A line o' gowf or two

MR. LEGION.

If we Americans took good government as seriously as we take the game of golf, we might hope to overhaul the millennium.

Whether in his relations to others or in the game of golf, almost everybody tries to do too much at one time. So from now to the end of the year we shall attempt but two things—(1) to be kind to those around us; and (2) to learn how to use a mashie. Fore!

Fine distinctions are being drawn between amateur and professional golfers. In the case of the amateur one may occasionally be in doubt, but we can always tell a professional by the way he handles his iron clubs.

To throw coal accurately into the furnace, reports R. E. T., after experimenting, you must keep your eye on the opening, stand “open” and use a pendulum swing. Correct. And in order to get the coal to the back of the furnace you must have a free follow-through. A jerky stroke piles the coal near the door.

Many golfers are setting out for the so-called sunny southland, where for two or three months, they will hook and slice with all their clubs, and pitch balls with a mashie in every direction except toward the flag. We say nothing about the wooden club, but the fluffed iron shot always evokes our compassion. Sooner than persist in such ineptitude we’d arrange our implements in a neat pile, pour kerosene on them, and strike a match.

There may be more than one way to get a straight ball with an iron, but there is at least one way. All the player need keep in mind are two things, instead of the conventional baker’s dozen. And the first of these is that his right elbow must be in contact with his body throughout the swing until the ball is struck. The second essential is that the knuckles of his right hand must be underneath when the ball is struck. If these two items of a complicated matter are attended to the other eleven will give less and less trouble. What a dub needs is a short cut. There it is. Keep the change.

Golf, says Mr. Taft, is a great boon to humanity. It is indeed. It not only “takes you out in the open air,” but it consumes so much time that you haven’t much left for making speeches and putting your foot in it. Every politician should play golf. Col. Lewis, for example, should swap his pen for a midiron.

Despite the pleasant words said of Mr. Wilson’s golf game his scores probably have to be taken out and buried, as G. Ade expresses it. It may be that he is like the gentleman whom he appointed Minister to Belgium. We were playing with the Hon. Brand, and things weren’t going well. He related an experience at St. Andrews. After he had shot five or six holes, he asked the caddie what he thought of his game—“Aweel,” said the bag-bearer, gloomily, “you have a grand style, but nae luck.”

We have located the man who was first on the links of the Jackson Park Country Club. He got there at three A.M. Sunday morning, and, it being too early to play, he curled up in a rocker and went to sleep. He slept so soundly that when he woke up the starter had given out two hundred tickets.

THE PILL.

In quest of a certain volume of golf scripture we visited the Crerar Library in Chicago. Mr. Andrews, the librarian, apologized for the lack of scripture on his shelves, saying that the Public Library had agreed to take over all amusements. Amusement, forsooth! Golf is a religion, a disease, a fixed idea, a state of mind, a system of metaphysics, what you will—but not an amusement. And Mr. Andrews himself a golfer!

When a man has to be coaxed into a golf game he is tired.

GOLF ILLUSIONS.

Perhaps the greatest illusion about golf is that it is a sociable game. The fact is, that, next to solitaire, golf is the most unsociable game that man has invented. One of many such stories tells of two Scotchmen, brothers, who played together in perfect silence up to the twelfth hole, when one of them let fall a trifling remark; whereupon the other flew into a passion, declaring that his brother’s gabbing had spoiled his day. An exaggeration, but only for artistic purposes. On all golf courses one sees the same twosomes or foursomes going the season through. Players avoid other players as they would the plague. If a round, even with old friends, is played sociably, it is at the expense of the game. Silence and obsequial gloom brood over the putting greens. A match for the president’s cup is a funeral procession. Golf a sociable game? About as sociable as a hand at Canfield in the morgue on a rainy afternoon, in November.

The second great illusion about golf is that to play par, especially to win important matches, a man must possess a mysterious something called “temperament.” Now, the only comprehensible temperament is what an English writer has happily termed the wooden temperament. Combine this with a maximum amount of skill, and par golf is possible seven days in the week. Golf rhapsodists are fond of declaring that the successful match player must have a great heart, and an indomitable soul, and all that rot; whereas the requirements are great skill and almost perfect muscular control. Great players with the so-called temperament have blown up under pressure; even the wooden temperament is not proof against an occasional loss of muscular control. Harold Hilton won the finals in this country through a fluke; what good would his temperament have done him if his ball had not struck a rock and bounded to the green? A heart as big as an ox is no assistance if skill and luck are lacking, and many an indomitable soul has topped a critical shot. The only really temperamental player is the man whose score fluctuates between eighty and ninety.

Concerning our giving up smoking, it had to be either that or golf. When a man misses a twenty-five-foot putt he should ask himself whether tobacco is unsettling his nerves.

LOVE’S ANTIDOTE.

(Miss May Sutton avers that “athletics is an antidote for the poison of premature romance.”)

FORE!

An excellent substitute for golf is swatting flies. Although it does not take one out in the open air, it provides more excitement. The full course may be played over in a nine-room apartment, playing from parlor to kitchen and back again, but good sport may be had in a six-room flat. Four or five slapsticks of varying shapes and widths are all the clubs required, and the following suggestions may be useful to those who wish to take up the new sport.

If the fly is on a table top or other broad surface, a mashie may be used. If on a curtain, use the driver and follow through with stroke; this being the only chance to employ the follow-through. If the fly is on light or expensive wall-paper, take a niblick. This is a difficult shot, as the fly must be lifted clear of the wall, after which he is holed out with the putter.

If the fly is on the side of a valuable vase or other bric-à-brac, the putter and a delicate wrist are required. The swing must be checked the instant the fly is crushed and before the club reaches the china. A coffee cup, such as is found in a quick lunchery, is a good thing to practise on. In fact, that is just the place to practise putting.

HOUSEFLY GOLF.

Sir: On Sunday, after the company had gone, the Missus and I played a twosome of your new game of bughouse golf; but on the first hole—“kitchen”—after a good drive off the sink, I foozled my approach into some water from an overflowing drip pan under the icebox. I claimed a right to lift out of casual water, but wifey said I’d forgotten to empty the pan for several days, and that the puddle constituted a regular hazard. Is she right?[1] Then, on the fourth hole, up the hill over the dining table, I sliced my brassie into the sand pit, alias the sugar bowl, and though I could get out with my mashie the ball went back into the pit again and again and I had to use a baffy spoon. After that I got several bogies, and didn’t blow up till I came to the “nursery,” when I laid my approach shot dead against the kid’s toy balloon. I must have pressed a bit, for I couldn’t find the ball afterward.

G. B. M.

Sir: Your new “fly” game, as a substitute for golf, should become very popular with those who have had trouble with the old-fashioned outdoor sport. After spending most of my time on hands and knees in the tall grass, peering down gopher holes for eighty-five cent disappearers, I find the new game a refreshing diversion. Have already one good score to submit—

Played the bedrooms in 4, 6, 5, and 3 respectively; parlor, seven; dining-room, five; kitchen, nine; and finished the bathroom in bogey. The flour barrel and range were some trouble, but bunkers add zest to the game. The chandeliers and my wife were mental hazards, which I shall become accustomed to or remove. A friend of mine says the sport is particularly enjoyable out at Calumet, where the flies have nine legs and stand so high they don’t have to be teed. I am open to challenges.

J. H. C.

And, as Arnold Bennett would say, with those cadences singing in his head a man will go out and quarrel with a golf ball.

“Golfers sleep on Grounds.”—Lead, South Dakota Call.

Nothing uncommon. Our friend B. L. M. takes a nap over every putt.

A reader mentions casually that he took sixteen shots for the first hole at Skokie, with three balls in the pond. It doesn’t seem possible. Still, it might be done this way: Three in the pond is six strokes; the seventh was over, the eighth was topped, the ninth was in the bunker; two chops make eleven, out in twelve; thirteenth on the green or thereabouts; and three putts. It’s a great game.

By sheer nerve a golfer with a handicap of twenty-something played through all the threesomes and foursomes ahead of him, on the Skokie, holding them all back, blowing up the entire course, and putting everybody out of humor. When last seen he was smoking a seegar on the club porch, entirely at peace with himself. It must be great to have a hide like that.

The cost of golf balls is to be inquired into. For a reasoning creature, man spends an intolerable time in needless investigation. The manufacturers charge a high price for golf balls because they can get it. There is absolutely no other reason.

GOLF NOTE.

Sir: At Wabash and Madison, I noticed a whitewings using the Varden grip on his implement. Is this au fait in the profession.

W. F.

Golf players talk and write a great deal about the niblick, but they devote hardly any time to practising with that tool. It is considered a comical club.

The meanest golfer is Pop Royce, who holes a twenty-foot putt, and acts as if he did that sort of thing every day of his life.

Crack golfers find a week of tournament play physically fatiguing. A dub doesn’t tire so easily. He will play thirty-six holes, day after day, and use up as much energy in one drive as a champ needs for a dozen. Vive le dub!

Mr. Taft’s gabby caddy explains that the president plays “consistent” golf. That is to say, he does not bring in a poor score one day and a better one the next, but brings a poor one every day. Thus we observe again the influence of the judicial temperament. It’s a grand temperament, but it never sets any links on fire.

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE.

Envy not the men who go south in the winter to continue their golf. They miss the pleasure of waiting for spring days and greening turf. Besides, the more they play the less eradicable become their bad habits.

IN THE WAKE OF THE WAKE.

A stretch of greensward fringed with the morning shadows of oaks and maples; a reach of swampland gay with the colors of October; a flash of tardy songbirds drifting south, reluctant still to go; a small lagoon glittering like steel in the sunlight; a slender shaft rising and falling rhythmically; a click, followed by the graceful flight of a small white sphere that falls obediently upon a square of velvet green—

Oh, shucks! Don’t forget to register.

SCIENCE AND INVENTION.

The Chronomatic Golf Ball is another neat little invention of Prof. B. House of the University of Iowa. It is used only in driving, the object being to avoid the loss of so many balls. The device consists of clockwork imbedded in an ordinary golf ball, which clockwork is set to allow for the time in walking from tee to the end of drive.

Modus operandi: On stroke from club (impact on plunger) the machinery starts. At the expiration of five minutes—or whatever time is allowed for in the setting—a bell rings. The ball is then officially a “lost ball,” but it is actually recovered, the owner being able to follow the sound. Ringing continues until ball is found.

After the golf scientists finish the fascinating study of the pronation of the left hand and forearm, we wish they would take up the matter of rhythm, which is the fundamental law of golf, as it is the law of the almost as interesting universe. An ounce of rhythm is worth a pound of pronation.

The “slow back-swing” comes highly recommended, but its only value is that the dub does not fight himself quite so violently at the top of his swing; his mind is a blank for a shorter space of time. Why a back-swing at all? Why not take stance, turn the body, adjust the club back of the head, and then, when all is set, swat the ball? We have driven dozens of balls that way. It is not beautiful, but it is better than the jerky, snatchy, spasmodic swipe of the average golf player.

Miss Kaiser was defeated in the finals of the woman’s tournament, and Mr. Krupp got as far as the finals at Sandusky. Mr. Rainwater won in the finals at Atlanta. He must be, as Joe Davis allows, a casual player.

In the accounts of important golf tournaments we read, in every other paragraph, about the terrific strain; and if the winner does not “crack under the strain” he is hailed as a person of wonderful nerve and the possessor of a lion heart. We wonder whether the writers, who themselves are players, do not exaggerate this strain stuff. Golf is a good deal a matter of taking pains, and if a person is exceedingly keen to win he will not play carelessly. The concentration which care brings, more than offsets, we are sure, any strain. One plays best when alone on the links, or in a close competition; one plays worst in a “friendly game,” especially if the friend is an inferior player.

Ouimet won against Varden by eliminating the Englishman from his consciousness; to all purposes he was playing solitaire. Travis, whose heart is assayed one hundred percent leonine, walks the links in a trance; he, too, is alone.

If you go out to play a friendly game do not expect a score. If this is necessary to your happiness, erase your friend from your mind at the outset and restore him on the final green. It will not be sociable, but golf is not a sociable game.

If you received an invitation to take a shot on the new golf course at the Elgin State hospital of Illinois, you probably remarked: “Yes, I’m crazy about golf, but not enough to go to Elgin.”

Mr. Evans, the well-known “Chick,” reports that golf is played very seriously by the patients at Elgin. This is remarkable as showing that, in one respect, there is no difference between the persons inside and those outside.

LET THE DIVOTS FALL WHERE THEY MAY.

Sir: Golf enthusiasts will be interested to read in Timothy iv., 7: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course.”

G. A. G.

(THE LAST LINE OF ALL.)

You know the infallible sign of spring: father on the back porch, cleaning last fall’s mud from his golf shoes.

B. L. T.