    And the caddy, Skip-an-fetch-it,
+    Waiting all to do you honour.
+    Leave your war club, Tom-ah-haw-kus,
+    Bring the peace sticks, Dri-vah-nib-lix;
+    Leave your toilsome reservations
+    And the dust of smoky cities
+    For the Pow-wow in the wigwam;
+    Bring the peace pipe, Swee-too-suk-kat,
+    Taste the bowl, Hi-baw-laf-tah;
+    Play the game, Roy-al-skoch-wun,
+    All the morning in the sunlight,
+    All the afternoon, till evening
+    Spreads the feast of squab and chicken
+    'Mid the joy of good companions
+    Gathered in the spreading wigwam
+    Of Onwentsia for the Pow-wow.
+
+Lasting for two days, with one great night in between them, it happens
+that the first session of play is conducted in a state of high
+anticipation and with much joyful shaking of hands and exhibitions of
+brotherly attachment, and the second session with a feeling as of a
+slowly receding past. Only those who attend the feast in the big wigwam
+are eligible to play in the numerous competitions to which are attached
+such an abundance of prizes that it is difficult for the golfing brave
+to go empty-handed back to his gentle squaw. A law indeed has had to be
+made that he shall not take more than two of the trophies away with him.
+
+At eight o'clock on the morning of the first day the play begins. There
+is a thirty-six holes medal competition for the Sum-go-fah trophy (the
+"Indian" titles are changed from year to year), and at the end of
+eighteen holes the numerous competitors are grouped into sections of
+eight, according to the place in the returns--first eight, second eight,
+and so on for separate match-play competitions for the Sko-ki-ko-lah
+prizes. The prize for the first eight is the Mis-sa-sko-kih, for the
+second the O-ma-go-li, for the third the Hit-ta-sko-kih, for the fourth
+the Sti-mi-gosh, for the fifth the Bum-put-tah, for the sixth the
+Went-an-mis-tit, for the seventh the Top-an-sli-sah, for the eighth the
+Let-mih-tel-you, and for the ninth the Dub-an-duf-fah. Then there is a
+competition for the Bun-kah-bun-kah prize, which is embraced within the
+Sum-go-fah, being for the best eclectic score made in the two rounds, or
+"choice score" as they prefer to call it in the States. Two-thirds
+handicap is allowed. Likewise there is the Noh-bak-num-bah prize, which
+is by medal play with an age handicap, the handicap being determined by
+the years of the contestant above or below forty. By such play, whether
+it is successful or not, do the braves qualify for the feast, and at
+half-past seven there is the call to the big and happy wigwam. The
+great dining-room is indeed made by fitting and decoration to appear as
+one great wigwam, and there are some of the adjuncts of the life of the
+old Iroquois. The golfing braves stride eagerly, joyfully, chatteringly
+in. Reddened are the golfers' faces; wrapped around them are their
+blankets, from their hair stick big black feathers; long pipes of peace
+are held before them. Then there are strange but toothsome dishes; they
+taste the "Hi-baw-laf-ta-tah"; happiness and contentment increase; there
+are toasts and shouts and whoops. The successors of the Iroquois hold
+their pow-wow well. At the beginning of the morning, when the moon is
+riding through the fleecy heavens of Illinois, softly they steal away,
+and in the distance now and then there may be heard the same lone cry
+that once resounded through the forest when Iroquois were on the trail.
+But at nine in the morning more competitions begin, and are most
+thoroughly attended. There are tournaments for the Bus-tis-tik-sah, the
+Boo-li-bus-tah, the Strok-a-hol-ah, the Heez-noh-mut-sah, the
+Ho-pu-get-it, the Get-sa-loo-kin, the He-za-pee-chah, the
+Wil-lin-loo-sah, the Oh-you-papoose, and other cups. Some of the prizes
+go to the players doing certain holes in the lowest gross score during
+the tournament, the Wil-lin-loo-sah is captured by the man who does the
+four rounds worst of all on the two days, and an Onwentsia medicine
+pouch, the nature of which may be guessed by golfers with little
+difficulty, remembering British practice, is awarded to the brave who
+does a particular hole in one stroke. It is all very remarkable,
+wonderful, interesting, and thoroughly American, and not the ragged
+corner of a paper dollar the worse for it either. Happy Onwentsia!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Glen View Country Club they have a special autumn festival also
+which has a character of its own. The motto of Glen View is "Laigh and
+lang"--low and long--which is a good variation on the monotonous "far
+and sure." And about Glen View there is a Scottish flavour; in manners
+and customs for a very brief season in the golden days of the fall there
+is wafted from the far distant Highlands a breath of Scotland. Here they
+call their festival the "Twa Days," and it is carried through with a
+fine spirit. There are competitions in number and kind to satisfy
+everybody, and the social side of the affair is excellent.
+
+Glen View, again, is not like the others either. I spent some days there
+as the guest of the club, and nowhere have I had a more pleasurable
+time. It came after an exceedingly strenuous, rushing period at other
+places, and towards the end of one of the hottest spells of weather that
+they had known for many summers in those burning parts. Glen View is a
+pretty name, but it is not prettier than the golf course there, which is
+one of the most charming I know. It reminded one in some ways of
+Sudbrook Park in the early summer, always, as I think, one of the most
+delightful inland courses in the south of England; but Glen View, with
+its sleepy streams, is nicer. It may not be up to "championship
+standard" in its architectural features, but it might be made so. Yet if
+such a change would remove much of the character of Glen View, I, in my
+selfishness, knowing that on some future morning I shall again take the
+9.35 from Chicago on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, and
+alight at the station which is called "Golf," hope for my high pleasure
+that there will be none such made. When a club once becomes infatuated
+with the championship idea its contentment and happiness depart, and
+Glen View is best as it is. The holes have character. The greens are
+placed in the most beautiful nooks and corners, great belts of trees
+surround the course, and a stream winds snake-like through the grounds.
+At about every third hole there is a large barrel which is filled every
+morning with fresh spring water, into which a large block of ice is
+placed. When you play in a shade temperature of nearly a hundred
+degrees, as I have done at this place, you appreciate these barrels.
+They have a natty way of naming their holes at Glen View. The first is
+called "The Elm," the second "High Ball," the third "Sleepy Hollow," and
+the next in order are "Polo," "Lover's Lane," "Old Hickory," "The Round
+Up," "Trouble," "Reservoir," "Westward Ho!" "The Grove," "Sunset," "The
+Bridge," "The Roost," "Spookey," "The Orchard," "Log Cabin," and "Sweet
+Home." The course is 6279 yards long, and every one of these yards is a
+pleasure to play along. Visitors do like this place. In one year
+recently there were 3550 of them who paid a dollar a day for the
+privilege of playing. The members of the club pay one hundred dollars a
+year subscription, and nowadays it costs about five hundred dollars for
+admission. Every member must be the possessor of a hundred-dollar share
+in the club, and these shares are now at a premium of about five times
+their par value. At few other places in the golfing world is there such
+a nicely appointed club-house as there is here. One could put two or
+three of the largest dining-rooms that our golf clubs possess into the
+one of Glen View, and the furnishing is finely and tastefully done in a
+Flemish style. Some of the golfing prints with which we are most
+familiar hang upon the walls. Other pictures of value keep them
+company, and there is a large crayon drawing done on the spot by my old
+friend, the late Tom Browne, who once came here with his bag of clubs.
+
+The cafe at the Glen View club is an interesting institution. The club
+has one of the cleverest cocktail mixers in America, and the printed
+list of available liquid refreshments that is laid upon the tables
+suggests a little consideration. The American golfers, for the most
+part, do not drink very much, and what they do drink has little effect
+upon them, thanks to the heat and much perspiration; but they do like
+novelties and the variety. So on this list--which, mind you, includes no
+wines, which are quoted on a separate sheet--there are scheduled no
+fewer than 147 different kinds of refreshments. There are thirteen "soft
+drinks," eight different lemonade mixtures, eleven sorts of mineral
+waters, thirteen beers and ales, six rye whiskies, seven Bourbon
+whiskies, eleven Scotch and Irish whiskies, thirteen varieties of
+cocktails, two "toddies," three "sours," three "rickies," three
+"cobblers," six "fizzes," two "flips," seven "punches," three "smashes,"
+and thirty-six "miscellaneous." The last is a most interesting section.
+It includes the "Prairie Oyster," the "Millionaire," the "Pousse
+l'Amour," the "Sam Ward," the "Russian Cooler," the "Japanese Cooler,"
+the "Golfer's Delight," the "Angel's Dream," the "Ladies' Puff," and the
+"Glen View High Ball." Nearly all of these cost twenty or twenty-five
+cents each.
+
+One may be most pleasurably lazy at Glen View. The club-house has some
+forty bedrooms, with a fine equipment of shower and other baths, and the
+usual telephone service to all the bedrooms with a complete telephone
+exchange downstairs. The service and comfort are as good as they can be.
+I liked the lounges and the shady verandahs, with rocking-chairs to tip
+one away to a short dream on a hot afternoon of purling brooks on
+English hills and woods in Wales. Yet when I awake I am satisfied. There
+is no hurry here. In the mornings one would hear the men rising at six
+o'clock and splashing themselves about in the bath department, and
+generally becoming very active all at once. Some time later I would join
+them at breakfast, and see them depart very early for their businesses
+at Chicago. When they had gone one could settle down, and there were
+ladies to chatter with or to play Chopin or something else on the piano.
+It is necessary to take things a little easily during the early and hot
+part of the day, because soon in the afternoon the men come back from
+Chicago, and they are all energy and rush as if they had not spent a
+howling morning in the "Pit" or one of the other great business centres.
+One has to fall in with their schemes of activity, which endure until
+the evening meal, taken in an easy way of _en famille_ in the restaurant
+of the club, luscious green corn to begin with and the most appetising
+dishes later, with laughter and gossip always. And later in the evening
+David Noyes and I might sit in the dark on the verandah, and under those
+stars of Illinois speak of the differences between English people and
+the Americans as we respectively saw them. We understood each other and
+could be frank. "The worst of America," said I, "is that it has no soul,
+and the Americans have none either." "Well," said he; "but we have big
+hearts." Agreed. He is a leading broker in the "Pit" at Chicago, the
+great wheat market of the world, and one morning he took me there and I
+met many golfers I knew round about those four screeching masses of men
+who make of this place a babel and such an exhibition of raw fighting
+human nature as, with all its differences, I can only compare with the
+same brilliant and yet ugly show that is made in the rooms of the
+Casino at Monte Carlo. It is raw life on the strain at both places--hot
+seething life. The reposeful Glen View is needed for the people who
+barter there.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Massachusetts is a fine golfing land, and it rose to the heights in
+1913. After gaiety in New York, and amazement at Chicago, you should go
+to Boston. And really they who live there have reason for their pride.
+There is no other town or city in the United States or Canada that has
+anything like such an English flavour as this in the New England. There
+are times when we wander along the great thoroughfare, Washington
+Street, or turn up one of the side avenues like Boylston, that the
+American idea for a moment ceases to press closely upon us, and when we
+pass the old churches, wander through historic chambers Georgian in
+their style, look into the Faneuil Hall, or into the old-fashioned
+market, or go down to the shipping in the docks where our Boston man
+will surely take us, that we may see the place of the "tea party," as
+they call it now, which had vast consequences to the States and England
+when taxes were made and were rejected--then in the New England we feel
+the old one there. And, of course, the wandering Englishman is taken out
+to Bunker Hill as well. Though with all Americans their spirit of
+independence is an obsession, and it seems sometimes that they like to
+think of themselves as a new race of people come up out of nothing or
+from heaven, owing nothing to any other race, yet at Boston I suspect
+they are a trifle glad that they and their city are not like the others,
+but are something more English in their way. There is a difference in
+the atmosphere. A certain ease is possible, a culture is apparent.
+Streets and shops do not look as if they had been cut out by machinery
+at the same time that the streets and shops of a dozen other cities were
+being cut, and all life is not mathematically arranged and standardised.
+If an American university is not at all like either Oxford or Cambridge,
+still Harvard is an influence, and Harvard is at Cambridge, a near
+suburb of Boston. The result of it all is that we feel something of the
+old atmosphere of home and are stimulated. Boston grows upon us very
+rapidly. The father of one of my good American friends, Mr. John G.
+Anderson, who has gone on golfing expeditions with me in England,
+Scotland, France and the United States, is a Scot with a great love for
+his home country, and our rambles round old Boston have been of a
+peculiarly interesting kind. And when in Boston, and the car of a friend
+comes along to the Touraine in the morning, we throw the clubs in the
+back of it, and get up with just that feeling of having a sporting day
+ahead that one develops in the country at home and hardly anywhere else.
+
+There are many courses round about Boston, and there are four of them,
+all quite different from each other, of which I shall have a clear
+recollection always. Two have very special places of their own in
+American golf, one being The Country Club of Brookline already
+described. Massachusetts itself will not be called a "state" like other
+states, but is a "commonwealth," and The Country Club is not the Boston
+Country Club or the Brookline Country Club, but The Country Club, and
+visitors who would be appreciative and make no _faux pas_ are
+recommended to keep the point in mind, the reason being that this one,
+with its charter of incorporation away back in the eighteenth century,
+was the first of all the country clubs in America, and is dignified
+accordingly.
+
+They do blow the place up in America when they determine to make a golf
+course. Forest and rock are of no more hindrance to any idea or scheme
+than a few daisies might be. I was strongly impressed with this view of
+things when I was out one day at the Essex County Club at
+Manchester-by-the-Sea, another of the outer-Boston courses. "Come to
+golf at Essex in the morning; you will see something of the way in which
+we do our golf in America that you have never seen before." Such was the
+substance of an invitation from Mr. George F. Willett, one of the most
+ardent and admirable leaders of the golfing movement in the Eastern
+States. So in the morning golf at Essex, twenty miles out of Boston, was
+the programme of the day, and by half-past ten we were on the first tee
+preparing to drive from an eminence down towards low land in front. The
+terms of the invitation were amply justified. Towards noon, when we
+might be somewhere about the thirteenth or fourteenth hole, a great roar
+and crashing sound came from the other side of the course in the
+locality of the fifth hole, and looking towards it there was to be seen
+a rising cloud of smoke, with masses of earth and splintered rocks being
+hurled high into the air. A moment later and there was another deafening
+bang and more earth, more rocks, and various stumps of trees were shot
+up towards the sky. Bang! bang! bang!--ten times in the space of a few
+seconds was this surprise repeated, and it began to seem that we must be
+on Olympian links and that Jove himself or Hercules was bunkered. "It's
+only Ross's men tinkering away at the new fourth," said my man
+unconcernedly, as he ran down a long putt. A couple of minutes
+afterwards we rounded a bend of the course, and as we did so some wild
+yells were heard and a number of the Italian workmen were seen running
+fast in our direction and then stopping suddenly to hide themselves
+behind trees. Three more big bangs, more smoke, flying earth, flying
+rocks and roots, and then as my partner played his brassey he
+soliloquised that he had added, unintentionally, a touch of slice to the
+stroke and was in the pot on the right. As to the noises, our part of
+the course, I was assured, was perfectly safe. The three explosions were
+made by Ross's Italians at the new fifth. Thirteen of them in five
+minutes was perhaps a little unusual, but they were all over now, and,
+as could be seen, the Italians, with sundry calls to each other, were
+moving back towards the place they had sprinted from. The object of this
+concentration of noise and disturbance in five minutes, it was
+explained, was to give the full body of workmen plenty to do as soon as
+they resumed after their midday meal.
+
+The truth is, that golf at Essex, when I was first there, was undergoing
+a great and most wonderful transformation, regardless of cost,
+regardless of the magnitude and seeming impossibilities of the task,
+regardless of everything, but caused by the insatiable desire of the
+American golfer to have courses that are as good as they can be. To
+satisfy this desire he is everywhere pulling Nature to pieces and
+reconstructing her, doing his work deftly and skilfully, and with a good
+eye for pleasing effect. At the finish you might think that, save for
+the putting greens and bunkers, it was all the simple work of the mother
+of earth herself in her gentler moods, smooth swards for rocks, and
+chaste glades where forests were. This transformation and extension of
+American golf and the way it is being done is most amazing. All the old
+courses are being lengthened and greatly improved, and new ones of
+first-class quality are being made in large numbers. When it is desired
+to make changes and extensions on a British course the work that has to
+be done is not generally of a very formidable character. Some tolerably
+smooth sort of land is frequently available, and alternatives to
+existing holes may be planned. But even so, the question of expense
+seems often to be a fearsome thing, and a year or more of thought and
+yet another year for action are commonly needed. A thousand pounds or
+two thousand seems to be a mighty sum to spend, but for all that we
+think that in the south, at all events, we are doing our golf on a very
+grand scale in these days. And when I think of St. George's Hill and
+Coombe Hill and others of their kind I know we are doing it on a very
+fine scale. But the case of America at present is most specially
+remarkable. In the Eastern States particularly, the courses have had for
+the most part to be carved out of virgin forests. Tens of thousands of
+tons of rocks have had to be blasted, and hundreds of acres of swamps
+drained before the fairways could be laid and sown with grass. Such work
+is having to be done now for the extensions and improvements, and it is
+wonderfully done. The committees appear to take about a week to think
+about it, a day to decide, and then in two or three months, with the
+help of dynamite, tree-fellers, and hundreds of foreign workmen, the new
+scheme is carried through. The cost is not considered till afterwards,
+and then it never worries, but it is enormous. Here at Essex, the chief
+work that was being done was the addition of a total of 175 yards only
+to the fourth and fifth holes, which were to be given new numbers, and
+this little bit of lengthening, with the tree-felling, the splendid
+draining of a swamp, and the use of 400 lbs. of dynamite on the rocks,
+was costing 10,000 dollars or L2000. Some other alterations and new
+constructions were being done, and the course, one of fine undulations,
+well-planned bunkering, magnificent putting greens, and glorious
+scenery, was being brought to perfection. The work was being carried out
+under the direction of Mr. Donald J. Ross, the chief superintendent of
+the club and course, who was once a Dornoch man. He thinks out his
+construction schemes in the grand way, and he is going about America
+blowing hundreds of acres of it up into the air and planting smooth
+courses upon the levelled remains. Shortly before this, they called him
+up to a mountainous place at Dixville Notch, in New Hampshire, to plan a
+new nine-holes course that had to be cut out of solid rock, at a cost of
+L10,000. No golfer had ever been to that place, and the first had yet to
+arrive when the promoters wrote hurriedly to Mr. Ross, not long back
+home, saying: "We are convinced that it will soon be necessary to have a
+longer course, and are very desirous that you will come at once to lay
+one out on Panorama Hill." It will cost L20,000, but that does not
+matter. Golf is demanded everywhere in America, and it must be supplied.
+A little extra space was required for play by the Rhode Island Country
+Club at Narragansett, so, with Ross's help they took forty acres from
+the sea, and are now playing the game where a year previously the waves
+were rolling. Again, this remarkable golf engineer a little while since
+finished his work on the very first course that has been laid out in
+Cuba. I do not know what the future of American golf will be, but its
+present is a bewildering, astonishing thing.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes, but wait until you see Myopia!" I was not glad to leave Essex, but
+I was happy to go from there to the Myopia Hunt Club a few miles distant
+(and may I never forget that glorious ride in Mr. Willett's big car,
+along the winding road fringed with silver birches and autumn-tinted
+foliage, past placid little lakes, through some of the country of
+chastest charm in New England!), for Myopia is America's golfing pride.
+Besides, it is one of the few American courses that have a wide
+international reputation. Remember the astonishment when Andrew
+Kirkaldy, a St. Andrews golfer, if ever there was one, a man believing
+in the old course of Fifeshire as a Mussulman believes in Mecca, came
+back from an American tour and declared to British people that Myopia
+was the best course in the world! So we approach one American golf
+course with wonder and a certain awe. There are other reasons for doing
+so if we only knew them beforehand. Traditions and old dignity are
+strongly attached to it, and this Myopia is such a club for high feeling
+and exclusiveness as would do credit to any institution we have at home,
+golf or otherwise. It is, at the very least, as difficult to become a
+member of Myopia as of the Royal and Ancient. If I dared I would say it
+is more so. Myopia, I am told, will use the black ball with joy when
+there is a candidate at the doors. It might be easier in some
+circumstances for a man to become the President of the United States
+than to become a member of the Myopia Hunt Club. The dignity of Myopia
+exudes from the timbers of its long, quaint club-house. The ceilings are
+low, while the walls are panelled and are really old, for in quite early
+days of New England this, or part of it, was a farm-house.
+
+The name of the club in this case has nothing to do with golf, nor with
+the name of a place, for the place is Hamilton. Myopia is a technical
+term for near-sight. The original members despised the game, and as for
+letting it influence them in their choice of name of the club, such a
+thing is inconceivable. Originally, and for long afterwards, and
+primarily even now, Myopia is a hunt club; it prides itself on being so,
+and when anybody asks one of the old hunting members if they do not
+possess a good golf course there, he might say he supposed they did play
+some game with that name there sometimes. In the early days, I believe
+that many of the members wore coloured glasses for some reasons
+connected with their sight, and it was through this that the name of the
+club was given. Golf was a very late addition, and some of the old
+hunting-men, whom you will see moving about the club-house in real and
+unaffected riding costume as hardly anywhere else in America, feel a
+little sore about it still, and it is even now the fact that the hunting
+section keep to themselves in one part of the club and the golfers to
+themselves in their part, with such as Mr. Herbert Leeds and one or two
+others in both. Mr. Leeds showed me some of the old prints on the walls
+illustrating the race meetings that had taken place there in almost
+prehistoric times, and some mementoes of the early days of the golf
+club, together with the score card of George Duncan's record round on
+the course. I hope you realise that Myopia is not an ordinary golf club;
+I did so within a minute of my arrival there.
+
+The course is not like others in America. It is almost more of the open
+heathland sort of course than any other I have tramped over while in the
+country. It is a little barer, seemingly a little wilder than most of
+the others, and none the worse for that. Its putting-greens are capital,
+and at some of the holes, if not all, I have certainly trodden on turf
+that is better than anything else that my feet have touched on that side
+of the Atlantic. I remember that I nearly shouted with delight to my
+partner when I came upon the first stretch of it--green and soft and
+velvety. But it was not all like that, and in some respects I do think
+that, splendid as the course is, praise of it has been a little
+overdone. Yet on the other hand it is certainly a course that grows on
+the constant player there, and reveals new subtleties to him every time
+of playing. That after all is the test of a great course.
+Architecturally many of the holes are splendid. I do not quite like the
+idea of the man having to drive uphill at the first hole, but the
+tee-shot has most decidedly to be placed--to the left--or the player has
+the most fearful approach that he might ever dream of after the most
+indigestible dinner. The fourth hole is a splendid one of the dog-leg
+kind, a drive and an iron with the green very well bunkered, and some
+very low land to the left which is a constant attraction to the
+weak-minded ball. Then for my own part I liked the tenth very much, for
+a big drive has to be done over some high ground with a bunker away to
+the right that draws hard at sliced balls, while the green is one of the
+nicest and most prettily guarded. I lingered about it for some time in
+an admiring way. The last hole also has infinitely more in it than
+appears at the first glance, for here again a big bunker jutting into
+the edge of the green and to the right is a strong factor, especially
+when the pin is behind it; and if the hero does not place his tee-shot
+to the left, and within a very little space there, too, he will be
+sorry. It is 6335 yards round the course. In the club-house over the
+tea-cups, on the occasion of my first visit, I pondered upon the
+marvellous excellence of Duncan's record round, and paid some most
+sincere compliments to Mr. Leeds for the quality of the golf
+architecture of Myopia, for it is he, after close study of the best
+British models, who has been chiefly responsible for it.
+
+A day and night at the Brae Burn Country Club at West Newton, near
+Boston, left a warm glow lingering in my mind. Here if anywhere in
+America there is country charm and social delight. Nowhere is the idea
+of the complete and happy social community of the country club better
+developed. The course is a fine one, and here also, at the time of my
+first visit, extensive works were being carried out, and some splendid
+new holes over heaving land were in the process of formation. They have
+since been completed and the course has now risen to the highest
+standard. The putting-greens are in the nicest and most beautiful
+places, belts of trees line the fairway at several of the holes; there
+are others in open country, and the short ones are uncommonly good. A
+new one that they were making then, calling for a drive from a height
+down to a pocket-handkerchief kind of green is one that I hope to be
+puzzled at in the play within a few weeks of the moment when I write. I
+had the happiness then to nominate the situation of a new bunker at one
+of the new holes, and sure I am that a momentary vexation will be the
+result when I play that hole, for I, too, in America, have found that I
+develop the American hook, which seems to be in the climate and the
+soil. It was on this course that Harry Vardon in his all-conquering tour
+in America in 1900 sustained his only defeat. Our dinner-party in the
+club-house in the evening is an unforgettable reminiscence. It was a
+good-fellowship golfing party such as this game only can bring about.
+Mr. Harry L. Ayer, Mr. E. A. Wilkie, Mr. George Gilbert, Mr. C. I.
+Travelli, good Anderson and self talked our golf, British and American,
+to the full extent of a good ability. One of the topics was club
+captaincy, and the discussion we had may lead to the creation of the
+office at Brae Burn and elsewhere, for it is a curious thing that the
+American clubs have never thought of creating captains, and this
+community was rather pleased with the idea. It is an office that a golf
+club needs. If the captain is the right man, if he is chosen for his
+past service, for his present strength, and for his tact and quality as
+man and golfer, he can do much for a club, and his appointment is a
+recognition that a club needs for its best and most faithful men.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The country round about New York abounds in interesting golfing places,
+and if inclination were followed there should be descriptions given of
+Nassau, of Apawamis (not forgetting the rock to the right of the first
+green there which an English ball most usefully struck when the
+thirty-seventh hole was being played in the final of the American
+championship, Mr. Fred Herreshoff, finalist, being loser thereby), of
+Garden City, Baltusrol, and many other good golfing places in these
+parts. Garden City is a name familiar to golfers in Britain, because it
+is the place where Mr. Walter J. Travis came from when he won the
+championship at Sandwich. If it lacks some of the boldness of feature of
+some of the later American courses, yet this is a fine testing course,
+thoroughly--and so deeply!--bunkered, and with splendid putting-greens,
+and all the place round about is very pleasant. And now I am very
+anxious to see Piping Rock, as I soon expect to do.
+
+There are good reasons for making a journey by the Pennsylvania railroad
+from New York to Washington. One must pay the visitor's homage to the
+seat of American government and experience the feeling of being at the
+heart of the States, with its magnificent buildings and its historical
+remembrances. It is an intensely interesting place. At the White House
+there is Mr. President Wilson who is a golfer, as ex-President Taft was,
+and remains one of the keenest in the land. Mr. Taft will write
+enthusiastically about the game, and make speeches about it when he
+thinks it proper. "My advice to the middle-aged and older men who have
+never played golf," he says, "is to take it up. It will be a rest and
+recreation from business cares, out of which they will get an immense
+amount of pleasure, and at the same time increase their physical vigour
+and capacity for work as well as improve their health." And he also
+says, "Preceding the election campaign in which I was successful, there
+were many of my sympathisers and supporters who deprecated its becoming
+known that I was addicted to golf, as an evidence of aristocratic
+tendencies and a desire to play only a rich man's game. You know, and I
+know, that there is nothing more democratic than golf, and there is
+nothing which furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint,
+nothing which puts one more on an equality with one's fellows--or, I may
+say, puts one lower than one's fellows--than the game of golf. If there
+is any game that will instil in one's heart a more intense feeling of
+self-abasement and humiliation than the game of golf, I should like to
+know what it is." One who was in office there told me something of his
+enthusiasm for the game. I asked him how often Mr. Taft had played when
+he was there in the golfing season. The answer was that Mr. Taft used to
+play every day, positively every day, and some of those who played with
+him indicated to me what a very thorough and determined golfer he was.
+It might be said of the ex-President that he has spent more time in
+bunkers than most citizens, because he has generally insisted on playing
+out, no matter how many strokes have been needed. He has been playing
+now for sixteen years, and is quite one of the oldest American golfers
+in point of service to the game. Nothing can take away from him the
+distinction of having been the first President of the United States to
+play what they have determined shall be their national game.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had a happy experience when one day I left New York, where it was most
+swelteringly hot, and went up into the Green Mountains of Vermont for
+golf at the Ekwanok Country Club. A friend, Mr. Henry W. Brown of
+Philadelphia, who had played with me at my favourite Brancaster in
+Norfolk once, had heard I was somewhere in America and sent a letter to
+me directed to a chance address, which, being a golfing kind of
+address, found me with little delay. "Come," said Brown, "to
+Manchester-in-the-Mountains in Vermont. You ought to see our quite
+famous Ekwanok course, and I can promise you some fine mountain air,
+good golf, and a hearty welcome. If you will tell me what train you will
+come by, I will meet you with the car at Manchester Station." A moment's
+hesitation dissolved in firm decision and action, which took the form of
+a taxi-cab to the New York Central Station, and the north-bound train
+which left at twenty minutes to one in the afternoon. Then along we went
+by the Hudson river, up which I had sailed from Albany a year before,
+past the Palisades, past Poughkeepsie and the Catskill Mountains,
+through Troy and Albany, and as the daylight waned we were mounting
+upwards through the hills of sweet Vermont. At a quarter to eight the
+train reached Manchester, Brown and his car were waiting there, and we
+sped along the main street to his home.
+
+It seemed that the silver moonlight was shining not upon an earthen road
+but glistening on snow. Little villas like chalets and chateaux of
+Switzerland lined the way and the people living in them could be heard
+in their laughter and song, for the dinner time was just gone by and
+yellow light shone from the windows, making that happy contrast with the
+coldness of the moonshine, that speaks of home and comfort. We passed
+the great hotel where five hundred people are constantly gathered
+together in the summer time from all parts of the States, and indeed
+from places far beyond the States, for there are Britons in numbers
+here, and travellers from Africa and the deep southern lands, making
+such a cosmopolitan gathering of its size for drawing-rooms and bridge
+parties and the usual orderings of social gatherings as is not easily to
+be matched. And there is an amazing vivacity among all these people, for
+two reasons, one being that the American spirit at its best pervades,
+and the other that it is Ekwanok, the heartening, the vigour-making, the
+youth-restoring. In New York and Chicago at the end of the day one is a
+little apt to think of the wear and tear of life and the fading capacity
+of a good constitution; high up in the mountains of Vermont, in the
+shadow of the hills of Equinox, one revels in fresh youth again and has
+no more envy for the lad of twenty. And that again is a reason why
+Ekwanok is not like the other golfing places of America, and another
+following upon it is that this is, so far as I have discovered, the only
+truly golfing holiday resort in all the States, a place to which people
+go for the pleasure of the happy game and for hardly anything else, a
+place that lives and thrives on golf. From far and wide the Americans
+come to it and leave all their work behind, and are happy and leisurely
+as you rarely see them at other times. In Britain we have a very large
+number of resorts that are for holiday golf alone, and more are coming
+all the time, but this is a feature of golf that America in general has
+yet to know. If it comes to that, Manchester-in-the-Mountains is not so
+very high (that is a rather curious association of English
+ideas--Manchester and mountains, dingy streets with the smoke-thickened
+atmosphere of the Lancashire city and the big bold hills of God), but
+here is the mountain scent, enlivening, heartening. The house of my
+host, Breezy Bank as it is called, is set at the foot of one big
+mountain and looks across the green valley, where the golf course lies,
+out toward another--a delightful abode. A log fire burned red on the
+big hearth, a kind hostess gave us welcome, and after a supper that
+embraced fresh green corn (it is the essence of the enjoyment of green
+corn that it should be taken quickly from the growing to the kitchen),
+we talked, over cigars and coffee, golf from one end of the game to the
+other, and right across it, and handled clubs, until bedtime came. Brown
+is keen, and he has sound views on the influence of the game on national
+character.
+
+Next morning, with sunlight and breeze, we went along to the course, so
+near that a ball could have been driven to it from the lawn of Breezy
+Bank, where the master has been known to practise mashie shots by
+moonlight, and I was joined in foursome with Mr. Walter Fairbanks of
+Denver, Colorado, against B. and his son Theodore. What then happened is
+of no consequence; the tale may be told in Colorado but not in England.
+But the course--it is splendid, and reflects an infinity of credit upon
+Mr. James L. Taylor, the first in command, who has for the most part
+designed it, has constantly improved it, and has made it what it is. All
+the holes have abundant character. They are up and down, straight and
+crooked, interesting always, with a good fairway that gives fine lies to
+the ball, and putting-greens of the smoothest sort. We drove first down
+a hill with a slanting hazard that made awful menace to a slice, then up
+again and away out to the far parts, with some very pretty short holes.
+The gem of the collection of eighteen is the seventh, which has been
+called, and with some fitness, the King of American Holes. A great,
+fine, lusty piece of golf it is, 537 yards from the tee to the green,
+and every shot has to be a thoughtful, strong, and well-directed shot,
+with no girl's golf in it anywhere. It is a down drive from the
+high-placed tee, and the land below heaves over in a curious twisted way
+that demands very exact placing of the ball. Then there is a strong and
+straight second to be played over a high ridge in front into which big
+bunkers have been cut. Afterwards there is plain country to a
+well-protected green. It is a great hole, a romantic one, and is well
+remembered. Some of the drive-and-iron holes that follow are splendid
+things, and this course was very well chosen for the Amateur
+Championship Meeting in 1914. When we were leaving it at the end of that
+day, the sun had just gone down behind big Equinox Hill, but presently
+and by surprise he sent a last good-bye. Round the mountain side a
+golden bar of light was cast, and it spread along the olive-coloured
+hill across the shadowed valley like a clean-cut shining stripe or a
+monotinted rainbow. These were the glorious Green Mountains of Vermont!
+We tarried until the sun went right away, and took with it that parting
+beam, and, sighing, we passed along.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have left to the last of these few remembrances, what is in many
+respects the greatest of American courses--the National Golf Links at
+the far end of Long Island. In recent times it has probably been more
+discussed than any other course on earth. A while since a number of very
+wealthy, ambitious, and determined golfers put their heads and their
+money together, and decided on the establishment of something as near
+perfection as they could reach. In pursuit of this idea they have so
+far, as I am informed, spent about two hundred thousand dollars, and are
+in the act of spending many more thousands. They have their reward in a
+magnificent creation, as great in result as in idea, or nearly. All the
+people in the golf world have heard by this time of this National Links,
+and have no doubt wondered upon it, and the extent to which the
+extraordinary scheme that was developed a few years ago has been
+realised. It has been referred to as "the amazing experiment," and "the
+millionaires' dream," and so forth. Undoubtedly in its conception it was
+the grandest golfing scheme ever attempted. It came about in this way.
+America, with all its golf and money and enthusiasm, was without any
+course which might be compared with our first-class seaside links, the
+chief reason for her deficiency being that nowhere on either of her
+seaboards could be discovered a piece of land which was of the real
+British golfing kind. But at last a tract was found nearly at the end of
+Long Island, about ninety miles from New York, which was believed to be
+nearly the right thing. It was taken possession of by a golfing
+syndicate, and they determined there to do their very best. The question
+of expense was not to be considered in the matter. A member of the
+syndicate, Mr. Charles B. Macdonald, an old St. Andrews man, and one of
+wide golfing knowledge and experience, went abroad to study, photograph,
+and make plans of the best holes in Great Britain and on the continent.
+The whole world of golf was laid under tribute to assist in the creation
+of this wonder course. After exhaustive consideration a course was
+decided upon which was to embrace, in a certain reasonable measure,
+features of such eminent holes as the third, eleventh, and seventeenth
+at St. Andrews, the Cardinal and the Alps at Prestwick, the fifth and
+ninth at Brancaster, the Sahara at Sandwich, the Redan at North Berwick,
+and some others. The scheme was modified somewhat as the work
+progressed, but in due course the National Golf Links, a string of
+pearls as it was intended to be, was opened. Many different reports have
+been circulated as to the quality of the course, and the extent to which
+the object has been achieved. It has been described both as a failure
+and as a magnificent success.
+
+I preferred to go there alone and see things for myself without
+explanations and influences. A certain penalty had, however, to be paid
+for this enterprise. I shall not soon forget my journey to the
+Shinnecock Hills out at the end of the Island, nor the journey back
+again. It was on a glorious Sunday morning in October that I went to the
+Pennsylvania station and took train there for Shinnecock, which was a
+three-hours' journey along the line. In getting out at Shinnecock I was
+nearest to the course, but there were no cars waiting there, and the
+tramp that had to be made across country for two or three miles was one
+that might have suited an Indian brave better than it suited me,
+although I have an instinct and a desire always to find things and ways
+out for myself rather than be told and led. It was nearly noon; the sun
+was high, and it was burning fiercely. The so-called path was something
+of a delusion. It was more of a trail through a virgin bush country with
+a tendency to swamp here and there, and occasionallv one was led to a
+cul-de-sac. I could see the National Golf Links a little way ahead all
+the time. There was a big water cistern standing out against the
+sky-line, and there were some smoothly laid out holes, but grapes were
+never more tantalising to any fox than those holes are to the wanderer
+who tries to get there from Shinnecock along a route over which a crow
+might fly, and who determines that he will discover the elusive secrets
+of the National Links, however dearly the expedition may cost him.
+However, the enterprise succeeded, and the journey back from the course
+to the Southampton station was also accomplished despite the prevailing
+difficulties, and, with the sense of something having been attempted and
+done, we rode home on the Pennsylvania, and were back in New York by the
+same night--about the hardest day's golf business I have ever done.
+
+A certain disappointment is inevitably threatened when one visits a
+course of this kind about which one has heard so much beforehand. An
+ideal is established in the mind which cannot possibly be realised, and
+it is the fault of nobody. We do not know exactly what it is that we
+hope to see, but it is something beyond the power of man and Nature to
+achieve. But the National is a great course, a very great course. It is
+charmingly situated, most excellently appointed, and bears evidence of
+the most thorough and intelligent treatment by its constructors. Any
+preliminary disappointment there may have been soon wears away as the
+real excellence of the course and its difficulties are appreciated. Had
+we heard nothing of this copying, and did we not make comparisons
+between new and old in the mind, through which that which is new does
+not often survive, we should glory in the National at the first
+inspection of it. And the fact is, that the comparisons we suggest ought
+never to be made, though I, for one, was not aware of that till
+afterwards. Absolute copying was never intended; only the governing
+features of the British holes, the points that gave the character and
+quality to them, were imitated so far as could be done. That has been
+done very well, and some of the holes are very fine things. Those the
+design of which is based on such gems as the sixth at Brancaster and the
+eleventh at St. Andrews are very well recognisable. I should like to
+write much more about this course; it is a strong temptation. If I
+thought less of it and did not realise its greatness as I do, I should
+yield to the desire, and yielding, might rashly criticise as well as
+praise. But there is an imperative restraint. Upon a moderate course, or
+even a very good one, you may sometimes, if sufficiently self-confident,
+judge in one day's experience. But there are courses which, not because
+they grow upon you as we say, but because they command a higher respect
+at once than is given to others, which do not permit of such
+presumption. I saw the National on one day only, though I hope to see it
+many times again, and to gain courage for comment upon it. Now, with cap
+in hand, I can only signify my respect and full appreciation that here
+is something that is by no means of an ordinary kind, the accomplishment
+of a magnificent enterprise, and no doubt the achievement of a great
+ideal. But I shall say, at any rate, that a links more gloriously
+situated than this one in Peconic Bay, with pretty creeks running into
+the land here and there, and hill views at the back, could hardly be
+imagined. The view as I beheld it from different parts on that peaceful
+sunny Sunday afternoon is one that I never shall forget. It is the ideal
+situation for a national course.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To Mr. Macdonald thus belongs the credit for the initiation of what we
+may call the higher golf in America. In the last few years this movement
+has made strides as long and rapid in the United States as it has done
+in England, and above all other countries in the world America, which is
+so much dependent on her inland golf, having scarcely any other, is the
+country for this movement to be carried to its ultimate legitimate
+point. The day for very plain and purely and obviously artificial
+construction of inland golf courses is gone, the original inland system
+in all its stupidity and its surrender to difficulties has become
+archaic. It has come to be realised in this business that man may
+associate himself with Nature in a magnificent enterprise, and only now
+is it understood that this golf course construction is, or may be, a
+really splendid art. Landscape gardening is a fine thing in the way of
+modelling in earth and with the assistance of trees and plants and
+flowers and the natural forces, while engineering across rivers and
+mountains is grander perhaps; but in each of these the man takes his
+piece of the world from Nature and shovels it and smashes it, and then,
+according to his own fancy and to suit his own needs, he arranges it all
+over again. But in the making of a golf course, while we have indeed to
+see that certain requirements of our own are well suited, knowing how
+particular and hyper-critical we have become, yet we wish to keep to
+plain bold Nature too, and we want our best work to be thoroughly in
+harmony with her originals. I believe that if we could express it
+properly to ourselves, we wish now to make our golf courses look as if
+they were fashioned at the tail-end of things on the evening of the
+sixth day of the creation of the world--just when thoughts had to be
+turning to the rest and happinesses of the seventh. And so the great
+architect now takes a hundred acres or more of plain rough land and
+forest, hills and dales among it, and with magnificent imagination
+shapes it to his fancy. The work he now does will endure in part, if not
+in whole, for ages hence, and so it is deeply responsible. It is a
+splendid art; I do not hesitate to say it is a noble art.
+
+Mr. Colt, with his great thoughts and his splendid skill, has done fine
+work in several parts of the United States. The new courses of the
+Mayfield Country Club, and of the Country Club of Detroit, are splendid
+things. But Mr. Macdonald's creations--for more of them now follow upon
+the original at Southampton--are destined to be leading influences in
+the new American golf course construction. I have had some interesting
+talk with him upon these matters, and am glad to find that he is artist
+and creator enough to have the full strength of his own original
+opinions in this matter, especially as in some ways his ideals differ
+from those commonly accepted in Britain. I have been so much interested
+in his views, and I think that these views are destined to have such an
+enormous influence upon American golf in the future, that I have asked
+him for some brief statement of them, an enunciation of his creed as an
+architect of courses, and he has kindly made it to me in writing, as
+follows:--
+
+"To begin with, I think the tendency to-day is to overdo matters
+somewhat, making courses too long, too difficult, and with too much
+sameness in the construction of two-shot holes. To my mind a course over
+6400 yards becomes tiresome. I would not have more than eight two-shot
+holes, and in constructing them I should not follow the ideas or fancies
+of any one golf architect, but should endeavour to take the best from
+each. While it is the fashion now to decry the construction of a hole
+involving the principles of the Alps or seventeenth at Prestwick, I
+favour two blind holes of that character--one constructed similar to the
+Alps, and another of the punch-bowl variety of hole some fifty yards
+longer than the Alps. It is interesting now to read the 'best hole'
+discussion that took place in 1901. The leading golfers of that time
+were almost unanimous in pronouncing the Alps at Prestwick the best
+two-shot hole in the world. The eleventh at St. Andrews and the Redan at
+North Berwick were almost unanimously picked as the best one-shot holes.
+
+"To my mind there should be four one-shot holes, namely, 130, 160, 190,
+and 220 yards. These holes should be so constructed that a player can
+see from the tee where the flag enters the hole. The shorter the hole
+the smaller should be the green, and the more closely should it be
+bunkered. The most difficult hole in golf to construct interestingly is
+a three-shot hole, of which I would place two in the eighteen, one 520
+yards and the other 540. The putting greens at these holes should be
+spacious.
+
+"This leaves us four drive-and-pitch holes--280, 300, 320, and 340 yards
+in length. These should have relatively small greens and be closely
+bunkered, one or two of them having the putting greens open on one side
+or corner so as to give a powerful, long, courageous driver, who
+successfully accomplishes the long carry, the advantage of a short run
+up to the green. The size and contour of the putting green and the
+bunkering should depend upon the character and length of the hole. The
+principle of the dog's hind leg can be made a feature of several holes
+advantageously. The gradients between the tee and the hole should be
+made use of in bunkering. Whenever it is possible it is best that the
+bunkers should be in view. A number of the holes should be built with
+diagonal bunkers, or bunkers _en echelon_, so constructed that the
+player who takes the longer carry shall have an advantage over the man
+who takes the shorter carry. The hazards for the second shot should be
+so placed and designed as to give a well-placed tee shot every
+advantage--in other words, should make a man play his first stroke in
+relation to the second shot. There should be at least three tees for
+every hole, to take care not only of an adverse or favourable wind, but
+also of the calibre of the player. It is necessary on a first-class golf
+course to have short tees for the poorer players, otherwise they are
+everlastingly in the bunkers. The lengths which I give should be
+measured from the middle of the middle tee to the middle of the putting
+green."
+
+There is so much knowledge and good suggestion in this statement, and
+the matter is of such high consequence, that every player of the game
+should think well upon it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE U. S. G. A., AND THE METHODS OF THE BUSINESS-MAN GOLFER, WITH A
+REMARKABLE DEVELOPMENT OF MUNICIPAL GOLF.
+
+
+People in England or Scotland do not quite understand what a splendid
+thing for American golf is the United States Golf Association. It is so
+absolutely necessary for the game in America that I am sure there would
+be little that is like golf there now if there had been no U. S. G. A.,
+with its loyalty and attachment to St. Andrews. There would be few
+Americans coming to play on the links of the homeland of the game, and
+there would be no British golfers wandering happily among the American
+courses. American golf would have become as much like the old game as
+American college football is like the football that is played at Oxford
+and Cambridge, which is to say that it is not at all like it. America is
+not a country small in space like our own happy islands. There it is in
+its millions of miles, new everywhere, and with little communities of
+golfers so far apart as New York and San Francisco, Massachusetts and
+Arizona, and isolated golfers in the loneliest places trying to bring
+others to their pastime for the matches they would have. What should all
+these people, away from all the influences of the home of the game, hot
+with the spirit of freedom, unrestrained by laws and conventionalities,
+eager to do things better than they have been done before--what should
+they care for St. Andrews and traditions, and the preservation of the
+unity of the game? As sure as eagles fly, and stars are bright, they
+would have made it to suit themselves in every community. Here they
+would have abolished the stymie, in another place they would have
+changed the size of the hole, away in Texas they might have permitted
+the introduction of the "mechanical contrivance," and soon there would
+have been a hundred golfs in the States, and not a real one among them.
+Just when this possibility, without being an immediate probability, was
+arising the U. S. G. A. came into existence. It joined all the golfers
+of America together in a republic for the preservation of the unity of
+the game, and for the promotion of its welfare in the spirit that the
+game had been cultivated in the homeland. And being thus given power, it
+has ruled with a strong hand. It has kept American golf in order as
+nothing else could have done, and as a governmental machine, I who have
+made some close examination of it, regard it as perfect, which is not to
+say that we need such a thing in Britain. In America I have had the
+pleasure of the intimate acquaintance of Mr. Robert Watson, Mr. Silas H.
+Strawn, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, Mr. William Fellowes Morgan, Mr. Harry
+L. Ayer, Mr. John Reid, junior, and many others of the leaders of the
+Union, and better men for the direction of such a game as golf, in whose
+hands it is quite safe, there could not be. They hold the right spirit
+of the game, and they are wise men, conservative in their golfing ways.
+Mr. Windeler indeed is an old British golfer like Mr. Macdonald, who was
+one of the original gathering that established the U. S. G. A. In the
+December of 1894 the representatives of five of the leading clubs met
+and framed the constitution of the U. S. G. A., and Mr. Theodore A.
+Havemeyer, of the Newport Club, was chosen president.
+
+The constitution of the U.S.G.A. is an interesting study. There are two
+classes of members, active and allied, and the difference is that the
+active members, who exercise control, are clubs that have been steadied
+by age and experience, and have acquired dignity. The definition in the
+constitution is made thus: "Any regularly organised club in the United
+States, supporting and maintaining a golf course of at least nine holes,
+and whose reputation and general policy are in accord with the best
+traditions and the high ideals of the game, shall be eligible to
+election as an Active Member." Then, as to the Allied Members, it is
+said that--"Any regularly organised club of good reputation in the
+United States shall be eligible to election as an Allied Member." There
+are far more allied members than there are active members, and the
+former are only admitted to the latter when they have thoroughly proved
+their worth. Thus the allied clubs have always an ambition before them,
+and they can only achieve it by conducting their golf on the best and
+oldest plan. At every meeting of the Association each active club is
+entitled to be represented by one voting delegate whose appointment has
+to be certified in advance by his club to the secretary of the
+Association. Allied clubs have no voting privileges, but all members of
+active and allied clubs have the right to attend all meetings of the
+Association, and to participate in the discussion of any question. The
+active clubs pay thirty dollars a year for subscription, and the allied
+clubs pay ten. Article IX. of the Constitution gives the Association its
+power and authority. It says: "The acceptance of membership in the
+Association shall bind each club to uphold all the provisions of the
+Constitution, bye-laws, and other rules of the Association; and to
+accept and enforce all rules and decisions of the Executive Committee
+acting within its jurisdiction. Any club failing in its obligations as
+above set forth may be suspended or expelled by a two-thirds vote of the
+Association, or by a two-thirds vote of all members of the Executive
+Committee; provided such club shall have been given due notice of the
+charge or charges preferred against it, and an opportunity to be heard
+in its own defence. Any club thus suspended or expelled by vote of the
+Executive Committee may appeal from its decision to the delegates at any
+annual or special meeting of the Association."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this about the machinery of American golf, consider the men. There
+are three classes of golfers in the United States, corresponding to some
+extent to similar classes in Britain, but they are rather more sharply
+defined than with us. There is the class that regards the game as a
+sport for competition, almost as a form of athletics, being mainly but
+not exclusively the younger class; there is the business-man class that
+believes in it as the ideal, and indeed the only recreation satisfying
+the needs of the times as a relaxation from the strain of life and work,
+and a means of promoting physical and mental efficiency, such people
+being as with us the largest section and the mainstay in one sense of
+the game; and there is the humbler class who play upon the public
+courses.
+
+I do not believe after the closest observation and most impartial
+consideration that the best American golfers are yet quite so good as
+ours, but in recent years they have been rapidly lessening the gap that
+has existed, their thoroughness, determination, and efficiency are most
+wonderful, and if they had our courses and climate they might become
+better than we are. They think they will anyhow. As it is they are
+handicapped by lack of full-blooded seaside courses, and a climate that
+is by no means ideal for the game; and although by their zeal they have
+to some extent discounted that handicap, I feel that they can only
+neutralise it altogether and go beyond it by the production of the
+occasional genius. The good Americans seem to me mostly to play what we
+could call a plain, straight game. American courses are for the most
+part without any sharp undulations; there is nothing in America like our
+rolling seaside links. Therefore the players are not taught or induced
+to be making allowances for this and that in all the days of their golf
+from their youth upwards, and they have not the sea-coast winds to lead
+them in the same way as we have. So they have good reason to play
+straight to the hole, and never to depart from doing so without the most
+obvious and pressing cause. It follows from this that the American
+players have fewer "scientific" or "fancy" strokes at their disposal,
+and those who have visited this country have been remarked upon for the
+plain simplicity of their iron play. They seem to standardise their
+shots. But assuming that this is their principle or their system, it
+enables them to concentrate keenly and with fine effect on accuracy.
+Delicacy of touch, splendid judgment of distance, and perfection of
+execution are strong characteristics of the American players, who do not
+need to be reminded that there are no bunkers in the air. It is the
+straight game of the Americans with all its accuracy that is paying in
+their matches against us. At the same time I think that the comparative
+weakness of the Americans in wooden club play is a serious handicap to
+them, and their courses need to be tightened up to improve it. That
+"American hook" of theirs is a dangerous thing sometimes, and their
+round flat swings are looked upon by some of our best British
+authorities with much suspicion.
+
+But there is one most important way in which they are scoring over us.
+They are beating us in temperament, concentration, and determination,
+and in the capacity to make the very most of their own game, so that not
+a shot of it is wasted. This means very much. A man may be plus five,
+but of such a temperament and such ways that he habitually wastes two or
+three holes in a match through negligence or slackness. The Americans do
+not waste holes in this way. They waste nothing. The game of which they
+are capable is produced nearly every time at full quality and is made as
+effective as it possibly can be. The utmost pains are taken over every
+stroke; the man blames himself for nothing after it is made. His
+concentration is enormous; he is often inclined to race through the
+green, but his capacity for being slow and meditative, when necessary,
+is great; and most noticeable again is his persistence, which is another
+way of making the most of a game that a man possesses. Of course all
+these remarks are applied to the two classes of players in a very
+general way. There are many exceptions among the Americans and there are
+many among our players, but that they do indicate the tendencies in the
+two countries I am certain. The American game may not be as scientific
+and complete as ours, but its more serious exponents do make the most of
+it as ours do not, and probably the high importance that is attached to
+the numerous first-class tournaments they have over there has something
+to do with it. They believe in competitions more than we do.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This matter of consideration and concentration is one to which every
+player should give closer attention. His success is largely dependent
+upon it. He may think he concentrates enormously as it is, more than on
+anything else, but often he deceives himself. Not one man in ten gets as
+much in effect out of his game as it is capable of. He walks to his ball
+and plays some kind of a shot, with a more or less hazy idea of what it
+is that he wishes to do. When he finds his object has not been
+accomplished he suddenly remembers something, and it is a case of "I
+should have known," or "If I had only thought," or "What a pity I did
+not look." With such people a round of golf is a succession of regrets,
+and it is the simple truth that the majority could do far better with
+their game if they did not waste so much of it by carelessness,
+thoughtlessness, and a sort of distraction which allows their minds to
+wander to other things than the stroke in hand, and sometimes by their
+conversation too. When a man has played a stroke he has quite sufficient
+to occupy his mind for the next minute or two in considering how he
+shall play the next one, and the many features of the case that will be
+presented to him.
+
+It is a remunerative resolution to make at the beginning of the season,
+to think deeply upon all the points of match play, and then exploit the
+art of it with some thoroughness. It is not difficult. All who have
+attended the Amateur Championship meetings and have been close observers
+of what happens there can remember how even players of the very first
+class in this most important of tournaments let themselves get beaten by
+inferior players simply because they do not make the most of their game.
+They forget things, do not think enough, and play strokes carelessly
+because at the time of doing so they seem to feel it does not matter. No
+stroke should ever be played as though it were not the most important of
+the game--as it might turn out to be. The old maxim that if a thing is
+worth doing at all it is worth doing well, applies with tremendous force
+to match-play golf. Many a time when the result of a stroke played
+exactly as intended, is not what was anticipated, through some of the
+circumstances not having been taken into consideration, the mistake that
+was made is obvious then. The man excuses himself by saying that he
+cannot see and think of everything, but nine times out of ten he should
+have seen. The most fatal mistake, however, that many players make in
+the early part of the season when their match-playing qualities have not
+been properly revived, is in their letting matches slip, in not pressing
+home advantages that they gain, and, above all, being too indifferent
+upon the future in the early part of a match, and too careless when they
+get a lead. All this sounds very simple, very obvious, but it often
+takes the best part of a season to drive the lessons home into the minds
+of golfers who are losing matches through their weakness in fighting
+quality.
+
+Now here are one or two samples of points in regard to which the golfer
+constantly neglects to display his cunning and is the loser thereby.
+Assuming that in the general way you can get as much length when it is
+wanted as the other man, always try to make him play the odd to you. You
+do so naturally with your tee shots and many of the others, but are not
+really thinking at the time that you are wanting him to play the odd.
+The man who is playing the odd, even from a very little way behind the
+other, is at a much greater moral disadvantage than is often suspected,
+and if the other man always noticed things as much as he should, he is
+at a greater practical advantage than he realises, for if his opponent
+fails he can see the cause of it, this remark applying especially to
+what happens in the short game. How many putts have gone wrong that
+never need have done had the man who made them watched what happened
+when his adversary putted first! Then, again, on this point of making
+the other man play the odd the case is constantly recurring where both
+men are obliged to play short of some hazard, or to take a particular
+line to a hole which is not the straight one. The man who goes second
+will find it very much to his advantage if he tries to squeeze so
+closely up to the point of danger as to be just nearer to it than the
+other, the latter then having to play the odd and being then more
+inclined to press with it and perhaps to miss it. The man who is playing
+the odd is in a sense taking a shot into the unknown; the other man
+knows everything. That is just the difference. Another stupid mistake
+that many men make is to try experimental or fancy shots, perhaps with
+clubs that are unfamiliar to them, just because the other man has played
+two more. How many thousands of holes have been lost through that! The
+experimental shot fails, the other man makes a good one, the
+experimenter suddenly finds he has to fight for it, and a minute or two
+later is watching his adversary take the honour from the next tee.
+Again, what matches could have been won that were lost if the players
+had only shown half the sense that Mr. Hilton did in the Amateur
+Championship of 1912 at Prestwick, in picking his places for putting, as
+it were, always, whenever possible, running up so that he would have to
+putt uphill instead of down, the former being far the easier kind of
+putting. Nowadays there are inclines on every green and round about the
+hole, and a flat putt is a comparative rarity. But the average man never
+thinks of these inclines until he has to play along them. The time for
+most thinking about them is when making the stroke before, so that the
+putt may be along the easiest line to the hole. This is not a question
+of skill; it is simply one of sense. A man can play short of the hole
+or past it, or to the right or left, and there will be one point from
+which the putting will be easier than the other. It may often happen
+that it would pay better to be four yards past the hole than two short
+of it, for you will not only have had the chance of holing, but the putt
+back may be an uphill one.
+
+But with it all, the habit must be cultivated of thinking as much as
+possible in advance--thinking quickly and acting with decision.
+Questions of the value of practice swings have arisen lately. We have
+seen rather too much of these practice swings in some quarters. We may
+believe in the practice swing--just one or at most two. A man may be an
+experienced golfer, and he may have played a certain stroke nearly a
+million times before, but golf is essentially a game of fears and
+doubts, and apart from just setting the right muscles in a state of
+complete preparation for the task in hand a practice swing gives one a
+little confidence. The shot is shaped; there is nothing to do but repeat
+the stroke that has been made; it can be done. To that extent the
+practice swing may be thoroughly recommended. But some members of the
+young American School go farther than this, and it is questionable
+whether they are wise. For one thing the delicate muscles and the
+nervous system that are concerned with the stroke in hand are easily
+tired, and if the shot is a long one needing power the odds are against
+its being done so well after five practice swings as after one. Show me
+the man who can drive his best and straightest after five practice
+swings on the tee. Then there is the hesitation and doubt that are
+induced. I believe that in most cases these players are really waiting
+for an inspiration. They are not ready for the stroke they have to play.
+Jack White in once confiding to me some of the secrets of his
+successful putting, said that when he went about on the green examining
+the line back and front, he was simply trying to gain time and nothing
+more. "I want to feel that I want to putt," he said, "and while I am
+waiting for that feeling coming on I can hardly stand motionless on the
+green or look up at the sky." It is that way with these Americans; they
+are waiting for an inspiration. But it does not always seem to be
+responsive, and they wait too long. A moment must come when they are as
+ready for the shot as ever they will be in their lives; if they let it
+pass nothing but doubts and hesitations can follow, and that is the
+danger to the player of excessive slowness. He begins to fear his fate
+too much. And also one round of golf played like this makes a fearful
+mental strain, and how often do we see that men who win their morning
+matches by such methods look very tired and lose easily in the
+afternoon.
+
+The case of Mr. Ouimet, who has so suddenly become a great power in
+American golf, has already been considered, and Mr. Walter Travis's high
+position was established long ago. Apart from these two, the new star
+and the old one, and the young professional M'Dermott, there are two
+others who hold a higher place in the opinion of the golfers of their
+own country and ours than any other players do, and those are Mr.
+Charles Evans, junior, of Chicago, and Mr. Jerome D. Travers, foremost
+players of the west and east as they respectively are. In every way Mr.
+Evans is a very delightful golfer. When we saw him at Prestwick in 1911
+he was even then a brilliant player, and one who impressed British
+golfers as no other had ever done since Mr. Travis had won at Sandwich,
+and he had then an advantage which the winner of our championship had
+not--he had his whole golfing life before him. Since that time he has
+undoubtedly improved. He has become physically stronger, experience has
+helped him, and he has greater resource and skill. And despite the fact
+that he has not yet won an American championship, there is this to be
+said for him, that in the sense of accomplishment, in variety of stroke,
+perfection of it, in playing the game as it was meant to be played, as
+we say, he is still, for all his failures, the best amateur golfer in
+the United States at the present time. But Mr. Evans is a man of very
+keen and somewhat too sensitive temperament. He is inclined sometimes to
+fear his fate unduly. Yet whenever we are inclined to judge him a little
+harshly for his temperament, let it be remembered that fortune has dealt
+him some cruel hurts, and that it is not a quality of human man to bear
+himself indifferently to perpetual adversity. When he was the last hope
+of his country at the championship at Sandwich in 1914, and striving
+gallantly, his opponent went to the turn in a record score of 31. To be
+merely sorry for "Chick" in such circumstances is inadequate; along with
+him we smiled at the absurd extent to which his ill-luck spitefully
+pursued him then. Even though it had to be counted, it was unreal. He
+must be a champion some time.
+
+One of the greatest tragedies of his life, so far, was that he suffered
+in the appalling Amateur Championship at Wheaton, Illinois, in
+1912--appalling by reason of the terrible heat that players and all
+others, including my unlucky but still deeply interested self, were
+called upon to bear. It has come to be nearly a settled understanding in
+Britain that the championships must be attended by weather quite
+ridiculously and most uncomfortably unseasonable. Thunderstorms and
+lightning, gales and floods--these are the accompaniments of the great
+golf tournaments of the year in the summer months of May and June, and
+matters seemed to reach a climax in 1913 when the progress of the final
+match of the Amateur Championship at St. Andrews had to be suspended
+because of the terrific storm which flooded the putting greens until
+there were no holes to putt at, and when in the Open Championship at
+Hoylake shortly afterwards Taylor had to play his way to victory through
+a gale against which ordinary people could hardly stand up. Almost does
+it appear that the American climate is disposed to follow the bad
+British example in times of championships, seeing what happened at
+Brookline in the same season; but it was very different at Wheaton in
+the year when Mr. Hilton failed to retain the American Amateur
+Championship he had won the season before at Apawamis, and when Mr.
+Travers beat Mr. Evans in the final by seven and six. Mr. Norman Hunter
+and some others, Americans, were burned out of that championship by a
+temperature which at times was more than a hundred in the shade, and
+while some players conducted their game beneath sunshades that they
+carried, most of them had towels attached to their golf bags for
+body-wiping purposes. There was no escape from the heat anywhere, night
+or day, and no consolation in anything, unless it were that in the city
+of Chicago a few miles distant the people were reported to be even worse
+off than we were, and deaths were numerous. Well did we call that the
+blazing championship, and when I am asked, as is often the case, which
+of all championship experiences I recall most vividly, my remembrances
+of events in Britain, far more numerous as they are, give way to an
+American pair, the hot one at Wheaton in 1912, and the wet one of the
+British debacle at Brookline a season later. But the sun at its worst
+could not diminish the enormous interest that there was in that Wheaton
+final, for the draw and the play had brought about the ideal match, from
+the spectators' point of view, and even that of the players too, Mr.
+Travers of the east and Mr. Evans of the west, and finely did the
+Americans show their appreciation of what had come to pass by wagering
+incredible numbers of dollars upon it and watching it in thousands. That
+time it was thought that Mr. Evans would win, and he was three up at the
+turn in the morning round, but he lost two of the holes before lunch,
+and I am sure that the reason why he fell such an easy victim to Mr.
+Travers in the afternoon was that he grieved too much for the loss of
+those holes, and feared his fate when he need not have done. I know that
+Mr. Travers in that second round played golf of the most brilliant
+description that nobody could have lived against; but did Mr. Evans
+encourage him to do so? This matter of temperament might seem to be a
+fatal consideration for ever, being one of Nature and seemingly
+unalterable, were it not that we have had cases of fine golfers with
+weak temperaments who, perceiving their desperate state, have resolutely
+and with patience changed those temperaments, or curbed their influence
+as we should more properly say. The best modern instance of such a
+change being made is that of George Duncan, and never fear but that
+"Chick" will soon come to his own as well.
+
+Mr. Jerome Travers is undoubtedly one of the strong men of golf to-day,
+a big piece of golfing individualism. At twenty years of age he won the
+American Amateur Championship, in 1912 I saw him win it for the third
+time, and the following year he won it again at Garden City. In his own
+golfing country he must be one of the hardest men in the world to beat.
+He plays the game that suits him and disregards criticism. He began to
+play when he was nine years old. A year later he laid out a three-holes
+golf course of his own at home--first hole 150 yards, second 180, third
+apparently about the same, back to the starting-point. There were no
+real holes--to hit certain trees was to "hole out." For hour after hour
+this American child would make the circuit of this little course, and
+day after day he would work hard to lower his record for these three
+holes. At thirteen he started playing on a proper nine-holes course at
+Oyster Bay. At fifteen he became attached to the Nassau Country Club,
+and there, chiefly under the guidance of Alexander Smith, to whose
+qualities as tutor he pays high tribute, his game improved. His swing
+was wrong at the beginning. "Shorten your back swing, and take the club
+back with your wrists. Swing easily and keep your eye on the ball." That
+was Smith's advice to him, and he says it served him well. He began to
+place the right hand under instead of over the shaft, and that added
+more power to his stroke, and then he discovered that taking the club
+back with his wrists or starting the club-head back with them, increased
+its speed and gave him greater distance. Then it was practice, practice,
+practice for an hour at a time at every individual stroke in the game.
+He would play the same shot fifty times. He putted for two hours at a
+stretch, placing his ball at varying distances from the hole, trying
+short putts, long ones, uphill and downhill putts, and putts across a
+side-hill green where the ball had to follow a crescent-like course if
+it had to be holed out or laid dead. During the championship at
+Apawamis, when he was playing Mr. Hilton, he had what everybody declared
+to be an impossible putt of twenty feet, downhill over a billowy green,
+and he holed it because he had practised the same sort of putt before.
+In the next championship at Wheaton he did an "impossible" bunker shot
+and laid the ball dead from the foot of the face of the hazard because
+he had practised that shot also. Next to the Schenectady putter
+belonging to Mr. Travis his driving iron is, or should be, the most
+famous club in all America. It is a plain, straight-faced iron with a
+round back, and is heavy, weighing sixteen ounces. It has a long shaft
+and a very rough leather grip, and was forged at St. Andrews. This and
+his other irons are kept permanently rusty. He carries very few
+clubs--five irons, a Schenectady putter, a brassey and a driver, but, as
+Mr. Fred Herreshoff, who turns caddie for him in the finals of
+championships, says, the two latter are for the sake of appearances
+only. He believes in the centre-shafted Schenectady putter, illegal here
+but allowed in America, as in no other. He calls for a very low tee, one
+that is only just high enough to give him a perfect lie, "the duplicate
+of an ideal lie on the turf." He plays his drives off the right foot,
+which is about three inches in advance of the left, the ball being just
+a shade to the right of the left heel, because in that position he finds
+it easier to keep the eye on the ball without effort, and in the strain
+of a hard match or competition every simplifying process like this is
+valuable.
+
+But the most remarkable thing about his preparation for driving is his
+grip, which is unique. He does not employ the overlapper. He likes the
+right hand to be under the shaft; but this is the main point--that the
+first fingers are almost entirely free of the shaft, with the tips
+resting on the leather, curled inside the thumbs. Both thumbs are
+pressed firmly against the sides of the first joints of the second
+fingers, forming a locking device which prevents any possible turning of
+the shaft. He is an utter believer in this detaching of the first
+fingers from the club, and declares he could not play in any other way,
+his theory being that it permits better freedom of the wrists and
+enables him to get greater power into the stroke without deflecting the
+club-head from its proper sweep in the swing to the ball. With his
+driving iron he is a supreme master, and with it alone he has played a
+round of a difficult course in America, Montclair, in 77. When I
+watched him win his third championship I decided that in whatever else
+he might excel he had a finer temperament for match play than almost any
+other player I had seen. Silent, imperturbable, not a trace of feeling
+in his countenance, he seemed to be mercilessly forcing his way to
+victory all the time. Only once since he became established as a
+champion kind of golfer have his nerves ever failed him, and that was on
+an occasion of supreme importance, and yet one when the strain upon
+nerves was not, or should not have been, unduly severe. I saw him lose
+his match to Mr. Palmer at Sandwich in 1914, and there was something
+nearly as mysterious about that occurrence as there was about the
+victory of Mr. Ouimet at Brookline--far more than there was about the
+defeat of the latter at Sandwich by Mr. Tubbs, for then Mr. Ouimet
+simply played a poor but not a timid game. But in the Palmer-Travers
+match the American for the first time for years was afraid. Half way
+round, all the watchers were saying so, saying his nerves were catching
+at his shots. Knowing the man, having seen so much of him in America, I
+could not believe it then; but before the round was ended the truth was
+clear. His nerves had failed, and it was responsibility that had caused
+them to do so. He could not possibly have played so poorly otherwise. It
+was not the real Travers who played that day.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The middle-aged business-man golfer is an important individual in the
+general golfing scheme of things in the United States. He is that
+elsewhere, but he stands out most in America. Well enough does he know
+how the game is good for him. The early American golfers (those of from
+ten to twenty years ago) adopted the game enthusiastically, because it
+answered exactly to certain requirements they had in mind in regard to
+creating and preserving physical fitness. The American business man
+leads a quick life and a hard one and, in recent years particularly, his
+pursuit of this physical fitness has become something of a craze with
+him, for the reason that through it he seeks to bring the human machine
+to the highest point of working efficiency and, at the same time, enable
+the human man to derive more enjoyment and satisfaction from the
+pleasures of life. This is not a vague, subconscious idea in the
+American; it is a clear, definite scheme, adopted by thousands and
+thousands of those who have devoted themselves to the game. Hence their
+generous support and excellent enthusiasm. The country swarms with men,
+two-thirds way through an ordinary lifetime, who have only been playing
+the game for five or six summers and no winters--for in very few places
+in the northern parts of the United States is any play possible between
+the late fall and the spring--and who can play a good six-handicap game,
+British reckoning, for in America they have a system of handicapping
+according to which scratch is the lowest, and their six handicap is
+about equivalent to our two or three. The majority of our middle-aged
+men seem to resign themselves to the idea that in no circumstances can
+they ever become really good players, and they pretend they are
+satisfied to make their way round the links merely for the sake of the
+health and exercise that they obtain from so doing. Perhaps in a sense
+they are wise, but still it is certain that more than half of the joys
+and pleasures of golf are missed by those who never feel any improvement
+being made, who never rise above a steady mediocrity, and who never feel
+the thrills of playing above their ordinary form.
+
+The business-man golfer is seen at his best at the country clubs near
+to the great cities. There is nothing elsewhere which for its healthy,
+honest pleasures and the satisfaction it yields is comparable to the
+American country club and the life that is pursued there. It gives to
+the busy man the ideal relaxation he could not obtain in any other way.
+I spent several days at one of these country clubs, a railroad journey
+of an hour or so from Chicago, and the experience was illuminating. The
+American business-man golfer works in the city for part of the day in
+the summer and spends the rest of his time at the country club, where
+the predominating features of the life are golf, rest, and sociability.
+These country clubs are provided with a large number of bedrooms, and
+are surrounded with cottages, nicely equipped, which generally belong to
+them and are let for periods to the members. The vitality of the man of
+whom we are thinking is enormous. He is out of his bed at the club at
+about six o'clock in the morning, and goes through a process of shower
+baths, with which the establishment is splendidly appointed. By seven
+o'clock he is dressed in the thinnest flannels, and sits down to
+breakfast with thirty or forty other members at 7.15. At this time he is
+jacketless, and all in white. A large glass of iced water is laid before
+him to begin with, and then the half of a grape fruit or a cantaloup,
+with a piece of ice stuck in the middle, is presented as the first
+course. These things, as we get them in America, are very delicious. At
+once an argument begins round the table about the qualities of different
+balls and clubs, and I am closely questioned about the way we do things
+in England. Next, there is oatmeal porridge laid before us, with tea or
+coffee, and the men begin to match themselves for the afternoon round.
+Mr. A says he will play Mr. B for a certain stake, but the latter finds
+he is already engaged to play Mr. C for a higher one. Eventually,
+Messrs. A, B, and C agree to play a three-ball match for still more
+dollars. Such extensive wagering is not the rule, but it is frequent.
+After the porridge, bacon and eggs, calf's liver and bacon, or something
+of that kind, is served with a baked potato, a little more iced water
+may be called for, and there is marmalade with toast and sweet cakes,
+and, then at a quarter to eight, all get aboard the club motor-omnibuses
+and are whizzed away to the railroad station, light jackets very likely
+carried on their arms.
+
+Before nine o'clock they are hard at work in the big city. Some early
+birds were even there by eight o'clock. They work very hard, no dawdling
+of any kind, and by one or two o'clock they have finished for the day
+and are off back to the golf club as fast as they can go. Frequently
+they are back in time to lunch there. Soup, some meat done in American
+fashion, an American salad, blueberry pie, iced water, and a glass of
+cold tea with a lump of ice in it and a piece of lemon, finishing up
+with a large supply of ice cream, and then a big cigar, are what the
+American golfer goes out to play upon. The caddie whom he takes out to
+carry his clubs costs him tenpence an hour--always paid by the hour,
+during which he is in the golfer's service, and not by the round. By
+this time the player is in thinner and lighter clothes than ever, and he
+has been cooled down by more shower baths. His round is played very much
+as it might be done in England. He is very keen on his game. But he
+takes a little more time on the consideration of his stroke when once he
+has reached his ball than we do, and he is most deeply painstaking.
+Towards the end of the match he may develop an idea for playing the
+enemy for a number of dollars a hole for the remainder of the round, and
+when it is all over, everybody is quite satisfied with everything. More
+shower baths, a lounge, and a cigar, and then a long American dinner,
+with vegetables very fancily done, corn cobs, sweet salads, plenty of
+iced water, ice creams, "horses' necks"--ginger ale with lemon and
+ice--and so forth. Long arguments on the verandah upon the respective
+merits of British and American golf, and at ten o'clock this busy golfer
+of the United States gets himself off to bed. He never sits up late. He
+sleeps, of course, with his windows wide open, with a wire netting
+arrangement to keep out the flies and mosquitoes, and as he falls away
+to his slumber he feels that golf is the best of games, that America is
+the chief of countries, and that this is the most agreeable of all
+possible worlds. Here I have been writing in general terms, but I should
+add that each and all of my details are taken from the life, from
+personal experience at one of the best of these country clubs.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are some interesting characters in American golf as everywhere,
+and the very wealthy golfer in the States is often to be considered. Mr.
+John D. Rockefeller, the "Oil King," is, as all of us know, an extremely
+rich man. He is also a business man, if ever there was one. And he is
+extremely fond of golf. His case may have as little to do with the
+matters just discussed as you may think, but I shall present it as I
+found it out. A few years gone Mr. Rockefeller, who has a capacity for
+giving advice of a very shrewd and worldly character, announced his
+intention of retiring from the presidency of the Oil Trust and of
+devoting a fair part of the remainder of his life to playing golf. Since
+then he has discovered that it is easier to make a million dollars than
+to hole a five-yard putt, for the Rockefeller millions now make
+themselves and the putts are as unholeable as ever. His methods of
+playing, and his moralisings on the game, are not like those of any
+other man. Readers must judge for themselves as to whether they have
+anything to learn from them; I think they may have something. Take this
+case for an instance. One day when playing the game he made a very good
+shot on to the green, and, ever ready to draw a moral from the game of
+golf which would apply to the greater game of life, turned to his
+companions and said: "Waste of energy I regard as one of the wanton
+extravagances of this age. Rational conservation of energy and
+temperance in all things are what the American nation must learn to
+appreciate." Mr. Rockefeller is now seventy-five years of age, and he
+was nearly sixty before he first began to play. He became an enthusiast
+at once, and, as with most other men, his golf aggravated him, goaded
+him, tantalised him, and made him ambitious and determined. He began to
+find things out and to invent new ideas as rapidly as any of us have
+ever done. He said the game changed his life. Made him happy. Brought
+back his youth to him. His friends when they played with him declared
+that he was not a cantankerous old man, but a really charming fellow.
+Golf was doing him good. It was making a new man of him, as it does of
+all others. But he did not get on at it as quickly as he thought he
+ought to do. He found that there were rather more things to remember in
+a very short space of time when making his shot than he had ever had to
+remember before, and that for the first time in his life he was liable
+to forgetfulness on the most important occasions. Then he acted on the
+business man's principle of getting others to do things for him. He got
+others to do the remembering. For a time whenever he went to play a
+match he had three caddies attending on him; even now he generally has
+two. He employed them for other purposes than carrying clubs. When he
+was about to make a stroke No. 1 Caddie stepped up to him and said
+respectfully but firmly: "Slow back, Mr. Rockefeller, slow back!" He
+might otherwise have forgotten to take his club slowly back from the
+ball at the start of the swing. This adviser having moved away, Caddie
+No. 2 went forward and said: "Keep your eye on the ball, Mr.
+Rockefeller, keep your eye on the ball!" Then, in turn, Caddie No. 3
+advanced and spoke warningly: "Do not press, Mr. Rockefeller, do not
+press!" So, reminded of the common faults, the Oil King made his stroke
+and did not commit them, but was guilty of several others, and realised
+a little sadly when the ball did not travel as it should that he needed
+a hundred caddies for warning, and not three. Still, there is some good
+sense in this method, and the man who made it a strict rule to say to
+himself always, just before a stroke, what Mr. Rockefeller hired the
+boys to say to him would make fewer bad shots than he does.
+
+Mr. Rockefeller has a very nice course of his own on undulating land at
+Forest Hill, on the edge of Cleveland, Ohio, and there he has parties to
+play with him constantly. He is fond of cycling, and instead of walking
+after his ball when he has struck it, he takes his cycle on to the
+course with him, jumps on to it, and wheels himself along to the place
+from which the next shot must be made. By this means he not only saves
+much time, and gets more golf in an hour than we do, but considers that
+he derives more physical benefit from the combination than he would from
+golf and walking. More than this, he knows exactly how far he has hit
+the ball every time, for he counts the number of turns of the pedals he
+has to make in cycling from point to point, and calculates accordingly.
+He does not lose his temper when he makes a bad shot or a series of
+such, as some have suggested, but he is quite ecstatic when he makes a
+good one; and, despite his seventy-five years, has been known to leap
+high into the air when the result of his efforts has been specially
+good. He is a most thoughtful player, and takes the utmost care always
+to note effects and to try to attach causes to them. "Now gentlemen," he
+has said, "that was really a very good stroke that I made then. You
+observe that I am learning to make better use of my left arm. It was
+that Scotchman who told me of the trick, but somehow I have never been
+able to use it advantageously until now." He has a large number of clubs
+in his bag, including all the most usual implements, while two or three
+have been made according to his own special ideas. One of his caddies
+also carries a large sunshade to hold over him while playing when the
+weather is uncomfortably warm, and it is the duty of this boy also to
+give a hand at pushing the bicycle when the line to the hole is uphill
+and Mr. Rockefeller finds the pedalling too much for him unaided. So you
+see that there is nothing that is conventional about Mr. John D.
+Rockefeller and his golf. You would hardly expect it.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now for the public or municipal golf in America; it is one of the strong
+features of the game in the United States that impressed me most. The
+average player in Britain, where the municipal golf movement is making
+slow headway, may be surprised to know that there is such a thing across
+the Atlantic; let him understand, then, that public golf in America is
+far ahead of public golf in Britain. Some Americans of great golfing
+experience, not confined to their own country, have not hesitated to say
+that they will "make America the greatest golfing country in the world."
+If we disregard such a challenge, there are yet circumstances and
+forces in operation in America of which serious notice must be taken,
+and the first of them is this great movement that is progressing in
+favour of municipal golf. The whole vast country is taking to it. The
+leaders of the people are appreciating the necessity of it and preaching
+it. They say that the times are desperately strenuous, that an antidote
+is needed, an ideal relaxation for body and nerves, a perfect recreation
+and diversion, and that, having tried everything and thought of other
+possibilities, they have come firmly and decisively to the conclusion
+that golf is the only recreation that meets the requirements of the
+times. Therefore they say that it must be provided for everybody, for
+the "common people," and given to them absolutely free with every
+inducement put forward for them to play it. The result is that public
+golf in America is already advanced to such a state as is almost
+incredible to those who have not seen it there. I have seen it. In New
+York, Boston, Chicago, Kansas, Louisville, Milwaukee, Elgin, Toledo, and
+a host of the smaller places, there are good public courses. In the
+large cities there are often two or three. Chicago has now three and a
+fourth was being made when I was there last, a fine long course in the
+Marquette Park. Two of the existing courses are in the Jackson Park, one
+being eighteen holes and the other nine. The third is in Garfield Park.
+The full-sized course in Jackson Park is quite an excellent thing. The
+turf and the putting greens are well tended, the views are pleasant, and
+the play is absolutely free to all who obtain the necessary permit from
+the Parks Commissioners. The regular player may have the use of locker
+and dressing-rooms in the pavilion, and good meals may be obtained at a
+reasonable cost. How shall we wonder then that the Americans take kindly
+to this game and are becoming overwhelmingly enthusiastic at it, or that
+more than a hundred thousand games are played on one single course at
+Jackson Park alone in the course of a year? Though for the best part of
+the winter there is snow on the ground and play is impossible 105,000
+games were played on the long course at Jackson Park during 1912 up to
+the beginning of October, and the news just reaches me that on one day
+at the very beginning of this season of 1914 nearly 900 tickets were
+given out! On a fine morning in the summer there will often be a little
+crowd of players waiting at the first tee for their turn to start at the
+dawn of day, and as many as two hundred have been counted there at seven
+o'clock in the morning. Having finished their game on ordinary mornings
+these people go off to their work, and they "hustle" all the more for
+the shots that they have played and hope to play again before the
+falling of the night. It is the same in the Franklin Park at Boston, in
+Van Cortlandt Park in New York, and everywhere. In this matter these
+Americans have sense. If public golf in England is ever to be a good and
+useful thing we must do as the Americans do, and if we do not the people
+will be the poorer, and we shall be sorry. Corporations must provide
+free golf, and they must be satisfied with the good done to the people,
+and not take the narrow view that the balance-sheet must show a direct
+profit apart from the indirect one that is certain. They must also put
+their courses in central and convenient places where people will be
+attracted to them, and which will not take the greater part of the time
+available to reach them. The game must be played in central parks which
+will then become more useful than they have ever been so far, and for
+the first time will be a real joy to the people who pay for them. I may
+be an enthusiast in golf, but I have gone deeply into this matter and
+studied it in its every bearing, and I know that I am right.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And the Americans are gaining in another matter--they are bringing their
+young boys into the game. I have been to preparatory schools where they
+have their own little courses and their school championships. The boys
+like it, the masters encourage it, and the grown-up players admire the
+youngsters' enthusiasm. This is the way that "prodigies" are produced.
+In England we do not encourage the boys to play golf. The head-masters
+of schools say that it is a selfish game and that it is bad for them. I
+wonder how much these principals have thought of the moral qualities
+that must exist in the good golfer who knows how to play a losing match
+and perhaps save it, and how long in real argument before an impartial
+tribunal the contention would hold that it would be better for the young
+boy to stand for hours in the deep field at cricket on a hot summer's
+day than for him to learn to play golf and learn to keep a tight hold of
+himself when the whole scheme of things might seem to be breaking up.
+Cricket and football are great games, and they are splendid things for
+boys, but that golf is inferior to them in what it does for character I
+deny, and if the comparison is pressed the golfers with me can put
+forward an invincible case. Anyhow the fact is there that young America
+is getting golf and young England is not, and that will make a
+difference some time some way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+CANADIAN COURSES, AND A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AT TORONTO, WITH MATTERS
+PERTAINING TO MAKING A NEW BEGINNING.
+
+
+Towards the end of an afternoon in September, rounds being done, I stood
+with Mr. George Lyon (who is a kind of John Ball of the Dominion of
+Canada, having won the championship of his country seven times) on the
+heights where stands the club-house of the Lambton Golf and Country Club
+in Ontario, and we looked across the valley along which the course is
+traced to the woods on the opposite side where there were some fiery
+crimson spots to be seen as if burning amid the mass of foliage that was
+olive or tinting down to brown. They were the maple leaves of Canada,
+the emblem of the new land, of which it is prophesied that it shall be
+the greatest country of the earth. In early days the Canadians dabbled
+with the lacrosse which the Indians played, and some of the invaders,
+too, brought their cricket with them and taught it to others whom they
+found there. Then the people who are near to the borders of the United
+States, and are somewhat impressed with the American ways of doing
+things, have been cultivating an interest in baseball for its
+spectacular properties. Rounders revised is well enough for those who
+are within shouting distance of Buffalo and for places like Toronto, but
+I could never believe that such a game or pastime, whatever its
+merits--and I know that it has many--could suit such a very serious,
+contemplative, cold, and earnest people as the Canadians are. I regard
+the nature of these people, as I have had the opportunity of considering
+it, as more serious and intense than that of any other, and I know only
+one recreation beyond those that are the simplest and most essential, as
+of roaming in the untamed country, fishing, shooting, and hunting, that
+is agreeable to such a nature. They also know it; they have declared for
+a national game.
+
+There is this to be said at the beginning for Canadian golf and its
+courses, that the general atmosphere of the game in this great country,
+rough and often bare and primitive as still it is, seems to be much
+nearer the atmosphere of golf in Britain than that of any other country
+different from us. One misses the sea-coast links, courses are long
+distances apart, fine players are comparatively few, for the men of
+Canada are still so busy and so earnest that they have not even time to
+play, but yet there is a fine chain of the game all the way from St.
+John's to Vancouver. There is more of the peculiarity of British
+sporting instinct in the Canadian than in any other person out of the
+British Isles; he likes what we like, and he likes it in the same way
+and for the same reasons. Except that the coldness, like that of the
+Scot, is sometimes too much exhibited in him, and that even on suitable
+occasions he is reluctant to demonstrate his enthusiasms, so serious he
+is, so deep he looks, I have found him to be a splendid opponent with an
+agreeable persistency, and a most desirable partner in a foursome. Here
+in Canada there are trestle tee-boxes, a few--but only a few--of the
+club-houses are built and equipped in the manner of the Americans,
+betokening an existing prosperity and a provision for that greater one
+which is felt to be as sure as the fruit and the corn of the following
+season; but otherwise golf seems much like what it is at home, and
+especially do we feel like that when we reach the old places where the
+game first took root out there. There is a Canadian Golf Association to
+rule the affairs of the game in the country with a certain subservience
+to home and St. Andrews as the Dominion holds to Westminster, and such a
+ruling authority is necessary in a new and wide country like this where
+so much pioneering is being done, just as it is necessary in the United
+States and in Australia. The chief function of such an authority is to
+keep the game together, hold it compact and maintain it in even
+uniformity with the game elsewhere. There is no blame to the Canadians
+because they have not associated themselves with the subtle and
+insoluble mysteries of the British handicapping system, but have
+followed the American lead in this matter and put their best champions
+at scratch. Otherwise they are full British still, and even if they have
+their doubts upon the wisdom of the edict of St. Andrews which banned
+centre-shafted clubs and the Schenectady putter of American origin, they
+have remained loyal to the law without dissenting as the Americans did.
+So in Canada you may not use the Schenectady. You may putt with it on
+one side of the Niagara Falls but not on the other side.
+
+It is fortunate that a ball cannot be played across the Falls, or over
+those whirling Rapids, or some puzzling international complications
+might arise. The adventures are called to mind of two great scientists,
+the late Professor John Milne, who made such a fine study of earthquakes
+and could feel them in the Isle of Wight when they were taking place in
+Asia, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the eminent Cambridge pathologist,
+when they went to the meeting of the British Association for the
+Advancement of Science when it was held in South Africa. They travelled
+to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, and there they contemplated
+a mighty carry of a hundred and sixty yards over roaring, foaming water.
+The keen golfer is always prepared, for the emergencies of the game are
+constant and attractive, and Mr. Milne produced driver and ball, and,
+with a fine nerve and eyes that were controlled most marvellously,
+delivered a golf ball from one side to the other for the first time
+since the world began. The pathologist admired the achievement and
+emulated it. He also carried the Falls of the Zambezi. It were better
+that these greedy men had left it at that and been well satisfied.
+However, they came to think they might go on with this majestic carry
+continually, and generous Fortune chided them. Crocodiles took the balls
+that they drove into the Zambezi.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us take a look at Lambton. From my room in Toronto I rang up Lyon,
+whom I had met several times in England, and asked him to guess the name
+of the caller; he gave the name without hesitation, though he had no
+more reason to know that I was in Canada than in Tasmania. So quite in a
+matter-of-fact way we met on the following day in a Grand Trunk car
+starting from the Union station, and inquired of each other as to the
+ball that each was using. The journey from Toronto is one of only a few
+minutes, and soon after the stopping of the train the feet may tread on
+some of the nicest golfing turf that is to be found out of England, and
+the reason is palpable, for here are the big bunkers of the proper kind
+made of real yellow sand, which is natural to the place. When they need
+new sand bunkers at Lambton they cut them open and there they are. So
+sandy is the place that sometimes they have a difficulty in making the
+grass grow properly, and one result of these favourable natural
+conditions is that the course is better bunkered than most others on the
+American continent. Tee shots and approaches must be played well, and at
+the very first green the hint is given that the short game must be well
+done. The fourth hole is one of the jewels of Canadian golf. The teeing
+ground is on a height, and below it is a series of descending plateaux
+like giants' steps until the level is reached. When he has made a very
+passable drive the player is called upon with a very proper second to
+carry the Black Creek which guards the green and is coiled like a snake
+about it. The shot must have fair length and it must be very straight as
+well. Normally the hole is 365 yards long, so that in mere distance it
+is not a terrible thing, but when medals are being played for its length
+is stretched out to the four hundred yards. At the sixth the stream
+which they call Humber comes into the reckoning. It is a nice two-shot
+hole, and the seventh is an excellent short one with the inky creek here
+again. With the stump of a tree protruding from the water, large leafy
+growths upon the surface, a general sleepiness and the green in a
+sequestered corner beneath a shading hill, this is quite one of the most
+attractive of water holes. It is a strong hole, too, with fear about it,
+for the carry is one of 165 yards, and I was told that when Miss Rhona
+Adair, now Mrs. Cuthell, several times lady champion, was in these parts
+some years ago she twice did the carry and a third time her ball skimmed
+the water and reached the green after all. This was good work for a
+lady, especially as I rather fancy she must have been using the gutty
+ball at that time.
+
+The greens at Lambton are generally excellent, and they have adopted a
+means for keeping them in good order which, though it has been tried in
+other parts of America, has not to my knowledge been employed elsewhere.
+I have heard objections raised against it, but the results at Lambton
+are uncommonly good. Nearly all the greens here are kept properly
+moistened by a process of sub-irrigation, and are never watered on the
+surface. Below the green there is a deep bed of cinders, and over this
+and about eighteen inches from the grass there is a network of water
+pipes made of a hard porous clay, "weeping clay" they call it, the
+entire under-surface of the greens being covered with them. At the
+corner of each green there is a feed pipe connecting with this network,
+and once a day the water supply is laid on to it and all the pipes under
+the green are loaded. The heat of the sun then slowly draws the water
+through the porous pipes and up to the surface, and the results of the
+process are uniformly good. Lambton is a fine institution altogether.
+There is a short ladies' course as well as the other, a fine toboggan
+chute down the slope in front of the club-house, and the latter is in
+all respects an admirable place, well fitted with baths, bedrooms, and
+public apartments that are elegant and comfortable. This place has
+something to do with Toronto life of to-day. There are seven hundred
+members, and now it costs a new one the equivalent of six hundred
+dollars in his first year. He has to get a hundred-dollar share in the
+club to begin with, and these are at such a premium that he has to pay
+five hundred dollars for one. On one of the walls of the club-house is a
+life-size portrait of the champion of the country in a characteristic
+attitude with his brassey under his arm.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of Toronto is very interesting. The club, which takes the name
+of the city and is one of the oldest in the country, was started in
+1876, and completely reorganised some eighteen years later. The pretty
+little course that it had until lately was on the outskirts of the city,
+with an old and quaint farm-house, which had from time to time been
+enlarged, for a club-house. As to the course, it was quite nice. It was
+very undulating, ravines, gullies, and belts of trees being prominent
+everywhere. The turf was good, and some of the holes were excellent. In
+the club-house there were fine trophies and some old prints, and a plan
+of the old course at St. Andrews, with a photograph of old Tom Morris
+attached to it, signed "From Tom Morris, to the members of the Toronto
+Golf Club, 1896." Everything belonging to this old course was sweetly
+mellow, and one's visit there made a pleasant experience. But it met a
+fate which has been common enough near London but rare elsewhere. The
+speed of Toronto's expansion brought it about, and, owing to the
+encroachments of the builders, the club had to move. I was there at the
+parting, and it was a sad one. Its members, however, being a very
+wealthy and enthusiastic body of gentlemen, determined to make for
+themselves a new home which should be as good as anything that could be
+done, and their ambition was fulfilled. Etobicoke! It is one of the
+wonders of the west, and I was the first wandering British player to set
+his foot upon it.
+
+Etobicoke is several miles out from Toronto, and here with the money
+that the club obtained from the sale of the old course they bought 270
+acres of what was virgin land, being for the most part covered with
+trees at the time. This they had cleared, ploughed, and properly
+prepared, and Mr. Harry Colt came out from England to lay out the
+course. His finished work, as I have seen it, must rank as one of his
+masterpieces. As on so many of the Colt courses there is something of a
+Sunningdale look about the holes, and nearly all are extremely good. A
+very fine short one is the fourth and one with which the architect
+himself was much in love when he had completed the design from the
+natural materials that were at his hand; and the tenth is a wonder of
+its kind, the hindmost tee being on a hilltop from which a glorious view
+of the course is to be had, with Lake Ontario beyond it, while some way
+lower down the slope are second and third tees, making the distance
+shorter. The soil is sandy, the turf is good, and the course must be
+considered to rank as first class absolutely. Mr. W. A. Langton, who
+went over it with me, said he believed they had come into possession of
+what would be the finest golf course in America when it has matured, and
+his judgment may be right.
+
+Many parts of the world were laid under tribute for the making of this
+course at Etobicoke where the club is still called by the good old
+simple name, the Toronto Golf Club. It was designed, as I have said, by
+an English architect, and in order to give a grass to the course that
+would stand the rigours of the climate better than the ordinary grasses
+with which courses in North America are generally sown, seeds were
+obtained from Finland. Then nearly all the rough work of construction
+was done by Bulgarians and Roumanians, these immigrants being splendid
+for work of this kind. They were paid at the rate of about seven
+shillings a day, and they lived in huts which they made on the ground
+and saved the greater part of the money that they earned. A little over
+L16,000 or 80,000 dollars were paid for the land, and about the same
+amount was spent on its preparation and completion as a course; while
+L20,000 or 100,000 dollars were spent on the building and equipment of a
+splendid club-house, embracing the utmost comfort and convenience, with
+about fifty bedrooms. This is a members' club, and the club has all the
+members and money that it needs, and it is not a speculative enterprise
+in any way whatever. But British golfers must surely pause with wonder
+when they hear of a place like Toronto spending L50,000 on a new golf
+course! Such is the enthusiasm of the Canadian for the game, that while
+this enterprise was afoot a six-holes course was being constructed
+alongside it, at a cost of L10,000, for a gentleman who intended to
+build a house near by to which he might ask his friends.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One pleasant day when staying at Montreal I went out to Dixie, a few
+stations along the Grand Trunk line, where there is the course of the
+Royal Montreal Club, to be regarded now as the oldest properly
+established club in the Dominion. This one alone has that title of Royal
+which Queen Victoria gave it permission to use in 1884. In its early
+days the course was in Mount Royal Park, overlooking Montreal. Out here
+at Dixie a certain flavour of the old spirit and good strong sporting
+simplicity of the game are tasted. The course is somewhat flat and
+parky, and big banks of bunkers stretch across the fairway, making the
+general style of the architecture very much of the Victorian, but the
+undulations and unevennesses of the banks and hollows are redeeming
+features. Some of the holes are good and the putting greens are
+excellent, but generally the course suffers from the absence of testing
+second shots. There is a magnificent view up the river from the seventh
+tee. A house agent might honestly declare that the club-house is
+commodious and comfortable. It was made before it was the fashion to
+erect palaces on golf courses, and sheet-iron bulks largely in its
+composition; yet it is cosy enough inside, and contains many relics of
+peculiar interest. In a glass case there are some ancient clubs with
+which members played in the early days, and a leather belt for which
+they competed, the names of the winners being written on the inside.
+
+There are many other courses in Montreal and round about it. There is
+the Beaconsfield Club with its place situated some way up the river,
+reached by the G. T. R. at Point Claire. The part of Fletcher's Fields
+in Mount Royal Park, on which the Royal Montreal Club first played, is
+now in the occupation of the Metropolitan Club, and is only about five
+minutes' ride by car from the centre of the city. On the eastern slope
+of Mount Royal is the course of the Outremont Club, which, at the time
+of my visit, was about to go forward to a new and great enterprise;
+while on a plateau at the western end of Mount Royal are the nine holes
+of the West Mount Club, most charmingly situated, with fine views of the
+city and the river.
+
+At Ottawa there is a course which ranks high among the very best on the
+continent. It is different in character from that at Dixie, for here
+there are ravines and gullies, and the land is strongly undulating
+everywhere. The bunkers and other hazards are natural, the putting
+greens are smooth, and the subsoil is of sandy loam. It is on the other
+side of the Ottawa River, beyond Hull, and owing to its being exposed to
+a broad reach of the stream it is seldom that there is not much wind
+blowing across it. And there are courses all the way from east to west
+of this wonderful, blossoming Canada. We find that wherever we wander in
+the Dominion we are not much distant from a golf club. Even when on a
+day I sailed across Lake Ontario and made the Gorge Valley trip to the
+Niagara Falls there was golf near by had it been wanted. Winnipeg,
+Edmonton, Calgary, round and about the Rockies, and up them
+too--everywhere the game is played. I was told that when the course at
+St. John, New Brunswick, was started in 1897, Mr. H. H. Hansard, who
+made the opening stroke, holed from the tee in one. Holes in one have
+been done in many curious circumstances, but surely this is one of the
+most interesting of all. Compare the excellent beginning of St. John
+with what happened the other day when a new course was being started
+here at home. I am sorry to say that the municipal dignitary upon whom
+the chief responsibility was cast missed the ball the first time, and
+also the second, but contrived to move it from the tee at the third
+attempt.
+
+A note has just reached me from a friend in the Dominion saying that out
+on the Gulf of Georgia, on the coast of Vancouver, they are reaching
+forward to a golf ideal. They have planned and started there a new town,
+which they have called Qualicum, of which the golf course is the central
+feature. They have laid out a fine one along the shore, one that has
+splendid natural qualities, and they are doing their best to make it
+understood that here is a golf city if ever there was one, for they have
+christened the streets and roads by such names as St. Andrews Road,
+Berwick Road, Portrush Road, Rye Road, Sandwich Road, and Dollymount
+Road; and there are others with the names of Hoylake, Sunningdale, and
+all the rest of our British best.
+
+Friends whom I consulted in the matter declared there was no golf in
+Quebec, little but French people, French talk, and French games of two
+generations back, the Canadian French not yet having adopted the sport
+to which so many of the Parisians have attached themselves with great
+earnestness. I was barely satisfied with such denials, and when, after
+another night on the C. P. R., I found myself on a glorious Sunday
+morning on those famous heights of Quebec, whence the view is one of the
+most magnificent in the world, I set about investigating the matter all
+alone. I can hardly say why, but somehow I strongly suspected the Plains
+of Abraham, the big, bare piece of land on the heights overlooking the
+St. Lawrence, on which Wolfe and Montcalm, more than a century and a
+half ago, fought that great fight, and died. I have always found it as a
+most remarkable thing that where great battles have been waged, and big
+encampments made, golf courses in a great number of cases have been laid
+out there later. Sure enough, then, the game was here on the Plains of
+Abraham. I had just been looking upon the pillar with the simple
+inscription, "Here died Wolfe victorious," and had walked for the length
+of two or three good drives towards the citadel end of the plain,
+called, I think, the Cove Fields, when putting greens came to view, with
+sticks not two feet long and bits of red rag attached to them in the
+holes. The greens and the teeing grounds were rough as could be, and
+there were no proper bunkers on the course, but plenty of trouble for
+all that, the ground being coarse and stony. The public could roam about
+the place just as it pleased, and did so, and there did not seem to be
+anything to prevent any one from playing the game on this course. It
+looked just like public golf on common land, and though it is a far cry
+from Blackheath to Quebec, there is something in the nature and
+character of this golfing ground at the historic Canadian port to remind
+one of England's oldest and crudest course. I discovered afterwards that
+the Quebec Golf Club, a club without a club-house, had acquired the
+rights to play on it; that this club is one of comparatively early
+origin; that its members are clearly primitive in their tastes, but
+sincere and earnest; and I am led to the belief that the course has
+another point of similarity with Blackheath, being the oldest now in
+existence on the American continent. It is said that a daughter of old
+Tom Morris, who married a Mr. Hunter and went to America, was largely
+responsible for the beginning of golf at Quebec. Men and boys were
+playing on it on this beautiful Sunday morning when the bells in
+countless steeples of Quebec and at St. Levis on the other side of the
+St. Lawrence were ringing their music through the stillest air. I sat
+down on the edge of the course overlooking the precipitous depths to the
+river, far down below, where the smoke from a warship at anchor came
+lazily from the funnels, and looked for long enough to gain an undying
+impression of one of the grandest panoramas in the world, seen at its
+most peaceful and its best. Nature had a grand inspiration when she made
+Quebec as now we find her.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This marvellous country is a rare place for making the new beginning.
+Everything is so raw, so suggestive, so encouraging to earnest failures
+who would, like Omar, if they could, conspire with fate, shatter the
+existing scheme of things and "remould it nearer to the heart's desire."
+Canada is indeed a fine place for hope for the future. I met several men
+in the country who told me, that on leaving England and Scotland, they
+had perforce, with all the hard work before them, to give up the game
+for a long period; while another reason was, that those having been much
+earlier days, there were fewer courses there. So years after, when the
+fortunes had been made, they came back to golf again, and they were
+making another new beginning, and felt a certain gladness as they
+remembered some of the faults and the torments of the old game with all
+its vast imperfections. In everything they would start over again as if
+it were all quite new, and they knew nothing about it. Generally they
+have made successes of their second golfing lives on earth in this way,
+but yet they have found that they needed to act warily and be on their
+guard always against old enemies, for golf poisons are marvellously
+subtle and enduring things; and it has been found that when once a man
+contracts a habit that is bad it will last for ever, whether he plays
+the game continually or not, and the worse the habit the more incurable
+it is. The best that can be done is the application of a system of
+subjection, by which the disease is kept under, and does not pain or
+hinder. But men who have fallen into bad and hopeless complications with
+their golf, and found that it never could be improved any more, have
+tried to begin it all over again as left handers--the most drastic
+change--and even that has failed. They have then realised that the only
+way to die happy is to give up the game for a matter of half a
+generation and start again, with the determination to keep the head
+still, to begin the back-swing with the wrists, and not to start
+pivoting on the left toe as soon as the driving is begun, as if it were
+necessary to do this thing, as so many of the teachers have suggested,
+to the ruin of their pupils, for the unsteadiness it has produced. One
+learns to do this pivoting after an hour's practice at the game, and can
+pivot well when nothing else can be done at golf. But it takes years and
+years sometimes to get rid of such a stupid custom. The left heel must
+rise, but let it rise as little as may be, and of its own accord. Its
+rising should be always a result of something, and not a cause of
+something else.
+
+What is needed at a beginning, or a fresh start in any golfing life, is
+a thorough grasp of essential principles. Considering the subject the
+whole way through, we may feel that there are really only two essential
+and compulsory principles applicable to all cases, instead of two
+hundred or more as the bewildered player is often led to imagine. These
+two are, first, that the eye must be kept upon the ball until it has
+left the club; and, second, that in addition to the still head there
+must be one fixed and practically motionless centre in the human system
+while the stroke is being made. It is neglect, generally accidental, of
+one or both of these principles that causes most of the bad shots that
+are made. Let us remember that. Never, or hardly ever, should we neglect
+these principles, and if we do not our handicap is almost sure to come
+down, not only because so many bad shots will be avoided, but because
+the exactness, certainty, and quality of all the strokes will be
+steadily improved as they cannot be when hampered by neglect of the
+principles. The eye makes the connection between the captain in the
+brain and the engineers of the physical system. It is the speaking-tube
+or the telegraph apparatus. There can be no union without it. But, as we
+all know, it is not such an easy thing to keep the eye on the ball as it
+ought to be kept on it, and the more anxious the player the more liable
+is he to err in this matter. As to the fixed centre--somewhere in the
+interior of the waist--we should reflect that the golfing swings, when
+carried out properly, consist of the action and movements of thousands
+of different muscles, operating in different ways, different directions,
+and at different times. Perfect harmony and correlation among them all
+is necessary if the general result is to be smooth and exact. Make no
+mistake about it, the golfing swing, with all its complications and the
+acute precision that is necessary for its good and proper effect, is one
+of the most wonderful things of which the physical system is capable.
+When I reflect upon it I think it is marvellous that the human man can
+make it as he does. To obtain harmony among all these thousands of
+movements there must be one centre from which they are all regulated. If
+we think it out we see that this is so, and then we appreciate the
+importance of what is too baldly described as keeping the body still, as
+we have perhaps never done before. As a point of truth, the body as a
+whole cannot be kept still, but there must be one centre that must be
+fixed from the moment that the club addresses the ball until the latter
+has left its place after impact. The captain in the brain, the eye, and
+the fixed head and centre are the great trinity who manage the whole
+concern. Only one man who has neglected this law has ever raised himself
+to eminence in golf, and that man is Edward Ray, who has done it by mere
+physical strength. When the fixed centre is held secure a great host of
+evils which constantly cause failure are avoided--swaying of the body,
+collapse of the legs, improper foot work, dropping of the right
+shoulder, falling forward, and more of such a kind of fatal faults.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the biggest dictionary that I can find neither the word "futurism"
+nor "cubist" is given a place, and yet these words, meaning certain
+movements, are probably on the tongues of art folks with much frequency
+in these times. In the same way the word "subconsciousism" and
+"subconsciousist" are not in this or any other dictionary; but they may
+yet be coined and made legitimate to fill certain vacancies, and they
+represent definite golfing systems. The principle of subconsciousism in
+essence, then, is that of showing a visionary picture to the mind for a
+moment, banishing it, and, in a certain measure, forgetting all about
+it, and then going on with the game as if the incident had been closed.
+But the mind retains its record more or less vaguely always; and the
+picture thrown on the mental screen makes an impression there which
+stays; and that impression is an influence upon the succeeding physical
+actions. Subconsciously the player does something--it may be little or
+much--to imitate the movements in the mental picture that he saw. He
+cannot avoid it; the influence upon him cannot be wholly resisted. If,
+as it were, he saturates his mind with impressions of this kind, of the
+strokes he would like to play, of the way he would like to play them, he
+will gradually and almost surely begin to play them just like that. It
+has been recognised for ages that the best golf is that which is played
+entirely subconsciously, that is to say without conscious effort, and
+without thinking in detail of the stroke that has to be played. When a
+man is "on his game" he has none of this thinking to do, and does none.
+There seems to be only one way of playing the shot, and that way is
+unavoidable to him and quite natural. He does not need to shuffle about
+to find his proper stance, and he is not anxious about any part of his
+swing. The moment a clear consciousness of detailed action asserts
+itself, and the man does think about the movements of his swing, and
+does shuffle about for his stance, he goes off his game, and the
+stronger the consciousness the more he goes off. These points are
+disputed by nobody. A little while since a new writer on the game
+declared that the golfer at the beginning of his swing thought of the
+advice of one professional; half way up he thought of the suggestion of
+another; at the top he remembered the recommendation of a third man; and
+coming down, the hint of a fourth flung itself into a mind that must
+have been working with amazing rapidity in the most difficult
+circumstances. What the result of such strokes is was not suggested;
+but if any number of golfers carried out their scheme of swinging in
+this way we should know exactly why it is that so much bad golf is
+played. As a matter of truth nobody has ever been able to mix up his
+plans in such a manner; but the statement suggests the extreme of
+consciousness, and fear with it also. With subconsciousness there is no
+fear, no hesitation, and no doubt.
+
+Now we can show how our subconsciousism, when unaided and not encouraged
+(there is nearly but not quite a contradiction in terms here), has had
+its effect upon the player hitherto. If a man watches the play of any
+golfer much better than himself, say a first-class professional, very
+closely for some time he takes a little of that man's style into his own
+system without knowing it, and, it may be, without making any conscious
+effort to imitate it. He is much more likely to succeed in this way than
+by making any deliberate attempt to copy. Again, you will often find
+players telling you, that after a week of watching a championship
+meeting, and without having paid attention to any player in particular,
+certainly without attempting to imitate any one, they find on resuming
+their own game that a new influence is upon it; that in particular they
+address the ball in a more businesslike way, with more confidence; that
+their swing is less flabby, and that they play their iron shots with
+much greater sense of wrist, and with more firmness. This has been
+noticed over and over again, and it is a most interesting result of the
+influence of impressions involuntarily recorded on the mind. Consider
+another way in which the impression acts. A player may be removed from
+the game through illness or some other reason for a time, and during
+that period he works some of the problems of golf out in his mind, and
+constantly pictures a new and particular way of playing a stroke that
+has troubled him. When he returns to the links he plays the stroke like
+that without any effort to do so, or perhaps without even thinking of
+it. Another remarkable example of subconsciousism was afforded to me
+recently by a good golfer, who said that to develop a certain stroke
+which he had found beyond his best efforts--conscious efforts--he had
+three enlarged photographs made of that stroke as executed properly by a
+first-class man, one showing the beginning, the other the top of the
+swing, and the third the finish. He had these pictures placed alongside
+each other on one of the walls of his room, and there they were all the
+time, not to be avoided. He made no effort to study them, but his mind
+simply absorbed them, and then subconsciously he found the stroke coming
+to him until in the end he played it just like that. In these matters
+subconsciousism is shown to be at work without being understood or at
+all suspected.
+
+Having this valuable agency at command the next thing is to apply it,
+and make it of more thorough practical effect without permitting it to
+change to interfering and dangerous consciousness. In the cases that
+have already been cited certain methods are plainly suggested. Here is
+another which has, as I know, proved amazingly effective at times. The
+player, we may say, is not driving as well as he should, or in the way
+he would like to do. At the moment of taking his place on the
+teeing-ground he runs through his mind, as it were, a cinematographic
+picture of his favourite model player doing the drive. He sees, in
+imagination, the man taking his stance, swinging the club back, down on
+to the ball again, and finishing. He just sees it once, and bothers
+about it no more. Then he sets about his own drive without any further
+reference to the mental picture that his mind has absorbed. The mind
+does the rest. The drive may not be made in the ideal way that was
+imagined. It may be done in the old way. It may even be foozled. But
+there has been an influence at work, and if that influence is always
+employed in the same way the good result will come in time, always
+provided--and this is important--that the model is one that is suitable
+to the player, and can be copied by him. It would be useless for a man
+who is far past forty, very fat and very short, with no athletic quality
+in him at all, to take Harry Vardon and his graceful lithesome swing for
+his mental cinema show.
+
+Another way in which practical subconsciousism may be made exceedingly
+valuable is by imagining a place to which the ball has to be delivered
+without looking at it when it ought not to be looked at, as when a very
+short running or pitching approach has to be made. The very best of men
+often find it impossible to keep the eye fixed on the ball until the
+stroke is done. A little while since there was the case of one of the
+finest amateur golfers of the time flopping his ball into the bunker
+guarding the green of the first hole at Sandwich from the bank thereof,
+when, if he had played an easy shot and kept his eye at rest, he would
+almost certainly have avoided this trouble, and then won the St.
+George's Cup for which he was playing. I remember an exactly similar
+case in the final of the Amateur Championship of 1908, at Sandwich, when
+Mr. Lassen, who did win, knocked his ball into the big bunker in front
+of the old tenth green there from the top of the cliff overlooking it.
+What is needed in such cases, or in like cases when presented to
+inferior players, is something to keep the mind's eye contented, and it
+has been found to serve if a picture of the hole is flashed into the
+mind just before the stroke is made. This is what is certainly done,
+though unintentionally, when putting. The man does keep his eye on the
+ball when making his stroke this time; but yet it is most desirable that
+his mind should retain a very clear and exact impression of the place
+where the hole is, the distance of it, and the features of the green in
+between. In other games that may be compared with golf, the player has
+his eye on the object at the moment of striking; in billiards the very
+last glance is given at the object ball, and the eye is on it at the
+moment the stroke is made. That is because the player is sure of his way
+of striking, as in putting he is not. If you try a method of putting
+which was once attempted by some players, but was severely and properly
+discountenanced by the authorities, of lying down on the green and
+putting with the end of the club, billiard fashion, you will find that
+then the eye is on the hole when the stroke is made. In golf, the
+player's eye being wanted for the ball, a last look is given at the
+hole, and the picture of it is kept on the mind when the stroke is being
+made, and it influences the application of strength more than the player
+often realises.
+
+This application of strength is always done subconsciously, and here
+again there is a part of professional teaching which does not recognise
+the fact when it ought to do. The teachers tell us that to strike the
+ball a certain distance with an iron, the club chosen should be swung
+back to a certain point, that to get twenty yards more it should be
+swung upwards so many more inches or degrees, for a farther distance so
+much more swing should be made, and so on, throwing the onus of swinging
+the proper distance on to the conscious effort of the player. By a
+moment's thought it will be realised that players do not consciously
+regulate the lengths of their swings in this way, that they could not do
+so, and that any deliberate stopping of their swing at a certain
+carefully calculated point would be ruinous to the stroke in hand. What
+is done is, that an estimate of the distance to which the ball has to
+travel is made; this is taken into the mind, and the mind, having much
+experience, influences the swing so that it is quite subconsciously made
+of the proper length, or at all events the length that the mind
+suggested. In this way the swing is certainly made short for short
+shots, and longer as the greater distance is needed; but it is wrong to
+suggest that the matter is carefully and consciously arranged by the
+player. The truth is that not one player in a thousand could tell you,
+when about to make a swing with an iron club, exactly how far he intends
+to swing, or having made the shot successfully, how far he did swing.
+His mind subconsciously arranged the whole affair.
+
+An interesting case was quoted to me some time since of the success a
+man achieved in lofting over stymies, and the reason why. This person
+never seemed to miss. He related that he found previously that his
+failures were due to looking at the other ball too much when in the act
+of making the stroke. He then found that he succeeded frequently when he
+did not look at either that ball or his own but at the hole itself.
+Doing this enabled him to carry his club through, failure to do which is
+the chief cause of missing these shots. But he did not altogether
+believe in this system, which seemed dangerous, and he compromised by
+keeping his eye fixed on his own ball, but at the same time imagining
+the hole and seeing mentally his ball dropping into it. Since then his
+success has been wonderful. In much the same way and by the same
+principle it will be found that the best way in the world to encourage a
+good follow-through, and to stop jerky hitting with wooden clubs, is to
+look at the ball properly and yet imagine it a couple of inches farther
+on.
+
+The principles of this subconsciousism suggest one earnest
+recommendation to the player who is bent on making a change in a faulty
+or ineffectual style, and it is that such change is better brought about
+gradually and in the way of a coaxing influence rather than by a quick
+drastic alteration. Thus the player whose swing is too upright and who
+wants to obtain a flatter one, or he who desires to change from a long
+swing to a short one, or the other way about; or again he who would
+bring the ball more over to the right foot (one of the most difficult of
+all changes to make for a player accustomed to have it nearly opposite
+the left toe, but a desirable one in these days when the rubber-cored
+ball shows no disinclination to rise as the gutty did); all these
+players would do better to make their changes slowly and gradually and
+by way of subconscious influence. If the ball is moved three inches to
+the right all at once the entire swing is upset and the whole driving
+arrangement is likely to go to pieces. But when done in the other way
+the gradual change is not noticed, and when the ball gets to the desired
+position it would be as difficult to play it from the old one, as the
+new one would have been, if assumed suddenly. It is sometimes said of
+golf that the most exasperating part of the whole thing is, that the
+more you try to succeed in it the more you fail. There is more truth in
+that sad reflection than may have been fancied, and a fine moral in it
+too. To "try" in this case means to make conscious effort.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, in this teaching about subconsciousism we are merely going
+back again to Nature, to simplicity, and to an original idea that there
+is undeveloped golf in all of us just because all the movements of the
+game are so natural, and natural because they are so true and
+rhythmical. In everything Nature encourages always the best in a man,
+and she likes most the graceful movement, the perfect poise, the equal
+balance. The easier, the more natural, and the more rhythmical our
+movements are in golf the more successful will be the efforts always.
+The undeveloped golf is always in the system, and with fair
+encouragement or a hint that is sufficiently obvious the instinct will
+surely lead a young subject to its cultivation on good lines. Man when
+old becomes awkward and contrary, and so the aggravations of the game
+arise.
+
+I have always maintained that if we placed a young boy who had never
+seen or heard of golf on a desert island and left him there with means
+for his subsistence for a few years, together with a set of golf clubs
+and a few boxes of balls, the people who might be wrecked on those
+lonely shores thereafter would find him playing a good scratch game and
+in want of nothing but a caddie, for which part the arriving boatswain
+might be indicated. But these wrecked miserables, with their shiverings
+and their grumblings, would jar unpleasantly upon the happy peace of
+this purely natural golfing youth, in all the ecstasy of the discovery
+of his own world. Probably he would wish the others--all except the
+boatswain--to leave him there when a white sail of relief was seen upon
+the horizon. A pretty speculation arises instantly. Suppose at the same
+time we had placed upon another desert island four thousand miles away
+another raw child, innocent of the simplest, vaguest thought of what
+golf is or could be, and left him also with clubs and balls and
+directions for obtaining fresh meat and fresh water when the human
+desires in food were felt. He would surely take to the game in the same
+way as the other boy did, practise it and probe into its mysteries with
+just the same enthusiasm, would become a good scratch player also, and
+would probably make use of the same simple expression of condemnation
+when a shipload of people uncivilised to golf were wrecked that way. But
+here is the point: this second scratch desert-island boy would probably
+be just as good as the first scratch desert-island boy, no better and no
+worse, and if they were to play for the Championship of the Most Lonely
+Islands, nothing is more likely than that their excellent match would
+have to go to the thirty-seventh hole or beyond it. They would, being
+good material to begin with, attain approximately equal results so far
+as playing the holes in a certain number of strokes is concerned, and
+each youth's system would be perfect for himself, but between the two
+there would be the very widest differences, and the basic principles
+that were common to the games of both players would be so encrusted with
+masses of individual detail and coloured with temperamental attitude
+that they would be scarcely discernible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+GOLF DE PARIS, AND SOME REMARKABLE EVENTS AT VERSAILLES AND CHANTILLY,
+WITH NEW THEORIES BY HIGH AUTHORITIES.
+
+
+In front of the red brick club-house of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club at
+Hoylake, a citadel which by its tower and clock commemorates the great
+achievements of Hoylake's famous son, John Ball, there was assembled
+late in the afternoon of Friday, the 21st of June 1907 (being the
+forty-seventh year of the Open Championship), a large gathering of
+golfing persons who by their speech and demeanour suggested some of the
+vivid unrealities of a stage crowd near the footlights. They had a
+self-conscious and somewhat artificial bearing towards each other. They
+muttered and beckoned. They gave the impression of being a little uneasy
+and nervous. Friends among them who essayed to conduct a conversation
+found themselves at a loss for appropriate comments upon what had
+happened and made remarks which had no clear or relevant meaning.
+Professor Paterson, wearing the red rosette, came from the house and
+stood before the little table bearing a silver cup which had been held
+by the line of champions all the way from the time of Morris, the
+younger, and a familiar friendly figure in chequered garments moved
+about in a manner of official preparation. What had happened had indeed
+been dramatic; but the drama had had the living circumstance of full
+reality. We could not discuss constructions and readings, and suggest
+other endings. Here was the one gross fact, that Arnaud Massy, a Basque,
+the professional attached to the leading club of Paris, a strong bonily
+built man with no British blood in his being, had just made himself the
+possessor for the year of that historic championship cup, which hitherto
+had never been taken out of the United Kingdom. This was something which
+the gathering did with difficulty absorb into their golfing minds. They
+were good sportsmen, and they cheered because they knew that this Massy
+was a fine fellow and a good champion; but it was all a little
+dream-like, and there was a spell that needed to be broken.
+
+Massy, the victor, with a big smiling face came forward. The gold medal
+was delivered to him. There was a little silence, a few muttered
+incoherent words, and then this splendid Massy threw up his hands into
+the air and shouted out with a full blast from his lusty lungs, "Vive
+l'entente cordiale!" The tensity was broken; the people cheered easily,
+naturally, and whole heartedly; they accepted Massy as the true and
+proper successor to James Braid in the Open Championship, and wished him
+thoroughly well--even though he were a Frenchman or a Basque. He had
+done the right thing.
+
+This foreign player (never forgetting that he was trained to the game at
+Biarritz, which in golf is mostly British, though it lies under the laws
+of France) was brought to England and Scotland by Sir Everard Hambro,
+and was improved in golf at North Berwick with Ben Sayers assisting him.
+He well deserved to win that championship, and it should not be
+overlooked that, so to say, he has confirmed his victory by making a tie
+for the championship again since then. He is the only man outside the
+great triumvirate who has done so much as twice to reach the top of the
+list in modern times. He was well on his own very good game. There was a
+crispness about his play with his wooden clubs that indicated the man
+who for the time being had full confidence and could hit his hardest.
+And Massy's putting, especially in the case of the most difficult and
+fateful of all putts, those of from five to nine feet--putts for the
+missing of which there is the fullest excuse, for whose holing there is
+enormous gain--had been splendid for a long time before and was most
+excellent then. At those putts of the kind I remark upon I do not think
+that Massy in accuracy or confidence has his equal in the world. He
+strokes the ball into the hole as though it were the simplest thing to
+do; easily and gracefully he putts it in. In other ways he makes a fine
+figure of a golfer. Military training in France has given him a stiffer,
+straighter build than most great golfers have, for this game tends a
+little to a crouching gait and posture. Massy marches from the tee to
+the ball that has gone before with a quick, regular step of the
+right-left-right military way, and when he comes up with the ball he
+does a right wheel round, presents his club, and plays his second with a
+quickness and lack of hesitation in which he is second only to George
+Duncan. Particularly in putting is Massy a man of inspirations and quick
+impulse. And I must not now forget that there is in the world a charming
+little lady who is called Mlle. Hoylake Massy, which is her proper name.
+Providence is disposed often to be kind and generous to the strong and
+those who have well deserved, and that week Mme. Massy gave to the man
+who was even then making himself the champion a sweet little daughter.
+Having won the championship, the next question was one of christenings,
+and, said Massy to his wife, "Voila! Surely she shall be called our
+little Hoylake!" Which she was accordingly, Mme. Massy, rejoicing in her
+husband's success, like the good, happy little woman of Scotland that
+she is, having cordially agreed.
+
+And in France there were rejoicings among the golfers. My friend, M.
+Pierre Deschamps, fine and keen sportsman (and the "father of golf in
+France," as we call him for the grand work he has done in establishing
+the game so well at La Boulie, where he is president of the Societe de
+Golf de Paris, and encouraging it with all his heart and energy
+elsewhere in his country), rose and made a remarkable declaration that
+golf was to be the "national game of France." The national game of
+France, our Scottish golf of English development, started, as some still
+will have it, in Holland, played in some sort of way as _jeu de mail_
+even in France, practised in Pekin, called the "national game" also, as
+I have heard it, in America--now it was to be naturalised and made the
+"national game of France!" Ubiquitous golf indeed! M. Deschamps, whose
+words are careful if they are quick, as befits one who is in the
+diplomatic service of his country, sat down and wrote an essay on golf
+in general, and Massy's success in particular, and, addressing the new
+champion as if he were before him, said: "Et maintenant a vous la
+parole, mon cher Massy; continuez votre brillante carriere, jouissez de
+votre belle gloire dont nous sommes tous fiers, comme Golfeurs et comme
+Francais; a cette heure, ou tant de links s'ouvrent chez nous, pour
+repondre aux besoins d'enthousiastes sportsmen, puissent d'autres
+professionels de notre race suivre votre example, unique encore dans les
+fastes du 'Royal and Ancient Game,' et contribuer a faire de ce sport un
+jeu national dans notre beau pays de France!" That was written. In
+victory you may be magnanimous, and M. Deschamps at this time would
+graciously waive all questions of origins and growths; he must have felt
+that then it mattered little that a kind of golf called _chole_ had been
+played ages back by the people of the north, and that it was possible
+the Scots had copied from them. It was enough that Arnaud Massy was "le
+Champion du monde."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Disregarding all those doubts about the _jeu de mail_ and the game of
+_chole_, and considering only the real thing as we know it, taking its
+time from the stone temple by the Fifeshire sea, it was away back in
+1856 that the game was first played on the soil of France, and that was
+in the south by the Pyrenees at Pau. Yet at that time only the wintering
+British were concerned. Forty years went on before the French themselves
+made a fair beginning with the game. In 1896 the Societe de Golf de
+Paris was established, and it has been a splendid success. To-day in
+prestige and influence it stands for the headquarters of the game in the
+country, though since it was begun there have sprung up many clubs of
+great pretensions, with good courses, nice club-houses, distinguished
+memberships, and unlimited francs. Yet La Boulie holds her queenship
+still. Excellent golfing places have been made at Chantilly, Le Pecq,
+Compiegne, Fontainebleau. Out on the north-west coast at such resorts as
+Le Touquet, Dieppe, Deauville and Wimereux by Boulogne the game is
+established. Long years back I played at pretty open Wimereux when there
+was but a nine-holes course there, and not the excellent one of eighteen
+that has now been made. Shall it not be considered as a happy token that
+golf links are commonly found on old battlefields and at places where
+armies have encamped? Sometimes this is just because the soldiers play
+the game when they are abroad; sometimes it is because entrenchments are
+bunkers all prepared; but oftenest it is just coincidence. Whatever it
+be or why, it is the fact that there is golf where armies and battles
+have been in Egypt, in South Africa, in the United States and Canada,
+and at many places. Where there was the fury of flying shells there is
+now only the peaceful hum of the rubber ball. One recalled when first at
+Wimereux that here the great Napoleon had encamped with his grand army,
+the same as was to cross the Channel to defiant isles and make a
+conquest of them. But playing neither the first hole nor the last do we
+need any reminder of what great Bonaparte wished to do, for by us there
+towers aloft the monument that he had erected to that successful
+invasion of Albion that never did take place. Hereabouts is indicated
+the place where the master-general in full satisfaction with the
+progress of things, and in remembrance of great achievements,
+distributed his military favours. And here all along are deep
+grass-covered trenches, and larger, rounder, shallow pits that once
+might have been kitchens or stables. All these that now are bunkers and
+hazards are where Napoleon camped and waited. And on a fine day our
+white-cliffed Albion is in full view. Sometimes there may even be a sigh
+as one reflects that the Corsican little dreamt of what should be done
+with his camping land when a hundred years were gone, that those
+sportsmen of Britishers would be playing their game about there, taking
+their divots and holing their putts, and striving for golden tokens
+given for competition by the mayor and municipality of adjacent
+Boulogne! It was not for no reason that Arnaud Massy called aloud "Vive
+l'entente cordiale!" In the heart of the country there have been more
+golf clubs and courses formed, and they are supported now mostly by the
+French. At Rouen and Rheims the game may now be enjoyed. It is
+spreading. M. Deschamps may yet be soundly justified. And indeed when we
+take our clubs to Paris we feel that he should, and heartily do
+wandering players echo the cry of Massy, who by his victory signalised
+the fact that French golf had grown from babyhood to the strength of
+independence, and was now to be considered as an entity. There is a
+subtle sweetness about a golfing expedition in Paris that there is about
+a little holiday for the game at no other place. One is not here
+suggesting that it is better for golf and other matters to go to Paris
+than elsewhere, only that it is quite different, intensely enjoyable,
+and easily convenient. We breakfast in comfort in London, read the
+newspaper afterwards, go through the pack of clubs to see that the
+roll-call is rightly answered, and with time enough for everything move
+along to Victoria. Had we dawdled less we might have gone much earlier
+from Charing Cross. We meet quite casually other golfers in our
+compartment on the South-Eastern, and inquire with no astonishment as to
+which of the Parisian courses will be scarred by their irons before
+their trip is done. From Dover or Folkestone we have a quick and
+comfortable crossing; we discover some people who are bound for Le
+Touquet and tell us of the excellent changes there, and then on the
+comfortable railway of the Nord we are swung happily into the heart of
+France, and are in the capital before the sun has set on a summer's day,
+and with time yet to go out to La Boulie, which is by Versailles, or
+Chantilly, and stretch our English arms and legs in preparation for
+matches of the morrow. We are at home as golfers without delay.
+
+What one feels about golfing in Paris now is that while there is always
+that elevation of the spirits, that sense of extra life, that little
+superfineness of feeling that are induced by a sojourn in the capital by
+those who feel themselves somewhat akin to her, and there is a certain
+subtle difference in the golfing ways and systems, such as we not merely
+find but wish for, golf at Paris and the world over is really very much
+the same--the same not merely in the playing of the shots as in the
+general scheme of things, the going and the coming, the _tout ensemble_.
+We settle ourselves comfortably in a big hotel in the Rue de
+Castiglione, and next morning we fling away the sheets before eight as
+alive as any Parisian _ouvrier_. The _cafe complet_ disposed of, the
+next question is that of clubs and balls. If it is a fine day and there
+is time for the walking, we may stride through the corner of the gardens
+of the Tuileries, across the corresponding corner of the Place de la
+Concorde, over the bridge and into the station to the left by the side
+of the Seine and down the steps to the platform, where there always
+awaits us at the most convenient time what is in essence largely a
+golfers' train. Our golfing people are in full evidence. You cannot
+mistake their kind in a train of France any more than you can when they
+journey from Charing Cross to Walton Heath. They pervade. So on to the
+other end of the journey at Versailles, and there the carriages await
+us, and the brake for those who like it, and we are bowled and rattled
+along through that place which has seen much of the makings and undoings
+of France, and on to La Boulie, where we hasten to the first tee,
+fearful of any waiting. Or, alternatively, we take a taxi-cab that is
+outside the hotel in Paris, and let loose through the Parisian streets
+with it, across the Place Vendome, past the Opera, away along to the
+Gare du Nord with our inimitable Parisian taxi-man hurtling round the
+corners with all the fury of a charioteer in the races of ancient Rome,
+making us reflect that it is well there will be a rest of an hour
+before being called upon to do the first putting at Chantilly. So we
+perceive that the going and the coming are very much what they might be
+in England, with just that difference that gives a piquancy, while,
+after a day on the course, it is found to be quite excellent to have the
+gaiety of Paris at one's disposal. Those who have tried it generally
+agree that golf de Paris makes the finest change of the game, the most
+exhilarating that may be had by the player of the south of England, who
+is not too far removed from Charing Cross or one of the ports. It may be
+444 miles from our metropolis to St. Andrews, and 383 to North Berwick,
+but it is only 259 to Paris, and despite the sea the journey lasts a
+much shorter time than the dash to the north by the fastest trains. We
+do not compare the golf of Paris with the golf of our historic and
+beloved seats of the game, but the courses of France, as inland courses,
+are good, and we think again of the virtues of the change complete, of
+the _tout ensemble_. Good things have come out of France in the days of
+long ago and in recent times; golf that is nearly of the best order
+rises in it now, and when we see Mr. Edward Blackwell and some others of
+the great men of the auld grey city who are most particular about all
+golfing things playing themselves on the slopes of La Boulie, over the
+plains of Chantilly, and through the forest of Fontainebleau, we know
+that things are moving tolerably well.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Upon our initiation at La Boulie, our curiosity is stirred and attention
+is attracted to many things. Perhaps M. Deschamps, or such a good
+sportsman as the Baron de Bellet--whose son, M. Francois de Bellet, has
+won the Amateur Championship of France, while Mlle. de Bellet is the
+best of the lady players in the country--would conduct a guest about the
+place and show him many things that would interest him, and many more
+that as a golfer he would most honestly admire. La Boulie is not a great
+course despite all the championships that have been played upon it, but
+the Societe de Golf de Paris, which has a membership of 750 at a
+subscription of about L10, is quite a great institution. Yet, let me
+hasten to say that in the first remark I was judging La Boulie on the
+highest inland standard, and even then the judgment must be qualified by
+the statement that if not great in the best sense La Boulie is good and
+is quite interesting. At one time it suffered much from the nature of
+its soil and turf, but greenkeeping science, the francs of France, and
+the loving and most assiduous care of M. Deschamps, have changed much if
+not all of that. In the summer time it is quite one of the most
+beautiful courses I can think of with its wealth of trees, in which the
+nightingales sing soon after the golfers have done, and its majestic
+undulations, which come so near to being mountainous that herein, with
+so much climbing to be done and so many uphill and downhill shots, is
+one of the greatest faults of the course. But everything is well done at
+La Boulie, and human ingenuity and thoroughness are well applied. M.
+Deschamps is a fine humanitarian, and exerts himself constantly for the
+welfare of the caddies, who are as good for their business as any
+caddies in the world. It was a happy idea on his part to have these boys
+trained under a semi-military system as he has them now. They are all
+housed in a building near to the first tee under the care of the club;
+they have to observe regulations of duty and life which are good for
+them, and they are dressed in a boy-scout khaki uniform with touches of
+red to brighten it, and the principles of boy-scoutism are worked into
+their young lives. This is excellent, and indeed it is the truth that
+already we have a little to learn in golf from France. By the way, one
+of the curious laws of the country--curious as it seems to us, though
+soundly sensible--is that boys are not allowed, when under about fifteen
+years of age, to carry more than a certain weight in the way of work,
+and this prohibits caddies from carrying a bag of clubs of more than
+fair extent. As a matter of detail you will find that the weight
+quantity allowed works out to something like ten clubs of an average
+mixture, but happily for some good friends of mine there is no weighing
+at the first tee and no officers of the Republic there to see it done.
+They threaten to arrest us at St. Andrews if we play the game with iron
+clubs only, and they have the power through bye-laws ratified by
+Government to do so and send us to prison. Is it possible that a
+wandering player in happy France should be lodged in a modern Bastille
+for that on one eager day he defied ill omen and the law by carrying
+thirteen clubs in his bag, as both James Braid and Edward Ray have done
+when winning championships, the weight limit being exceeded and all the
+unhappiest consequences following? M. Deschamps took the initiative in
+founding the Golf Union of France, which is based completely on the
+American system and is likely to be a strong force in the golf of the
+future.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To the best of my knowledge they have only one plus-handicap amateur in
+France, being M. Francois de Bellet, who is rated at plus 1 at two or
+three clubs, but I have examined the handicap books at different places
+and find that there are a few scratch men, and that the number of
+players who have single figure handicaps is quite good in proportion to
+the whole, and is increasing. The fears we had that the French
+temperament was not good for the game prove to be unfounded; while the
+French enthusiasm is equal to anything that we know. There are cases of
+golf fever in France that are every degree as bad--or as good--as those
+we find here at home.
+
+One muggy winter morning, when a friend and I teed up at the beginning
+of the round at La Boulie, we could with difficulty see the flag on the
+first green, short as was the hole. We surmised that we might be the
+only players; but, no, many holes ahead, having started early, was a
+match going on between a baron of France and one of his rivals. The
+baron was taking the game with exceeding seriousness, and the
+information was given to me that he played two rounds on the course
+every day of his life. "Saturdays and Sundays?" I asked my caddie.
+"Toujours!" was the answer. "Even if it rains?" I pursued. "Toujours!"
+the boy answered with emphasis. "Or snows or is foggy?" I persisted, and
+then the carrier of clubs replied a little impatiently and with
+finality, "Toujours!" intending to convey that in all circumstances
+whatsoever the indefatigable baron played his two rounds a day, and
+independent witnesses confirmed the statement of the boy. This surely is
+the French counterpart of what is considered to be the finest case of
+golf enthusiasm that Britain has produced, being that of old Alexander
+M'Kellar who played on Bruntsfield Links in the brave days of old and
+was known for his ardour as "the Cock o' the Green." He also would play
+always; when snow covered the course he begged and implored some one to
+become his opponent in a match, and if nobody obliged he would go out
+alone and wander the whole way round, playing his ball from flag to
+flag, the greens and holes being hidden. At night he would sometimes
+play at the short holes by the dim glimmer of a lamp, and golf by
+moonlight was his frequent experience. Once upon a time his suffering
+wife thought to shame him by taking to the links his dinner and his
+nightcap; but he was too busy to attend to her. M'Kellar is long since
+dead, but something of his soul survives in England--and in France. And
+there are old and experienced golfers in France. There are Parisians who
+are members of the Royal and Ancient Club of St. Andrews, and I have met
+others who could argue most deeply with me upon the peculiarities and
+merits of many British courses from Sandwich and Sunningdale to Montrose
+and Cruden Bay. I took tea at Fontainebleau with M. le Comte de
+Puyfontaine, who exercises a kind of governorship over the course, and
+he told me that he learned his golf twenty-three years ago at a place
+near Lancaster, and that since then he has played in many parts of the
+United States and elsewhere.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have endeavoured to make the point that the French are worthy and
+thorough, that the Parisian golf and golfers must be taken seriously,
+and that it is a pleasure to go among them with our clubs. Their courses
+are nearly good enough for anything, and they are all different from
+each other in type and characteristics. Fontainebleau is cut out of the
+forest, and silver birches line the fairway, while some of the great
+boulders which are peculiar to the place stand out as landmarks near the
+putting greens--but not so near as to be useful to the erratic player.
+Holes of all kinds are at Fontainebleau, and some of them make pretty
+puzzles in the playing. The teeing ground for the third is high up on a
+hill and the view is charming, but that may be of less account than the
+circumstance that the carry is farther than it looks, and the hole is a
+long one. The fifth is a catchy dog-leg hole, which the caddies of
+Fontainebleau do not call a _jambe du chien_, as you might expect them,
+but a "doc-lac." Soon the game will be Gallicised completely. The ninth,
+being a drive and a peculiar pitch, is a strange hole which worries the
+pair of us exceedingly. It looks one of the simplest things, but there
+is an inner green and an outer one, as one might say, and the former is
+on a high plateau. There is a secret about it which we did not discover
+in three full days. The tenth is a fine long hole, with a guard to the
+green that might have been brought up from the Inferno, and so on to the
+end in great variety. I like Fontainebleau. Chantilly has less character
+but more length. It is a better test of wooden club play, but not of
+pretty work with the irons in approaching. Yet it is well bunkered, the
+fairway is smooth and dry, as it is at Fontainebleau, all through the
+winter, and the putting greens are most excellent, fast and true. If
+most parts of the course are a little flat, there is a great ravine
+about the middle of it which gives a touch of the romantic and helps to
+the enjoyment. The turf at La Boulie does not winter so well as it does
+at the other places, though the club has spent many thousands of francs
+in applying real sea-sand to it for its improvement; but in the spring,
+the summer, and the autumn, golf here at Versailles is a fine pleasure.
+Yet some will say that, much as I tempt them, they would not after all
+go to France for golf, that indeed they could never confess to others
+that they had been to Fontainebleau and Versailles and Chantilly for
+their game. But why may they not take their game and their historical
+views and reflections on the same days, as they may do better in France
+than elsewhere; though when we play at St. Andrews or at Sandwich, where
+Queen Bess visited, and Westward Ho! we wonder again how strangely this
+royal and ancient game does attach itself and cling to the old places of
+celebrity, and especially those whose fame was made for them by kings.
+It is curious. The keen golfer is a man of thought and sense. We play on
+a morning at Fontainebleau, and in the afternoon we wander through the
+rich galleries of the wonderful palace where many kings of France held
+magnificent court, a place where the great Napoleon loved to rest a
+while between campaigns. There are relics of the Emperor in many
+chambers; and it was at the chief entrance here that he bade his last
+good-bye to the old guard and went lonely away, an emperor no more. The
+wonders and the glories of Versailles are known even to those who have
+never crossed the Channel; Chantilly has had its great romances of
+history also. The old castle was put up in the ninth century; here the
+Condes lived in fine state, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries the place was very famous. The good French have endeavoured to
+make their courses suit their places. Sometimes we seem to look even on
+these playgrounds for a touch of art, a little delicacy, a fineness and
+a high quality, and we think in just that way of the golf de Paris when
+the train of the Nord runs us homewards again.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The seaside golf in the northern and north-western parts of France is
+coming to be an important thing in the general scheme. Personal
+association and its seniority above all except Dieppe have led me
+already to mention Wimereux, but the golf of Wimereux is not the queen
+of the game of northern seaside France. In all honesty we must crown the
+slightly younger Le Touquet, on the other side of Boulogne, with that
+distinction. Here you may have one of the most charming changes of the
+game, and the most wholesome, delightful rearrangement of your general
+daily living system. Go to Etaples from Boulogne, then spin in the car
+through that splendid forest, skimming by Paris Plage and its casinos
+and evidences of lightness of life, and so through to Touquet, where
+there is a course for golf that is most excellent in every respect,
+lengths and character of holes, sandy nature of soil, quality of putting
+greens--everything. Some of the holes are a little tricky; but the
+course in general has been enormously improved in recent times, and it
+well deserves the championship dignity that has now been accorded to it.
+The girl caddies there are the best of their kind. I remember a little
+Marie for such an intuition regarding clubs to be used as I remember no
+other assistant: and after playing for a day through these avenues of
+fir trees with the great banks of silver sand in the distance, shutting
+off the sea, then dawdling among the coloured lights at Paris Plage
+listening to the music after dinner, and in the night sleeping in an
+upper room near to the links, and hearing at the last moment of
+consciousness the wind music floating in from the surrounding trees, one
+feels that this is almost an enchanted land, with the spirits of
+happiness and pleasure controlling a joyful cosmos.
+
+Dieppe is good, and it is quite different. Here the golf is some
+seventeen years of age, the whole system of things is well matured and
+settled, and the golfing season goes along with a fine swing from the
+beginning to the end. It was Willie Park who first laid out this course,
+but it has been much altered and lengthened since then, and now there is
+a fine club-house and all that a player might wish for, and especially
+one who likes to contend in competitions. There is something for such
+challengers to do all the time; I know few other golfing places where
+there are so many competitions in August and September, and yet they are
+no nuisance to the people who say they hate such things. At Etretat the
+game has been making excellent progress lately; at Deauville by
+Trouville, where you bathe always except when you do not golf or sleep
+or eat, it has been long established, and the course there has recently
+been raised very high in quality; and at Cabourg and Havre, in the same
+region, there are courses also. There are at Etretat thirteen holes, and
+yet you may play a lucky round, and I am reminded that in the long ago,
+when golf near the sands of Picardy was first being thought of, a wise
+man of Cabourg sent for an English course architect, and, displaying to
+his view one nice field, said, "Voila! Make me a hole! Two if possible!"
+But they know much better now than that, and Cabourg has its full
+eighteen. To golf, to lie down and sleep, to splash and tumble in the
+sea, to seem to do so much and yet to do so little except make a few
+drives and miss some putts--it is all a very happy holiday that you may
+enjoy at these places.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The championships of France, which began in a small and gentle way, have
+lately risen to be very important events, and they gain a most
+wonderfully cosmopolitan entry. In 1913, which was the greatest year for
+championships in general that the game has ever known--Taylor winning
+his fifth Open at Hoylake, Mr. Hilton his fourth Amateur, Mr. Travers
+his fourth American Amateur, Ouimet beating Vardon and Ray in the
+American Open--the championships of France did indeed rise to the first
+class, and in both events, the Amateur at La Boulie and the Open which
+was held for the first time at Chantilly--and the first for it to be
+taken away from the mother course at Versailles--produced some most
+exciting business. I have never seen a more extraordinary final in its
+way than that in the amateur event at La Boulie on this occasion, when
+Mr. E. A. Lassen came to grips with Lord Charles Hope--and such grips
+they were! I was led to describe it at the time as a dramatic affair of
+four periods and a spasm, and that is just what it was. Lord Charles
+Hope, though not physically strong, has acquired a fine game, and in the
+first period of this thirty-six holes match we witnessed him playing
+some quite beautiful golf and exercising the most complete
+self-possession and steadiness, gradually piling up a big lead of holes
+upon his more experienced opponent, who has been once Amateur Champion
+of Britain and a finalist another time, and seeming to make himself a
+certain winner. The duration of this period was one whole round, and at
+the end of it Lord Charles had five good holes to his advantage. The
+second was a period of peace, in which we watched Lord Charles keeping a
+tight hold on his most valuable gains, while Mr. Lassen, if losing
+nothing more, was gaining nothing when it was absolutely necessary he
+should be gaining quickly if he was not to be the loser of the day. Time
+was flying and holes were being done with, and fewer of them being left
+for play and recovery. This period terminated at the turn in the second
+round, with Lord Charles Hope still four to the good and "still
+winning." The third period lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth holes
+in this round, and in it the man who had seemed to be very well beaten
+threw a new life into his game, tightened it up, made it exact, certain,
+and aggressive, while at the same time his opponent seemed to collapse
+entirely, his driving becoming soft and uncertain and his short game
+nervous. The Yorkshire player won four of these five holes and at the
+fourteenth he was level with his man. Never was there a more
+extraordinary illustration of the truth that no match is lost until it
+is won; to some extent it recalled that amazing championship at Hoylake,
+when Mr. Sidney Fry so nearly gained the title after being at one time,
+as it appeared, hopelessly beaten by Mr. Charles Hutchings. Now it was
+surely Mr. Lassen's match; but in the crisis Lord Charles Hope came
+again and fought every inch of the way home. In this period every hole
+was halved to the end of the round, so that after the statutory
+thirty-six had been played the state of things was as at the beginning
+of the day. No business had been done, and each man might be said to
+have had his tail up quite as much as the other. The spasm followed. The
+thirty-seventh had to be played. Mr. Lassen teed up his ball, said to
+himself that he must keep it to the left as there was the dread
+out-of-bounds on the right that had been a constant trouble to him,
+swung, struck, and to his dismay saw the little white ball bearing
+slowly but surely to the right after all. It did not reach the trees,
+but, almost as bad, it fell into the big deep bunker out that way, and
+made recovery difficult. Lord Charles Hope seized his advantage. A good
+ball shot straight down the middle of the fairway, and the hole and the
+match were his. An extraordinary game indeed that was.
+
+In the Open Championship at Chantilly there was an entry that was nearly
+good enough for a championship on British soil. Vardon and Ray, out
+across the Atlantic, were missing, but otherwise the class was as
+numerous and good as need be, and there were a few of the best British
+amateurs. George Duncan won, as he had won the "News of the World"
+tournament the week before, and so made it clear that he had come into
+his own at last. These two were his first really big victories in
+classic open events, and they were brilliantly and indeed easily gained.
+But it was not Duncan's victory, so well deserved as it was, that makes
+this championship at Chantilly worth a place in golfing history. It was
+something else that very nearly happened. Among the competitors was an
+amateur in Mr. H. D. Gillies, who at different times in recent seasons
+has shown an immense capacity. At St. Andrews in the Amateur
+Championship only a few months before he had made a brilliant display.
+Now, here, he did a thing which to the best of my belief and after a
+searching of all the records had never been done before, and that was in
+an open championship competition of the first order, decided by four
+rounds of stroke play and with the best players of the world arrayed
+against him, he as an amateur led the whole field for three consecutive
+rounds. Mr. Ouimet in America did not lead for three rounds, no amateur
+had led for three rounds in any open championship before, and it is not
+often that any professional has done so either. Mr. Gillies has enormous
+powers for concentration and effort, and, as one might say, he can
+strain himself at the game until he nearly drops. In his third round he
+had a wicked piece of bad luck which cost him two most valuable
+shots--not the sort of bad luck that one gets through finding a
+specially nasty place in a bunker, but the much worse variety which is
+the result of a grave error in course construction. After one of the
+finest drives one might wish to see, at a hole just after the turn he
+found his ball lying on a road which had to be treated as a hazard, and
+from here he was bunkered. He knew that Duncan was pressing him hard,
+and that he had not a stroke to spare. Still by an enormous effort he
+kept his lead, and at the end of the third round it looked as if it
+would still be a lead of two strokes, when alas! on the home green he
+lost a stroke in putting. Instead of having a lead of two over the
+terrible George for the last round he had now a lead of only one. There
+is not much difference between one and two--it may all be accounted for
+by the very smallest of putts--but in a case of this kind the moral
+effect is very great. You see, when you lead by two strokes you realise
+that you can afford to lose one of them and still be leading, but when
+you only have an advantage of one there is the cold truth that you
+cannot afford to lose anything at all or the lead will go--the lead that
+Mr. Gillies had held all the time. One may be sure that he felt this,
+for coming off that home green some one said to him quietly, "You still
+lead, Gillies," and he turned with a little melancholy and responded,
+"Yes, but one stroke is not much to lead Duncan by, is it?" The effect
+was visible at the first tee in the afternoon. He knew the
+responsibility. He took an infinity of pains, far too much. He addressed
+his ball until he was sick of looking at it any more, and then he topped
+it into the bunker in front of him. Good-bye, Open Championship of
+France! But there it was, a brilliant achievement for all that, and if
+he had won, as once he seemed likely to do, no man could have done
+justice to the golf history of that year with amateurs Ouimet and
+Gillies as Open Champions.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Surely Mr. Gillies is one of the most interesting studies in the game at
+the present time. Born in New Zealand, he became a boat-race Blue at
+Cambridge, and is the only one who has won a high position in
+first-class golf. Now he is a surgeon in Upper Wimpole Street, already
+with a high reputation as a specialist in matters affecting throat,
+ears, and other organs of the head. He is evidently a man of immense
+will-power, with a most enviable capacity for concentration and for
+obliterating from his mind completely what is not essential to the
+business of the moment. He will work at his profession continuously for
+a week or a month and only just remember golf, and then he will suddenly
+appear in a great competition, perhaps a championship, and be a golfer
+and nothing else whatever. That is as it should be, as it is always
+supposed to be in golf, but few men can exchange themselves to this
+extent. When he won the St. George's Cup at Sandwich he had not touched
+a club for ages, but somebody insisted on motoring him down there for
+the occasion. He had no idea of going to Chantilly, but was at Wimereux
+when an entry form was sent along to him there, and he said to Mrs.
+Gillies, "Let us go and watch the professionals," but they watched him
+instead. He is always going to courses he has not seen, and when he has
+not been playing golf for a long time, and then doing wonders on them.
+Tall and athletic in build, in demeanour he is solemn, and I have heard
+it said that his attitude at times somewhat suggests that he is about to
+put his opponent on the operating table--which in a sense he often does.
+He belongs to the hard thinking and slow playing school. Although he has
+a keen temperament, and is a man who at his best plays largely from
+inspiration, yet he is much of what we call a mechanical golfer, and is
+very measured and deliberative in his movements. He has studied and
+satisfied himself about what are the essential principles of this
+mysterious game, and he applies them to the best of his intense ability.
+He keeps himself steadier on his feet than almost any other player I can
+recall. Those who have had the necessities of pivoting on toes drilled
+into them from their first day at golf should make close observation of
+the Gillies way and see how well that way pays. He swings his club
+backwards but a little way and very slowly, but finishes the swing at
+great length. As is often the case with players of his attitude towards
+the game, his iron strokes are plain and they can be depended on.
+
+But the most interesting feature of his system and his principles is the
+remarkable steadiness with which he holds his head during the making of
+his stroke. We understand very well that of all principles this is the
+most imperative, and that he who disobeys it is completely lost. When we
+have foozled we know well that the presumptive cause was a little
+movement of that most restless and anxious head. We know also that head
+movement disturbs the general balance, and induces body movement, and
+have not troubled to consider why. A reason seems vaguely obvious, but
+Mr. Gillies knows more about matters of the head than other people, and
+from his surgical knowledge he has come by one of the most interesting
+theories that have been propounded in connection with this game and
+believes in it absolutely, which is one reason why he has decided that,
+when driving, whatever happens his own head shall be absolutely
+motionless. This is not a matter for a layman to explain or guess at,
+and so I have gone to Mr. Gillies himself and begged from him his
+theory. He says to me, then, that he has always felt that keeping the
+eye on the ball is certainly the key to the situation, but in recent
+times he has realised that the importance of so doing is really in
+keeping still the delicate balancing organs of the head when executing
+the shot. These organs or semicircular canals are intimately connected
+with the eye, and also give one the sense of position. The least
+movement of the head upsets the fluid in these canals, so that the sense
+of position is more or less lost, according to the amount of movement.
+Without the sense of position the stroke is almost sure to fail. "I take
+it," he says, "that your visual memory is good enough to remember the
+position of the ball, if you shut your eyes just before hitting it; but
+if you move the head at the moment you cannot hit the ball correctly.
+Swaying the head in putting, as Tom Ball does, is probably not very
+disturbing owing to the movement being so slow that the fluid in the
+canals does not get jerked. At the same time I can understand him
+requiring a great deal of practice to perfect the sway." To the layman
+this theory is very remarkable, and it is impressive for two reasons,
+one being that it is backed by expert scientific knowledge, and the
+other that it is emphasised by successful application.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And if Mr. Gillies is one of the most interesting figures that have
+arisen in amateur golf in recent times, most certainly George Duncan is
+the most interesting of the newer professionals. Here is an artist at
+the game if you will, the greatest genius of golf that has come up since
+Harry Vardon rose to fame. I am convinced that in the new period that is
+beginning with the inevitable decline, to some extent at all events, of
+the old triumvirate, George Duncan will be far and away the most
+conspicuous figure. He is a great golfer, and is in every way admirably
+fitted for supremacy. A more fascinating player to watch and study and
+think about afterwards has never driven a ball from the tee.
+
+When he first came out it was declared that he was the fastest golfer
+who had ever lived. It was said that he walked up to his ball and hit it
+away before anybody had time to realise that he had taken his stance. He
+was likened unto hurricanes, lightning, and racehorses. I remember that
+Mr. Robert Maxwell, being once partnered with him, in an Open
+Championship I think, remarked afterwards that it was the most violent
+and disturbing experience of fast golf he had ever known. All this was
+true. Duncan never seemed to find it necessary to think as we do, and
+not merely we with all our doubts and hesitations, but those far better
+than we are, men who have won championships. He dispensed with all
+alternatives, those fatal alternatives that ruin our own game. We often
+fail because there are not only so many ways of doing the same thing in
+golf, but because we try to think of too many of them when we have a
+stroke to play and change from one to another and then to a third, until
+our increasing indecision can be no longer tolerated and some sort of
+shot has to be played. Analyse your own emotions and experiences, and
+you will discover that this vacillation has been the cause of many
+disastrous failures. But George Duncan never suffered in this way. He is
+a man of lightning decision, of peculiarly sound and valuable
+inspiration, and he is one who, having once decided, does not swerve
+from his determination no matter what may be the allurements in the way
+of alternatives. Duncan does not know the alternative. He has no use for
+it. He does not recognise it. He believes that first thoughts in golf
+are best, and he abides by them. He decides and he acts. And he does all
+such thinking as is necessary for his decision while he is walking from
+the place where he played his last stroke to the place from which he
+will play his next, so that when he reaches his ball there is nothing to
+do but get to business without any waste of time. All these were
+features of the early Duncan just as they are of the present one, and
+they have been developed and perfected during the ten or dozen years
+that he has been out in the professional world.
+
+But the Duncan of the early period had a fault of temperament in that he
+would go wild. He would at the moment of crisis lose his head, think of
+impossibilities and try to do them. He would lose his grip of his game.
+Elation and despondency would alternate too quickly in his mind. He
+would be careless; he would forget consequences. Who that ever saw it
+will ever forget the way in which he let the Open Championship at St.
+Andrews in 1910 slip from his grasp in that terrible last round? He had
+done rounds of 73, 77, and 71, the third being then and still the record
+of the course. Another 77 would have given him the Championship. Instead
+of that he did an 83. The next year at Sandwich he did very much the
+same sort of thing in his third round. It has seemed that in each of the
+last four or five years he was good enough to win the Championship, and
+that it was largely his own fault that he did not do so. That is why we
+used to say of him that ambition should be made of sterner stuff, that
+these weaknesses of his temperament were inexcusable and must be stamped
+out.
+
+Duncan has cured that fault of temperament now. He has stamped it out.
+The other day when he and I were discussing his predecessor in the same
+flesh, he said, "All that is past and done with. It is gone behind me.
+There is no more of it. I am quick still. I shall always be quick
+because that is I, Duncan, my nature. I cannot be anything else. And why
+should I not be quick? Are there not too many slow golfers in the world?
+But for the rest of it I am steady now. I feel hold of myself and the
+game. I do not forget." Championships should come quickly to him now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+RIVIERA GOLF, AND WHAT MIGHT BE LEARNED FROM LADIES, WITH A
+CONSIDERATION OF THE OVERLAPPING GRIP.
+
+
+One who will only play on summer days is a little less than half a
+golfer after all. Golf at the full demands resource, good heart, some
+courage, and a settled nerve, and it is of its principle that in the
+matter of places, times, and weather the game shall be taken as it is
+found. Hence the real golfer should not only tolerate the play in the
+bad seasons when there are howling winds and drenching rains, and much
+of life seems damp and sad, but he might be expected even to feel some
+occasional satisfaction in it. One who can hold himself up to the big
+wind and drive a ball that whistles through it to the full drive length,
+then play a good second and all with fine allowance and good wind work
+with his irons, so that the game works out well enough for any day, is
+one whose contentment is a state to be envied. Rarely does one feel the
+thrills of the golfing life better than when playing well in a lashing
+wind, with clothes that soak and stick; the sense of mastery is
+magnificent. Yet of such luxuries of winter golf one may sometimes tire.
+The strong would be gentle again; and sunshine comes well after storms
+and leaden skies. Swearing in December that this winter shall see us
+stay at home the season through, playing on our east coast links
+throughout, January finds us hesitate, and in February, if we wait till
+then, there is a journey being made away through France to the sweetness
+of life by the blue Mediterranean Sea. It is an unforgettable change. We
+have spoken wrongly when sometimes after, at the end of a winter season,
+we have declared we tired of it. Never.
+
+We have returned to London weary at the end of a January day from
+Sunningdale or Walton Heath, or it may have been just back along on the
+underground from the Mid-Surrey course at Richmond, which seems as well
+in winter as any, and much better than most others. But London is murky
+and dirty. It is cold, it is windy, there is a drizzling rain, and the
+streets are very dirty. It will be three-quarters of an hour before we
+may be seated at the dinner table. Oh, we become a little tired of this!
+Troubles never come singly, and probably on such a day a match or
+matches have been lost. Those who are not of the community do not
+understand what worries make up the full agony of this game, and that is
+why the loss of two matches was considered by the gentle lady with her
+friend at tea to be the cause complete of the horrid din as of breaking
+furniture in the hall, the barely-stifled awful words, the yelping and
+limping of the little dog that suggested some sudden and unexpected
+injury, and the general impression that was conveyed throughout the
+household of havoc and disaster. "It is nothing," said gentle Fanny of
+the perfect understanding as, with her toes in pink satin on the fender,
+she poured another cup for Mrs. Larcombe. "Really, it is only George,
+who, I can tell, has lost _both_ his matches, dear!"
+
+But it was not the matches only. It was the waiting lone and weary for
+Marmaduke at the beginning of the day; it was the lame excuse of
+Marmaduke for his tardiness; it was the aggravating manner of the man
+throughout and the stupidity of the caddie; it was the stickiness of the
+greens; it was something wrong with the fateful golfer's lunch that made
+it all worse in the afternoon; the slicing that was more frequent and
+farther into the rough; the pitch shots that were topped still more; and
+the putts that ever lipped and stayed outside. It was the luck that went
+viler all the time, the cruelty of circumstance, the misery of it all;
+and after the twin defeat the sad discovery and reflection that if one
+little thing--perhaps only the pressure of a finger--had been remembered
+about some big things that were wrongly done, it might all have been
+avoided. It is realised again that of all the sad thoughts the saddest
+is: "It might have been." It is then that the agony of golf is
+experienced; it is then that the golfer is not happy. And it is then, on
+the retreat to town, that one may seem to hear the Mediterranean call,
+and see a vision of a sun glistening on a flowered and song-laden land
+where golf is played. Take the chance, unhappy man; make the change then
+if you can.
+
+The strongest emotions often arise from the widest and most sudden
+contrasts. Our beautiful English summer comes to us too slowly and
+gradually through the vicissitudes of spring for the fullest delight.
+One may step out from the mist and drizzle of a London street into the
+greater darkness of a theatre, and it is all blank and gloom and
+nothingness, but there is a quick expectancy. A few moments, and there
+is the tinkling of a bell, the curtain is rolled up, and there is a
+blaze of light with a pretty picture, perhaps, of summer with a full
+suggestion of Arcadia. Music and song, love and gladness, and younger
+again is the heart in years. Thus for a while the load is lightened. It
+is like that when one wanders to the Riviera for golf in the depth of
+England's winter. We leave London when it rains and is cold and heavily
+depressing; the spirit is weary from the trials of the season. Charing
+Cross--the Channel--Paris, hardly less gloomy than her sister
+Londres,--the plunge into the rumbling darkness of the fast train on the
+P. L. M.--sleep and dreams. And in the morning the bell rings and the
+curtain of the new and sunny world rolls up, and it is glorious summer.
+Nothing in the way of change of scene is quite so good as this. Those
+who do not know the Riviera may try to imagine it, but in the clearest
+vision they cannot approach the grand reality of this sudden change.
+Marseilles--Toulon--Hyeres--Costebelle; and there is the sunshine, the
+flowers, and the game. A rest of a day, quiet slumber through the night,
+and in the morning drowsily one hears a beat, beat, beat upon the
+window-panes, and, not being then awake to Hyeres, or Costebelle, it
+seems perhaps but the dismal tapping of the London rain. But later it is
+discovered to be the tapping of the leaves and rosebuds on the glass.
+Breakfast on the terrace, the contenting cigar whose smoke rises
+wreathingly through a still atmosphere upwards to the blue, and then an
+effort to lift oneself from a summer languor. Clubs in possession again,
+a walk for a little way along a rose-fringed road, and then a plunge
+through a coppice along a broken stony path that thousands of golfers
+have trod before. Through a field of narcissi, through the planted
+violets, past a little vineyard on to the plain below--there the golf
+course is. Then play the game all day, and mount to the hotel again when
+the afternoon is nearly spent. But in the earlier afternoon at
+Costebelle I would rather climb back through the little wood after my
+single round, enjoy this perfect illusion of summer, and read and rest
+in laziness. Tints of lemon and citron come into the sky when the sun
+falls to its setting. Out beyond the plain is the sea and then the Iles
+de Hyeres, or the Iles d'Or as they have been called, because the sun
+will shine upon them when it has left the mainland for the
+day--Porquerolles, Portcros, Titan, Bagaud, and Roubaud--a
+pearly-coloured group. You may make a short journey to them, to the blue
+Mediterranean which is so very blue. There is the delicate blue of the
+sapphire, and the richer blue of the turquoise. There is the wide blue
+of the Italian skies, and a wonderful blue in some women's eyes. But
+there is no blue that is so deep, so glorious, so soulful as that of the
+Mediterranean Sea, as in fancy I see it now. We gaze upon it and are
+content. All is so peaceful and pleasant. Over the hills comes a booming
+sound; it must be naval gunnery at Toulon. Grim realities of life and
+strife press even into this sweet scene. Yet they are French guns, and
+they are not meant for England either. I love Costebelle. For the simple
+sunny happiness of the life that is led there it is incomparable.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And this happiness in scene and sun, be sure, is the greater part of the
+golf on the French and Italian Riviera. There is often much doubt by
+those who have not been there upon the quality of Riviera golf. It
+varies. It once was poor; it was bad. It is now much improved, and it is
+improving still as the demand for it has quickened, as the people of
+southern France who depend so much upon their British visitors have come
+to realise the full meaning of "the golf boom" and the education and
+bettered tastes of the golfing people who leave Britain in the winter
+time. It is now, as golf of the inland kind, quite tolerably good, which
+is to say that in degree it might rank fairly well up in the second
+class of British inland golf. It is no better than that; it is
+sometimes not so good. Climatic difficulties on the Riviera are somewhat
+desperate. In the summer there is a continuous baking heat, and this is
+followed by days of warmth and nights of frost, and in such confusion of
+temperatures the golf courses have to be grown afresh for every season.
+Until recent times the putting greens needed to be newly sown and
+cultivated for every winter season, and I believe that it was at Nice
+that Mr. Hay-Gordon, secretary of courage and discernment as he is,
+first gave battle to the destructive climate and determined he would
+hold his putting greens--which at Nice are better than at almost any
+other place in southern Europe--right through the suns of summer and
+keep them on from one season to another. At Nice, again, thanks to gold,
+and thought, and enterprise, they have what the guardians of other
+Riviera courses do much envy, a magnificent supply of water, and this is
+lavished upon the turf through the dry time when the golfers are back at
+their homelands. The experiment of Nice, which was a fateful one, proved
+successful, and since then it has been copied by other clubs out that
+way, and greens are kept on and are much the better for it. In the old
+days it was a painful thing, as I remember it, to tread upon those
+tender new-born blades of grass, thin and scarce they were, and unfit
+for such usage as golfers give. It is far better now. Then also the
+construction of the courses has been much improved; but it must be
+remembered again that conditions and circumstances do not encourage or
+even agree with ideas of length and bunkering as we of Britain entertain
+them. Yet these things do not matter. We need no six thousand yards and
+no bottle-neck approaches when we wander southwards to the sun. Life
+shall be taken simply then; the press of existence shall be relieved,
+the game shall be made a little gentler than at other times, the nerves
+shall not be unduly tried. So we discover that there is a virtue in what
+is little more than five thousand yards, a generous amplitude of short
+holes, and enough to satisfy of those that can be done with a driver and
+an iron of sorts. In a mood of ease and languor, when even strong men
+who like the game find joy in a mixed foursome, we come to admire the
+Riviera system; and we may find men at nights hard in argument upon the
+points and delicacies of the fifth hole or the fifteenth, the
+aggravations of the sixth and the sixteenth, when they would disdain to
+think of such like in their golfing life at home. That comes of the
+influence of the sun; it soothes and satisfies, and it makes
+contentment.
+
+Then there is this good thing to be said for the Riviera golfing way,
+that it yields a very full variety, and it might well be advertised that
+it embraces something to suit all tastes. Not only does it vary in the
+kind of course, but in the way of life that is attached to it. The
+manner of living at Hyeres and Costebelle is more of the English country
+kind and more sporting healthily open-air, with less of the flummery of
+fashion, than it is at other Riviera places, not meaning by that that
+there is not enough of good music and social entertainment for evening
+hours. The sea is a distance off, and there is next to nothing of
+promenading. Here we live well and are happy, and the sun is very warm.
+R. L. S. lived at "La Solitude" at Hyeres, and he loved it. The golf in
+some respects is as good as elsewhere on the littoral; in some ways it
+is even a little better. There is the course of Hyeres flanking one side
+of the quaint old town, and there is Costebelle with the chief hotel on
+the hillside on the other, and its golf course on the plain below.
+Hyeres is a gentle course, pretty, smooth and nice, and much improved
+in recent times. The turf is good for southern France, and some of the
+holes are remembered, as where we play through an avenue of trees with
+silver bark. Golf is younger at Costebelle and it is quite different,
+but if one were led to make comparisons, as from which we shall refrain,
+it might be said that often youth is no harmful thing. Golf architecture
+had already advanced to a science when this course was first made, the
+first planning being done by Willie Park, and such as Mr. John Low have
+advised upon its improvement since, while M. Peyron has lavished much
+money and attention upon it too. Even if there are still some rawnesses
+apparent, golf at Costebelle comes near to being the real thing. Then it
+is a good point in favour of this end of the Riviera that here we have
+the golf almost at the door of our hotel as it is scarcely to be had at
+any other place. It is something to walk down to the first tee, and
+pluck a rose by the wayside as we go.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That of Cannes is a pretty course. The Grand Duke Michael has done much
+for it and here he is a king. Society is high at Cannes, the people come
+along to La Napoule, six or seven miles from the town, in their
+motor-cars in a long procession, and it is the proper place for the
+luncheon party and such social entertainments as go well with a
+verandah, sunshine, and the flowers. One would go to the golf club at La
+Napoule even though one did not golf; many do--perhaps too many. Those
+who eat and chatter, kiss hands and smile, but never take a divot are
+losers of something that is heartening. A river runs through this
+golfing land, and twice we cross it by a famous ferry worked by hands
+upon a rope that is stretched across the stream. On one side of the
+river there are twelve holes laid and on the other there are six; but
+the six may be considered to be better than the twelve for the pleasure
+that they yield. First we play three of the batch of twelve, and then we
+are floated to the precious six. Here there are big sand bunkers of a
+natural kind, and they are nicely placed. The fairway is tolerably good,
+and there are putting greens in pretty places.
+
+If this were all it would be good; but the course of Cannes gains a
+splendid charm from its magnificent situation which cannot be ignored.
+There is a promise of beauties to come when we approach the club-house
+by that long avenue of golden mimosa; later there are glimpses of almost
+heavenly scenes. If the golf at these continental places is gentler than
+at home, such things as scenery may count for a little more. I have
+never had full sympathy with the suggestion that the golfer cares
+nothing for scenery or sparkling air except when he is off his game and
+then falls back upon them for compensation. There is not only hypocrisy
+in this, but in suggesting the player to be scarcely above the savage it
+is unfair to a healthy taste that has had some training in appreciation
+of natural beauties. One does not dwell upon cloud effects nor let the
+mind loose upon a panorama when the strokes are being done and there is
+a man to beat, but sunlight and sweet scenes have always their strong
+effect subconsciously, and it would be a pity if they had not. I shall
+not place the course of Cannes at La Napoule in that warring and jealous
+company, many clubs strong they are, each of which claims that it is the
+most beautifully situated in the world. I have played upon three or four
+of such courses, and indeed their claims have appeared to be strong. It
+is enough that Cannes is very beautiful. It will be well if there are a
+few moments for waiting caused by a slow-going match in front when your
+ball has been placed on its little pinnacle of sand on the fourth teeing
+ground, for spread out in the distance there is a glorious panorama of
+the snow-capped Maritime Alps, on whose last spur there lies glistening
+white in the sunshine the little town of Grasse where sweet perfumes are
+distilled and where, as they say, twelve tons of roses are crushed to
+make a quart of essence. Grasse rests on that hillside like a linen
+sheet dropped there by the gods. When we have done this hole and face
+about, there are the pearly-tinted Esterels ahead. Hereabouts the holes
+are chiefly laid out through avenues of fir trees, and here and there,
+especially when one is approaching the eighth green, the picture is one
+that bears some suggestion of an Italian charm. Elsewhere in the round
+the Mediterranean is presented, as once when we look across the bay in
+which Cannes is placed to Cap d' Antibes at the opposite corner from La
+Napoule. By comparison some of the concluding holes are a little dull in
+looks; but when we play them in the afternoon the sun is setting behind
+the Esterels in front, and then there is indeed a sunset to be seen.
+
+Again, the course of the Nice club is at Cagnes some miles out from the
+town. It is different from the others of the Riviera, and it has its
+special advantages. I recall an example of one of them which was the
+more impressive since it was made on the occasion of my first visit to
+the course. That was years ago, and we had been held up at Nice for five
+days and five nights by continuous and heavy rain during the whole of
+that long time, and it was in February too. Such a spell of Riviera wet
+seems almost incredible, but it happened, the oldest inhabitants, for
+the credit of their country, declaring that such a thing had never been
+before since the world as they knew it had begun. When this kind of
+thing happens on the Riviera there is only one thing to do, and that is
+go to the casinos; and it was bad for us in every way that this rain
+came down like that even if it was good for the Casino Municipal and
+the others at Nice and for M. Blanc at the adjacent Monte Carlo. When
+the five days and five nights had been endured, when the heart had grown
+sick of what happened at the tables, when our thoughts had turned to
+Sicily and Egypt--for during this period of the flood I had made one
+voyage (we should call it a voyage though the journey was done by
+motor-car along that glorious Grand Corniche) to the Riviera of Italy,
+and there at Bordighera and San Remo (and what a pretty little course it
+is at Arma di Taggia) found it to be raining still--the sun came out
+again and the question of golf arose to life. But surely, it seemed,
+golf would be impossible for some time; courses would need to dry.
+However, we argued that a stroke with a driving mashie is better than no
+play, and so we took the car at the Place Massena and soon were out at
+Cagnes, and there we played on a course that was as dry as any course
+need ever be though the rain had been pelting down to within three or
+four hours before. In one or two hollow places there were little pools
+of casual water, but otherwise the state of things was such that we
+might sit upon the grass when the opposition was badly bunkered and
+needed time for his recovery. Others knew that Nice recovers quickly,
+for when we were out in the middle of the course we espied some figures
+a couple of long holes away, and about the attitude of one of them there
+was something strangely familiar. There was a manner of walking on the
+course not so much stiff as small and quite precise, and there was a
+club being carried vertically, head high up as if it were a gun and the
+carrier were one of a line of infantry. I can recall only one man who
+sometimes walks with his club like this--not that there is anything
+against it--and, knowing him, I still regret that opponent had not
+courage to accept a wager of anything from five francs to fifty that I
+could name the man at that distance of seven hundred yards, having no
+knowledge that he I had in mind was on the Riviera at all. It was Mr.
+Arthur Balfour, ex-Prime Minister, who, chafing for lack of golf after
+his own five days' shutting up, had motored over from Cannes at the
+moment that the rain held up.
+
+There is a certain plainness about many of the holes at Nice, but others
+are interesting. The first is appetising, the eighth is a mashie shot
+over a belt of trees, and the ninth is one of the longest I know, quoted
+on the cards at 605 yards and stretching away to the west, parallel with
+the sea-shore, and quite close to it so that a highly extravagant slice
+might deliver one's ball to the Mediterranean. However, we get there
+very quickly, and the hole is not so long as figures make it seem, for
+there is much run on the ball at Cagnes. One of the prettiest holes
+follows this one. The sociabilities here are excellent, and Nice itself,
+being rather a place of tumultuous excitement and very much within the
+Monte Carlo zone and influence, you may find it a beneficial thing in
+many ways to get out to the golf club as frequently as you can.
+
+In recent times they have effected a great improvement to the course at
+St. Raphael, and up at La Turbie, overlooking Monte Carlo, and in one of
+the finest situations conceivable, they have made a new one with
+considerable luxury of appointment. The climatic difficulties which they
+had to encounter here, at a height of nearly two thousand feet, were
+such that they had not dreamt of, much less reckoned upon, and for a
+time an appreciable portion of the money was being lost on the greens
+that was being gained through the reds and blacks in the casino down
+below, the two organisations not being without association with each
+other. The construction of this course stands out as one of the great
+engineering feats of golf. The top of the mountain on which it was
+determined that it should be made was a bare rocky waste. There was not
+even the necessary soil to grow the grass on. It was determined to take
+up the soil from a neighbouring valley, and three hundred men were
+employed to do the work. There was no railway, no horse or mule traction
+would get the stuff properly up that hillside, and so it was carried in
+baskets on the backs of those three hundred men. Next, rocks were
+blasted, the soil was spread, seeds were sown, and a result was awaited
+with anxiety. Then came down some tremendous rains, and down the
+hillside that soil was washed away, and most of the carrying up had to
+be done all over again. But labour and perseverance conquered, and at
+last the grass was made to grow, and the plain truth is that here now
+they have a course that for the Riviera is quite passably good, and most
+extraordinarily beautiful in its situation, the Alps being in the
+picture on three sides of it, and the Mediterranean down below on the
+fourth. On a fine day Corsica can just be seen. Now it is clearly
+indicated that the man who would demonstrate a perfect alliance with
+happy fortune must accomplish a grand double event. He should break the
+bank at Monte Carlo in the morning, and he should hole in one at La
+Turbie in the afternoon.
+
+This course and that of Sospel are a new and separate feature of Riviera
+golf. Formerly the whole strength of the golf of the littoral lay at its
+western end, and it was down near to the level of the sea. Now Monte
+Carlo and Sospel, chiefly Sospel, have moved the balance a little nearer
+to the east. Sospel is agreeable; and here again the construction of the
+course and its improvement to its present good state stand for a great
+triumph of skill and perseverance. Sospel is some thirteen miles behind
+Mentone in a valley of the Alpes Maritimes, and it is a quaint old
+place. If one never golfed at all, the journey there with all its
+thrills and excitements, and the picturesque little town that is at the
+end of it, are well worth a day of the time of any man. That journey may
+be made by motor-car, or now by tram, and one may safely say that there
+is no other golfing journey of its kind that can compare with it. As to
+the course, it possesses turf which is as good as anything to be found
+in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, and though the round is only a
+trifle over five thousand yards, and there is no hole of so much as four
+hundred, it is nice golf for all that, and the wooden club is needed
+frequently for the second shots.
+
+Here and there by this Mediterranean sea new courses are being made.
+They have one at Grasse. There will be others soon. The truth is that
+dawdling on the Riviera has gone quite out of fashion, and it has come
+to be understood at last that this wine-like air and the golden sunshine
+are better than the dim light and dank atmosphere of the gaming rooms. A
+few persons who go to the Riviera in the winter seem to be nervously
+afraid of giving up much of their time to golf. I have heard them say to
+themselves and others: "Is not the golf of London better than anything
+by the Mediterranean, and why then do we pay hundreds of francs to come
+here merely to play golf, and almost forget that we are in the south of
+France?" You will not forget that you are by the blue sea to the south
+of Europe. Not only is the glory of this part of the world in winter
+better understood and better appreciated by those who golf than by those
+who don't, but by far the most is made of their time by the players of
+the game. I do not see what is the use of going to the Riviera unless
+one golfs.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may seem a strange reflection, but it is the truth, that when at the
+Riviera for any length of time in the winter, and especially when at
+such a place as Hyeres, one is inclined more to a thorough overhauling
+of one's game, a study of its weaknesses and a determination upon
+certain improvements, than at any other time. A good explanation is,
+however, possible. At holiday time like this one has the play
+continually. One is detached from all the workaday considerations of
+life at home. And then again one is thrown among new golfing friends
+from all parts of the world, people of infinite golfing variety and all
+charged with their own new ideas. We see every kind of style and every
+degree of skill, and if much of the style is bad and the skill is often
+deficient, there is something always to be learned or suggested. And it
+has been found as a matter of practical experience that at such places
+the majority of people fall to thinking of their ways of driving, often
+because their driving at the beginning out there is very bad, and that
+in turn is often due to the difficulty at first of sighting the ball
+properly in the pellucid atmosphere. But the whole system of driving is
+overhauled, and one would dare to suggest that proportionately to the
+number of players involved there are more conversions made from the
+plain grip to the overlapping on the Riviera in the season than anywhere
+else. Only this very morning as I write--a bitter cold morning when I
+shiver in proximity to an east coast links, and sigh for the passing of
+a few days more when the Channel shall be crossed and a glad journey
+south made on the P. L. M.--a letter comes up to me from a friend at
+Hyeres demanding that all possible information printed and otherwise
+shall be transmitted on the subject of the grip, for there is a drastic
+revolution to be made in the case of one anxious golfer! In this matter,
+one of the most important in all practical golf as it surely is, there
+is a suggestion of great value to be made.
+
+The advantages of this grip as they are being discovered by more
+converts than ever before, are greater driving power owing to wrist work
+being easier, and also the fact that the left arm and hand pull the club
+through better and drive the ball as it ought to be driven, the
+overlapping reducing the right hand to a low subjection. No matter how
+good and careful the player may be, he who uses the two-V grip is
+certain sometimes to be in trouble with his right hand, which will
+constantly attempt to establish a lordship over the left, which when
+done is fatal to the good swing and the straight ball. Straight driving
+along a good, low trajectory, getting a ball with plenty of run on it,
+might almost be said to be characteristic of the overlappers, who are
+certainly off their drive less frequently than their brethren. These
+being the advantages of overlapping, how is it to be gained by those who
+have all along been addicted to the plain two-V way of gripping, and now
+find it impossible after many trials to convert themselves, these trials
+having been made in the most obvious way by hard practice on the teeing
+ground and with a brassey through the green? This is a good question to
+ask, but the answer is too often disappointing. Those who have started
+their golfing lives as old-fashioned two-V men seem fated to remain as
+such. As it happens, I believe I have come by the simplest and most
+effectual way of making the conversion; at all events, it is one that
+has never failed, though it has been tried in very many cases. It is
+simplicity itself. Nearly every man who tries to adopt this grip does so
+with his driver. It is natural, because it is for the driving that he
+most wants the grip, and he never thinks about it for anything else. In
+these experiments, however, he feels in constant danger of missing the
+ball--and sometimes does miss it--is most extremely uncomfortable,
+entirely lacking in confidence, and sooner or later comes to the
+conclusion that the overlapping grip, whatever its merits, is not for
+him. The sure and certain way is to begin with the putter, which is easy
+and also valuable, because the experience of the best players is that
+the overlapping grip improves one's putting at least as much as it does
+one's driving. You may become accustomed enough to this way of gripping
+the putter on the first day to try it in the most important match or
+competition. After two or three weeks of this way of putting, let the
+grip be tried for short running-up approaches, which will be
+satisfactorily accomplished after a very little practice, and then,
+after another week or two, let it be used for short lofted shots. The
+crisis comes when a swing of such length has to be made that the head of
+the club has to be raised more than elbow-high. A difficulty will be
+experienced at this stage, but it will soon be overcome, and when it is
+the way to overlapping with the driver is opened. Within a week the man
+is a complete and happy convert.
+
+On the general question of grips and gripping, which is high in the
+minds of golfers preparing for their season's campaign and setting their
+bags in order, one does feel that points of detail are not generally
+considered as they should be. In many cases the grip has really more to
+do with the effectiveness of a club than the head thereof, and yet
+perhaps not more than one golfer in four is properly suited. In general
+the grips are too short, too thick, and their thickness is too uniform.
+A very thick grip tends to take weight from the head, to spoil the feel
+and balance of the club, and to reduce the sense of control over it,
+but thickness in moderation is good for weak hands and fingers. Thin
+grips throw the weight into the head, give extra control, and improve
+the feel, but in excess need strong hands and fingers. The professionals
+nearly all use quite thin grips, their hands and fingers being very
+strong. But remember that the right hand and its fingers are stronger
+than the others, and also that that hand has less work to do in
+gripping, while as it is mainly concerned with steadying and guiding it
+is best suited by thinness of grip. Clearly, then, the grip should be
+thicker for the left hand than for the right, should, in fact, taper.
+This morsel of theory is overwhelmingly justified in practice, and that
+is what we mean when we say that most grips are too uniform in
+thickness, for they are nearly as thick for the right hand as for the
+left, and end suddenly with a kind of step just beyond the place where
+the right forefinger is applied. For hands of moderate strength let the
+circumference at the top for the left hand be 2-11/16 in. in diameter,
+and at the place where the right forefinger holds on let it be 2-1/2 in.
+From this point let it taper off gradually for about 4 in. until the
+leather has nothing underneath it, and then half an inch of wrapping on
+the bare stick brings the grip, as it were, to fade away into nothing.
+The full length of a grip of this kind may be about 12-1/2 in., and the
+tapering conduces greatly to the improved feel of the club and to a look
+that somehow makes for confidence. In the case of iron clubs the length
+and the decreased thickness towards the bottom are very good when taking
+a short grip of the club.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Matters appertaining to ladies' golf also come more prominently before
+the average male player of the game when he is on the Riviera with the
+sun than they do at other times. He sees more of it for the reason that
+his home exclusiveness cannot be tolerated there, and he sees much to
+make him think, even though the best lady players of the game do not
+often go that way. After watching a ladies' championship for the first
+time I left the place with some deep reflections. The idea that men have
+anything whatever to learn from ladies in regard to golf may seem
+preposterous, but it is not so. There may be a thousand times as many
+good men golfers as there are lady golfers who are as good, but there
+are just a few of the latter who are very good indeed, far better than
+they are generally supposed to be, and their style and methods are very
+well worth studying. When great events are stirring in golf the leading
+Scottish newspapers regularly print leading articles upon them, of so
+much general importance are they considered. After the ladies'
+championship in question, I read a leading article in a Glasgow daily
+newspaper, and it said that it was evident that if Miss Ravenscroft and
+Miss Cecil Leitch were to enter for the Amateur Championship and were to
+maintain their best Turnberry form the result would be disconcerting to
+those who hold that the scratch man can give the equally competent woman
+golfer half a stroke or thereabouts. With this I agree. The game of
+girls who can drive 250 yards, who can win 330-yard holes in threes to
+other girls' fours, who can do nine holes in 37, and so forth, needs to
+be taken quite seriously. The real importance of the matter is just
+this, that the best of these girls have arrived at a result which is
+superior to that attained by the average man golfer, and they have
+reached it by a system and a method which are practised by comparatively
+few male players. Their golfing principles and styles are quite
+different. Is there nothing we can copy from them? Surely.
+
+Now we hear very much about 300-yard drives, which one is half given to
+understand have become the regular thing with the most modern balls; but
+we know, as a matter of fact, that the average man does not drive
+anything like this distance, and that he would give a part of his income
+to be able to drive as far as some of the very best girls do at the
+championships. They achieve their distance not at all by hard hitting,
+for they hit quite gently, but by long, free swinging, perfect timing,
+and especially by full following through, that is to say, they swing in
+just the same way as it was necessary for the best men players to swing
+in the days of the gutty ball. They finish their swings with the club
+head and shaft right round their backs and their hands well up; I saw
+some of them who made nearly as perfect models of the golf swing as
+Harry Vardon does in the picture made of him by Mr. George Beldam and in
+the statuette by Mr. Hal Ludlow. Their style was most excellent and it
+was a fine thing to see. Necessity has caused it. These girls have not
+the strength of arm, wrist, and fingers to get a good length in the same
+way that men get, or try to get it now; the rubber-cored ball has not
+made the game so easy for them that they can dispense with an inch of
+the fullest swing that they can make. They seem to use their wrists but
+little, and all their movements are as smooth and harmonious as they can
+be. In this way they drive many yards farther than the average man
+golfer does. In the Amateur Championship you will not see one man in
+three drive the ball in this way now. Short swinging, imperfect
+following through, and a jerky, snappy kind of hitting have become
+almost general now that the balls can be so easily driven by the
+exercise of mere wrist power. The result is that good style in driving
+has become very rare among men. From the point of view of results
+obtained this is well enough for men who play in championships; they
+drive much farther than the best girls do, though I do not think that
+they are generally so straight. But the average golfer, consciously or
+unconsciously, copies his superiors, and most of them have now no style
+and do not know the sensuous pleasure that is obtained from a full
+swing, a clean hit, and the complete finish which seems to give a thrill
+to every nerve in the system. Then, if these men with all their jerks
+and wrist strain still do not get that length to which they may think
+they are entitled--as most of them do not--would it not be worth while
+to go back to the old way of better style and practise most assiduously
+at the full swing until they get it right? The very best girls show
+evidence of fine schooling in this matter. They hit the ball with
+marvellous cleanness. In a large proportion of cases the advice to male
+players in these days to swing short and hit hard is sound so far as
+mere results are concerned. But all men are not so strong in the forearm
+as they may think, and they do not get the length they seek, while
+another thing to remember is that the long complete swing when once
+mastered is less frequently thrown out of gear than the short one, which
+is a very difficult thing to keep in order.
+
+Then there is something to notice also in the preliminaries to the drive
+as the really good girls go through them. Not all players suspect what a
+deep influence the preliminary waggling of the club has on the
+subsequent swing. The influence is enormous, and the way that the
+majority of male players waggle is one that directly encourages jerky
+hitting. You will find that they tighten their wrists as they lay the
+club to the ball and move the head of the club back in two or three
+short, quick movements, rarely letting the head go forward over the
+ball. This is strongly conducive to a fast back-swing, a fast on-swing,
+and no follow through. It makes for the hard hit pure and simple. Now
+many girls who get long balls by big swings keep their wrists very loose
+in the waggling and allow the head of the club to swing easily backwards
+and forwards like a pendulum two or three times, four or five feet in
+front of and behind the ball each time, so that when the real swing is
+entered upon it is almost a continuation of the waggle and is made at
+much the same pace. This is a direct encouragement to the long swing,
+long follow through, and smooth rhythm of the entire movement. Between
+the man's waggle and his swing when done in the manner described there
+is no sort of connection whatever, and the driving is always much the
+poorer for the fact.
+
+Again, in the putting the ladies' play is full of morals for men. I do
+not hesitate to say, after an immense amount of observation, that the
+putting of many of the girls at their championship is quite as good as
+most of that we see in the men's Amateur Championship. They are deadly
+with the short putts up to two yards, and they hole the long ones with
+astonishing frequency. They come to their conclusions speedily as to
+what is the proper thing to do, and, having done so, they make their
+strokes with no further hesitation. We see very little tedious and
+laborious examination of the line, and, we may be sure, that they are
+the gainers for it. In the men's Amateur Championship the wearisome ways
+of some of the competitors are notorious. They study the line
+meditatively from north, south, east, and west, convince themselves of
+the existence of influences which do not in reality exist at all, next
+they hang over the ball with their putter addressed to it until one
+suspects them of having fallen into a cataleptic state, and then they
+miss the putt. The girls putt with a great confidence and accuracy. Of
+course these eulogiums refer only to the best of the lady golfers;
+between them and the others there is a very big gap, and it would be
+ridiculous to pretend that the average championship girl is yet within
+miles, as it were, of the corresponding man. But she has ways that the
+average man might often copy to advantage. Miss Cecil Leitch, who is
+surely the finest mistress of golfing method and style that her sex has
+ever yielded to the game, and is splendidly worthy of the championship
+that at last, after much waiting, she won at Hunstanton in the summer of
+1914, comes as near to being a perfect model as any one I can think of.
+She has graced a masculine way in golf with some feminine delicacy, and
+there is art, there is science, and there is rhythm in all her golfing
+movements. And she is splendidly accurate. Her iron play is a thing to
+be admired, and one might say of her as one cannot of all players who
+have been many years at the game, whatever may have been their success,
+that she is indeed a golfer.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And whoever is the champion of any particular period may be interested
+to know that at no time and place is he ever so much appreciated as away
+from his own country during the time when it is so wet and cold at home
+that people play comparatively little--less perhaps than they should do.
+As masters indeed they are properly regarded, and most dissectingly
+discussed are the champions when their disciples are abroad; and it is a
+good thing too, for if there must be influences on the game of humble
+players, let them come from the heights. In this matter many of us have
+always regarded John Henry Taylor as quite one of the best of models,
+despite what any one may say about a lack of beauty in his style.
+Taylor, five times champion, is indeed a very great master of this game,
+and he has special advantages as a model in that first he is deeply
+practical and can explain everything he does correctly (I know some of
+the greatest players who explain, but incorrectly, that is, they do not
+even know what they do themselves), can reason, and is almost, as one
+might say, a medium between the inspired play of Vardon and the
+mechanical way of Braid. He is one of the most thoroughly practical
+golfers who have ever played, and perhaps he has taught more other
+golfers than any one who has ever lived. I believe that to be the case.
+Taylor plays his wooden clubs with a round swing, and to-day some great
+authorities are disposed to condemn that style of swing utterly and
+declare that only the upright one is the real thing. But what about
+Hoylake in 1913? Then Taylor won his fifth championship, and he did it
+chiefly, as I believe, by his magnificent driving, done in such
+circumstances of terrible weather as would have made it next to
+impossible for any ordinarily good player to drive at all. Above
+everything, Taylor's golf is effective, and it is effectiveness we want.
+
+Once he explained in an interesting way how he viewed his own driving
+and how he gained the power that he does with his comparatively short
+swing. He is what we may call an open-stancer, and he insists that
+stance and character of swing must be adapted to each other in a special
+way, that for the open stance only a round-the-body swing is suitable,
+and that when a man plays an upright sort of swing with a square stance
+his right elbow must inevitably leave his side, and that is one of the
+worst and most frequent faults in driving, though one often little
+suspected or appreciated. If he stood square, says the champion, he
+feels he would lose direction; if his swing were upright he thinks he
+would lose distance, and if his right elbow were allowed to leave his
+side, then he is sure he would lose power; and direction, distance, and
+power are the three essentials of good driving. So he is all for the
+open stance and flat swing, and one of its chief merits and necessities
+is that in the back-swing the wrists do not permit the head of the club
+to move outwards and backwards in the line of flight behind the ball as
+it has been preached they should do, but begin to circle the club round
+at once, and by this means the right elbow is kept to the side. The
+importance of this elbow movement is very great. It might be safe to say
+that more than half the golfers of to-day do it wrongly and suffer
+accordingly. Taylor urges, of course, that the initial turn of the
+wrists at the very beginning of the swing is extremely important; and
+then as to the arm movement, he emphasises that the right elbow should
+be kept close to the side and should move round the side irrespective of
+any movement of the body. That makes for a smooth flat swing, and a
+sense of enormous gain in power is certainly the result. He says that he
+feels a gain of half as much power again by this movement in comparison
+with an upright swing. The initial wrist movement induces it. He warns
+those who think of trying to flatten their swing, and so gain some of
+the power which he certainly has, against allowing excessive body
+movement to which they will be very liable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+ABOUT THE PYRENEES, AND THE CHARMS OF GOLF AT BIARRITZ AND PAU, WITH
+POSSIBILITIES FOR GREAT ADVENTURE.
+
+
+It is not a bad thing to be at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris on a night in
+early February, seeing a porter attach to one's baggage a scarlet label
+with the words "Pyrenees--_Cote d'Argent_" printed diagonally across it
+on a bright yellow band. It indicates a journey southwards to the sun,
+to a corner of the Bay of Biscay where there are Biarritz and St.
+Jean-de-Luz and Pau, and the Pyrenees queening over all. Golf was played
+in these parts some ages back; indeed it was here that the foundations
+of continental winter golf were laid long before any stir was made
+elsewhere. It is not always warm at Biarritz; often it is windy;
+sometimes it is very cold; but generally it is genial and pleasant,
+constantly sunny, and there is something about the place that conduces
+to a strong and healthy sporting feeling. It is a matter of taste. I am
+not here to write down that from the golfing point of view it is either
+better or worse than the Riviera. They are not the same. They have bad
+holes at each, and some good ones at both. Biarritz, which is one of the
+most popular golfing winter resorts in existence and retains its great
+popularity in spite of its rivals (really when I was there lately in the
+month of February they told me they had already taken L700 in fees that
+month, though there was then still a week to go), has some holes which,
+as we think upon them at home in England, seem quite shockingly bad.
+They are not so much bad as nearly improper. And yet when we are at
+Biarritz we do love these holes, as do the great players without
+exception, and as lief would we suggest the filling up of the Cardinal
+bunker at Prestwick and the flattening of that range of Himalayas at the
+same glorious golfing place as touch an inch of the face of the Cliff
+hole at Biarritz. The course has the gravest faults, but it is very
+enjoyable to play upon in February, and in the winds that blow there one
+needs to be playing uncommonly well to get round in figures reasonably
+low. On the other hand, the golf at Nivelle by St. Jean-de-Luz and Pau
+is among the winter's best in Europe. There is indeed much difference
+between the coast of silver and the coast of blue, and the contrast
+comes out strongly in the golf. There is less of music and flowers and
+softness of life, less languor at Biarritz than at Cannes and Nice and
+other Riviera places. The games are everything, and the easy strolls and
+the social dalliances are much less. In the morning we seldom see the
+young ladies in fine costumes bought in Paris. They flit fast about the
+streets and along up the Avenue Edouard VII. in short skirts and the
+simplest _semi-neglige_ dress, each with a brightly coloured
+jersey-jacket of a very distinctive colour--a brick red, a sulphur
+yellow, a cobalt blue, something that does not hide itself. Every one is
+keen and openly admits it. And the golf club beyond the lighthouse is a
+great institution, and it is splendidly governed by Mr. W. M. Corrie,
+the honorary secretary.
+
+Biarritz golf is distinctly peculiar. The course is a short one; it
+offers a generous continental supply of holes that can be reached with a
+good shot from the tee (but they must be good and well-directed shots,
+for the guards of the greens are exacting), and the turf and putting
+greens are as good as one has any right to expect them to be in the
+south of France. These are generalities. Now the course, like the old
+Gaul of Caesar, is in three parts. We begin the play and go on for some
+seven holes on a flat tableland; then we plunge down over the cliffs to
+the level of the sea, come up again to the tableland at the thirteenth
+hole, and so finish on the level. One may leave the first part of the
+play out of consideration. It is neat, but one often feels the desire to
+be "getting down below," where there is better sport and much scope for
+skill and enterprise. At last we come to a teeing ground on the edge of
+the steep white cliff which is some hundred and thirty feet in height.
+It is a drive-and-iron hole that is before us, and quite a pretty thing,
+a hole that for feature and natural beauty it would not be easy to
+improve upon. To a part of the underland, where the drive must be
+placed, has been given the name of "Chambre d'Amour," and tales for
+sorrow and weeping are told of it, of lovers being caught by the tide
+and dying there. The green is away in a corner of the course, tucked up
+in the shadow of a towering lighthouse, and the bounding waves of Biscay
+come rolling almost to its very edge. If we are not convinced that it is
+technically perfect, this is at all events a charming hole, one of the
+most picturesque we can find in France, At the lighthouse we turn about,
+play some plainer things along the level of the sea, and then come to a
+piece of golf which is famous all over the world. The ascent to the
+higher surface has to be made at the thirteenth, and it is done at what
+is known to every one as the Cliff hole.
+
+Nearly all who have never even seen it have heard of the Cliff hole of
+Biarritz, have studied pictures of it, and speculated upon its peculiar
+difficulties. No hole on the continent of Europe has nearly such a
+reputation; indeed, it is perhaps the only one with a special celebrity.
+I have been asked questions about it in America. I have seen and played
+it, examined it thoroughly, and thought it out. It is a queer thing,
+quite different from any other hole I know. It needs such a shot to play
+it properly as is not demanded elsewhere. And yet it requires absolute
+skill, the proper shot must be played and played thoroughly well, and it
+is practically impossible to fluke it. Why, then, should this not be
+reckoned a good golfing hole? The circumstances are these: The teeing
+ground is on the lower level, and it is only some fifty yards from the
+base of the cliff. The ground in between is rough and stony. The cliff
+here is about forty yards in height, and, if not vertical in the face,
+bulges outwards frowningly at the top, while a thin stream of water
+trickling down at one side seems to add a little more to the
+fearsomeness of the thing. At the top edge of the cliff there is grassy
+ground sloping quickly upwards for about a dozen yards until a line of
+wire is reached, and there the green begins. The fact that the green
+(which is tolerably large and in two parts, an upper and a lower) then
+slopes downwards away from the player does not make matters easier.
+Beyond it is another precipice, but wire netting is there to save the
+ball from this, and there is some wooden palisading to keep it out of
+trouble on the left. Then there is a local rule saying that if the ball
+reaches the top of the cliff, but does not pass the wire, it must be
+teed again, with loss of distance only, the man not being allowed to
+play it from the tee side of the wire. (He would do so at peril of
+toppling over the cliff!) But all these things do not make this awful
+hole much easier in the play. One day I sat on the edge of the cliff and
+watched the people playing it, and the ball that reached the green and
+stayed there was a rarity. It can be done. Braid and Taylor and Vardon
+would do it all the time, and it is no trick shot that is wanted. You
+might hit hard at the ground in front of the wire and make the ball
+trickle on, but that would call for more than human accuracy. Or you
+might sky your ball up to the heavens and let it fall straight down on
+to the green, and that would be superb. But champion Taylor would take
+his mashie and play, perhaps, some fifteen yards above the cliff with
+all the cut that he could put upon the ball, and then he would be
+putting for a two. A difficult hole follows, but after that the work is
+easier.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a pair of prism glasses looking Spainwards to the left, we may just
+discern the quaint and quiet little town of St. Jean-de-Luz. It is one
+of the best of the winter places for golf, for health and sunshine, and
+no nonsense. The little town is thoroughly Basque, and the player in his
+hours away from the game will have a good satisfaction in wandering
+about it and peering into such places as the old thirteenth-century
+church which is a perfect specimen of the religious architecture of the
+Basques, and such a thing in churches as you would not see elsewhere. It
+was here that Louis XIV. came for his wedding two and a half centuries
+back. And in this locality we have three courses to play upon--three!
+There is the old one of St. Barbe, which is a nine-holes affair, and has
+one hole--the third--called the "Chasm," which is a very strong piece of
+golf, for the drive is over a deep fissure in the rocks, with the sea
+running in below. St. Barbe is the second oldest course in France--Pau
+being the oldest--and there are some fears, perhaps exaggerated, that it
+may not be in existence for many years more. Another of the three is the
+course of the St. Jean-de-Luz club at Chalet du Lac, and this also is
+one of nine holes. Until a little while since there were twelve, but
+then three were captured by the terrible builders, who seem to oppress
+the golfers all over the world; but the club received some compensation
+in having a new and neat little club-house erected for them at the
+landlord's expense. And here also they make the claim that "the scenery
+surrounding the course is probably the finest to be obtained from any
+course in Europe." Certainly it is very good. The nine holes are very
+tolerable in golfing quality. Here and there the driving must be very
+straight. A pull, for instance, at the third, will deliver the unhappy
+ball to the Bay of Biscay, and the sea will bang it about the rocks for
+a long time after. At the fifth, again, one must respect the ocean when
+approaching. Generally, however, the holes are somewhat easy, and do not
+worry so much as to hinder appreciation of the surrounding views, which
+are indeed magnificent. Out one way is the grand panorama of the
+snow-topped Pyrenees, and the light and colour effects upon them change
+at nearly every hour throughout the day. Below is the pretty harbour and
+town of St. Jean-de-Luz. Away to the west is the great expanse of the
+Atlantic, framed here at the course with a wildly rocky coast, and up
+along to the north is a rough fringe of shore, the innermost corner of
+the Bay of Biscay, which leads the eyes out to the most distant point,
+where a cluster of buildings gleams in the sunlight, and the tall, white
+lighthouse beyond them indicates that the place is Biarritz.
+
+But Nivelle, the course that rises up from the bank of the broad river
+of that name, is the chief course of the group and quite a wonder of
+golfing France. When I first saw it and inquired upon its origin I felt
+that here was something which was undoubtedly among the best in Europe,
+and yet only five or six years ago all the land, except a small piece
+which is occupied by two of the eighteen holes, was bare soil on which
+cabbages, turnips, and other edibles were being grown. Listen to the
+story of the creation of Nivelle. One day Mr. Frank Jacobs, the
+secretary of the St. Jean-de-Luz Club, and a Spanish doctor, went
+exploring the country round, and they hastened to Count O'Byrne to tell
+him that there was ground on the banks of the stream Nivelle which
+looked to have the possibilities of such a full-sized golf course as was
+needed then. He agreed with them. They were men of keen discernment; for
+even then while a little of that land was pasture the rest was under
+cabbages and other growths. It was ascertained that a hundred and sixty
+acres could be bought for six thousand pounds, but such a sum of money
+was not at hand. Count O'Byrne told the local hotel-keepers the truth
+that unless there was a first-class golf course there St. Jean-de-Luz
+would lose in the race for winter popularity, and he asked them to
+guarantee the money in the first place, a company to relieve them
+afterwards. They did so accordingly, and the land was secured; but the
+farmers could not be turned off at once, and some time was lost thereby.
+When they came to make the course they followed an interesting and, as
+we would think, an extraordinary procedure. The farmers, recovering from
+their grief and resentment, gave up to the incoming golfers a priceless
+secret. They said that if they would leave the bare land alone to look
+after itself it would from its own sources grow for them the most
+beautiful grass for their purposes that they could ever dream of on the
+happiest summer's night. So the Count and his comrades gathered their
+men about them, the land was raked and smoothed out, and then they
+borrowed the town roller, being the heaviest thing of the kind in the
+district, to flatten it down. And so they left it and waited. Sure
+enough up came the tender blades of grass, and in a season there was a
+thick coating there, fine, beautiful turf, and I can answer for it that
+it is nice to the touch of the feet and excellent for the game. The
+climate in these parts is most times a little moist and better for the
+production and preservation of golfing turf than that of the Riviera.
+The hotel-keepers were soon relieved of the full responsibility by a
+company floated for ten thousand pounds, the capital afterwards being
+increased to twelve thousand, but they were so much enamoured of the
+project, believed in it so utterly, that they and the tradesmen took up
+as many shares as they could get. But some great personal driving force
+was needed, and it was found. A Dundee gentleman, a keen golfer and a
+great lover of this sweet spot in France, Mr. W. R. Sharp, came forward
+and increased his commanding interest in the club and the course, and he
+has done wonders for them. That he is president of the club is a good
+thing for the club. Now there is a charming club-house; Arnaud Massy,
+once open champion, has a pretty villa for himself close by, some
+hundred and forty golfers are playing on the course at the busy
+time--and play goes on all through the year--and only four years after
+the course was opened the company was able to pay a dividend. So I say
+that this is a miracle of golf.
+
+Of course, the story is not complete at this. Fine turf and a prosperous
+club do not necessarily make good holes. But St. Jean-de-Luz has holes
+as good as most in Europe. They would even be good on a first-class
+inland course in Britain. They are, thanks to the broad undulations of
+the land, good in character. The round is opened with a fine two-shotter
+of a full four hundred yards, with an incline against the player from
+the tee. The drive must be properly placed, and that is the case nearly
+all the way round. The second is a pretty short hole; the third presents
+a fearsome drive across a yawning quarry; at the fourth the return over
+it is made in the progress to the longest hole, one of five hundred and
+fifty yards, and so on to the end, some of the middle holes being very
+good, the seventeenth a fine full one-shot hole, and a good drive and
+iron of three hundred and eighty yards downhill to terminate. The view
+from the seventeenth and eighteenth tees, the town of St. Jean-de-Luz
+shining in the sun, the Nivelle pressing itself into it, and the pretty
+harbour white-flaked with the waves, is peaceful and pleasant, and it
+gives that sense of "going home" which one always likes to have when
+playing the last holes of a round.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The game itself is not everything in the golfing life; it attaches other
+occupations and diversions as necessities to itself which are all added
+to the sum of "a day's golf" and make of it a thing of adventure and
+time packed with variety of deed and thought. There is the meeting and
+the parting; the lunch time and--everything! Chiefly there is the
+journey, and has it been properly considered how golf and the car have
+been linked together for a magnificent combination of sporting joy? In
+the remembrances of every player there must be happy and stirring
+episodes of motoring to and from the game. I have hundreds of them,
+apart from all those countless pretty spins on the outskirts of London
+town. Motoring for golf is an entirely different thing from motoring for
+nothing.
+
+The golf-motoring out from Paris to Fontainebleau and the other places
+round the capital of France is unforgettable, and always will there be
+clear cut in my mind the details of an expedition I once made to this
+Nivelle, St. Jean-de-Luz, at a time when lounging golfless in the north
+of Spain. It is not frequently that we go crossing frontiers in
+motor-cars and having our clubs examined with wonderment and irritating
+inquiry by officers of the _douane_ twice in the day, going and
+returning, for just two rounds of the best of games. Nor is it a common
+thing that in one day English golfers should speed along in a German car
+from Spain to France and from France back again to Spain to play on a
+splendid course with French and Scottish opponents--a considerable
+mixture, if you like. I was idling at San Sebastian when the aforesaid
+Mr. Sharp, with such thought and kindness as golfers display towards
+each other, gave greeting and said, "Come to Nivelle again for a day of
+play." But how? It was thirty miles away, and those trains, with changes
+at Irun and Bayonne, would be most fearfully slow. "Bother the trains!"
+said Sharp, "what are motors for, and particularly what may be my own
+car for? Say the time when you will have risen and bathed and taken your
+_cafe complet_, and it will have gone over to San Sebastian by then." So
+it came about that it was waiting at the door of my hotel at eight
+o'clock in the morning. Coats were buttoned up, pipes were lighted, and
+when the first quarter was being chimed from the church steeples we were
+already doing our thirty to forty miles an hour through the hilly
+suburbs of San Sebastian. There are such hills in Spain and France
+between San Sebastian and St. Jean-de-Luz as you can hardly think of;
+but the speed dial showed that we flashed up some of them at thirty and
+darted down the other side at sixty-five. Great hills to the left with
+jagged skylines and strange formations as go by such names as "Camel's
+back"; and such sweet vales with mountains framing them over on the
+right! Hereabouts is some of the prettiest scenery of Spain, and I hope
+not to forget how on that glorious morning the mists of the new day
+dissolved in the warming sunlight, and the opalescent gossamer that had
+clung about those peaks of Spain gave place to strong blues and greys,
+and then to shimmering rose. At Irun, on the Spanish side of the
+frontier, the car's papers had to be shown, then we bowled over the
+dividing river, and at Hendaye the Frenchmen asked their questions and
+did their looking into things. Then up a steep hill for the last, and in
+a few minutes we were gliding down into St. Jean-de-Luz, all of this
+heartening business done within the hour. At the end of the day, two
+rounds done, when the sun was setting, I was swung again over those
+Spanish tracks, and just when the light had completely failed and a few
+spots of rain came beating upon the glass the sixty horses in the Benz
+had done their duty. I opened the casement of my room at the Maria
+Christina; soft sounds from the sea floated in, and soothed one to a
+pensive mood.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The case of the golf of Pau is curious. Here, so far away from Britain,
+far from Paris, four hours even from the coast at Biarritz, inland and
+hugging closely to the Pyrenees, we have positively one of the oldest
+golf clubs in the whole world. At the beginning there was Blackheath,
+and then there were the Edinburgh Burgess, the Honourable Company, the
+Royal and Ancient, Aberdeen, and two or three other clubs. Golf, growing
+up, made its first leap across the seas to Calcutta in 1829, and
+seventeen years afterwards it settled in Bombay. It first landed in
+Europe in 1856, and was definitely and thoroughly established at Pau,
+and has remained there flourishing ever since. This circumstance is the
+more curious when we reflect that at that time there was no golf about
+London except at Blackheath. The Royal Wimbledon and the London Scottish
+Clubs were then unborn. Such great institutions now as the Royal
+Liverpool Club at Hoylake and the Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! were
+undreamt of, and a boy child might have been born to a golfer at Pau and
+grown almost to middle age before the Royal St. George's Club at
+Sandwich was begun. Scots, of course, were at the bottom of all this
+pioneering work. The early Blackheath golfers were Scots; they carried
+the game to Westward Ho!; they fostered it in India, and some of them
+went off with it to Pau, where they liked to spend the winter in the
+warm sunshine and in air which for sweet softness is almost
+incomparable. Over the fireplace in the smoking-room of the club-house
+is a picture of three of the founders of the club, who were still living
+in 1890--Colonel Hutchinson, Major Pontifex, and Archbishop Sapte.
+Another of those founders was Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Lloyd-Anstruther.
+Thus it happens that the charm of age and long settlement hang upon the
+golf of Pau as they do upon no other golf club in Europe. Here, as not
+elsewhere, you feel impressed upon you the dignity of golf, realise that
+it is not a thing of to-day or of yesterday, and there are almost the
+same deep pleasure and elevation of spirit and feeling when you come to
+such a place after wandering among newnesses elsewhere as there are in
+abiding for a while at St. Andrews or North Berwick in October, the
+crowds then being gone away, after a course of southern golf of the most
+recent preparation.
+
+The club-house at Pau is of the kind you would expect to discover at a
+good club of long and honourable standing up-country in England. The
+attributes of age and tradition are to be found within it. On a wall is
+a painting twelve feet long depicting the leading golfers of Pau in
+1884, assembled on the course, and it was done by that Major Hopkins who
+did such work, now celebrated, concerning the earliest golfers at
+Westward Ho! gathered by their iron hut. In this picture of Pau there
+are some eminent golfers shown, such as Colonel Kennard, not long since
+dead, who was field-marshal of the Royal Blackheath Club; but the artist
+leads the eye to the gaunt figure of Sir Victor Brooke, a tam-o'-shanter
+on his head, addressing the ball on the tee in the way of a determined
+man. Sir Victor, for four or five years captain of the club, was the
+lion of the golf of Pau in those days, and when a match book, now lying
+musty in a corner, was started his was the first entry that was made in
+it. The course is beautifully situated on the Billere plain, a mile or
+so to the west of the middle of the town; and in the unusual absence of
+a friendly car it is a pleasant walk through a shaded avenue of lofty
+beeches in the splendid Parc du Chateau.
+
+One is a little puzzled to estimate the quality of this course, being
+faced with a kind of semi-official printed statement that "Pau is
+undoubtedly the best course on the continent" which to some degree is
+intimidating. The turf, grown on a dark, sandy soil, is excellent, and
+more than fifty years of play upon it have given it the firmness and
+crispness that we miss elsewhere. The holes are of good length, well
+arranged, and not easy. Yet pancake was never flatter than the central
+part of the course, and with the very dullest and plainest kind of
+mid-Victorian bunkering--three low, straight grassy banks in line with
+each other right across the fairway--the golf hereabouts is less good to
+the eye, at all events, than it is to the spirit in the play. The first
+hole, a long one, with a road running diagonally across near the green,
+close to which there is a little cottage, somehow by its surroundings
+recalls memories of old "Mrs. Forman's" at ancient Musselburgh, and the
+second is a short hole of quality. From the fourth tee the line of the
+course bends round to the right, and for half a dozen holes we are away
+from that central part; there are ups and downs in the land that give
+more colour to the golf, and here and there are clumps of bushes that
+need consideration. All the time we are close to the bank of the River
+Gave, and at length, near to a point where a wild stream plunges into
+it, we cross to a spit of land between them and play a few holes there.
+They are nice holes. The ground heaves and rolls, and there must be good
+calculation and accuracy in approaching. Another stream runs through
+this isolated part of the course, and the green of the fourteenth hole
+closes to a point where two running waters nearly meet and there is a
+rutty road alongside. It is a pretty green, the situation is cunning and
+delightful, and that fourteenth hole is one of the best in France. Not a
+doubt about it--Pau is very good in parts. But we turn up a note on the
+golf in a little guide to Pau, and read: "Owing to the nature of the
+soil and their admirable preservation, the links at Pau compare
+favourably with the course at St. Andrews, in Scotland, where the
+conditions are almost ideal." O, Pau!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now Pau is one of those places where the golf, excellent and admired, is
+not domineering, as one might say. You take it, you enjoy it, and yet
+you live in an easy contentment after your game without raving about it.
+It is a delightful little of a most happy and contenting whole. That is
+because Pau of all places on this planet makes one feel rested,
+contented, peacefully, languorously happy, and that is a most blessed
+state at which to arrive after a long season's course of tubes and
+taxi-cabs, noises and disturbances, crushes and crashes, late nights
+and far too early mornings, and, yes--for they also come with the burden
+of the Londoner--heavily bunkered five-hundred-yard-holes near our
+excellent London town. The air is famous for its sweet soothing
+properties. It wraps itself round your tired limbs, it steals into your
+nervy senses, and it comforts you. Pau lets you quietly down, rests you,
+gives you sleep, stills those jagged nerves that twitched so much in
+town. Every one says so, and it is true. One morning I gossiped on the
+course with Mr. Charles Hutchings, the wonderful man who won the Amateur
+Championship at Hoylake in 1902, and who has known what nerves are
+since. He told me he has now been wintering at Pau for the last twenty
+years, and it is the only place that is any good to him. "Before I come
+to Pau, and even when I am at Biarritz," said he, "my nerves are like
+this"--and he slowly passed his right hand up along his left arm from
+the hand to the shoulder--"and when I am at Pau they are like this," he
+added, and he smoothed the arm back again from the shoulder to the
+fingers. It was as if he had been stroking a cat the wrong way and the
+right one--that was the idea. Biarritz, so very bracing, certainly makes
+you jumpy, and many of us have played far better at Pau than at
+Biarritz; in fact, we find that at Pau we can hit the ball as cleanly
+and with as much confidence as anywhere.
+
+That reflection leads us when gazing abstractedly upon those Pyrenees,
+which are so good for thought, to consider the effect of climate upon
+one's game. Undoubtedly the effect is great, and yet it is neither
+appreciated nor properly considered. After working hard for a spell in
+town we say we will go for a weekend's golf, and, when we can, we choose
+a highly bracing place, because we believe it is good for us and "bucks
+us up." But do you remember how often the golf that we play at such
+places is so extremely disappointing? The "bucking up" seems to have
+failed. Take Deal, for example. There is hardly a course in the world
+that I like and admire as much as this; but that strong air of Deal
+upsets the game of nearly every man at the beginning. Pau is supposed to
+be a little relaxing, but, except for the fact that we do not eat so
+much as at Biarritz, we hardly notice it. It soothes us, quietens us
+down, reduces our boiler and engine arrangements to low pressure, and
+_voila!_ our game comes on, and it does so because the question of
+playing well or ill by a man who knows the game is nearly always a
+question of the steadiness of his nerves, and there are fine shades of
+this steadiness that we do not always realise. That is why we play well
+at Pau, and it makes us think sometimes that the relaxing places have
+not had full credit for their golfing quality hitherto.
+
+There is a general conspiracy among all things at Pau to rest and soothe
+the tired man. There are the bells. How can they affect the golf? you
+ask. See, then. We know of the fame in song of "The Bells of Lynn" and
+those of Aberdovey too; but it seems to me that the bells of Pau should
+have an equal celebrity. They are excellent. Alongside the hotel at
+which I stay at Pau a fine church steeple towers up, and there is in it
+a splendid belfry with skilful ringers to use it. Sometimes their
+performances wake us before our proper time in the morning, which is the
+first effect. Then on some days and nights the ringers practise a kind
+of bell music, which holds one spellbound. It begins slowly and quietly
+with a few hesitating notes in the bass. Soon there is an answering echo
+in the treble, and then it all gradually increases in time and volume
+until in three or four minutes a veritable torrent of stormy music is
+crashing out from the tower and flinging itself out to the Pyrenees.
+And then it is as if the crisis passes, the bell music dies away again,
+and at the end there is but the thin little tinkle of a treble bell
+sounding lonely in the night. There are other fine belfries in the town;
+but, more than that, there are little churches all along the hill that
+frames our course on its northern side, and these have good bells as
+well, and they all chime the hours and the quarters--and all at
+different times! When one set of chiming begins just as you reach the
+green, you know that listening for the others will so much distract you
+that three or four putts may be needed, while the other man, being very
+phlegmatic, is down in two for a win again. There is one of these
+churches with its bells which has cost me many holes; its chime for the
+quarters is exactly the first four notes of the good old tune, "Home to
+Our Mountains." It strikes once for the quarter, twice for the half,
+three times for the three-quarters, and four times for the full hour,
+and, with the other two quick notes of the line missing, it always seems
+incomplete, and always irritates. If I am just about to swing when these
+bells begin to chime I see a catastrophe before me.
+
+If there were no Pyrenees there would be no golf at Pau; I doubt if
+there would be Pau. Those glorious hills, beyond which are the castles
+and gold of Spain, make an almost matchless view, and they are so
+strong, so insistent, that they seem to dominate us in every
+consideration. If you should tell me that mountains that are more than
+twenty miles away can have nothing to do with the golfer's life and
+game, I ask you to go to Pau and be surprised. Those far-away hills give
+us rest, and they calm us to those moods of reflection to which, as
+golfers, we are so well inclined. From the window of my favourite room
+at Pau, I look right out on to the majestic chain, and have the best
+view of it that is to be had. Below is the Boulevard des Pyrenees, more
+than a mile in length. Beyond there is a valley, and beyond that the
+Pyrenees rise up to one long wonderful white-topped line. Looked at in
+this way they seem so very near, and yet their nearest point is more
+than a dozen miles away, and there are peaks four thousand feet in
+height which seem within easy walking range, and yet are distant forty
+miles. From one end to the other we look out upon a length of some
+thirty miles of these peaks, and indeed the effect is most enchanting.
+This is the view that I get at its very best from my little window high
+above the boulevard, and it is the view that brings scores of thousands
+of pounds of English money to be spent in the winter and the spring at
+Pau. It is a view that never palls, for it is never the same. To our
+eyes those great Pyrenees are always changing--kaleidoscopic in variety
+of shapes and colours. There are mysteries of the light and atmosphere
+about them which make for perpetual curiosity and wonderment. In the
+morning when we rise our first thought is as to what the Pyrenees will
+look like to-day, and gazing out from our little window we see them all
+done up afresh in new colours and shapes by Nature. They change as the
+hours pass, and then one is curious to know what new surprise the sunset
+will have in store. Sometimes in the morning they stand out bold in
+black and white, just as if they were plain and simple Pyrenees. In the
+middle of the chain two great points of peaks rise up from all the rest,
+and they are in the straight line out from the lofty window where I sit.
+They are the Grand Pic and the Petit Pic du Midi d'Ossau, and they are
+the pet favourites of all of us who gaze out southwards to the range
+beyond which the Spaniards dwell. The greater peak curls over a little
+at the top towards the lesser one, that seems always to be snuggling up
+close to it, and they look to us always to be like a lover hill and his
+timid lady. Another morning all these mountains will be of a sapphire
+blue. Next day they may be rosy red. But the best effects are those of a
+phantom kind. Now and then those Pyrenees seem to have gone away to a
+hundred miles beyond, and we see them rather dimly, but still with their
+outlines well defined. They look like ghost mountains, and in
+imagination we can peer through them to a nothingness beyond. Yet more
+curious, there are mornings, fine and bright in Pau, with everything
+shining in the sunlight, when there are no Pyrenees at all! There is
+that little low range of hills in front, with the chalets and the
+chateaux all plainly to be seen, and the light seems as good as ever it
+was in southern France; but the Pyrenees, where have they gone? Not a
+trace of them is left, and we are lonely, disconsolate. It is as if a
+jealous Providence had wrapped them up in the night and carried them off
+to another land where their eternal solitude would not be hindered by
+the touring man and woman. But they come back again by night, and their
+gradual reappearance is a thing for happy contemplation. Yet for the
+greater glory and richness of colour the evening sunset effects are the
+best of all. Then from the corner at the right the setting sun shines
+along the hidden valley between the little hills and mountains beyond,
+and it is as if in that unseen place below, millions of fierce lights
+had been set burning and shining up the Pyrenees as rows of hidden
+electric bulbs are sometimes used to throw a soft, weird glow upon a
+ceiling and cause it to be reflected back again beneath. Then the
+Pyrenees are as an ethereal vision; their base is like a golden band and
+their tops like filmy gossamer, so that these seem to us to be not
+mountains of the world at all, but high hills of heaven itself. And away
+in the west the sun sets in a burning Indian red, and the thin crescent
+of a new moon, with an attendant star, rises in the firmament. It is
+this that I look upon from my own crow's nest at Pau when my tramping of
+the day is done.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day at Pau a voice was raised in our little party and it said, "Let
+us get up closer to those splendid Pyrenees"; but another said, "Where
+should we get our golf?" It was answered that there was golf everywhere,
+and there must be some right alongside those white-capped peaks.
+Argeles! We remembered. It was advertised and well recommended as a good
+course, "open all the year round," and laid in the most delightful
+situation, the Pyrenees going up from its very edge. The prospect
+sounded well. We decided at night that on the morrow we would proceed
+with our bags of clubs to Argeles, and the porter at our hotel gave full
+directions for getting there, which made it seem a very simple business.
+It appeared that it was about thirty miles from Pau to Lourdes, and with
+the journey two-thirds done we were to change trains there. But, short
+as the distance was, it was to take us two hours. Our train would start
+at twenty minutes to nine in the morning. The match of the day, with
+four golfers implicated, was accordingly made overnight, and
+anticipation of the joys of Argeles became keen. All this was well, but
+when three of us had slept and were mightily refreshed, certain hitches
+and accidents began to happen. The fourth party to our contract still
+slumbered heavily at a quarter-past eight, and being then reminded, by
+sundry taps, of the prevailing circumstances, he muttered indistinctly
+that he was not to be tempted from his situation by the opportunity of
+playing two rounds on any course in Paradise. So we left him snoring,
+piglike, there, and we were only three.
+
+We got to Lourdes and descended from the train. Troubles arose
+forthwith. The station-master blandly observed, and as it seemed with a
+hardly hidden smile (how is it that non-golfers of all classes always do
+seem to be made happy upon the contemplation of a golfer being suddenly
+robbed of his game?), that there was no train from there to Argeles
+until the afternoon, the service which the hotel porter had in mind not
+beginning until three days later. By the same token the return train
+which we reckoned on was non-existent, and he expressed doubts about our
+sleeping that night at Pau if we persisted in what he could not help
+regarding as a very mad enterprise born of too much enthusiasm. We
+thanked him, and went out into the streets of Lourdes to see what could
+be done. Truly, we were only ten miles from Argeles, even if the road
+was through the mountains. And it was a fine day.
+
+Suddenly, and as it seemed from nowhere, up came carriages from all
+parts of the compass, each drawn by a pair of horses, the coachmen all
+loudly soliciting the favour of driving us to Argeles, which they
+explained was fifteen miles away--a deliberate exaggeration. The first
+man to whip up to us asked for twenty francs for the single journey, and
+the others were amazed at his impudence. Another offered to take us for
+fifteen, and a third cabby came down at once to twelve. Then they all
+did so, and the market seemed to settle at that price, a great gathering
+of coachmen surrounding us and expatiating on the superior merits of
+their various horses and the comfort of their vehicles. It was a great
+spectacle, this golfers' carriage market at Lourdes! At last the first
+man to make an offer to us, suddenly, in a mood of desperation, came
+down to ten francs, and we closed with him, not so much because of the
+saving of an odd franc or two, but because his pair of bays certainly
+did seem to have more fast trotting in them than any of the others. It
+was such a glorious journey down the valley of Argeles as golfers seldom
+make, huge, rocky, snow-capped mountains rising up from either side of
+the winding road. Leaving Lourdes there were two high hills on the left,
+one surmounted with a single cross and the other with three crosses of
+"Calvary" standing out clearly against the sky. Then, later, from the
+bottom of the valley a stumpy hill suddenly rose up in the middle, an
+old keep of mediaeval times on the top of it, and after that the great
+peak of the Viscos, with the pass to Gavernie on one side of it and that
+to Cauterets on the other were presented. Soon afterwards we rattled
+down the little main street of Argeles, and lunched at the chief hotel.
+There was then a ten minutes' drive to the course, and our coachman--a
+local fellow, and not the one who drove us from Lourdes--stopped at
+various cottages on the way and shouted out inquiries as to whether
+Adolphe or Marie or Jeanne was at home. He was getting caddies for us,
+as he explained there would be none otherwise. Eventually from different
+places we picked up three--two little girls and a boy--who hung on to
+the back of the vehicle and proceeded with us to the appointed place.
+The course has great possibilities, but as yet they are thinly
+developed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE GAME IN ITALY, AND THE QUALITY OF THE COURSE AT ROME, WITH A SHORT
+CONSIDERATION OF THE VALUE OF STYLE.
+
+
+The other day, when we sat on the deck of a little steamer plying on the
+lake of Como, contented in warm spring sunshine with a sublime panorama
+of blue water and white-topped Alps, I was led to recall some of the few
+remarks which a shrewd and pungent commentator on life and men, the late
+Henry Labouchere, had made about our game, and, as he was not himself a
+golfer, and not the most tolerant of men despite his certain breadth of
+mind, it may be guessed that they were not complimentary to the game. We
+had left Varenna, and the little ship was paying its dutiful respects to
+Bellagio and Menaggio and such like places of an Italian fairyland.
+Hereabouts, as I remembered, Mr. Labouchere had lived in the proper
+season, and it came about some seven years back that a golf course--and
+a nice course too--was established near by, and the local hotel-keeper,
+in proper enterprise, ran a conveyance each day regularly at a certain
+time from his door to the club-house. Radical as he was--if he really
+was--Mr. Labouchere disliked this disturbance of the old peace and
+harmony of his lakeland retreat, and affected to see something vulgar in
+it. This wit and cynic, who once, answering an inquiry, said that he
+liked a certain lady of his acquaintance well enough but would not mind
+if she dropped down dead in front of him on the carpet, certainly wished
+that golf had never grown into the human scheme of things, and he
+complained loudly of its invasion here. He suggested that Italy was now
+passing to the dogs. Had he lived a little longer he would surely have
+played at Menaggio, and we could have assured him then that golf in
+Italy was long before his time, and would certainly be of good help to
+the country for long after. It is one of the curious facts of golfing
+history that the game was played in Italy before any golf club, except
+one, was definitely established in Scotland, the only exception being
+the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, and lo! it was played there by a
+Scot, and a Scot so good as the bonnie Prince Charlie himself. When I
+first went to the Villa Borghese in Rome, I remembered, on approaching
+it through the park, that when Lord Elcho went there in 1738 he found
+the Prince playing in the gardens. Many courses now exist in different
+parts of this beautiful Italy, and the country has begun to take its
+place in the great forward movement in European golf. It has begun
+slowly; but now, as I have seen it, does really advance.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little fable is quickly told. A wise father had sent his son, for the
+good of his mind, to Rome, and when the boy returned he asked him what
+he thought of the city that is called eternal. Harold then answered, "I
+think, sir, that the lies at Rome are very good." Do not judge Harold
+harshly upon this answer, as you may be inclined to do. He might have
+come to know less of Rome had he not discovered that the lies on the
+Campagna were so good, and that the legions of mighty Caesar which were
+exercised there had left no enduring marks of their galloping behind
+them. He might not have gained so many good Roman friends to tell him
+helpfully of the wonders of the city. And if golf is a little thing, and
+the contemplation of Rome is so enthralling, yet, be it murmured, the
+golf of Rome is one of the wonders of the golfing world. I have found it
+so. As it was to me, so it will prove a revelation to all golfers who go
+to Rome and have as yet no knowledge of the course that is there. For
+the full-bodied character of the holes, caused by natural land
+formations, and for their variety and interest, I do not hesitate to say
+that there is no course on the continent of Europe which is better, and
+I support this statement with another, that while I can hardly recall
+any hole where a bad shot will go unpunished or a good one without
+reward, yet in the whole round there is not a single artificial bunker.
+Nature has seen to all the tests and difficulties. Of what other course
+can this be said? Golf at Rome was begun in 1898, and ever since then
+there have been some fine golfing men working to what they were sure
+would be a successful end, chief among them being Mr. R. C. R. Young,
+who in the capacity of honorary secretary has been largely responsible
+for the general management of the club. Lately the round has been
+extended from nine holes to eighteen, Mr. Young and Doig, the
+professional, having done the planning of the new holes, and with this
+the golf of Rome enters upon a new era. The club flourishes, the golfing
+community, partly Roman, partly British, and partly American, is
+zealous, and the people there have come to believe that even the most
+serious, studious, and high-minded folk who go to Rome to steep
+themselves in living history of the past need for their refreshment some
+antidote to ruins. "St. Peter's, and the Colosseum, the Forum and the
+baths of Caracalla," said one of them to me, "will bring the foreigners
+to Rome, but only golf will keep them there!" Count this for weakness
+in man, and for his utter modernity if you like; but it is the truth.
+Consequently the golf of Rome is entering upon a new forward movement. I
+think that when the public in distant places comes to realise that the
+golf of Rome is half as good as it really is, thousands and thousands
+more will go to Rome than do so now, to play upon the Campagna, and
+during the time to gather to their souls a scent of the glory of the
+ancient mistress of the world. I have a vision of Rome becoming a
+headquarters of continental golf in the near future.
+
+On a morning after some days among the ruins--such a glorious morning,
+with the Italian sun burning gold amid a heavenly blue--two noble Romans
+came in their chariot for a barbarian wanderer at his hotel at half-past
+nine. They were not real Romans, but Augustus could have played their
+part of host no better, and a forty-horse-power car moved us towards the
+Campagna more speedily than the best of chariots. Away we went by the
+foot of the Equilinus, down the Via Emanuele Filiberto, through the gate
+of St. John Lateran in the Aurelian wall, and then straight on. In a few
+minutes we were at Acqua Santa and inside the club-house. Of all the
+club-houses in the world, this is surely one of the most curious and
+interesting. It is an old farm-house, skilfully adapted to its purpose,
+and we shall be sorry if in the course of time and a grand extension of
+the golf at Rome it is given up for anything more palatial and
+conventional. Here in an upper room we take the necessary nourishment in
+a simple way, and among other liquid refreshments there is the real
+_acqua santa_ itself, a pleasantly bitter and quite delicious water that
+is drawn from a spring by a farm-house at a corner of the course. In
+days gone by the water was considered, perhaps not without good reason,
+to have splendid curative properties, and popes of Rome came to it and
+blessed it accordingly. I believe that one of them derived some healing
+benefit from it. And now, as we think of popes and cardinals, we recall
+that one of the latter, Cardinal Merry del Val, had some kind of a
+course in his private grounds, and so far he has been the only cardinal
+golfer. Once before he died a scheme was afoot for a visit by him to the
+course at Acqua Santa. In a good and sensible and honest way the golf
+club of Rome is already a considerable social centre. Perhaps some day
+the King of Italy--already patron of the club--will join himself to the
+majority of kings and become a golfer too. A leading member of the
+famous historical family of Colonna, Don Prospero Colonna, is president,
+and a number of the most eminent people of Rome are among the members.
+Princes and princesses, counts and countesses, ambassadors of nearly all
+countries, and American millionaires may be found playing the game
+regularly at Acqua Santa. The keenest golfer of them all is Dr. Wayman
+Cushman, who is handicapped at plus 4, an American who spends half his
+year in Maine and the other half in Rome, where he plays golf nearly
+every day. The Americans are strong in the golf of Rome, and some of the
+young Italians are showing excellent form. There is one of them, Don
+Francesca Ruspoli, educated in England and son of a Roman father and
+American mother, of whom great golfing things are expected.
+
+Really this is an excellent course; but the full merit of it will hardly
+be appreciated in the first round or the second, for the wonderful views
+and the special points of interest in them will constantly interfere
+with concentration on the strokes and thought upon the scheme for
+reaching the putting green. Standing upon the first teeing ground and
+pondering for a moment upon the carry to be made across the little
+valley in front, the panorama begins at once to suggest its superior
+claims. Leftwards are the Apennines, opalescent in the morning mist,
+capped with snow upon their peaks. There are the Alban Hills, where the
+shepherds were born who followed Romulus on the Palatine, and at the end
+of the range is Monte Cavo, on the top of which are the ruins of the
+temple of the god of the Latin races, living in the Latium, the ground
+between the mountains and the sea. On the wine-yielding bosom of these
+shining hills there lies sparkling white in the morning sun the village
+of Frascati. There are the Sabine Hills with Tivoli, and away in another
+direction there is Mount Soracte, well said to look out there like a
+wave in a stormy sea. Up into our middle distance on the left-hand side,
+on the fringe of the course, are the splendid ruins of the Claudian
+aqueduct which stretch right across the Campagna, one lonely pile coming
+close up to our sixteenth green alongside which the Via Appia Nuova
+stretches, with two famous umbrella pines helping on the scene.
+
+There is so much for a beginning, and more views press upon us as we
+advance along the course. The play is opened with a good hole of drive
+and iron length, the second brings us back again with a drive and a
+pitch, and then away we go to the left with one of the cunningest
+seconds to be played across twin streams, making this third hole of Rome
+one of the most exacting in the way of approach that is to be found in
+Italy or even in the whole of Europe. When we come to the sixth we play
+up to the summit of a high tableland, and as we ascend the hill we pluck
+from the turf some of the freshest, prettiest crocuses that have ever
+grown, the course being as nearly thick with them in March as North
+Berwick is with daisies in the month of May. And from these heights what
+a view again over towards the city of Rome! Out along that way there is
+the tomb of Cecilia Metella, Crassus' wife, and away on the boundary
+there is the church of St. John Lateran and the great dome of St.
+Peter's. If golf is a royal and ancient game, here is a setting for it.
+Near to the eighth hole we turned aside to the ruins of an ancient Roman
+villa, and Santino, my little Italian caddie, with finger excavation,
+gathered some morsels of polished marble which may have touched the feet
+of Roman ladies in those great days of old. The line of the tenth comes
+close to one of those deep-cut streams that flow to feed the hungry
+Tiber, and in some ways this hole reminds us of the fourth at Prestwick
+where the Pow Burn insinuates itself close to the golfer's way. At our
+backs when we stand on the eleventh tee is a cave that might serve for
+robbers but which really makes an excellent shelter, and it was related
+that a few weeks before my time in Rome three ambassadors, being the
+British, the American, and the Austrian, were seen to sit in there and
+shelter. And who then shall say that, if "only a game," golf has no
+possibilities and powers in such high crafts as diplomacy? The twelfth
+is an excellent hole, and so are they all. The sixteenth takes us
+winding round a big bend between a hill and a stream and then faces us
+full to the putting green, which has the Claudian ruins for a
+background. The play concludes with a seventeenth which has a putting
+green very shrewdly placed, and an eighteenth where the second shot is
+played through a little valley, these ending holes abounding in golfing
+beauty and character.
+
+There is to be said of this course, and in the most sober and
+well-considered judgment by one who has seen golf in many lands, that
+there is scarcely an inland course anywhere that seems more naturally
+adapted to the game. Each hole has strong character of its own; I could
+remember them all after but a single round. Some time soon they will
+make an attempt at Acqua Santa to carry their putting greens on from one
+season to the next, and then they will get a thickness and trueness and
+quality that greens can gain in no other way. The golfers of Rome are
+keen, and they have energy and enterprise. A great future awaits this
+club and course, and I believe that when more money is spent on it, as
+will be soon, it will be in nearly every thinkable way the most
+attractive course on the Continent. The mood that gathers about one when
+in Rome tends to taking the game rather more seriously and thoughtfully
+than at the Mediterranean resorts; it becomes a real recreation, the
+refreshing change. The club's nearness and convenience to the city are
+very good. It is but a few minutes' journey by either train or tram from
+the heart of Rome to the club-house, near which there is a special
+golfers' railway station.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A Franciscan friar was the first to point out to me the situation of the
+nine holes of Florence--nine plain fair holes, though they have nothing
+of architectural beauty in them, not a trace of feeling, nothing of the
+mediaeval glow of spirit that separates this city from all others in the
+world, hardly a touch of imagination in their two or three thousand
+yards. Yet they serve their modern purpose well. For six days and six
+nights the rain had poured down upon the dripping Firenze from
+inexhaustible clouds; the saucer in which the city is laid emptied its
+floods into the Arno until, dirtier and more turbulent than usual, the
+big stream tumbled itself violently through the bridges. We wandered
+through the Uffizi Galleries and the Pitti Palace and the Bargello of
+courtyard fame. There is nothing in the world like sweet Florence, and
+it is a hopeless soul that feels no spark of artistic fire crackle for
+at least one inspiring moment when the glories of this city that was
+born and lived to the human expression of beauty are contemplated. But
+an incessant rain provokes a bold defiance; there almost seemed to be a
+weakness in such constant shelter, and I remembered a suggestion that
+was sent to me from a far distance--"Go up to Fiesole if you can." So in
+the car I went to Fiesole. We went out of the town and by San Gervasio,
+and wound past San Domenico, and twisted our way up the hill until, with
+five miles done, or it may have been a little more, the old Etruscan
+town, with the fragment of an ancient wall, was reached. At the very
+summit, where once a Roman castle stood, there is the Franciscan
+monastery. A brother in his umbrian gown looked meditatively outwards
+from the porch, and he was gracious and friendly when I told him I would
+like to go inside. From a loggia within we looked out upon one of the
+finest panoramic views of its kind. The rain had ceased. Grass was seen
+upon the Etruscan hills, tentacles of the Apennines came clear again
+through dissolving mists, and a golden light flamed up in the western
+sky. And in its peaceful hollow there lay Florence, the palace of art, a
+mediaeval jewel glistening there like a mosaic in white and terra cotta,
+with its great duomo in many-coloured marbles lording it over the
+lowlier piles. Florence! Sweeping the valley with a glance, the monk
+turned towards the north-east and, leaning upon a wall, he pointed with
+his right hand and said, "Pisa!" Over there was the city of the leaning
+tower and the baptistery with the amazing echo. But in the nearer
+distance there was a square patch of vivid green, and I traced its
+situation along there by the course of the Arno, by the Cascine, and
+other landmarks, and made nearly sure of what it was. The thought was
+incongruous at the time, nearly inexcusable, but yet there is little in
+golf that is vulgar after all, and it could not be denied that there was
+the golf course out that way. By some careful questions I gained
+confirmation from the friar. I told him I looked for a place, a special
+place, whose locality I described precisely. And he held out his hand
+again. The golf course was nearly in the line of Pisa.
+
+While so many things in Florence are four or five hundred years old at
+least, the golf course is only fifteen. Still, fifteen years makes a
+good maturity in these times, and Italy, if its courses are few, has
+some distinctions among them. Many continental courses depend for their
+attraction on their setting. Those of Florence and Rome have the most
+perfect setting conceivable, but while the course of Rome could live on
+its merits had there been no Rome, the course of Florence never could.
+Yet the city helps it out, and, though poor be the holes, here we have
+indeed one of the most enthusiastic little golf communities one might
+ever wish to mix among. The club is captained by Mr. J. W. Spalding,
+head of the great athletic business firm, who has ceased to live in
+America and lives now wholly in Florence, which he would hardly do were
+it not for this golf course, on which he plays nearly every day. Mr.
+Spalding is a fine example of the keen and determined golfer. A few
+years ago, in a terrible motor-car smash in Italy, he lost completely
+the sight of one eye. As soon as the surgeons and the doctors let him
+loose again he hurried to his favourite course at Florence and--think of
+it!--at once he won the scratch gold medal. He is a scratch man now, and
+plays as well as ever.
+
+These and many other things I learned on the day after the monk had
+pointed out to me the direction of the nine holes of Florence, when I
+went along to San Donato to make a closer view of them, to drive and
+putt at them. The golfers of Florence are a good company, managed with
+zeal by Signor Mavrogordato, in the capacity of honorary secretary. They
+are as keen and interested in their game as if they were at Sandwich,
+and they have a miniature club-house situated on a spot of land that has
+a cemented water-filled moat all round it, those who would enter having
+to pass over a little rustic bridge. The holes are plain with artificial
+cross bunkers, and the architecture is of what might be called the low
+Victorian school. One of the features of the course is a couple of tall
+trees that stand up in the middle with thin straight trunks parallel to
+each other, looking for all the world like Rugby football goal-posts.
+One great advantage that this course has is that it is splendidly
+convenient to the city. Take a tram-car No. 17 labelled "Cascine" from
+one particular corner of the cathedral square, say "Golf" to the
+conductor, pay him a penny for the fare, and the rest is inevitable. In
+a quarter of an hour you will be deposited at a junction in the roads by
+the barrier of Ponte alle Mosse, and two minutes' walk from there takes
+you to the iron gates which give admission to the course.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is the beautiful bay at Naples, and Pompeii, and a short voyage on
+the steamboat to the sweet isle of Capri; but golf has not yet come to
+Naples, though it will do so soon. When we travelled down there from
+Rome we were aboard a train that was taken by many of the Naples members
+of the Italian Parliament who were going home for the week-end--the
+"deputies' train" they often call that six o'clock from Rome. They had
+been having a fearful week of it, wrangling about their recent Libyan
+war and the cost of it, and their nerves were in rather a jagged state.
+I fell into conversation with one of them, and he said that he wished
+he were a golfer, as from all that he had heard and understood it was
+the real and only thing for the soothing of a deputy after such
+scrimmaging and scratching as they had been having in the Chamber that
+weary week. He asked questions about our Parliamentary golfers, and was
+informed about Mr. Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and all the
+others. I told this honourable member for Naples that nearly all our
+Parliamentarians played the greatest game of all, and that the Mother of
+Parliaments was all the better for it. He was impressed. He said there
+should be golf at Naples by the time I went there again--even if it was
+set there for the benefit of the tired members only!
+
+Above all things, Venice is a place for reflection, and when we are
+there we think of all things we have seen and done in Italy, and shape
+exactly the impressions that have been made. One time there were two or
+three of us in a gondola. The crescent of a seven days' moon hung among
+the stars in the Venetian night. The gentle regular plash that was made
+by Giovanni Cerchieri, our gondolier (and be it said that his gondola is
+the blackest and smartest and most finely dignified of all that glide on
+the Grand Canal), as he swung backwards and forwards to his work behind
+us, with a sigh or a murmur that might have swollen to a real boat-song
+had we encouraged it, was nearly the only sound on the still waters. And
+in this Venetian night, an hour after the coffee, we were in the mood of
+men who feel that they are soon to return to the cold hard facts of
+life. The rest of Venice might go to glory; we, soothed amid such ease
+and comfort as might have satisfied a doge, turned our thoughts to the
+links of home. There was nothing incongruous in the association of ideas
+and facts. Venice we found to be splendid for meditation, and any place
+with such a quality, like the top of a mountain, or the side of a
+purling stream, is a fine one for golfing consideration and conjecture.
+One man would talk of art, of pictures, and of sculpture; another would
+stupidly keep to golf. And then a compromise was suggested, when it was
+said that a question had once been asked as to whether there was such a
+thing as style in golf!
+
+Any thoughtful player who ever had any doubt upon this matter--but, of
+course, no thoughtful player ever could--would have it dispelled if he
+went to Italy even though he never played a game, did not take his
+clubs, and never saw a golf course there. It were indeed better for his
+education in this matter that he should not play when on Italian ground,
+for one would not expect to find on the courses there the best examples
+of golfing style. The fact of style in golf would come home to him when
+he wandered through the galleries and looked upon all the magnificent
+sculptures that are among the matchless treasures of the country, though
+there is no study of a golfing swing among them. I do not see how any
+player of the game who is thoughtful and contemplative can go to Italy
+and fail to be enormously impressed with the lessons that are silently
+delivered from the sculpture in the galleries and museums of Rome,
+Florence, and other cities. In hundreds of pieces here we see the
+suggestion of beauty put forward in every movement and exercise of the
+human body, and particularly when the frame is being brought to some
+considerable physical effort, when the limbs are being placed upon the
+strain, are grace and rhythm and style exhibited to us, and with them
+there is the suggestion always of the extreme of power. There is
+indicated the close relationship between exact and graceful poise,
+perfect balance, and supreme controlled and concentrated force. The very
+utmost efficiency is always suggested in all this artistic balance. As
+the art is better and more appealing, so the suggestion of power is
+increased and the marble almost seems to break with life.
+
+Considered in this way, what a fine thing is the "David" of Bernini in
+the Borghese Gallery! But for our golfing suggestion some of the
+discobolus models serve us better. Without ever having attempted to
+throw a discus, one may very well understand that success at such an
+exercise depends almost wholly upon perfect balance and accurate
+concentration of force and true rhythmical movement, and in the models
+in the Vatican and the National Museums in Rome and elsewhere we see how
+it might be done. The discobolus of Myron, reconstructed as it has been,
+and with the head made to face in the wrong direction, so they say, is a
+magnificent thing. In the National Gallery of Rome they have made a
+reconstruction from a fragment of another, and they have made the figure
+to look sideways and half upwards to the discus held at arm's length
+behind him ready for the throw, whereas in the Myron the face is to the
+front and the eyes are down. (Though one may know nothing at all about
+the ways in which the discs were really thrown, or what is the best way
+to throw them, one is hardly convinced of the desirability of disturbing
+the head in the back-swing of the arm and letting the eyes follow the
+object in the hand. Surely concentration would be impeded and balance
+suffer.) But in these images we see the intensity of the relation
+between style and power, and we realise that if there were no style in
+golf there ought to be, and the next moment, that of all modern games
+golf is a game of style and nothing else. Perhaps you may play it
+without style, but then it is not the same thing, and it can never be so
+thoroughly effective and precise. Unconsciously, perhaps, James Braid
+had style in his mind when he said that at the top of the swing the
+golfer should feel like a spring coiled up to its fullest tension,
+straining for the release. That is just what the discobolus suggests,
+and the golfer gets the fullest enjoyment from the game, the supreme
+physical thrills, when he feels this high tension for a moment and then
+its even, smooth, and quick escape, and he cannot feel it so when he has
+no style and all his movements and positions have not been made in
+perfect harmony. Some may say that the actions of the discobolus were
+probably not so very fine as the sculptors have made them out to be, and
+that much of the shape is merely artist's fancy, but probably they are
+fairly true to life. If they are not, one cannot contemplate them for
+more than a few moments without feeling that life ought to be true to
+them. The golfer in the suggestion of grace and power, as in the models
+that have been cut of Harry Vardon at the top and end of his driving
+swing, reaches some way towards the discobolus.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN
+MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES.
+
+
+"When we were in Madrid----" I have sometimes begun in conversation, and
+then invariably from one or more in the company there has been a quick
+interruption with--"But there can be no golf in Madrid! You do not go to
+Spain for golf!" But one who knows may answer that there is as good
+reason to go there for it as to most other places out of Britain, that
+in different parts of Spain there is fair golf to be had, that in Madrid
+there is a new course which is excellent and embraces some of the
+prettiest holes we would ever wish to play after passing by the
+Pyrenees, and that I have found there Spanish gentlemen to play with who
+have been among the happiest and most agreeable companions and opponents
+I have encountered. In a reflection upon my own experiences I dare to
+say that I would recommend a doubtful stranger to go to Spain only if he
+is a golfer, for by the agency of the game will the life and facts of
+the country be best presented to him, and mysteries be explained. The
+magic passport of golf is indispensable in all such circumstances. The
+truth is that it was golf that led me to Spain on my second visit to the
+country, and I had then one of the most interesting and instructive
+holidays I have had in my travelling life, during which I had the
+opportunity of seeing something of the inside of Spanish life and
+government, of discovering truth about the forces that work in the
+regeneration of this old country, for really an awakening is taking
+place, and one dares to say the firm establishment of golf is a symbol
+of it. I had some interesting conversations with the Count Romanones,
+who was then the Prime Minister, with his brother, who is the Duke of
+Tovar, a man of broad sympathies who takes a leading part in many social
+movements of high importance in Madrid, and with other persons of much
+importance. These talks, with the open sight of all that was passing in
+Madrid, made a deep impression.
+
+"You are a golfer, and we of Spain may give you some good golf to play!"
+said the Prime Minister cordially when by invitation I called upon him
+at his palace in the Paseo de la Castellana. He is a man of forcible
+appearance and manner. The face is thin, and its lines of character are
+strong--cold and strong. The aquiline features have something of
+Spanish--no Italian--fierceness about them, and the Count makes a
+piercing look which is considered discomforting to nervous strangers.
+But he is a very attractive companion in talk; his verve, his vivacity
+are wonderful. When discussing a subject in which he is interested his
+whole being becomes aflame; eyes sparkle and features quiver; he beats
+his fingers in the palms of his hands; he leans over towards you and
+gesticulates like an artist in enthusiasm. A man of hot nervous energy,
+one of keen purpose and determination is this statesman of Spain. He
+suggested that the new sports of his country were symbolic of her great
+awakening, of which he said he would talk to me that I might tell others
+what Spain is now and what she would be. "Europe does not understand my
+country," he remarked, "True, there has been little occasion to
+understand her. But a change occurs. Spain at this moment is passing
+through a most remarkable process of transition. You are right in a
+suggestion you have made to me; unsuccessful wars do not cause
+interminable loss and disasters. The war with the United States was not
+all bad for Spain. We may have lost Cuba, but the development that has
+taken place since then in our country at home, in its agriculture and
+its mining, and again in its healthy natural feeling, has been enormous,
+and is a good substitute for many islands." And then he went on in a
+deeply interesting conversation to tell me of the great awakening of
+Spain indicated in many different ways, and of all her political,
+social, and other ambitions.
+
+The Duke of Tovar, who is also coming to take an interest in the golf of
+Spain, smoked his cigar on a divan in his palace, and a Moorish boy
+brought coffee to us. The Duke travels much, and brings things and
+people back with him. I see that he has been an ambassador-extraordinary
+to the Pope of Rome and has received the most gracious papal thanks. A
+little of a statesman, he is much of an artist, and a marble bust of
+Alfonso _rex_, his own sculpture, casts a shadow beside us. In
+innumerable ways this Spanish nobleman associates himself with the life
+of the people, goes among them, attends their meetings, and he began
+telling me that one of the secrets of the new Spain was the important
+fact of the nobles taking to business, becoming the promoters and
+managers of industrial companies, as they were. He told me of dukes who
+were doing things. One of the new movements, in which he has assisted to
+his utmost and thoroughly believes in, is the boy scout movement, which
+has caught on like wildfire in Madrid. Three thousand Spanish boys were
+enrolled within a few weeks of the establishment of the system in the
+city, and the Duke became a president of a section. All class
+distinctions are avoided in this matter. "My son is going with the son
+of the porter," said the Duke of Tovar. And he most certainly believed
+in golf for the people, and would tell me stories of its beginning and
+its development.
+
+As to Madrid, never was such a quick transformation accomplished in any
+city of the world, save when 'Frisco perished and was made again, as is
+being done here in the city on the plateau of Castile. The Spaniards
+having decided on the regeneration of their country and on persuading
+foreigners to come to it, have determined they must have a capital
+befitting a first-class power. The result is that Madrid is being torn
+to pieces and rebuilt. Everywhere there is a fever of building raging.
+Think of it: but three years ago and there was not a single first-class
+hotel in Madrid; now there are two fine ones. The Alcala, where the
+Madrilenos stroll and mount up the hill to the Puerta del Sol, the great
+bare square where the idlers lounge, where the bull-fighting papers are
+sold, where there are many offices for the sale of lottery tickets,
+where there are cafes and yellow tramcars (run by Belgian companies, if
+you please!) and much life but no gaiety until very late at night, is
+soon to be deposed from being chief street of Madrid, for they are
+making a new ideal street, very wide and one mile long, which is cut
+straight through the heart of the city and is to be called the Gran Via
+when it is done. Millions and millions of pesetas' worth of property
+have been demolished to allow for the straightness of this street, which
+is to ask for comparison with a part of the Fifth Avenue across the
+water. Thirty-seven millions of pesetas were lately voted by the
+Municipal Council for the removal of the cobble stones of Madrid, their
+places to be taken by asphalte and wood. The cobbles of Madrid are
+picturesque; they make good harmony with those antique watchmen who seem
+to have been reincarnated from our own eighteenth-century London,
+walking the slumberous streets at night, lanterns in their hands and
+jangling bunches of giant keys suspended from their girdles, their
+business being to open the outside doors of blocks of flats for
+late-returning occupiers who in an unthinking languorous way of Spain
+would carry no keys, but leave the affair of their homecoming to the
+fortune of the night, the vigilance of the watchman, and the blessing of
+Providence. But the cobbles are not convenient. They are seldom
+repaired, and even in such a spacious public place as the Prado, which
+is a kind of Hyde Park Corner, there are sometimes deep holes which fill
+with water when it rains and make such pools as ducks might like and
+dogs would drink, but which take a leg of mine some way upwards to the
+knee when the night is dark. There was an old Madrid of which trills of
+love and passion have been sung. Fevered lovers sang to ladies whose
+lips were red, and whose skin was dark, as their hearts were
+gay--voluptuous women. Guitars and flowers; blood and life. That Madrid
+has nearly passed away. A few steep and narrow streets and some dirty
+open spaces, with little of the delicate charm of age to recommend them,
+are most of what is left of it in a quarter near to the royal palace.
+The city of later times, the Madrid of to-day, is already and quickly
+giving way to a third Madrid which will soon be made.
+
+In this that I have written I may seem to neglect my theme, and yet the
+state of Spain does most closely concern the strange case of golf in the
+country. Here is an answer to interrupters who are quick to say that one
+does not go to Madrid for golf. When Spain was all romance and colour,
+all dirt and laziness, it was no place for games like this. Bicycles
+were not popular then because they had to be pedalled ceaselessly, or
+the riders would fall: they, being as symbols of action, did not permit
+of lounging or a little slumber. In the days of the first and second
+Madrids, athletics could not be contemplated; the corrida was supreme
+and solitary for Spanish "sport." Now there is an athletic movement.
+There are many football clubs; there is a national cup competition and
+the King has given the cup. Still the corrida flourishes, but it is
+threatened. In the new movement for the third Madrid there are social
+clubs such as we have in London. There is an inclination for strong,
+healthy sport, and the King encourages it with all his royal might and
+influence. Don Alfonso has been the good leader of the royal game in
+Spain. The main point is that golf in these days is a token of a
+healthier disposition and a new progress, and it is a strong influence
+upon character. In the old Spain such a sport as this was quite
+impossible; now it grows, and, to me as one who has considered the birth
+and rise of golf in many countries, the case of Spain is deeply
+interesting. When I went there I remembered what some of the thoughtful
+and candid Americans had said about this game exerting a needed and
+subtle influence upon their own national character. It is such
+influences that are needed in Spain, and I shall go again among the
+Madrilenos to see this one in the working. Already they have courses,
+nice and tolerable, in Barcelona, Bilbao, and many other provincial
+places. When I went to San Sebastian, one of the most beautiful and
+fully equipped seaside resorts in the whole world, the municipal
+authorities assured me that they felt a fear that the bull-fights were
+becoming a doubtful attraction to foreign visitors, and they were giving
+their attention to the establishment of a municipal golf course. It
+will be the first municipal golf course on the continent of Europe.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let me plunge to my revelation and state that Madrid, in New Castile,
+land of the toreador, country where so much of the Middle Ages does yet
+survive, where games till lately have been almost unknown, this Madrid
+comes now to be possessed of such a first-class course as might be the
+envy of many a British seaside resort. While I lingered in the city
+Senor Fabricio de Potestad, one of the most active members of the
+general committee of the Madrid Golf Club, and of its green committee
+too, was a kind counsellor and guide. Just as might happen at home,
+while at breakfast at the Ritz there came to me notice that the car was
+waiting. Senor de Potestad, his clubs and mine inside the car, had the
+golfer's expectancy upon a genial Spanish countenance, rubbed hands, and
+declared it was a fine day for the game. We sped away from the Prado,
+and considered handicaps and odds as golfers must. But first we went for
+object lessons in the progress of Spanish golf. Three or four miles out
+we reached the hippodrome where some nine years back the game was born.
+Don Alfonso had been learning golf in England; he had striven with it in
+a left-handed way while he wooed a British princess in the Isle of
+Wight, and he gave a Spanish decoration then to the professional who
+showed him how to hold his hands and where to put his feet. Then nine
+simple stupid little holes were laid out in this hippodrome, and there
+they still remain as relics of the earliest age in the golf history of
+this country, the uncultured time when the ball was missed, the days
+when a hole in nine might have been considered good and a seven enough
+to make the soul of a great grandee quiver with a new found joy. Three
+Spaniards stood forward with the King as the pioneers of Spanish golf,
+and still they are among its leaders. There was a great sportsman, the
+Duke of Alva, president of the club; there was the Marquis de Santa
+Cruz, and there was the Senor Pedro Caro, perhaps the only Spanish
+golfer of early times besides Don Alfonso himself who learned his
+strokes and swings in England, where he was schooled, and who with the
+Count de la Cimera and the Count Cuevas de Vera, cousin of my guide, is
+one of the three best players of Spain. Two of them are Spanish scratch,
+and the Count de la Cimera lately achieved the distinction of being the
+first of his land to rise to the eminence of plus one. Thus you may
+perceive that the golf of Spain is helped by the best people, and that
+is not because it is fashionable, and it is not only because the King
+has shown a liking for it, but because the Spaniards have found in it a
+quick fascination, an awakening pastime, such a strong diversion from
+the often heavy life of their country as they had not imagined. Had you
+seen, as I did, the Duke of Aliaga bunkered one afternoon before a high
+steep cliff in front of the eighteenth green on the second oldest course
+of Madrid; had you seen him pensive as he felt the extraneous sorrows of
+a Spanish nobleman of riches and high station; had you seen the gleam of
+gladness in two Spanish eyes when the ball was heaved somehow to the top
+in one (the gods may know how he managed it; but we said to him that it
+was a splendid shot, and I do believe it was!) you would not doubt that
+golf was meant for Spain as these people declare it was--"the thing of
+all others that we needed," so they say.
+
+This second oldest course, the "old course" as they begin to call it
+now, marks the transition period of Spanish golf. It is not the
+primeval course of the hippodrome, but one which was made in 1907 at a
+place apart and a little farther along the road. The land is worth a
+million and three-quarters of pesetas now when Madrid has become so much
+bigger than it was, and the course falls within the city zone; and as
+the players became educated they yearned for something better, and they
+moved again. But fond memories will cling for long enough to this old
+course of Spain; with a little help from fancy one may look upon it even
+now as a kind of old Blackheath of Spanish golf. There is a small
+club-house with dining-room, dressing-rooms and all complete, in quite
+the English way, on a spot of rising ground, and from the verandah we
+may look over a part of the course, with a short hole to begin with and
+some curious bunkering here and there, with a highly modern attempt to
+adopt the system of humps-and-hollows bunkering that has been so well
+established on inland courses at home. Somehow one gathers the
+impression that the Spaniards have been striving all the time towards
+some kind of indistinct ideal, realising that the sport they had
+discovered was a great one and trying to improve their practice of it.
+And I recall that it was J. H. Taylor, the old designer, the old
+constructor, the quintuple champion, who was pioneer in the planning of
+courses in Madrid, and he laid out this one of eighteen holes very well
+for the early Spanish golfers.
+
+One of the curiosities of the course is the putting green at the
+eleventh hole, which is quite round and is surrounded by an evenly
+shaped earthen rampart. On seeing it for the first time the average
+Englishman observes to the Spaniard who is with him, "How like a
+bull-ring!" The remark is justifiable and it seems appropriate; but the
+Spanish gentleman has heard it many times. Playing the bull-ring hole is
+a satisfying experience, most exceedingly contenting. We play what we
+shall consider a perfect approach shot to our Plaza de Toros hole. The
+ball is pitched into the ring just over the near side of the barricade.
+A big bound and it is by the hole side, a smaller skip and it is away to
+the other side of the circle, and then there is one nervous little jump
+up towards that enclosing height. The perplexed ball seems in our fancy
+to claw up the steep slope, which is about four or five feet high; it
+nearly reaches the top. We, the player, feel a little pitter-patter in
+the heart. Is that little white bull of a ball of ours going to get over
+the fence and spoil the thing? It should not; we pitched him as nicely
+as human skill could ever pitch. He is vicious; but he is spent. The gay
+life which he had at the beginning of the stroke is flickering out. He
+cannot escape. Our cuadrilla of one, the little Spanish lad with the bag
+of clubs, advances and hands the putter, taking back the mashie which
+has done its business. The ball comes trickling back from the bank--back
+and back, and it comes on to within some seven or eight feet of the side
+of the hole. Then it falters and stops, done for. Meanwhile there is
+another white bull of a ball only four feet away; this also had come
+back from the bank, but a little more. I, as an espada, take my steel
+putter for the finishing touch. I see the line, I have the momentary
+hesitation, the nerves are tightened, and then I make the stroke, and
+happily it is a good one. The ball has gone down. In truth both balls go
+down, and "Four, senor!" and "Four--a half, _amigo_!" and the play to
+the eleventh hole of old Madrid is done. Even if there is a slope to the
+hole and there is the bull-ring rampart round it, we say that a four at
+this piece of golf is good. We also argue out that bull-ring with our
+consciences. I have seen nothing like it. It was clearly the object of
+those who made it to pen the ball up towards the hole, to make the golf
+a little easier, for it was found to be hard enough (as you and I have
+found it hard enough at home) to catch the ball and keep it and lead it
+to its hole. This hole, the rampart, seems to be a concession to the
+frail humanity of man. Conscience murmurs chidingly, "You know, you
+English golfer, that you should never have been so near to that Spanish
+pin! You should have been bunkered, my friend, perhaps badly bunkered,
+beyond the green!" But being in Spain, and doing as Spaniards do, we are
+a little independent, have a freedom of idea, and with some peevishness
+of manner, an arrogance, a way as of telling conscience to attend its
+other business and get back to London--where in some places they do
+place bunkers and hills upon the greens to keep the golfer, as it seems,
+from holing out at all--I retort, "I played a good shot anyhow; I only
+just pitched over the bull-ring fence; I pitched the ball up high and
+let it drop straight down, and cut every leg from it that it ever had.
+No man could do better with the ground so hard. It was right that the
+ball should come back."
+
+I shall hope that with their attachment to a new love that is so
+beautiful and good, the Spaniards will not give up their old course here
+that has served them faithfully and brought on their game. Besides, it
+is a course that is pretty in its situation. Away beyond, many miles
+away, are those snow-topped Guadarrama Mountains, fine rough things.
+Though it was March, and untruths are told about the wickedness of the
+Spanish climate, we lunched with Senora Elena de Potestad in the open
+outside the club-house in warm sunshine glistening on a pretty scene.
+Senora Elena is quite the best lady golfer of Spain; but writing the
+truth as she told it, the charming wife of my friend is not Spanish, but
+is a Russian lady from Khieff. I suspect her of being the best Russian
+lady golfer and the best Spanish too; it is curious. She has done the
+first nine holes here at Madrid in something less than bogey. Next to
+her on the championship list is the Marquesa de Alamoncid de los Oteros,
+six strokes behind. Queen Victoria sometimes plays, and I have seen that
+extremely popular lady of Spain, the Infanta Isabella, golfing here with
+the professional and a maid of honour. The game is doing well with the
+ladies of the peninsula; they like it. I had a gentle argument with the
+Senora Elena, who seemed a little doubtful whether golf were quite a
+ladies' game, for all her own skill and love for it. She pleaded the
+other feminine occupations and interests, even the distractions, and the
+difficulty of surrendering to the tyranny of golf. In her view it seemed
+to be of the ladies' life a thing apart, while we have known it to be a
+man's complete existence.
+
+As our speedy car skimmed the road on the way back to Madrid that night,
+Senor Fabricio would talk of the good influence of the game, and the
+special benefits that it might and did confer upon his hopeful
+countrymen. "Twelve years ago," he reflected, "I might meet all my
+friends at the corrida. All were for the bull fight--and the ladies too.
+But now--if I went myself, as I do not--I should see none. They are all
+for golf. At my club in Madrid we say one to another about the time of
+lunch, 'Do you go to golf this afternoon?' It used to be, 'I suppose you
+go to the corrida, eh?'" One thinks and wonders.
+
+I took tea in the lounge at the Ritz, and gossiped with a man who had
+just come along from Portugal and told me of some exciting times they
+had been having there. They had decided on having more golf, and were
+about to make a municipal matter of it near Lisbon. Hitherto, as I knew,
+they had had only one golf course in the whole country, and that was at
+a place called Espinho, some eleven miles out from Oporto, and it was
+said that bulls intended for the fights were fed up there and did their
+roaming exercise on this course. It is not a comfortable idea. The new
+course is out at Belem on the banks of the Tagus near to Lisbon, and
+this is the exact place at which Vasco de Gama landed on returning from
+his greatest voyage of discovery. It is an eighteen-holes course; it has
+been well planned; and much money is being spent on it. The Portuguese
+having started a new form of government and begun a new national
+life--as they hope--have come quickly to the conclusion that they need
+golf and much of it, for already a second course for Lisbon is being
+arranged, and there are to be others in different parts of the country.
+If King Manoel goes back, he will be prepared for them, for he has
+cultivated a fair game at Richmond.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the evening we went to stroll among the cafes of Madrid, and
+presently peered into the old parts of the city, where life is simple
+and strong, where the humbler Madrilenos resort, and there are dancing
+entertainments of a strange kind. On a little stage there is some
+jingling music worked out from a bad piano, and a troupe of girls with
+some gypsies among them will make a dance that, for all its art and all
+its naivete, is somewhat coarse. Other girls will sit round them in a
+semicircle and keep up a kind of barbarous wail, occasionally bursting
+into a mock shout of approval. A song will follow, and a chorus with it,
+and by and by the entertainers will descend and drink wine with the
+people in the cafe, and all this will continue until the night is very
+late. But out in the Puerta del Sol the lights are bright and there is
+more gaiety than there has ever been. So we wandering golfers, reckless
+of the game of the day that follows (after all we are to give a bagful
+of strokes to these Spaniards and can beat them yet--but not always, one
+remembers), turn in to one of the music halls which have three shows a
+night, the third beginning at midnight, and we see La Argentinita dance,
+see the rumba done. Then down the Alcala and over the Prado home. We
+shall insist that this is a part of our golf in old Madrid; it is not
+the conventional golfing holiday, as I try to show. Another day we will
+run out for many miles to El Escorial (thanking the Duke of Tovar for
+the offer of his car) and ruminate in this most sombre architectural
+creation of the great Philip--palace, monastery and tomb in one--and
+another day out to Toledo, a grand dead city of a long past of many
+phases and eras, a mummified city it seems to be, with halls and places
+that look sometimes as if they had but just been left by the rich grand
+caballeros of the time when Spain was great. You can nearly see their
+ghosts, gay in satins and crimson silks, leaning over flowered
+balconies, singing, kissing, laughing, and always living.
+
+I dislike the corrida. It is horrible. Its time has gone. I had enough
+of it once when south at Algeciras. But a Spanish golfing companion said
+that it was a very special day, and for the experience, and as a matter
+of being guest, I should go. There were eight bulls done instead of six,
+and horses in proportion, and a county councillor of Madrid took us
+behind all the scenes, into the hospital, into the matador's chapel, and
+explained everything. He was a courteous gentleman. He said they would
+have golf in Madrid, that the corrida would leave in time, but for the
+present the people must have the corrida. It takes time to make great
+changes, he said, even in Madrid--where it does take more time for
+movements than anywhere else. But the point of this reference is the
+harsh contrast that is indicated--our peaceful game of golf in which
+nothing is killed, no blood spilled, nobody hurt, and yet, as we think,
+the greatest, fullest sport of all, stirring the emotions better than
+any corrida in Madrid or Barcelona, and this awful feast of blood and
+death. I have seen golf in many places, but never in one where its
+setting seemed so utterly impossible as here. And yet golf in Madrid is
+strengthening, and by ever so little the corrida, so they tell me, is
+weakening. That the game can begin and can hold and grow in such a place
+is surely the utmost testimony of its power. Games like golf have some
+work to do in Spain. It is because of such considerations, because of
+the extraordinary environment in which this peaceful, excellent sport is
+set, that I have found golf in Madrid such a remarkable and interesting
+study, and have dwelt upon it and provoked the contrasts when I might.
+
+See contrast now again, yet more wonderful. The next morning broke
+bright and blue, and Senor Fabricio was round betimes in the Prado with
+his car. We were to go to the new course that day. We sped away on the
+Corunna road for some four or five miles from Madrid, and then turned up
+towards the higher land. All this was King's land; El Pardo it is
+called. Here is the new golf course of Madrid, which takes the place in
+the Spanish golfers' hearts and plans of the other one of which I have
+already written, that with the bull-ring hole. This of El Pardo is part
+of a great new sporting establishment, embracing a magnificent polo
+ground, tennis courts, and all the advantages and appurtenances of a
+thorough country club in the manner of those which began in America and
+have since been copied in England, and more recently at Saint-Cloud near
+Paris.
+
+Considered in some ways 1 am a little disposed to count this new golf
+course of Madrid as the eighth or ninth wonder of the whole golfing
+world, just as the Spaniards themselves set up a claim for El Escorial
+to be ranked as the eighth of the world at large. There are sound
+reasons for the nomination. I have shown that it might well have been
+held that the Spanish people's character and dispositions were a soil in
+which no good game might grow, and yet that it was being urged and
+proved that there was a great process of regeneration going on and that
+golf indeed had been given a very good start. Now we come to the
+astonishing climax for the time being in this little story of contrasts.
+Here, if you please, at El Pardo on the estates of Don Alfonso is just
+one of the nicest, best, and most interesting courses for golf on which
+the excellent game might ever be played. It is quite new and it is most
+thoroughly up to date. It is a course of which good clubs in Britain
+might be exceedingly proud. You and I would be glad to play there nearly
+always, and we should have little fault to find. When I was there it was
+only just being finished. Its history is a nice romance. The golfers of
+Spain had risen to that state when they felt they needed something
+better for the improvement and the enjoyment of their play than the
+rough primitive course with the bull-ring hole which had ceased to
+satisfy their needs and tastes. They were restive. Came Don Alfonso to
+their comfort and their happiness. At El Pardo was the ideal golfing
+land--wide undulating sweeps of lovely country, majestic undulations,
+grand environment, with the splendid Guadarramas in full view. It was a
+scene sublime. The land was wooded, trees would have to be felled, the
+ploughshare would have heavy work to do; but that is how courses are
+made to-day. Not in Don Alfonso's power was it to give the ground
+outright, but he passed it to the golfers for a nominal rent of a
+thousand pesetas a year, which, being converted to English reckoning,
+would be some L37. There was land for the polo and the tennis hard by.
+Estimates were procured, and it was discovered that to do the work of
+felling and ploughing, sowing and construction, building and finishing,
+a sum of just about twenty-two thousand pounds in English money would be
+needed, and most of the money would go to England too. Then with zest
+the golfers and other sportsmen of Madrid came forward, each one
+subscribed according to his means and ability, and in a very little
+while all that great fund of money was obtained, and it was in the bank
+before the work was started. That was a splendid achievement; the golf
+of Madrid deserves to prosper now.
+
+It was determined that with such a beginning everything should be done
+most thoroughly afterwards. Thousands of trees had to be cut down, the
+ground cleared, ploughed, and raked, and the putting greens sown. On
+hardly any course in any country has the work of construction been done
+more thoroughly. Then Mr. Harry Colt was brought from England to design
+the holes, and he gave of some of his most cunning, most artistic work,
+having a fine field for his quick imagination. The result is eighteen
+holes as good and rich as Spanish holes need be. Some of the short ones
+are as good short holes as I have seen. One with the green on a hog's
+back, the seventh, is a most appetising thing. At the third there is a
+quick slope on the left of the green and the approach is one of those
+twisty things that are a strong feature of the Coltian style of
+architecture, demanding a skill and calculation from the player that
+many bunkers would not exact. There is a dog-leg hole for the fifth that
+leads to a green partly framed in a corner of trees. Parts of Spain are
+treeless, the great plain above which Madrid is placed, the long lone
+sweep of land that you look down upon from the palace, down to the
+Manzanares and beyond to a far horizon, is one of the most desolate
+countries that my eyes have seen. But here at El Pardo there are trees
+enough. Chestnuts and cork are everywhere, and the course has a look of
+our sweet Sunningdale at home. Harrows, rakes, and spades have done
+their work most wondrous well, and the nicest gradients have been given
+to the putting greens. But there is something even more remarkable still
+that has been done. Make it as you would, tend it as you might, but if
+Nature were to be depended upon the loveliest course in all Spain would
+have to perish, for the climate forbids. So the climate had to be
+foiled. Water was needed, water everywhere, water always, always. The
+Madrid golfers, wise beyond all British example, determined they would
+have their water at the very beginning of things. Some way distant there
+was a river or canal, and it was tapped for their supply. Great cemented
+aqueducts were built to carry it across valleys; it was piped through
+hills. The water in abundance was brought up here to the course; and it
+was laid on to every teeing ground and putting green and to the entire
+fairway so that everywhere, always, the water should be poured on, the
+fine grass that grows should be kept always green, and the turf, which
+is of full sandy kind, should be always golf-like and moist. That was a
+splendid achievement. I enjoyed the round of the new course, delighted
+in a pretty valley hole towards the end, and admired the enterprise of
+the Spanish golfers exceedingly. They have golf in Madrid. As the
+express climbed with me upwards back to France I reflected again on
+these wild contrasts, and the struggle for light by Spain.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As a pursuit golf differs from all others in that there is no
+exclusively right way and no utterly wrong way of doing anything
+connected with it. Those engaged with it are constantly, to use their
+own expression, finding out what they are "doing wrong," and then with
+great eagerness and activity and newly revived hope are setting forth to
+repair their errors and place their game upon a new foundation. Yet
+despite this eternal discovery of faults and remedies, only a little is
+ever found out of the full truth that is hidden somewhere, by even the
+very best of players, and herein lies the consolation of the humbler
+people in that, if they know little, their superiors, being champions,
+know only a little more compared with all that there is to be known.
+Thus upon every disappointment an encouragement ensues. If these points
+are considered it will appear that there are deep truths in them, while
+at the same time they convey morals and point the way to a betterment of
+one's game. And the most important point is that there is no one
+exclusively correct way of doing anything, and this, with all the
+circumstances surrounding the proposition, leads us inevitably to the
+conclusion that this is no game for narrow-minded and conventional
+people, who would always do as others do, and have not the will to
+exercise their own convictions which, along with their admiration for
+some of the tenets of the political party to which they do not belong,
+are stifled in their consciences and put away. Golf is indeed a game for
+extensive individualism, for the free exercise of convictions and for
+continual groping along unknown channels of investigation in search of
+the truth. Those who do not investigate and explore in this way miss a
+full three-fourths of the intellectual joy of this pastime. And the
+investigators must have the courage to reject things of information that
+are offered to them, even when conveyed with the very highest
+testimonials for their efficacy from the best champions of home and
+foreign countries, while at the same time they should have the will to
+put into exercise even the most fantastic scheme of their own
+imagination.
+
+All dogmatic teaching in golf is wrong. There are two or three essential
+principles as we have called them--the keeping of the still head, the
+fixed centre in the body, the eye on the ball, and such like--which must
+be obeyed under the certain penalty of failure, because these might be
+said to be the laws of Nature as applied to golf, and have nothing to do
+with the eccentricities of human method. But, these being properly
+respected, there are innumerable ways of building upon them structures
+of golf which, in the goodness of results in the matter of getting
+threes and fours and winning the holes, are much the same at the finish.
+One of the structures may be precise, another may be plain, a third may
+be ornate, and a fourth may be rough and vulgar. Yet in efficiency and
+in results they may be just the same, and in most cases the man is led
+to his style of golf building largely by his own temperamental case. So
+long as the essential principles are observed in each case, being the
+same always but kept hidden in the recesses of the building, many things
+may be done that the books do not teach. The books are valuable to the
+utmost for their suggestions and for bringing the player back to his
+base, as it were, when he has wandered too far in his explorations,
+piled theory on theory and got his game into the most hopeless tangle.
+For corrective purposes they are in this way quite essential. They stand
+for the conventions and for the middle ways; they enable us to make a
+fresh start. And the golfer is always making fresh starts. What is the
+cherished belief of to-day is abandoned next week, the discovery just
+made and looked upon as solving the last problem that keeps the handicap
+man away from scratch, is found later to be a temporary convenience only
+and to be dependent on something else in the system of a highly fleeting
+and uncertain kind. These beginnings, this starting over again with
+increased hope, add always to the pleasure.
+
+What players need to remember above all things is that the games of no
+two men are quite alike, any more than the men themselves are quite
+alike, and that among the very best the widest dissimilarities exist,
+that the best game that any man can possibly play is not one copied from
+others, but that game which is his very own, the one built up on his
+physical, intellectual, and mental peculiarities. Every man has a game
+of his own somewhere which is quite different from any other, and that
+game, when he can play it, will be more effective than any other that he
+could play. What he has to do, therefore, is to find out that game in
+all its peculiarities, and this is what the explorer and investigator is
+constantly trying to achieve. He is finding out the mysteries not of the
+game in general, as he sometimes imagines, but of his own game, and the
+more he discovers the better is he as a golfer. Surely there is proof
+enough of the absolute soundness of this proposition in the fact that
+the discoveries as they are made, meaning not those which are found
+later to be worthless, but those which become established in the
+permanent system and are invaluable, are often absolutely opposite to
+those made in another case and which become permanent in the same way.
+Why, even the champions differ more widely than any others--yet one
+remembers that this should not be a matter of surprise, but something
+that by this argument is quite inevitable. The champions have been
+marvellously successful in the mining of their own golfing seams, and
+that is the chief reason why they are champions. And all this helps to
+make golf the game it is--the eternal finding out, the progress, with
+its occasional set-backs, towards the discovery, the completion of the
+golfing self. I have only met one man in my life who has golfed and
+never found anything out, and that was Mr. John Burns, the Minister of
+State, who assured me that once in the old days of the Tooting Bec
+course he was persuaded by a number of political persons to go with them
+to play the game there one day. He had never handled a golf club in his
+life, but having some practical knowledge of cricket, felt that golf
+could not offer any serious hindrance to him. Consequently he agreed to
+take his part in a foursome, and in the progress of this match usually
+drove the best ball, with the result that his side was well victorious.
+There seemed nothing in his game that needed improvement. Herein we
+observe Mr. Burns displayed many of the qualities of the highest
+statesmanship, but he rose majestically in his determination that from
+that day he would never play golf again, much as he liked it, and he
+never has. He has these three distinctions--that he has played golf once
+and once only in his life; that being a golfer, as all are who are once
+initiated, he has never lost a match; and that he has never found
+anything out. I shall hope to be present at the second game he plays,
+the resolution having broken down, and then we shall see discoveries
+made.
+
+But once again, "Golfer, know thyself" is the supreme moral drawn from
+the experiences of the players who have golfed and studied most. Every
+golfer worth the name has found out hundreds of things and hopes to find
+many more; some of them are quite different from any of the other things
+that have been found out; he has his own private collection, and in it
+almost any person might find something that might with a little
+alteration be added to his own. So I remember that when we came up out
+of Spain, where the golfers are in that happy state that they have at
+this present stage almost more to discover than any other golfers in the
+world, a new spring season was beginning in the homeland of the game and
+all players were looking over their stock of knowledge and seeing what
+they had found out in the most recent times. It occurred to me then to
+send out a demand to a number of good players whom I knew for their
+enthusiasm, for their individualism and their strength of mind, and for
+their conscientious investigations, and ask them what they had lately
+discovered in an original kind of way which had beyond question
+materially improved their game. The answers were enlightening, and some
+of them, which I may quote, are worth pondering upon. One of the best
+players of my acquaintance sent to say that he had made a discovery,
+which, applied as a resolution, had done him more good than any other
+half-dozen he had ever thought of. The essence of the new idea was that
+on the teeing ground especially, and when approaching his ball through
+the green, he would see to it that the stepping of the feet, the
+movements of the arms, hands--everything involving action--should be as
+slow and deliberate as possible, even the very speech itself, for the
+reason that this slow sureness created an irresistible tendency in the
+golfing action that was to follow, the back-swing was then slow and
+deliberate, and the whole movement was harmonious and precise. The
+probable value of this idea is suggested by the fact that the man who is
+slow and deliberate in his waggling--not meaning one who prolongs it
+unduly or does it in a hesitating way--generally does his swinging
+better. Another player said the best discovery he had ever made was the
+idea of imagining his weight during upswinging to be on his left foot
+without really throwing it there, at the same time holding his legs a
+little more stiffly than had been his wont and keeping his heels on the
+ground as long as he could. By these things, which could all be grasped
+in the one general idea of making himself conscious of his legs all the
+time, he has come by a firmness and steadiness of system that have added
+enormously to his driving capacity; in fact, it has converted him from
+being a man who could not drive at all to a very good driver indeed.
+
+I remember that once I was watching Taylor teaching a scratch man and
+giving him hints for curing some considerable cutting and slicing to
+which he was addicted. The champion turned round to us and said that one
+of them was the best tip he had ever suggested in his life. It is the
+simplest thing. In addressing the ball he would have the patient turn
+over the face of the driver until that face is positively hanging over
+from the top, pointing to the turf, at such a fearsome angle--no limit
+to it--as to make it seem impossible to do anything but smother the ball
+when coming down on to it. The back-swing has to be begun with the face
+in this threatening situation. The truth is that the nervous fear that
+it inspires is the secret of the success of the method. The man believes
+that if he comes down on to the ball like that there will be a horrible
+disaster, and all the time in the down-swing he is subconsciously
+(another to that long list of most important subconscious movements)
+making corrections and allowances, and his wrists are doing a twist to
+get the club right by the time of impact. It is this wrist action, with
+the left hand managing it, that is wanted, and the arm action that it
+induces. The club reaches the ball properly, and the ball goes off
+without a slice. If sometimes it is smothered it does not matter; the
+cure will take effect in time. But, you say, you do not want to go on
+for ever addressing the ball in this seemingly grotesque way. No; but,
+again subconsciously, when the ball is being hit and driven properly and
+the arm and wrist action become natural, there is a sure tendency
+towards a settling down to normal ways, and without the man bothering
+about it any more the club will gradually get itself straight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE SUPERIORITY OF BRITISH LINKS, AND A MASTERPIECE OF KENT, WITH SOME
+SYSTEMS AND MORALS FOR HOLIDAY GOLF.
+
+
+The chief and essential difference between golf in Britain and all other
+places in the world, as everybody feels on coming home to it after
+wanderings with clubs abroad, is that here in the home of the game it is
+"the real thing" as nowhere else. Climate, soil, history and sentiment,
+and the temperament of the people have combined to make golf here a
+thing that foreign people who have never seen and enjoyed it cannot
+imagine. It is not only that its excellence is so great, but its variety
+so infinite; and perhaps it is because of that excellence and variety
+that, human nature being in such a constant state of discontent, our
+people in these days are so much concerned with problems of architecture
+and the attainment of ideals which vary much with individuals and cause
+incessant wrangling. It is when we are far away that we think most of
+the magnificence of the courses on the western seaboard of
+Scotland--Prestwick, Troon, and Turnberry among them, with Machrihanish
+and Islay in more lonesome parts--of the wealth of golf in that East
+Lothian district that is so amazingly crowded with fine links, of the
+splendid strength of such as Hoylake and others in Cheshire and
+Lancashire, of our own east coast with such jewels as Brancaster set in
+it, of that marvellous trinity of courses on the Kentish seaboard, which
+as a golfing land has surely not its match in the world--Sandwich, Deal,
+and Prince's, in the group--of Littlestone and Rye along the southern
+coast, and then in the west such a glorious golfing ground as Westward
+Ho! And there is Wales with its pretty and excellent Porthcawl,
+Ashburnham, and many more, and Ireland also with its great Dublin
+courses, Portmarnock and Dollymount, and then sweet Newcastle in county
+Down, and bold Portrush.
+
+Indeed there are no others like the British courses, and it is always a
+tremendous speculation with any golfer of experience as to which he
+likes the best. When he comes to make it he has to separate in his mind
+the feelings of admiration and those of affection, for it commonly
+happens, if the judgment is reasonably good, that one may have the
+utmost admiration for some particular course, for its unimpeachable
+architecture based so well on perfect theory and the attempt always to
+make the punishment fit the crime and award stern justice, and yet not
+greatly delight to play upon it because in a way that sometimes he can
+hardly understand it does not give him his utmost pleasure. Here again
+the inexplicable emotions settle it. But in that matter of "justice"
+which seems so much to be the ideal of new architects, there comes the
+reflection in the ordinary golfer's mind sometimes as to whether golf,
+not really being a game of justice now, would be better if it were one,
+whether with so much that is unfair and tantalising removed from it the
+game would be half so good. Surely in no fine sport is there always
+exact justice done, and if it be made an ideal is it not possible that
+the nearer such ideal is approached the poorer may become the sport, not
+perhaps in regular proportion but in approximate effect? Golf is a game
+of Nature after all, and Nature in some ways does not always stick to
+justice. One may ponder upon what Anatole France once said about this
+justice. "In the vulgar sense," he wrote, "it is the most melancholy of
+virtues. Nobody desires it. Faith opposes it by grace and Nature by
+love. It is enough for a man to call himself just for him to inspire a
+genuine repulsion. Justice is held in horror by things animate and
+inanimate. In the social order it is only a machine, indispensable
+doubtless, and for that reason respectable, but beyond question cruel
+since it has no other function than to punish, and because it sets
+jailers and executioners at work." And perhaps it may be said that golf
+has little enough in principle to do with justice either; and we have
+seen into what perplexities the good authorities of St. Andrews have
+fallen by their vain endeavour to make a code of laws that would settle
+the just dues of every golfer in every circumstance. Nature in her
+variety has contrived to beat them all continually. Perhaps it may be
+the same with the construction of courses, but the end of all golfers'
+endeavour, however much it may be criticised, is the good of the game,
+and it is generally achieved.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those who in the most dispassionate frame of mind have considered
+carefully all the points that should count the most and detached
+themselves as well as they might from their private and inexplicable
+preference have generally come to the conclusion that there are three
+courses in this great golfing country of ours that are somewhat better
+than all the rest in their golfing quality. One of them is old St.
+Andrews, another of them is middle-aged Westward Ho! and the third is
+the youthful Prince's at Sandwich. Considered as the perfect course,
+weighing point against point, a jury of the best critics might have
+difficulty in coming to any other decision than that architecturally,
+for the real magnificence of its golfing value, the great creation of
+Mr. Mallaby-Deeley on the golfing land by Pegwell Bay is supreme. Here
+ten years ago there was nothing but a barren waste of sandhills, just as
+they had been, as it seemed, since the very beginning of
+things--lonesome, useless, forgotten. Then it was realised that what was
+good for nothing else was best of all for golf. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley saw
+it and understood, and now hereabouts the land is comparatively
+priceless so much is it coveted by the golfers, who also now understand
+as they see. Other great courses have been the productions of a long
+period of time, improvements continually on an original structure of the
+crudest kind. Westward Ho! was not made in a season, nor in many
+seasons. Only recently some of its most delightful touches have been
+added to it. St. Andrews was the work of generations. But Prince's,
+though it has been appreciably changed from its original design, was
+like one great flash of inspiration, and as such is surely the most
+amazing achievement in the architecture of golf. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley in
+other ways has shown himself to be a man of immense imagination; but was
+it ever better illustrated than in his making of Prince's? Our
+admiration for the course may be not the less but greater because we
+cannot play her properly. For my own humble part I love most the
+championship course of the Royal Cinque Ports club at Deal near by. Here
+there are charm and variety, and holes of the most splendid character.
+If some find fault with them, what does it matter when they are so good
+to play? The Royal St. George's course at Sandwich, again, is a most
+beautiful thing; surely there is no other which gives such an infinite
+pleasure to a greater number of capable players. But for sheer golfing
+quality, Prince's truly is the queen of all.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have asked Mr. Mallaby-Deeley to tell me what his ideals are in this
+matter, and in response he has made a statement of such interest and
+value that it should be given at its length. He said that, premising
+that for purposes of consideration we should regard "ideal links" as
+having reference only to the sequence of holes, both as to ranges of
+length, difficulty, and beauty of design, he submitted that the making
+of such an ideal course, given suitable ground, depended then on three
+things only, being knowledge, time, and money. St. Andrews and his own
+Prince's come nearest to this ideal, but the former fails in that it is
+too straight in and out, and also because one can pull all the way out
+and all the way home again without falling into any trouble, the truth
+being that the more one pulls the greater the possibility of safety in
+doing so. Some say that if you do thus pull you cannot reach the greens,
+but in these days that is not so. We have seen them reach those greens
+after the most exaggerated pulling. Then he thinks that the set of St.
+Andrews in the matter of prevailing winds is far from ideal, for so
+often the wind is at one's back all the way out and against the player
+all the way coming home, or the other way about. Again, no one can deny,
+he says, that St. Andrews has three if not four very ordinary and
+commonplace holes. Prince's, as now laid out, has in general opinion not
+a single commonplace or uninteresting hole in the whole course, but it
+has had the advantage of being laid out many years after St. Andrews,
+and after the introduction of the rubber ball. A course comes nearer to
+the ideal as its holes are placed to every variety of wind. In the early
+days of Prince's at Sandwich the disadvantage of an in and out course
+were soon discovered and an enormous amount of money was spent in
+altering it to its present form, in which, with the single exception of
+St. George's, it is the best in existence, the old course at Sandwich
+being ideal in this respect. Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, looking upon his
+Prince's in the supercritical way of a pleased but still insistent
+creator, can see only one blemish in it, and that is that the two short
+holes, being the third and the fifth--though the fifth is longer than
+the third--come too close together. Any two holes on a course may
+separately be extremely good, but coming together lack something of
+perfection because of the repetition that instantly arises. He would
+have the pin visible for every approach shot on his ideal links, and the
+only exception he would make would be in the case of a full second shot
+with a long carry over a high bunker to the end of it, for this to his
+mind is a most interesting shot. Such an one, he points out, is that
+presented at the sixteenth hole at Littlestone, and he would be
+surprised to know that any one would ever think of altering that hole in
+order to enable a player in the distance to see the pin. He also would
+not agree to placing a bunker immediately at the back of the green,
+which punishes the man who dares to be up and encourages "pawkiness."
+
+The visible pin is imperative at short holes; he will admit no
+exceptions. But all who have been to Prince's have been most impressed
+with the beauty and golfing perfection of the dog-legged holes there, a
+couple of which are presented at the beginning of the round, immediately
+introducing the stranger to some of the best delights of this course. He
+would have dog-leg holes of both shapes in his round, those bending to
+the right to worry the slicer, and those angled towards the left to help
+the long driver who greatly dares. The first hole at Hoylake and the
+second and eleventh at Prince's are dog-leg holes that he likes best.
+But, he will tell you, by far the most vital matters to consider in
+making any course with pretensions to being ideal are the position of
+the greens and the bunkering through the course and near the hole, and,
+though it is a consideration that is too often overlooked, it is nearly
+as important to bear in mind from which quarter the prevailing wind
+blows. He believes every shot from the tee to the hole ought to be of
+equal importance, but in the case of the majority of the courses this is
+not so. Despite the fact that on the tee the man has everything in his
+favour, a perfect stance and a teed-up ball, he is given more space to
+play into and a greater margin for inaccuracy than in the case of any
+other shot. This, says the architect, is wrong. Surely it should be as
+necessary on the ideal course to place the tee shot as any other. He has
+turned the subject of ribbon bunkers very thoroughly over in his mind.
+In a general way, he does not like them because of the varying winds. He
+says, "_Tutiores ibis in medias vias_," is a safe and golden rule of
+life, and it applies equally to ribbon bunkers which while they make
+some holes mar many more. Most frequently on account of wind and other
+things this form of hazard fails as a fair guard to the green for a hole
+that is meant for two full shots. It is then wrongly placed, and would
+generally be improved by the substitution of ear bunkers to catch sliced
+and pulled shots thereto. The push shot is one of the most difficult in
+the game to play, but it is one of the prettiest and most satisfactory
+in accomplishment; but the ribbon bunker is often unfair to the man who
+plays it. Yet the absence of such ribbon bunkers does not prevent the
+man who likes to play his high mashie shots from still playing them.
+Thus the absence of this form of bunker is fair to all, while if placed
+very near the green its presence penalises the push-shot player.
+But many a tee shot would be tame if it were not for the ribbon
+bunkers some way ahead. In epitome he says to the student of
+architecture--"Bunker your course so that every bad shot is punished;
+place your bunkers so that every shot must be played and played well;
+make the length of your holes such that if a shot is foozled it costs
+you a stroke; guard your greens right and left, and even to the very
+edge and into the green itself, if necessary, but this must of course
+depend on the length of shot to be played; and at one-shot holes make
+the green a very fort of surrounding bunkers, and guard the tee shot. Do
+not leave it open as at the famous short hole at St. Andrews, a much
+overrated hole. But above all things, make your bunkers fair; don't make
+them impossible to get out of except by playing back."
+
+As to the lengths of the holes on his ideal course he would have about
+twelve two-shot holes varying from 380 to 440 yards, and there should be
+three one-shot holes of about 165, 180, and 200 yards respectively.
+There would be two or three drive-and-iron holes of about 350 yards
+each, but a drive-and-iron hole should be so constructed that if the
+drive is missed it will be impossible for the man who missed it to sail
+on the green with his next. There is a good example of this in the
+fifteenth at Prince's, for although this hole is only a drive and an
+iron the penalty for missing the drive is that it takes the player two
+more shots to reach the green because of the nature of the ground in
+front of the tee. And then he would have it a condition that the last
+three holes should average about 400 to 420 yards each, and the
+seventeenth and eighteenth should be made specially testing ones. This
+is the ideal course, and, being such, it is not a place for foozlers.
+But if it is properly and fairly constructed it will be easier and
+pleasanter to play on than a course which is made difficult by the
+simple method of making it unfair, for example by putting bunkers in the
+wrong places, by cutting the hole in a ridiculous position on the
+green, by punishing the man who is "up" (a new-fangled and absurd idea
+of course construction) by placing the hole immediately in front of a
+bunker at the back of the green, and by leaving the approach to the
+green from a long shot rough or broken, and so unfair. It is easy to
+make any course difficult, and so conducive to high scoring, by making
+it unfair. This induces pawky play because the punishment for bold play
+may be too severe. He is also of opinion (and there is a constantly
+growing tendency to agree with him) that there is too much premium on
+putting, and that it plays far too important a part in the game,
+especially among first-class players and in first-class matches. He
+thinks the hole should be six and a half inches instead of four and a
+quarter. Under present conditions a putt missed by half an inch bears
+the same punishment (although the rest of the hole through the green may
+have been played faultlessly) as a hopelessly bad shot by one's opponent
+through the green.
+
+Prince's supports its creator's arguments very well indeed, and one
+enormous fascination of it lies in the fact that it is always suggesting
+to you, always inviting you, always tempting you to do the more daring
+thing, and hinting that, even though you failed, the suffering might not
+be too much. In that, it seems to me, lies the chief charm of this
+masterpiece of architecture.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So when we come home from other lands, let us think of golfing holidays
+in our own, and moralise from old experience. It is an aggravating
+circumstance that while there is hardly anything in the way of change
+and holiday that is so splendid as a golfing holiday, there is hardly
+any kind that is so easily spoiled. The golfer is not dependent on the
+weather, only to a small extent on his friends, he seldom knows limits
+of time or space, yet he fails oftener in his pursuit of the perfect
+happiness of a summer vacation than do the unsophisticated people who
+kill the time of August and September in other ways, and that happens
+because of the very fascination of the thing, and the enthusiasm and
+excess to which it leads him on. In our working days limits are imposed
+upon us; when we are loose and unrestricted all system and wise
+restraint fly to pieces. It is not only that we often play too much on
+holidays, but that during play and in the intervals between those spells
+of action the imagination is at work too fast and makes riot upon
+settled methods which have raised the game of the individual to some
+more or less agreeable sort of quality. Excess and experiment are the
+two evils that shatter so many golfing holidays, and yet the
+contradictions of golf are such that we find there is something good to
+be said both for excess and for experiment. But be all this as it may,
+it is not until a man has gone through twenty golfing holiday campaigns
+that he fully realises he has an education to serve in this matter, and
+after twenty more he is able to start out on the forty-first in the
+strong confidence that from the days and weeks before him he will
+extract the full available supply of rich golfing delight. These remarks
+do not well apply to the person of the thick phlegmatic temperament who
+plays now with the same set of clubs that he started with ten years or
+more agone, the which have not had their shafts varnished, nor their
+grips attended since the time of their first swinging. This man is
+without imagination, without feeling, and, with no blessing upon him, we
+may let him wander away to play wherever he will, knowing that he will
+always derive some great satisfaction from his pursuit and gain
+mightily in health. He is not like most of us; he is as the man without
+any religion; he is very material. He eats, he plays, he rests, he
+sleeps. And he does very well in it all; and yet we of the majority who
+think always, ponder deeply, worry exceedingly and are wracked with
+doubts and conflicting theories, disappointed ever in fruitless
+experiments, do not envy him. The material person does not go down into
+the depths where we grieve and are in pain (how often do we go and
+grieve!), but neither does he ascend to the heights of pleasure that are
+scaled by successful experiment, by the sudden discovery of some
+wonderful secret that seems to have unlocked the gates of the higher
+golf and rendered us immune from failure for evermore. (Never mind what
+happens in the morning!) We may suffer the depths for those hot moments
+of life on the summits.
+
+This preamble is needed for warning. Golf is the great game of emotions,
+and at holiday times those emotions are quickened, strung up and, flying
+loose in riot, play the devil with our game. I am sorry to believe that
+many young men who come back to their homelands from the golfing holiday
+grounds in October do so with inward sighs and stifled sobs. They tell
+us that they have had the most glorious time; they may foolishly give an
+account of a round said to have been done in 74, and of many of the
+longest holes that cost them only four strokes apiece, and we forgive
+them for their words which we know are false, realising the pain of
+their case and that their dissembling is in a small manner for the good
+of the game. Their emotions have led them astray; they have been weak
+and foolish; they have done the wrong things and they have left undone
+all those which were recommended to them as right. They have played
+three rounds a day, and they have bought new drivers and putters. And
+some of them have actually changed their stances and had an inch cut off
+a favourite shaft! Truly their emotions have led them wrong. Player! if
+you would pass the placid holiday, kill those emotions and cast them
+off. You may then take a golfing holiday from which you will derive that
+magnificent material comfort and refreshment that your butcher and baker
+do when they walk upon the promenade at Margate and, well fed, sleep at
+times on the sunlit sands. You will really believe on your return to
+labour in the town, that you have had a splendid time, but soon you will
+cease to talk of it for you will find that there is very little to
+remember. Time was passed; that was all. The man whose emotions played
+old Harry with him does not forget. He has something indeed to remember,
+for he lived very much in his month of play. So you will see that in the
+scheme of golfing things as jointly ordained by Nature and kind
+Providence, with the petty meddling of the man himself, there are
+different processes of holiday, and each in its way is the best. As in
+so many other affairs of golf there are contradictions abounding. But
+let us, after such philosophy, move to some definite considerations, and
+consider life and facts as they are presented to us.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One of the doctors' papers was well laughed at a little while since for
+suggesting that, on account of the nerve strain that it makes, golf is
+not an ideal game for everybody, especially busy folks with few hours
+and days for recreation. To quote: "If he takes his failures to play a
+good game to heart, it is doubtful whether his health gains very much.
+He has had, it is true, the advantage of a change of scene and
+occupation, and has lived for a while in a healthier atmosphere, and,
+if he had only been satisfied with his game, all these things would have
+conspired to send him back to his work cheered and braced up. But he may
+play very badly and become unduly worried thereat. A game that is
+calculated to increase an irritability which has arisen out of a trying
+week's work can hardly be said to be recreative, at all events to the
+mind." The medical writer concluded impressively: "The game of golf, if
+it does not go smoothly, presents so many points of analogy with the
+tiresome eventualities of life that there can be little doubt that
+persons of an irritable, gloomy, and worrying disposition would be
+better if they did not seek their recreation on the links." The common
+people sometimes look upon these pronouncements from the columns of the
+professional paper as being like the essence of the wisdom and knowledge
+of the whole of Harley Street. I remember, however, that when this was
+published the golfers ridiculed and condemned it, and agreed to take
+more golf and less medicine. It is not my function to advocate the
+playing of less golf than is played, much less the stoppage of any of
+it, but I dare to suggest that there was a germ of truth in what the
+medical paper said. There are kinds of players who should take their
+golf with restraint and caution, especially at holiday times. The truth
+is that a vast proportion of golfing holidays are completely ruined
+through a bad plan of campaign, or over-doing it, or both--commonly
+both. We would say nothing to a doubter now about the selection of his
+friends for his party; he should know that it is a matter demanding the
+extremest care. A golfing holiday _a deux_ may expose all the least
+beautiful parts of each man's character, and those who are not such
+friends that they can comfortably bear each other's infirmities might do
+better even to go on their golfing way lonely and without a partner.
+There is much to be said for the freedom of this latter holiday
+existence, and odd indeed would be the golfing place where there were
+not many games for the solitary stranger to play.
+
+The night before the opening of the campaign, the eve of the journey
+outwards, is a trying time to many men. I think of those who take loving
+interest in their clubs, and have many of them, including a first-class
+reserve, and perhaps a second-class reserve also, to the original set
+that is in full commission. The man who has only seven clubs in the
+world, and seems to take a pride in telling you that he has had them all
+since the beginning of his golf, is in no difficulty. But with others
+the trouble is how many clubs to take, and how many to dare to leave
+behind. After the first selection it is seen that about five or six
+drivers are put in the list, very many irons, and a large assortment of
+putters. All the ex-favourites are to be tried over again and
+experiments to be made with a number of others. It is found then that
+too many clubs have been selected; but after the most painful and
+difficult weeding out there may still be some twenty left, and these are
+taken. It is a mistake. From the day of arrival at the holiday place the
+man is in doubt as to what he will play with, and he mixes up his game
+into a bad state of confusion through using different clubs almost every
+day. It is a good rule, to which every golfer subscribes after twenty
+campaigns, if not before, to take away the regular clubs as used every
+day at home, not one less and only two more, being a spare driver and an
+extra putter. In that way happiness and contentment lie. I would leave
+out the driver did I not know the case of a man who so much grieved for
+one he had left behind that he travelled three hundred miles back home
+to get it!
+
+The little truth that there was in the indictment against the game by
+the doctors' paper is that it is possible for some men, many of them, to
+have too much of it, when it becomes bad for the men and bad for their
+game, and holidays are rendered failures. There was a time when really
+good golf could only be had at the seaside, or very far away from the
+great centres of work and business. That is no longer the case, and the
+situation is that the golf we are having all the time at home is hard
+and strenuous, demanding great ability and thought. The golfing holiday,
+then, might very well be made an easy one on a links where the holes are
+simple, and--remembering another scare that was made by a doctors' paper
+some time later--I believe that there is as happy golf to be had up on
+the hills, and in the lonely country places, as on the margin of any
+sunny sea.
+
+But it is the excess of golf that is played on holidays that spoils
+everything in the case of the man of a somewhat nervous temperament, and
+one who may not be as strong and beefy as the John Bull of the pictures.
+Too many of these people seem to think that, as they have gone away for
+golf, they should have as much of it as they can get, and play to excess
+accordingly. Three rounds! Three rounds! One of the reasons why some men
+play so much--as they put it to themselves--is that they wish to improve
+their game, and they conceive that the holiday time is the best of all
+in which to achieve that end. But experience shows that very seldom
+indeed is a man's game improved at such a time; very frequently it is
+injured, and that through the excess. When so much of it is played,
+weariness, though half unconsciously, is induced, proper pains are not
+taken at every stroke, carelessness becomes constant; then, with
+deterioration, too many experiments are tried, and worst of all, that
+terrible, and for the time being incurable, disease of staleness sets
+in, and there is then an end to all happiness and enjoyment. There is
+hardly any cure for staleness except complete abstention for a time. It
+needs some strength of mind to carry out such a resolve, but he who
+severely limits his golf at holiday times enjoys it the more, and he and
+his health and his game are the better for it. A holiday system based on
+wise restrictions is a splendid thing. Men of long experience have tried
+many of them, and the best of all is this: Play two rounds on the first
+day of the week, one on the second, two again on the third, one on the
+fourth, two on the fifth, one on the sixth, and take a whole holiday
+from the game on the seventh day. That is not too much nor too little.
+Another point for remembrance is that on the days that are warm and long
+the old convention of one round before lunch and another afterwards is
+not a good one for the best and most enjoyable employment of the day.
+Much better is it to play in the morning, rest pleasantly--sleep,
+perhaps--in the afternoon, and play again in the cool of the evening,
+when golf is the best of all--always provided your course is not laid
+out in a straight line from east to west and back, for playing full
+against a setting sun is a very tantalising thing.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mention has been made of staleness. In our minds there is awakened an
+unhappy thought with which something had better be done for good
+contentment's sake ere we pass along to the pleasant consideration of
+this holiday golf. Staleness is the canker that kills many of these
+expeditions that are planned with the happiest promise. It is a dread
+golfing disease that rages on the links almost like an epidemic during
+August and September. It spoils the game and happiness of every player
+whom it attacks, and sometimes it cuts holidays short. It is nearly safe
+to assume that when on holiday one golfer in every half-dozen is
+afflicted with it, and some of the others are in danger. It consists in
+the absolute incapacity of the player to produce a game that is within
+very many strokes of his real form; in truth the game of a good man may
+fall to the twenty-handicap level or lower, and each new effort on his
+part to raise it up again only results in a worsening of the case. There
+is no certain cure except isolation from the game and long rest. A
+trouble that has the power, then, to ruin the golfing holiday, and often
+does, must be considered very seriously.
+
+Here is the progress of a case for the details of which I can personally
+vouch. I was a sympathetic witness of it. The man was playing well at
+the beginning of the holiday season and went for a month to a fine east
+coast links where there was no town, no village, and no society but that
+of golfers, and nothing to do but golf, which was what he desired. For a
+week he played well, doing two rounds every day, and sometimes three.
+The weather was hot. At the beginning of the second week there were
+signs of a failing game. His first anxiety soon increased; he changed
+his ball, then began to make alterations in his stances and swings, and
+at the end of the second week was all foozles, and getting worse. Soon
+afterwards it was obvious that the cause of the whole thing was
+staleness. The man tried the heroic remedy of loafing about his
+quarters, golfless, for a couple of days, reading novels and pretending
+to play bowls against himself. He also studied the stones in the old
+graveyard near by. On the third day he went back to the links very
+hopeful, but the case was as bad as before, and, desperate, he gave his
+game a three days' rest after that. This also failed. Neither of the
+resting spells was long enough. This being a man of keen nervous
+temperament, who took his game very seriously and was very miserable, he
+did the wisest thing by giving up his holiday and going home to work in
+London.
+
+The primary cause of staleness is excess of play, resulting in
+exhaustion of nervous and physical energy, which in turn produces
+carelessness, decreases the capacity for taking the infinite pains that
+are necessary to the game, and--important--brings about a failure in the
+subconscious working arrangement between the mind and the physical
+system that has everything to do with the proper accomplishment of the
+various strokes. The movements of every golfing swing, as we have
+agreed, are extremely complicated; they consist of hundreds of little
+movements amalgamated into one great system, and while one is conscious
+of the system, it is impossible for the parts of it to be anything but
+subconsciously done, and they are made perfect by training and practice,
+and by getting the brain and the physical construction to work together
+exactly and with harmony. When staleness comes on, this working
+arrangement breaks down and the player attempts the hopeless task of
+trying to do consciously what can only be done the other way. I believe
+that this is the true explanation of staleness.
+
+_Note 1._--The exhaustion of the nervous and physical energy is often
+unsuspected, and is covered up by the enthusiasm for the game. _Note
+2._--Excess of play does not mean only a frequent playing of three
+rounds a day. Two rounds every day, as a regular thing, may be excess in
+many cases. Much depends on the individual. A man of highly-strung
+temperament will become stale much more quickly than a beefy, phlegmatic
+person, who is commonly immune. _Note 3._--Staleness is very much more
+easily induced, and develops more quickly and dangerously, in hot
+weather than at other times, because the tax on the nervous energy and
+the eyesight is so much greater then.
+
+Now here are the common symptoms and the results of staleness. Almost
+the first real sign of it is swaying of the body. This is very slight at
+first, and is rarely suspected; but it brings about a general collapse
+of the swing and the entire golfing apparatus. A very hopeless sort of
+tap is given to the ball on the tee, and it is driven perhaps only a
+hundred and fifty yards. As everything seems to have been done properly,
+the player is mystified, begins to experiment, and then worse troubles
+come on. Shakiness of the legs, and much exaggerated knee and foot work,
+often resulting in collapse of the right leg and the player getting up
+on his toes, make up the next symptom; and another one that is a common
+accompaniment of the beginning of staleness is falling or lurching
+forward as the club is brought down on to the ball. Anything like a
+proper swing is, in such circumstances, impossible. Bad timing begins
+immediately; then there is overswinging and too fast swinging; and, of
+course, the moving of the head and the taking of the eye from the ball,
+those two faults that never miss an opportunity of coming in to add to
+the woes of the worried golfer.
+
+What must the stale golfer do for his salvation and happiness? In the
+first place, if he has had this thing before, he should be on his guard
+against it and catch it in time. If taken at the very beginning an early
+cure is quite practicable. The golf should be stopped at once for a few
+days, and a rest and change, as complete as possible, taken. Then the
+game should be resumed warily--one round a day. In addition to this,
+some men will insist on having alterations made in their clubs. They
+deceive themselves. One of the greatest champions of all times once, in
+intimate conversation, laid down a rule to me with great seriousness,
+and it is one never to be forgotten. He said: "Never make a change in
+your regular clubs, and never buy a new one, unless it is a putter, when
+you are playing badly. Only make changes when you are playing at your
+very best. You may then play even better, knowing so well what you
+want." Yet, warn them as much as you may, many men will make extensive
+changes when they are stale and desperate. One plea to them then--the
+change having failed, go back to the old clubs before changing again.
+Never get far from your base, or you will be lost in doubt and
+confusion. Let it be the same with methods as with clubs. If a new way
+fails, let the sick man go back to the old one before experimenting
+again. He should remember that that old one has served him well, and the
+possibilities are that he will have to stand by it after all. Then the
+stale golfer should try to encourage himself; he should try a new set of
+opponents, play with men of longer handicap than himself, who normally
+would never outdrive him, and so on. A change of links often works
+wonders, but if the staleness has gone very far, and it matters little,
+it is often wise to give up the golfing part of the holiday if one is in
+progress. We have seen the advice given to play through a period of
+staleness. This is a heroic measure, but it would not succeed in one in
+six cases, and the suffering would be too great for the ordinary mortal.
+We tell him to take few clubs away with him, and to be faithful to them,
+and they will serve him well. And we tell him when his golf is ill not
+to fly to the dangerous stimulant of a new club. And yet, where is the
+man who does come back from his holiday without a new one in his bag,
+one fond relic of those days that were so tightly packed with golf? We
+bring them back with us, the names of their nativity upon them, as
+hunters and explorers bring trophies from distant lands. Mutely they
+testify for us. Sometimes when the holiday is done they are added, for
+their merit and fine service, to the clubs in commission in the bag;
+oftener they fall into the reserve; frequently they are given a purely
+honorary office and sent off with a title to the golfer's own private
+House of Lords as magnificent relics.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A diary should be kept during the golfing holiday; indeed it should be
+kept at all times. More such are made than the golfing world realises,
+because they are often, to the uttermost degree, secret and private, and
+that not merely for the reason that some diarists place themselves in
+the confessional when they make their entries, but because, alas! they
+are conscious of serving their own vanity by exaggeration of their best
+achievements. It may be kept for one of two distinct reasons, or for
+both of them, though the latter is not generally done. The two different
+objects are entertainment and instruction. For the former, the small
+things that are sold in shops will do. You write down, each time you
+have been playing, where the game was had, who the other man was, and
+what you beat him by; or the extent of the disaster if it was the other
+way about. In the column devoted to "Conditions" you exaggerate the
+force of the wind; and under "Remarks" you say you were driving and
+putting splendidly when you won. If you lost, the space is left blank.
+This record is in its own way valuable, because at a future time it will
+refresh the memory concerning great golfing days of the past, and thus
+furnish a real enjoyment. When a game of golf is played, and finished,
+it is not done with. It is lodged in a great store of remembrance, with
+full particulars attached to it, ripening with time, so that the
+player's memories are among the best happenings of his golfing
+possessions. All of us know that this is so, and it is as a kind of
+catalogue that the little diaries serve their purpose well.
+
+The diary of analysis or instruction is a very different thing. The
+object is to make a serial record of ideas and successful experiments,
+faults and tendencies--most particularly tendencies--in order that on
+periodical examination of it the player may derive useful lessons and
+improve his game. One should get a good exercise book, bound nicely and
+strongly, with morocco corners, and just enter up one's performances on
+the plain paper according to any system that one may choose, giving
+prominence to a line at the top of each entry, naming the day, the
+place, and the man. I have seen diaries kept in this way, and they have
+been very serviceable. But the man who is starting anything of this kind
+must come to a definite agreement with himself to be absolutely honest
+and sincere; and he must also be very introspective, and have keen
+discernment for his own faults and constant observation for all that he
+does at every stroke. Otherwise it were better that he merely kept the
+diary of glorious remembrances.
+
+Let him, if he keeps a diary of fact, hold it secret from all the world;
+but every night after his play put down in it the plain, real truth
+about what happened; and let him see to it, after much thought upon
+recent events, that he does properly know the truth. This point is
+emphasised because men may be short with their putts, say on sixteen of
+eighteen greens in one round, and yet not notice the frequency of the
+same fault; or they may be pulling or cutting their putts all the time
+and be oblivious, in the same way, to the circumstance. Or they may be
+pitching their approaches too short of the greens, or slicing most of
+their drives. The point is that the golfer's memory for his own
+misdeeds is an exceedingly short one, and he rarely gets them tabulated
+and analysed as he should. If he made an analysis of his play at the end
+of the day, stated the truth about it in the book, and then examined
+that book carefully once a week, he would learn something about the
+causes that were preventing him from getting on in the game, and the
+next step would suggest itself. Some would say that the making of
+personal statistics in this way would be a very troublesome matter, and
+they would be certain to tire of it soon. It is not so much a nuisance
+as might be imagined; it becomes interesting, and it helps one's game.
+
+But if you are doubtful about this idea, do keep a diary of sorts
+anyhow, for it is such a pity to let the golf that has been played die
+out of memory. You may gather a notion of the value and interest of what
+might be called played golf by reading through the match-book of another
+man, like that of the late F. G. Tait, which is included in the
+delightful and pathetic memoir that Mr. John Low wrote about him. Tait,
+model of golfers, always filed the facts about his matches, but briefly.
+Not many words were wasted in the "Remarks" column; what was said there
+was the plain truth. Often it was "F. G. T. in great form," but the
+recorder knew how to denounce himself. It does one good to read through
+this diary of one who was soldier, hero, golfer, and darling of the
+game.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But not every man departs on a golfing holiday for a strenuous time of
+continuous match-play with keen rivals who might be fine companions, and
+who would keep him up at night with bridge, after a day's work on the
+links was done. All sorts and conditions of men are included in this
+comprehensive golfing world of ours; and some have most contemplative
+moods, love solitude, and, alone with themselves and the game, probe
+deeply into its mysteries and into their own weaknesses. It is to the
+credit of the pastime that it accommodates itself most splendidly to
+every disposition and mood and manner; and men of a lonely way have gone
+solus on their holidays, and held themselves solus all the time, and
+have come back again, well refreshed and satisfied. They have often
+enough had fewer disappointments than the others. They have practised
+extensively, and they have improved themselves as golfers. Practice is
+indeed a feature of many golfing holidays. Here at such times we have
+the full game at our disposal and nothing but the game, and now, if
+ever, we can make ourselves to be better golfers. That is how we reason.
+It is a matter to be considered carefully.
+
+Practice fails in most cases because the golfers concerned do not
+concentrate upon their efforts with that keenness, thoroughness, and
+determination they exhibit when playing a real match. The game is not
+the same to them; they do not try so hard, however much, as one might
+say, they try to try, and the result is there is such an excess of
+looseness, carelessness, about their methods, that bad habits are born;
+and these persons then had really better not be practising at all, for
+thus they do harm to their game. This is one reason why one-club
+practice is better in small quantities than in large ones. It is not
+sufficiently interesting when kept up. What we should do, therefore, is
+to make the practice interesting, and fortunately the circumstances of
+the game afford wide scope for doing so. There is no other game that is
+half so good in this way. Golf to many people's minds is not merely a
+game to be played with others and against them; it is a study, a subject
+for meditative research and exultant discovery. If others should regard
+such terms as immoderate, golfers anyhow know they are fairly employed.
+The essential difference that the presence of a man as opponent makes is
+that a real game, hard and according to the law, has then to be played,
+and there can be a winning or a losing of it.
+
+Well then, it is our business, in order to make solitary practice
+interesting and valuable, to create a game for ourselves. It is easily
+done, and there are some wise men who say that they would rather play
+their solitary game, going round the links alone with all their clubs or
+nearly, than they would play a match with a stranger who happened not to
+turn out to be the right kind of golfing man. Many who start systems of
+solitary competitive play against themselves in this way fail with them,
+did they but know it, because they are not honest with themselves.
+Having become very badly bunkered, and having taken three for recovery,
+they must not call it one because they should have got out in one, had
+they played the shot just right; nor, having missed a foot putt, must
+they consider it as holed because if they had tried their uttermost they
+could have holed it. We must see that it is of the essence of solus
+play, and making it valuable, that the man should try his best and
+should know and feel that he has no second attempt at the same stroke,
+just as he has none in the real game when others are there. If he
+permits himself second drives and putts, all the strokes are done
+without the sense of responsibility, and the player then were better
+indoors writing letters to his friends to come and match themselves
+against him. Therefore let the first and the most inexorable rule in
+one's solitary golf be that the shot once made must count, no matter
+what its quality. What may be permitted--and this does not operate as an
+exception to the rule--is that when a shot has been badly done another
+ball may be played from the same place. One may learn something in this
+way, but always must it be understood that the first ball must count;
+and it is a good maxim that there should be no attempted repetition of a
+successful stroke, for if it were done well again the man would be no
+better off in mind or skill, and if it failed there would be an
+unnecessary disappointment and uncertainty.
+
+Now, to consider ways of competing against oneself that will make
+interesting the lonely game, and lift it to value too, every man of
+thought might quite well devise some suitable system for himself; but we
+may tell him of some that have been successful with many players, and of
+a good principle to embrace in any new one, which is never to make the
+test or competition too severe. I believe that golfers are improved more
+by coaxing and flattery than by harsh measures and heavy defeats. It is
+often said that the best way to improve is to play against better
+players than ourselves, but there are limitations to that advice which
+are not always sufficiently emphasised. The superior party ought not to
+be too much superior, the different points of the game of the two men
+should not be very widely contrasted, and the better player should be
+giving to the inferior one so much allowance that the latter ought to
+win as often as he loses, never letting it be forgotten that, when
+handicaps are right and three-fourths of the difference is allowed, the
+odds are really always in favour of the better player, as has been
+proved over and over again. Even when a man is of long experience and
+has been fashioned by nature in the heroic mould, it is impossible to
+play his very best golf, and be improving on it, unless he "has his
+pecker up." The pecker properly set makes happiness and confidence, and
+it is only when such moods are engendered that the man is led on to
+higher things, perceives the absence of limitation to his prospects of
+improvement, and likens himself to the chrysalis of a Vardon or a Braid.
+Above everything else, as we have agreed so often before, golf is a game
+of hope. Crush the hope by setting the man a task that is beyond him and
+you take away the joy of the game and kill the happy prospects. The
+golfer who is winning will win again and play better.
+
+In these observations there have been some principles for practice laid
+down that are seldom emphasised, but are of the most vital importance.
+To make exact systems to suit them is, after all, a simple affair. Now
+many men play round after round, counting their strokes, as if they were
+playing in a medal competition, and comparing results at the finish,
+always trying to break their own records. They may gain some benefit
+from this play, but it often fails in interest, and consequently in
+value, for the same reason that medal competitions do--because of the
+continual occurrence of the one, or it may be two, very bad holes. The
+percentage of cards that are turned from good to bad merely by one
+disastrous hole must be very high, and when a man is playing a practice
+round and does a nine at the second hole, it is difficult for him to
+treat the remainder very seriously or be keen about them. The remedy is
+simple. Let this system of playing and comparisons be that his aggregate
+shall always be for sixteen or seventeen holes only, leaving the worst
+to be eliminated. There is nothing unfair in doing so. The one bad hole
+is frequently more the result of accident than of inability. At the
+beginning of a system of practice play three holes may be dropped
+regularly from the reckoning, then a week later two, the week after that
+one only. Comparisons of form are more accurate and reliable when the
+worst hole is eliminated, than when all eighteen are totted up. Then the
+man may play the bogey game; but instead of opposing the set bogey of
+the course and complicating the business with handicap strokes, let him
+make a bogey of his own of such a kind that it represents not the
+scratch man's proper game but his, so that when he is playing well he
+ought to beat it, and it should be a tolerable match. In constructing
+such a bogey, he might make allowance for his own special likes and
+dislikes in regard to particular holes. Again, I have known men to
+derive pleasure and improvement from a system of practice against the
+ordinary bogey by which they merely reckoned the number of holes at
+which they equalled or beat the phantom's figures, disregarding the
+losses. There is a little difference between this and the ordinary
+reckoning, and it is in the direction of encouragement if the player is
+coming on.
+
+And then there is the interesting system that was first set forth by a
+most eminent player who has been amateur champion more than once, by
+which the practiser wins half-crowns for his good play and loses them on
+his off days. He plays against bogey on terms that give him an equal
+chance. Then he establishes a money-box with two sections in it, one
+being for bogey and the other for himself, and into each section he
+deposits four half-crowns, which is very little to pay for all the
+enjoyment he is about to gain. When bogey beats him one of the
+half-crowns is lifted out of the man's section into the ghost's, but
+when flesh and blood prevail the coin comes back. The course of practice
+is ended when one side or the other has got all the half-crowns. If
+bogey has them there is something wrong with the game of the man, and he
+had better start another series; but when the man is triumphant he may
+depart for a holiday exultingly and spend the money on it, in the doing
+of which he will probably win some more, his form being so much bettered
+by his lonely practice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE OLD DIGNITY OF LONDON GOLF, AND ITS NEW IMPORTANCE, WITH A WORD FOR
+THE CHARM OF INLAND COURSES.
+
+
+Perhaps in the middle ages of the game some rare old conservative of a
+player at one of the great Scottish seats of golf was told by another
+that a gentleman had just arrived by the coach from London and would
+like a match in the morning, and it is distinctly possible, if he was
+the excellent man we picture him, that he ejaculated, "And where, sir,
+is London?" The manner would have been Johnsonian, if not the sentiment.
+Should any one now be disposed to regard such lack of knowledge--though
+I think you would find it was only what might be called judicial golfing
+ignorance--or narrowness, or whatever it was, as merely stupid or a
+little culpable, he may hesitate. The pride of dignity, arising from
+conscious strength and superiority, was a fine thing among the Scottish
+golfers, and certainly was to be admired. That spirit, that sturdy
+consciousness of personal value, have helped to the making of a British
+empire. And sometimes a golfer would wander in the north and be
+discovered by the players there to have a wooden club with a brass sole,
+and thereupon he might be good-humouredly mocked for being the
+Blackheath golfer that he was, since it was on the famous course by
+London that the brassey was first used. Since then London has given
+other good things to golf, including many courses that are unequalled
+among their kind and a number of players of high championship rank. And
+sometimes there is more golf played in a day within twenty-five miles of
+Charing Cross than there is in the whole of Scotland in a week, and much
+of it is very good golf. But this is not a place for comparisons, and
+particularly it is not meant for one in which the English gratitude to
+Scottish benefactors for the gift of this remarkable game is to be
+lessened from the full. It is only suggested that London golf is now a
+thing of great account. That is coming to be understood; but one doubts
+if the Londoners properly realise that the game in the metropolis has
+rich history and traditions which make a match for those of nearly any
+other place. Except that the great players of the game of different ages
+were so little acquainted with it, Blackheath has golfing land as
+historic as any, and the Royal Blackheath Club, with its origin in 1608,
+is the oldest in the world. That is London. Some time since there was a
+fashion for open-air shows of pageantry, and if the golfers had then
+been so disposed they could have put forward a pageant of London golf
+that would have embraced most picturesque and impressive tableaux. There
+is King James the First of England and the Sixth of Scotland, keen
+golfer indeed, playing the game at Blackheath in the company of some of
+his nobles when the court was at Greenwich, and there is a charming
+scene to be imagined in which the monarch gives his royal sanction and
+authority to the Society of Golfers that is established at this place in
+1608, as it is well believed to have been, and in varying forms to have
+maintained its existence ever since, being to-day the Royal Blackheath
+Golf Club, and highly respected. I think we should regard this King
+James as being the very first of our London golfers, and he makes a
+fine figure of a player for the distinction, keen enough in all
+conscience. Five years before the reputed beginning of the Society at
+Blackheath he appointed William Mayne to be the royal clubmaker, and a
+few years later gave one named Melvill a monopoly of ball-making at four
+shillings a time. Altogether this makes a good scene of golf.
+
+Here in the earliest days the course of Blackheath consisted of but five
+holes, which was then considered the proper number, and was the same as
+the Honourable Company had at Leith. Later there were seven holes
+arranged, and though they are played in a different order, those seven
+remain much the same to-day. It is to the discredit of London golfers as
+a body, those golfers who make the most reverential pilgrimages to
+northern shrines, that they have not, to the extent of one in a hundred,
+ever been to the scene of the old Blackheath golf, or played a game
+there on this hallowed ground, as they may at their will. It is the
+story again of the prophet in his own country, the same failing as that
+by which the majority of Londoners might be condemned for never having
+visited the Tower of London. I believe I have met more golfers in
+America who have been to Blackheath than I have met in England, for I
+have encountered several who told me they had not cared to sail back
+home until they had made the short journey down from Charing Cross to
+the famous common.
+
+Apart from the sense of history and the sentiment of pilgrimage,
+Blackheath, as a practical golfing proposition still surviving, should
+interest every golfer intensely. Surely it is one of the most
+interesting courses, one causing the deepest reflections, and one which,
+even by play upon it, might have some good effect on a man's game. For
+it is a chastening course, is our old Blackheath; one that makes
+humility if course ever did, and one that gives us the best contentment
+with our modern lot. Men who have played at Blackheath do not so
+constantly complain of the weak effort of their greenkeeper, and his
+governing committee, at their most favoured club. A little while since
+the cry was raised that golf had become too easy--too easy! It was said
+that the improving of the fairways and the smoothing of the putting
+greens had taken all its early viciousness from the game. Conditions
+have certainly changed, but when champions tell me that this maddening
+game from time to time brings their nerves to the state of piano wires,
+it may be reckoned as sufficiently difficult for the ordinary mortal.
+But Blackheath is extraordinary and most educative. It is certainly hard
+enough, though the modern bunker scientists have done nothing with it,
+and in the ordinary sense it has no bunkers. New theories of bunkering
+and the changing necessities of new kinds of balls trouble the
+Blackheath golfers not at all, for the course belongs to London and not
+to themselves, and they cannot do any engineering work upon it, as is
+being accomplished continually on other courses. Of the seven holes that
+are played the shortest is 170 yards, there is another of 230, a third
+of 335, another of 380, another of 410, a sixth of 500, and the longest
+is 540. The two very long holes come together, and though they are
+virtually bunkerless you may be assured that they take an uncommon
+amount of playing, and that he who gets them in five strokes each is
+skilful and fortunate too. Here, as nowhere else, is one made to feel
+that inferior shots bring their own punishment with them without any
+artificial hazards.
+
+The common is quite flat, but it is intersected by various roads and
+paths, and the greens are generally near to these walking ways. Variety
+is given by the great gravel pits which are here, as they have been for
+ages, although they are now smoothed and grassed over, and the biggest
+of them has to be played through at both the long holes. What is known
+as "Whitfield's Mount," a little clump of enclosed trees, is almost the
+only relief from the bareness and flatness of this golfing common. The
+lies are better than they used to be, but however kindly they may think
+of them at Blackheath--and we must respect them for doing so--they are
+not good. How could they be? The common is open for the children of
+London, or any other place, to play upon, and for the grown-ups to
+lounge about or walk over, which in abundance they do. It is primarily a
+public common and only secondarily a golf course, and the vast majority
+of those who walk upon it know nothing of the great game, except what
+they occasionally see as they pass along. The golfers have no rights.
+They have the greens, as they are called for compliment, smoothed a
+little and made in some way to resemble greens; and there are holes of
+sorts but not generally with flags in them, and there are no teeing
+boxes. The fairway is as hard as might be expected, and consists for the
+most part of bare places and tufts. There is no smoothness and evenness
+of proper golfing turf about it. But one does not say this in an
+unappreciative way. Not for a million balls or a permanent increase of
+drive would we have Blackheath anything but what it is, for if it were
+changed the charm would be gone.
+
+Let us go there and try the game. We must decide in advance that, like
+Vardon, Braid, and Taylor we can play our real game before any gallery
+in the world, and let our nerves and self-confidence be braced
+accordingly, for those who play at Blackheath must undergo great
+ordeals. A number of children, usually accompanied by a small dog,
+discover us soon after our appearance on the course, and gather close
+while our stroke is being made, very close. There is a little boy,
+perhaps, one or two little girls, the baby, and the dog. We consider
+most the baby at Blackheath. The boy, occasionally relieved by the elder
+girl, is the spokesman of the party, and in tones indicative of complete
+sympathy with the objects of the expedition, which are to strike the
+ball and project it in the direction of the holes, he explains to the
+remainder what is about to be done, what is done, and how we fail to do
+what was intended. He corrects himself whenever he finds his information
+to have been wrong. Willie having told little Liza something about the
+performance that is pending, the child inquires about what will happen
+if the gentleman does not hit the ball, and the gentleman, hearing,
+develops fear. At this moment the dog, which has been lingering quietly
+within a yard of the ball, shows signs of becoming restive, and is
+inclined to smell at it. Finally it favours only a disconsolate bark.
+Somehow we despatch that ball at last, and then Willie, Nell, Liza,
+baby, Towser, and selves move on some way towards the hole, but not so
+far as we should have done, because the ball happened to strike a
+lamp-post; and on the way Liza desires to know if a golf ball would kill
+anybody if it hit them, and wishes Willie to buy one some day. And a
+human sweetness there is in these little Blackheath urchins after all!
+This early innocence is a sublime and splendid thing, and when in like
+circumstances you would scowl, you gentlemen from London, remember, if
+you please, that Liza called you one, and she thinks you are.
+
+And the caddies! At Blackheath they have the most wonderful of all
+caddies. The ways and manners and the character of the St. Andrews and
+Musselburgh caddies are inferior. These Blackheath fellows are not like
+the usual thing. They lean against the wall of the club-house and offer
+their services to the stranger, declaring that it is a nice day for the
+game, when a storm is gathering over the common. Generally the caddie
+is given to laziness; they are a shiftless company. But see, though the
+Blackheath caddie looks as indolent as any to begin with, he is in truth
+one of the most active fellows within a hundred miles of Charing Cross,
+as you very soon discover, after beginning the round with him. The old
+red flag of traction-engine law obtains at Blackheath still. The golfer
+is a dangerous person, death lurks in his flying ball, and so a man with
+a scarlet banner must walk before the player to warn all people that he
+is coming on. But we make the caddie do the ordinary work of carrying,
+and teeing up, and red-flagging also, and he contrives in effect to be
+in two places at the same time. He tees the ball, lays down the driver
+by the side of it, and then runs ahead with a coloured handkerchief,
+which is the red flag, and he waves it while on the run and the golfer
+follows. So the caddie, leaving near the ball the club that is needed,
+goes on again, and is always a shot ahead. Reaching the green he stands
+by the hole until the golfer comes near enough to see it, and then the
+man hurries away to the next tee, sets everything in a state of
+preparation (and he carries a supply of sand in his pocket), and at once
+is off again to the distance of a drive before the player has holed out.
+The weakness of this system is that the caddie, by force of
+circumstances, can know little or nothing of the progress of the match,
+he is not one of the party, and he cares nothing at all about our good
+shots. He lacks the sympathy of the real caddie, but he is marvellously
+efficient all the same. If it is true, as we always say, that golf is
+the same all over the world, I would suggest that if there is a place
+where it is not the same it is at Blackheath, and that is why every one
+should go there, and it should cease to be the fact that more London
+golfers have been to Fifeshire than have been to play upon that historic
+course.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Take a glimpse into the rich past of Blackheath golf. Look into the old
+bet-book of the club and see some entries there, and do not forget that
+all bets were made on the understanding that all members of the club had
+a share in the gains of the winner no matter whether the bets were made
+in cash or kind. On Saturday, July 9 1791, "Mr. Pitcaithly bets Captain
+Fairfull one gallon of claret that he drives the Short Hole in three
+strokes, six times in ten--to be played for the first time he comes to
+Blackheath--after the annual day. Lost and paid by Mr. Pitcaithly, the
+10th September." A little while later "Mr. Christie bets Mr. Barnes one
+gallon of claret that he drives from the Thorn Tree beyond the College
+Hole in three strokes, five times in ten, to be decided next Saturday."
+Mr. Christie in due course performed his driving feat and won his bet.
+Then "Captain Welladvice, having left the company without permission of
+the chair, has forfeited one gallon claret"; and "Mr. Turner bets Mr.
+Walker one gallon claret that he plays him on Wednesday, the 12th inst.,
+four rounds of the green, and that Mr. Walker does not gain a hole of
+him." Again, "Mr. Longlands bets Mr. Win. Innes, Sen., that he will play
+him for a gallon of claret, giving Mr. Innes one stroke in each hole.
+Four rounds on the green. Out and in holes to be played." One may well
+understand that all the good claret that was thus available from these
+gallant bets, together with what was bought and paid for in the ordinary
+course, had a heartening effect upon those old golfers, with the result
+that in the fine fancies that floated in the dining-hall of the "Green
+Man" after dinner, drives seemed all endowed with unusual length, and
+direction was always good. Again it is recorded that on an evening of
+June "Captain MacMillan bets a gallon with Mr. Jameson that Captain
+Macara in five strokes drives farther by fifteen yards than any other
+gentleman Mr. Jameson may name of the Golf Society now present, to be
+determined next Saturday"; and no sooner had Captain MacMillan
+registered his bet than there came along Mr. Callender, who "bets Mr.
+Hamilton one gallon that Mr. R. Mackenzie drives in five strokes farther
+than Mr. H., to commence at the Assembly Hole and go on five strokes
+running." Then Mr. Innes gets into a sporting mood, and he "bets Mr.
+Wilson a gallon (a guinea) that he beats him, allowing Mr. Innes the tee
+stroke with his wooden club, and after with his irons. Out and in--four
+rounds." All these were in the latter days of the eighteenth century,
+and all the time the happy golfers were filling up the bet-book of the
+club, not with golfing bets any more than, or as much as, with bets
+about events of the great war that was in progress; as, for instance,
+when Mr. Satterthwaite "bets Mr. Callender a gallon of claret that
+Admiral Nelson's squadron does take or destroy the French transports in
+the harbour of Alexandria, or the major part of them."
+
+In the Knuckle Club and the Blackheath Winter Golf Club, forerunners of
+the Blackheath Golf Club, the same happy state of affairs prevailed. The
+Knuckle Club was a very remarkable institution. In form it was a secret
+society. Each member had to be initiated, and had to learn certain signs
+and answers to questions by which he would know brother members from
+strangers. Also, the members wore orders or a kind of regalia, and there
+were heavy fines if they allowed themselves to be seen outside the
+club-rooms with these special tokens of their community about them. On
+one occasion we have a member, named James Walker, heavily fined in
+claret for being so thoughtless as to take home his order. The holder
+of the golfing gold medal for the year was termed the Grand Knuckle, and
+was the chief of the club, which boasted also a "Registrar," and various
+other officials of much dignity of title. As the mystic element of the
+club decreased, so the golfing strength and enthusiasm of it increased,
+and it was by this process of evolution that in course of time the
+mystery lapsed and the name was changed. Before the competitions of the
+club took place advertisements were always inserted in the _Times_ and
+the _Morning Chronicle_ of the period, and it must be remarked that play
+in these competitions was usually conducted on the strictest lines. One
+record in the minutes reads: "28th March, 1795. Medal Day. It being
+stated to the club that Mr. Innes, one of the candidates for the medal
+played for this day, lost his ball; the opinion of the club was desired
+whether the loss of the ball put an end to the candidate's chance for
+the honours of the day." The club determined that it did. So more than a
+hundred years ago their medal rules were stricter than ours, in this
+matter at any rate. "Scrutineers" always examined the medal cards after
+dinner, and announced the winner. In the early part of last century
+there seems to have been rather less of betting and a little more of
+feasting. There were gifts of venison and turtle from the members, and
+the supply of claret, varied now and then by champagne and choice
+spirits, was very copious. Each time a child was born to a member, he
+contributed a pound's worth of claret to the weekly or monthly dinner;
+and whenever a member was married, the same thing was done. The golf of
+Blackheath, and all connected with it, was then a highly picturesque
+thing. The course was yet only a five-holes affair. The clubs of the
+players were carried by pensioners of the Royal Naval Hospital,
+Greenwich, in their quaint uniforms, and an allowance of beer was
+regularly made to them by the club until 1832. The pensioners were
+caddies until 1869.
+
+The Royal Blackheath Club was, and still is, most original and
+interesting in many points of its constitution and government. To be
+captain of this club, small one comparatively as it is now, is to fill a
+high office, the honourable nature of which is duly impressed upon the
+holder at the time of his election and installation, for he is elevated
+with much ceremony and in much the same way as the captain of the Royal
+and Ancient Club. The retiring captain sits in his chair at the meeting
+for the last time, and thanks are offered to him by grateful members for
+the good things he has done in his year. And then the captain-elect is
+called by name by the secretary, who takes in his arms the silver club
+which is the equivalent of the mace in Parliament, the symbol of power
+and active authority, and places himself at the head of a procession
+which is formed. The field-marshal, conducting the newcomer to the
+chair, follows behind, and so they make their way to the head of the
+chamber, where the field-marshal presents the new captain to the old
+one. There are various little forms of ritual to be gone through; the
+new captain makes a solemn declaration of loyalty and fidelity to the
+club and his office, and, particularly, expresses his anxiety to
+maintain its dignity, and then he commits himself irrevocably and
+awfully to an undying oath--he kisses the club! All this is to-day just
+as it was in the ancient days. Mention has been made of the
+field-marshal of the club; no other club boasts a field-marshal, who
+fills an office of most ineffable and incomparable dignity. Captains may
+come and go, year by year; they do their work well; and they lay down
+the club. But the field-marshal is above all captains, and he is in
+office till he dies. He is a prince over captains. He is essentially a
+golfer--not a mere ornament--and a good golfer, and one strong in the
+true spirit of the game. Because a good field-marshal is not easily
+found, he is made much of. The installation of a new one is a fine
+ceremony. There is a solemn gathering, all the famous trophies and bits
+of regalia are furbished up; there are speeches, forms, declarations,
+questions, answers; and if it were a very coronation the thing could
+scarcely be more serious. The silver club is held before the
+field-marshal elect, and he is presented with the special medal of his
+office, when he is finally addressed thus: "We expect and ask that you
+will wear this medal at all golf meetings as your predecessors did; and
+we have further to ask that you will in all time coming, while you are
+spared in health, do all that in you lies to maintain and support the
+rights and privileges of this ancient club; to maintain the honour and
+dignity of the club; and should any attempts be made to interfere with
+the rights of the club, that you will aid the executive in endeavouring
+to put down such interference, so that the club may maintain the high
+and honourable position that it ever has done, since its institution in
+1608. Kiss the club!" The field-marshal kisses it, and thus he is
+exalted among the highest in the whole world of golf.
+
+There are many eras with marked features to be noted in the history of
+the club. Even now many of those features are still perpetuated. Dinners
+are still held; dignity still is high. We have now heard much of the
+old-time Blackheath golfers; but an era of vast consequence, not only to
+Blackheath but to the game, is one that can still be remembered by some
+old golfers, that of great activity which began just before the middle
+of last century, and is only just now reaching its climax in the great
+and universal "boom" in golf. It has already been suggested that
+Blackheath led the way, and led it most effectively. For long after it
+had done so it was still the premier club in England, and in playing
+strength was the best. The club itself has few solid possessions--just a
+few fine old club heirlooms--but many great memories. In a very modern
+sense it is poor, having a comfortable but not a magnificent club-house,
+and no splendid links of eighteen holes. But the Royal Blackheath Golf
+Club is like a fine old English gentleman of the very best kind,
+ignoring all new ways of thought and life, eschewing all sordidness,
+clinging to the fine simple principles of wise fore-fathers. That is
+just what it is, the fine old English gentleman whom the age has
+outstripped. It is the Colonel Newcome of the clubs.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And in that pageant of London golf that we suggested there are many
+other picturesque and significant scenes. If we cannot be sure of the
+places where the holes were cut, nor of the situation of the teeing
+grounds, it is still certain, from documentary evidence, that a golf
+course that was made at Molesey Hurst was only second, in point of
+seniority, in England, to Blackheath itself, and it was very high up in
+the list of the golf clubs of the world. Manchester came next in 1818.
+There are concerned in the only existing record two people of no less
+credit and renown than David Garrick, the actor, and the eminent Dr.
+Alexander Carlyle, of Inveresk, who witnessed the Porteous riots, saw
+the fight at Prestonpans, and amid these many excitements cultivated his
+game to a fine point, was one of the keenest golfers of the eighteenth
+century, and won the Musselburgh medal in 1775. Carlyle was like many
+others of the Scottish parsons of those good times and the present, who
+would take their golf clubs with them wherever they might wander, on the
+chance of opportunity presenting itself. He came to London, and knowing
+of Blackheath, the clubs came with him. Garrick at that time had a house
+at Hampton which in recent days was occupied by the late Sir Clifton
+Robinson, the organiser of the London electric tramway system. Garrick
+asked John Home and a number of friends, including Carlyle, to dine with
+him at Hampton and bring their golf clubs and balls with them that they
+might play on the course at Molesey Hurst. When the six of them, who
+were in a landau, passed through Kensington, the Coldstreams, who were
+changing guard, observed their clubs, and gave them three cheers "in
+honour of a diversion peculiar to Scotland."
+
+There might be a railway train in the pageant of London golf, one of the
+early trains with engines of the Stephensonian style. The period would
+be just after the accession of Queen Victoria, and there would be two
+gentlemen travelling together from London to Aldershot, one of them
+being Sir Hope Grant, a keen golfer, a member of the Royal and Ancient
+Club, who held a military appointment at Aldershot, while the other
+would be the Duke of Cambridge. It has been recorded that in matter of
+companionship this journey was a very dull affair, for Sir Hope Grant
+was moody, and failed to respond to the well-meant attempts of the Duke
+to open conversation. He seemed troubled. But suddenly after long
+silence he jumped up from his seat, rushed to the window of the
+compartment and opened it. At this stage the Duke of Cambridge felt that
+things could not be well with his companion, and jumping up after him,
+grabbed him by the tails of his coat. A moment later they both sat down,
+and looked at each other. "Well," said Sir Hope Grant, in the manner of
+a man recovering from a great surprise, "that is a thing that you
+seldom see near London; there were two men playing golf in a field out
+there."
+
+And then in the pageant there would be represented the starting of golf
+at Wimbledon in 1865, with the Blackheath emissaries all on fire with
+the zeal of their enterprise. Wimbledon with its Royal Wimbledon and its
+London Scottish, its famous holes and its windmill, and all the rest of
+it, has played no small part in golfing history. At the beginning seven
+holes were made as they had them at Blackheath, and did you ever hear
+that at Wimbledon once there was a round that consisted of nineteen
+holes, the longest round in number of holes in the world? Tom Dunn, who
+was responsible for the extension of the course about 1870, told the
+story, and so far as I am aware he only told it in America. We may
+repeat it here in the words he used. The committee had asked him whether
+he thought they might make a full-sized course on their land, and,
+coming to the conclusion that they might, he was told to go on with the
+work, and eventually was satisfied that he had made a good job of it.
+The secretary of the period is said to have been somewhat imperfectly
+acquainted with the game in general just then, and went to Dunn with the
+inquiry as to how many holes they had on the old course at St. Andrews,
+and was told. "The secretary thought a moment," said Tom, "scratched his
+head and began to look wise. Then he approached very closely, and
+nodding his head for me to bend my ear, he whispered in a hoarse voice,
+'Tom, let us have one more!' 'Oh, that is impossible,' I replied. 'It
+cannot be, for eighteen is the orthodox number.' 'I care not for that,'
+replied the secretary, who was accustomed to have his own way, 'we will
+have one more!' I was very young at the time and I would do anything
+rather than offend the gentleman, for he had much influence, and I
+wanted his goodwill; so I reluctantly submitted to the demand. The
+committee met the next day, and I was asked if I had succeeded in making
+an eighteen-holes course. I replied, with some hesitation, that I had
+made a nineteen-holes course, and explained why I had done so. Well, you
+never in your life saw a more excited lot of men. There was an uproar in
+a moment, and all made a dive for the poor secretary, who never heard
+the last of it."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within sight of Wimbledon now there is Coombe Hill, one of the best and
+most recent achievements in the new metropolitan golf. Here is a
+contrast indeed! One may sometimes wonder how those ill-tempered people
+who grumble that golfers in these days take their game, and all about
+it, too richly, and that fine club-houses do not make plus players--such
+complainers still being eager for all the most modern comforts
+themselves--would like to live their golfing lives for a season after
+the early Wimbledon manner in all its great simplicity. The first
+club-house those golfers ever had, if you would call it by the name, was
+the old iron "shooting house," and it measured only eight yards by six.
+It served the purposes of club-room, clothes-room and others. If its
+floor space was small, its roof was high, and the members' clothes were
+hung up on hooks, to the very top; and were lifted up to their proper
+places, and reached down again by a pole. Most of the numerous members
+had their private hooks, and a boy who worked the pole had a most
+marvellous memory for the garments and their proper owners, so that when
+a member, coming in suddenly, called for his jacket and his stockings,
+up went the pole, and down came the goods without a moment's delay, and
+all correct. This remarkable young person has his proper and
+highly-developed successor in Gibbon, the house-steward at the present
+Mid-Surrey club at Richmond, who, though he has nearly a thousand
+members to consider, knows so well the particularities and possessions
+of them all. Tom Dunn had his workshop in this iron shooting house, and
+here he kept a fair stock of clubs and balls, and did his own repairs.
+Presently some of the members suggested to him that it would be
+agreeable if he stored some eatables and drinkables in his shop for
+their sustenance and comfort, before and after rounds; and so he laid in
+a stock of wines and spirits, sandwiches and eggs, and so forth, which
+had of necessity to be laid out on his bench where there were varnish,
+shavings, sawdust and pitch as well. Behold here the early London
+golfer! It is an interesting historical fact, that when a few years
+after its establishment, and just before the Tom Dunn era, the club
+first thought of engaging a professional, the committee set it on record
+that "they took a very favourable view of young Tom Morris's application
+for the post."
+
+The people who accuse the moderns of being over fond of prizes in
+competitions--and a nasty name they call them!--might be told the tale
+of the old golfing baronet of Wimbledon, now dead, who once won five
+shillings, being his half share of the third prize in the sweepstakes
+attached to the monthly medal competition there. It was the first prize
+that this keen but unfortunate golfer had ever won, and he begged the
+permission of the committee to be allowed to add more money for a richer
+keepsake. The consent of the authorities was graciously given, whereupon
+the prize-winner purchased for himself a golden-eagle writing stand for
+which he gave a hundred sovereigns, adding ninety-nine pounds fifteen
+shillings to the prize-money. Friends, not being golfers, who called
+upon him had the prize exhibited to them, and they said, "Goodness,
+what a fine player you must be!" He felt he was, and that the prize was
+worth the money.
+
+When the 'nineties of the last century were reached golf began to spread
+in London, and such clubs as Northwood with its "Death or Glory" Hole,
+Tooting Bec, and Mid-Surrey laid the foundation for the great London
+golf that was soon to come. This Mid-Surrey club with its thousand
+members, its financial turnover of thirty thousand pounds a year, its
+hundred thousand rounds that are played on that excellent course in
+twelve months without its showing hardly the wear of a blade of grass,
+the twenty thousand lunches that are eaten by their members, the four
+thousand pounds that were spent in one year lately on the improvement of
+the course, is, I believe, the busiest golfing institution in the world.
+It is well said that there is nearly always a couple driving off from
+that first teeing ground near the rails in the Old Deer Park. And one
+might add that as a place where golf is played in a plain but excellent
+spirit, without any fancy trappings, the club here is one of the best
+organised and managed in the world, and is a vast credit to the
+secretary, Mr. J. H. Montgomerie, while the course, whose putting greens
+are a match for any in existence, is a fine testimonial to that prince
+of greenkeepers, Peter Lees, who was lately captured by the Americans
+for a great new course on Long Island. Lees has been a great influence
+in the development of modern golf in England, and I know that he will
+make a great difference to American courses. And there is champion J. H.
+Taylor as the club's professional. In a special way Mid-Surrey stands
+for London golf.
+
+It has come to this, that we no longer fear to speak and write of the
+great excellence of the London golf courses. Sunningdale at the
+beginning of the present century opened up a new era not only in London
+golf but in golf in general--the period of the inland courses of a far
+higher class, better and more interesting in every respect than anything
+that had ever been dreamt of before. Sunningdale was followed by
+Huntercombe and Walton Heath, of which Sir George Riddell has assisted
+to make such a magnificent success. There have come after them
+Worplesdon, Burhill, Bramshot, Stoke Poges, Sandy Lodge, Coombe Hill,
+St. George's Hill, and many others all belonging to the same class. Many
+of us hold to the fancy that Sunningdale, the mother of the new sort of
+courses, is still the best and most charming of them all. She is the
+Berkshire jewel; magnificent. But comparisons are not easily made, for,
+most remarkably and happily, these new modern inland courses that are
+setting an example to the world and which the world is following
+wherever it can afford it, vary enormously in character, in appearance,
+in the precise sort of golf that they present and offer, whereas at the
+beginning of inland golf we had the fancy, and the fancy truly led to
+fact, that in the main all inland courses must be the same--plain, flat,
+one cross bunker here, another there, and then the green. Not only the
+architecture, but, far more than that in its beneficial effects, the
+greenkeeping has been improved, soils are understood, they are fortified
+and seeds are adapted to them, and results are achieved which not ten
+years ago would have been regarded as impossible. The result is that we
+have fairways and putting greens on some of our best inland courses near
+London which are rarely excelled at the seaside, although nothing can
+ever give to inland turf that firm springiness--a term slightly
+paradoxical but one easily appreciated--which is the characteristic of
+good seaside links. No longer is good inland golf to be despised. It has
+charms all its own, and it has the distinction that golf as we know it
+to-day would never have existed if it were not for the inland courses.
+There are fewer hedges on them now than once there were, and no more
+ditches than there should be.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To a section of old conservatives it may seem a dreadful thing to say,
+but it is the truth that one of the reasons why we love our golf of
+London, praise it and rejoice in it, is because of its glorious trees.
+We know courses on the coast where there is never a tree or a bush to be
+seen, and never one to be avoided in the playing. The golfers who live
+and play and die in those parts know nothing of the splendour of trees
+and the leaves that come and go, and knowing nothing they will even
+sometimes wrongfully say that no golf course ever should have a tree
+about it. Golf is a game of Nature; allow it then all the best effects
+that Nature can supply. Permit it the trees that the townsmen otherwise
+so seldom see; cutting them down, hewing them away will not bring the
+ocean nearer nor liken the course more to seaside golf. Trees belong to
+the inland game as much as sandhills to the other, and when a question
+of removal arises, let constructors and committees reflect that a golfer
+can be made in a season and he perishes some time later, that a new hole
+can be made in a week and may be altered the week after, that some shots
+which are thought of might be hindered by the tree but that only one
+shot in a dozen is likely to be of the kind that is considered--and that
+the tree has taken ages to grow, and will live ages on, being more of
+eternity than many generations of golfers.
+
+They may not always be conscious of the fact, but the people who live in
+towns and are cooped in them constantly, abiding in flats, working in
+gloomy chambers and travelling in underground railways, derive more than
+half their golfing enjoyment from the vision of Nature, less adorned
+than in the public parks, with which they become associated in their
+golf--grass to tread upon, surrounding trees through which soft breezes
+croon, and timid clouds creeping slowly underneath the blue. There is
+nothing so good as the golf of the true seaside links; there could not
+be. In this, the real thing, we have land formations that are impossible
+on inland flatness; there are the wildness of dunes and bent that cannot
+be reproduced artificially away from the coast; we have the perfect turf
+that is ideal for the game and which has never yet been completely
+imitated away from shore, and above all, through the rich variety of
+situation and possibility, we have the course springing surprises on us
+all the time. This is golf in the highest, the stern, cold, enthralling
+game. London golf is a gentler thing, a little softer, but it has charms
+that are all its own, and they are the charms of green Nature and the
+delights of changing seasons. By the sea it is warm or it is cold, and
+there is little difference else from the beginning of the year to the
+end. But in London the golfer notices the seasons as he does nowhere
+else, and they are everything to him and his happiness. And the trees
+best tell him of the seasons, and it is then that he might exclaim, as
+Ruskin did, "What a great thought of God was that when He thought a
+tree!"
+
+In this way the two most beautiful seasons of the year, spring and
+autumn, touching nearest the heart, creating inspirations and causing
+reflection, the germinal and the fall, are the most splendid times for
+golf in London, and at other inland places, and they are surely the best
+seasons of all for the enjoyment and happiness of the game. But
+particularly they are London's seasons. In the spring there is the time
+for preparation, when all golfers are keen in a new life. Then the
+leaves of the trees are opened, and are there prettier scenes on any
+course than on some of those near London then? There is hardly to be
+fancied a better day than could be had at St. George's Hill or on the
+New Zealand course at Byfleet when the golden gorse is in bloom and
+gives out its rich perfume, while the trees that line the fairway all
+about are full to life again. Think, when May is come, of the glory of
+Sudbrooke Park, Cassiobury, of Sunningdale, even of Neasden, Northwood,
+and a hundred more. Then there comes the holiday time, and the seaside
+links, and the golf of London rests until the autumn, and then it is
+alive again; and let the faults of London golf be whatever they may, the
+players are few who are not happy to return to the old courses of home.
+Be they ever so poor they are their very own.
+
+This of all others is the most delightful golfing season. The white sun
+of summer has been toned to gold, and the air is sweet and cool; the
+turf is moist again. It is soothing; but there is a pathos in it all
+that the golfer, sensitive and sympathetic observer as he has become,
+must always feel. One may tramp a country lane and notice little, but
+the men of this game have been trained to notice. Here present is the
+season of the fall, the rest after achievement, when Nature closes in
+upon herself and lapses to her sleep. She has done her season's work,
+done it wisely, ever well. So the fires of heaven burn low again. Green
+of the world turns russet and bronze, with flashes of scarlet and gold.
+A smell of earth that is moist with autumn dew rises in the morning air.
+When the round begins the sun warmth is not enough to dry away the
+little globules of the dew, tears of the sobbing night, and the course
+has a glittering sheen upon it. From drooping branches of beeches and
+sycamores that half surround a putting green in a corner of the course,
+crackling leaves are falling and some must be moved before the intruding
+ball can be putted to its appointed place. As the little golfing company
+moves along to the adjoining tee more of these spent leaves come
+fluttering sadly down. But, a little sad as this may be, the golfer of
+the towns, with summer memories of mountains and hills and deep lanes
+still lingering in his mind, hearing the crooning of the summer seas and
+the lapping of waves near northern putting greens, has his consolations.
+He is grateful for the coppery leaves and the early dew, though they may
+hinder play a trifle. They are as echoes from the north and east and
+west. We see no dew in Piccadilly, and there are no mountains in the
+Strand.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Golfer, by Henry Leach
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