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Title: The Happy Golfer

Author: Henry Leach

Release date: August 19, 2011 [eBook #37136]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Credits: 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.)


*** START OF THE 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 £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_.




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