There can be no other explanation. But it is to be set down perhaps to the clergyman’s credit that he is so often unorthodox in his methods. On the links he is the broadest-minded man alive, and he is tolerant of all things. Why, if ever in London one wants to be reminded of just the way in which the Barry swing is done, one might seek out none other than the Bishop of London, for if ever a man performs that fall-back, bent-kneed swipe it is Dr. Ingram, as photographs will prove. If this is to be, then an archbishop might play no stymies, and how then shall a curate become a champion?
We have not that form and ceremony in the management of our golf clubs that our ancestors had, nor is there so much idea and sentiment employed. Golf in these days seems often to be regarded too much as a work-a-day affair, so that at few places besides St. Andrews is there any real preservation of the old feeling. Else, the true spirit dominating, why should there not still be chaplains to all the old-established golf clubs? How much the chaplain counted for in the great golfing days of old may be gathered from the minute of the Honourable Company which they made when settling an appointment to the office. The club then had its home at Leith, the date being 1764, and it was entered in the book—“The Captain and Council, taking into their serious consideration the deplorable situation of the Company in wanting a godly and pious Chaplain, they did intreat the Reverend Doctor John Dun, Chaplain to the Right Honourable the Earl of Galloway, to accept the office of being Chaplain to the Golfers; which desire the said Doctor, out of his great regard to the Glory of God and the good of the Souls of the said Company, was Religiously pleased to comply with. Therefore the Company and Council Did and Do hereby nominate, present, and appoint the said Rev. Doctor John Dun to be their Chaplain accordingly. The said Reverend Doctor did accept of the Chaplaincy, and in token thereof said Grace after dinner.” Whether the general company of golfers is at present in as “deplorable situation” as the Honourable Company was at this time, is a nice point which need not be inquired into.
In a day when the young school of golfers is making such a determined advance it is often difficult to make distinctions of merit and to determine who are the most promising and who will most probably become the really great golfers of the future. We are a little too much inclined to get into the way of saying that this man is likely to be an amateur champion of the future, and that that player is almost a certainty for the high honours of the game. When people talk in this irresponsible fashion they forget several things—that competition now is many times keener than it was in the days when the Balls and the Taits and the Hiltons first became champions, and when it was quite safe to prophesy beforehand that they would be, and that in the future it will be keener still; that there is more luck than ever in the game and in the selection of champions, and that if the honour is to be denied to such a fine player as Mr. John Graham, who has forgotten more about the game than some of the younger school know, nobody should say that others are likely to be champions; and that because a man does some fine golf for a week or two it does not follow that he is a fine golfer.
The game no doubt is easier now than it used to be, and it is more difficult for fine distinctions in merit between players to be reproduced in the balance of holes; but still in the long run knowledge and skill will tell, and those men of the younger school who are deeply thoughtful and scientific golfers will in the end separate themselves from those of their rivals whose methods are more of the slapdash order. With all the advance of the young school, and its scores of men with high plus handicaps, each of whom is declared to be good enough to win the championship if it finds him on his day, one would seriously hesitate to suggest that there are more than five or six young players at the present time who show any promise at all of becoming as good golfers as Ball and Hilton and Laidlay have been. The remainder may be only the veriest trifle their inferiors, and the difference may be so small that it may constantly be not indicated in the results of competitions, or it may even show a balance to the credit of the players whom we are regarding as the inferior ones. But in the long run the minority, who know more about the game, will triumph, and will be separated from the general ruck. With all the talk that there has been about the levelling up of the players as the result of the rubber-cored ball, depend upon it that in twenty years from now we shall still have a high table in golf, at which will sit the acknowledged masters of the game, just as some of those whose names we have mentioned have sat at this table for the past decade or two.
Perhaps it would be as well for the golf of some of us if now and again a time of quiet and inactive thought were enforced. It is certain that many men feel much the better in their game for having been deprived of play for a time, greatly irritated as they have been. The fact is that he who is a faithful golfer often plays it mentally when real shots on the links are denied to him. It turns out that this mental golf is of a very thorough order; never is the player so analytical and severely critical of his methods as then, and never does he grope more patiently or more intelligently for the hidden light that is the source of success. It is simple fact that men have discovered grave faults in their play in this way, such as they never suspected during the whole season that they had been committing them in real play on the links. And in the same way others have come upon great secrets of fine details of method, making for the improvement of their game, which they would never have encountered at golf on a course.
The chief, if not the only reason, and one that is quite good enough to be convincing, for this somewhat peculiar state of affairs is, that this is essentially practice and experimental golf, in which the player is constantly wondering and trying something new; while the golf that he plays with clubs and balls on the green grass is far too often exclusively match-play or score-play golf, and that is regarded at the time as too responsible a thing to permit of any experiment. The old ways may be bad ways, and no doubt many of them are; but we must stand by them on occasions of this kind, we say to ourselves, when the wise precept of an old player-friend flashes across our mind, the opponent being one up with three to go, and a very vindictive fellow. It is evident, then, that we do too much of this match and score play, and that the consequence is that we are never given time and the opportunity for thought and practice and the working out of experiments and ideas that might prove of the utmost moment. Our game runs along a little old-constructed channel, and it gets clogged with fault. When we go out to golf for the day, no other possibility presents itself to our minds than that of the two rounds, one before luncheon, and the other one after, with living opponent or opponents, and always upon such occasions we must trust to the old ways to pull us through. How much would it make for future improvement if one of the rounds, or a long afternoon, were devoted to simple lonely practice with one club, or at most two, in which new ideas might be tried, theories considered, and different and perhaps more effective ways to salvation worked out. Spend an hour thus in close communion with one’s cleek or iron, and what an intimacy is established that never would have been otherwise! There used to be suspicion, distrustfulness, fear, and neglect—and what may follow upon such relations save utter failure?—but now there is friendship, and an appreciation of capabilities and qualities that bodes ill for the arrogance of the opponent who has seen so many failures with this cleek or iron, that he has come to think that when it is unbagged it is time for him to be adding one more hole to his score. The man who never does any of this practice golf never gives himself a chance of learning how to play more than one stroke with one club, and when there is only one stroke to a club it is not generally a very good or very reliable stroke, as can easily be shown.
Thinking thus, we perceive the value of influenza and the minor illnesses, and come to realise the truth of the remark by one earnest golfer, that the thing that of all others had most improved his game of golf was a severe attack of typhoid fever, which all but summarily terminated his career. When this man told us that he emerged from that disquieting experience a new and better golfer, and one more thorough, the observation seemed cryptic to the point of absurdity, and it was not taken very seriously. But it is certainly true that a very earnest golfer will think long and hard upon all points of his game during a dull period of enforced rest and idleness such as comes at sickness, and then all the sins of omission and commission loom up in his troubled mind, and he corrects the faults that he knows now, as probably he would not admit before, went to the undoing of his game. The entire position is revised; in the early days of convalescence we send downstairs to the study for some favourite volumes, and we look up Vardon, Braid, or Taylor on a subtle point of which we have been making mental examination. The thoughtful studies of Mr. John Low are a stimulant at such times. Such introspection is a fine thing and most fruitful, and little wonder after all that the player does indeed return to health a wiser and a more complete golfer, who will now go farther in skill upon the links than ever he would have done in the old, narrow, careless days.
What follows is a story that bears somewhat upon the moral that we have been thinking over. There was a man who was in want of a shot that would come between the driving iron and the wood, and he could not find one. Of the cleek he had no good word to say; he could not play it. Of driving mashies he had several, and some of them were well enough at times, and at others they were like the cleek, so that what with his driving mashies and his cleeks, this man was in constant jeopardy when there was a shot of a hundred and sixty or seventy yards to play, and so he was unhappy in his game. It happened that one of his driving mashies was one that had been gifted to him upon a day by a great player, who said, “I pick this from all that I have seen; may I never play more if it is not a perfect club!” The man tried it, and it seemed to him that the head wanted more ballast, and after a little while he allowed the club to be gathered to his fine collection of idle relics, saying to himself consolingly, “What suits one man does not suit another.” Thus it came to pass that the perfect club that a champion player declared he would love to play a long-short hole with to save the life of himself or his dearest friend, lay for months and years in a dark cupboard.
In the even cycle of this golfer’s life the time of torment came round once again, and, as it had seemed before, it was more desperate than it had ever been. There appeared to be no remedy. All the tricks had been tried, and all the clubs generally put into commission had been experimented with, and there was no good result. And then a strange thing happened. Things were at about their worst, when, as sometimes was the case, this poor tormented golfer awoke in his bed very early one morning in summer. The sun had not long broken the darkness; it was about three o’clock. Being a man who went to bed betimes and who was early refreshed, he did this time, as on others, lie in long thought upon the events of life and his own affairs, the perfect stillness of the time conducing to effective contemplation. And, as was inevitable, the chain of reflection brought him round to the prevailing worry of the game, and for half an hour or so he considered this grave problem from every conceivable point of view, and subjected each iron instrument that was concerned with it to the severest cross-examination, from which none emerged with an unspotted reputation. It is not always in the human golfer to attach entire blame to flesh and blood, and wholly exonerate inanimate iron. Pride must have its place, even in the times of adversity. This man was self-assured that one reason for his failure—not the whole reason, perhaps; but still one reason—was that all his searchings and purchasings had yet left him without the club that he really needed, that one which was resting somewhere in a shop or in another man’s bag, that was the affinity of his game, the thing that was meant for him and which one day might come his way. He had a vague instinct of what the feel of that club would be like, of the shape of its head, its balance, and the length of the shaft. When he encountered it he would know it at once for the long-sought-for club.
Then, as by a gift of the gods, an idea flashed through his mind and caused him to start up, thoroughly roused from the dreamy state of lethargy. That club! That old despised club that had come to him from the champion with such a glowing recommendation, wasted entirely! That was the club that was wanted; it must have been one of the most irresponsible and illogical moments of his golfing lifetime when it was rejected. Did it not conform to that ideal that was vaguely felt in the mind? As he handled it in imagination now, did it not seem quite perfect, that above all other clubs its true motto was “Far and sure.” When a golfer makes discoveries of this kind about his old clubs, that, poor things, cannot speak for themselves and tell him what he is doing wrong, he is man enough to own his previous mistakes, and this player owned them. He was all contrition, repentance, humility. He wished to abase himself before the champion club and promote it to the captaincy of his bag. Therefore when there is no sound to be heard save the chirruping of the birds and the creaking of stairs, see this inspired golfer leave his room, clad in a dressing-gown, at half-past three in the morning, and go forward to the ransacking of a rubbish cupboard in search for the wanted club. And there it was found at last, a little rusty, the marks of privation from golf and of severe neglect written plainly upon its face, but sure enough that same grand club that had lived in the remembrance until at last it was appreciated. Yes, it was just as it had been imagined to be. It was the perfect club; it would do what all others had failed to do. Happy club in which there is placed such belief and confidence, for the less likely is it ever to disappoint! In his mood of repentance the man gets a little emery and brightens up the blade until the first shafts of the morning sunlight glint upon it. Being a handy man with a tool or two, he takes out the tack at the end of the grip and unwinds it, laying it back again in some way to suit the fancy of the time. And then the grip is waxed, and the club is ready, and it is laid to a ball on the hearth-rug, and how that ball could be hit, with a fine, low, skimming flight that would yield much length, and the stroke, having been something of a push, would dump the ball at the end of it just down beside the flag! It is no use. Let it be four o’clock or twelve, why should the conventions keep us off the links when these exalted moods are upon us? The golfer hurries through a bath, puts his clothes about him, and with the whole world of golf save this one unit still asleep, even unto the most watchful greenkeeper, he hurries down to the course with a few balls and just this one club, this one fine club. And there the truth of it all is realised. It is the club that was wanted, and the shots that come from it are just as perfect as shots by this man will ever be. The balls are fired off up to the first green one by one, and it is found then that such are the virtues of this club of exquisite balance that it is a splendid thing to putt with!
It is a glorious morning. The pearly sky seems to speak well of weather prospects for the day when it opens out, and there is not wind enough to curl a wavelet on the sea, which simply makes a little soothing creamy lapping on the pebbles. How grand is the fine expanse of the course in this morning freshness, and is there not something of rugged beauty in that huge sandy projection which marks the short hole far out? This indeed is the time of day for the golfer to be abroad. Happy man who is in this mood, having found that which was lost. The golfing life is not the same. A little thought and much confidence, and see to what they will carry you! Make the most of them, you happy fellow, for they may not last—they may not last!
Probably it is true that golf carries its votaries farther in enthusiasm than does any other game or sport. It is characteristic of the golfing enthusiasm that it does but increase as time goes on, and that not in the case of one man in twenty does it show any diminution, while the game is such a jealous mistress that it is rarely the convert to golf maintains any regular association with other sports unless he is of such complete leisure that it is impossible for golf alone to fill up his hours. Practically every golfer, therefore, is a keen enthusiast, and though we dislike to hear the phrase come from the lips of those who are not of us, we have to confess that there is some justification for the extremity of this enthusiasm being described as “golf fever”; for indeed at times it provokes the player to the doing of many things which in the cold light of reason afterwards would not be regarded as completely rational. We are all enthusiasts; but who was the greatest enthusiast who ever was? An impossible question to answer, of course, if for no other reason than that the limit appears to have been reached by hundreds; but tradition can always settle matters of this kind in its own way, and it has determined for us who was the keenest golfer, and has seen to it, moreover, that his memory shall be safely perpetuated. Thus we have old Alexander MʻKellar as the patron saint of the man who likes to get his three and four rounds a day in the summer-time, and is miserable unless he has a club in his hand in his resting hours.
It is something to have become regarded as the keenest golfer, for it goes without saying that every other worldly consideration of every description whatsoever must have been sacrificed to the attainment of that vast distinction. Such a man must have really earned the title of “Cock o’ the Green,” which was given to MʻKellar, and with that title his fame will be handed down through the generations as it is affixed to an historic print. This picture of the old worthy, who indeed was fairly “mad” on the game, was first circulated more than a hundred years ago, and has become one of our most cherished golfing antiquities. His enthusiasm brimmed over when in the act of play, and “By the la’ Harry, this shall not go for nothing!” as he used to say involuntarily when addressing the ball, became something of a catch-phrase in his district. He did his golf from Edinburgh, and Bruntsfield Links was his playing ground. How often does one find that they are the keenest golfers who do not take up the game in their youth? It may be true that generally the man who does not swing a club as a child has not such a good chance of becoming a player with pretensions to championship form as have those who made such early acquaintance with the game; but do we not find that these men become the fondest and most thorough players, making up in enthusiasm and real enjoyment what they lack in skill? Thus there is a grand compensation after all, and let us weep no more for the golf that we missed in our schooldays; for some of those who played it then are they who now find their greatest ease of heart for some weeks of the year at fishing, shooting, or some other sport in which something has to be killed.
And so the “Cock o’ the Green” did not begin his golf at all until he was quite a middle-aged man, and all likelihood of his ever becoming a really finished player had completely vanished. And he was of comparatively humble means. He had saved a little money, such as went for some justification for his constant idleness; but his wife found it necessary to keep a tavern in Edinburgh when they went to live there. MʻKellar gave no hand in the management of this tavern; he had no time for anything but golf, and bitter were the upbraidings that he had to endure from his worthy and industrious dame as a consequence. Mrs. MʻKellar may indeed be set down as the first that we know anything about of that long line of sufferers who go by the name of golf-widows. This lady might have borne her isolation better if it had not been the fact that she was somewhat mocked for it, and found the name of her lord a byword in every neighbour’s house and at every street corner for his over-indulgence in the game of golf, fair “cracked” on it, as everybody took him to be. She tried to shame him once, but had much the worse of the experiment. She thought to make him a butt for the laughter of his companions by taking to the links one day his dinner and his nightcap. But when she arrived there he was in the throes of a hard-fought match, and when she offered him the meal he answered her kindly, but with some touch of impatience, that she might wait if she chose until the game was completed, when he would attend to her, but that for the time being he had no leisure for dinner. And the game went on. So she came to loathe the very name of golf, and was scarcely civil to the tavern customers who were players and friends of her good man. But one day she had a sweet revenge upon him. She set out for a journey to Fife, and was expected to be away for at least a day. No sooner was her back turned than hospitable MʻKellar went forth to bid his golfing friends to his house, which, when its lady was in residence, they might in no wise enter. A fine feast was prepared, and the party was a merry one, when the door opened, and there stood, with a countenance drawn with suppressed wrath, Mrs. MʻKellar, who had been obliged to return, through the ferry being impassable as a consequence of the severe weather that prevailed.
Every morning the “Cock o’ the Green” hurried through his breakfast, and away he went to Bruntsfield Links with all the haste possible, never returning home again until night had fallen. Sometimes, indeed, he did not come then, if there were any good golfing excuse for not doing so. Many were the times when he was discovered playing at the short holes by the dim glimmer of a lamp, and a moonlight night was an almost irresistible temptation to him. Heat and cold did not diminish his ardour; and in the winter, when the snow covered the course, he would do his utmost to persuade an opponent to share a round with him; and if he failed he would go out alone and wander the whole way round playing his ball from flag to flag, the greens and holes not being discoverable. Like all keen golfers he loved the foursome, and preferred to be tested by it if he could find a partner of any quality whatever. One day he was in Leith and fell in conversation with some strangers there, glass-blowers they were, and, as always, the subject turned upon the game, and from the game in general to the prowess of the “Cock o’ the Green” in particular. The men of Leith affected to think little of his play, and challenged him to a match, upon which moment a Bruntsfield youngster made his appearance. “By gracious, gentlemen!” exclaimed MʻKellar, “here is a boy, and we will play you for a guinea!” The match took place, and victory lay with MʻKellar, who was so excited when the last hole had been played that he ran post haste to the shop of the clubmaker, screaming, “By gracious, gentlemen, the old man and the boy have beat them off the green!”
The artist Kay, who made the picture of him, went out on to the links one day to draw it from the life unbeknown to the hero, and when he came to know about it afterwards he was sorely disappointed that he had not been given the opportunity of posing. “What a pity!” he lamented. “By gracious! If I had but known I would have shown him some of my capers!” Perhaps it was as well he did not. When he won his match he would sometimes be so mad with joy that he would dance round the hole for a minute. Such delight was pure, for though he did wager a little on his matches he did not risk more than he could well afford to lose, and it was the game he tried to win and not the little that he bet. On Sundays, when there was no golf to be played, he fulfilled the duties of doorkeeper to an Episcopalian church, and held the plate. Douglas Gourlay, the famous ballmaker, one day put a ball into the plate by way of joke, guessing what would happen. He was right, MʻKellar’s golfing cupidity was too much for him. His eyes glistened, and in an instant the ball was transferred to his pocket. Poor old MʻKellar! Weak enough he may have been, but he did love his game as absolutely nothing else in life, which for him ended nearly a century since.
It is an ancient game; but let no man think yet that we have realised a fair part of the curious situations that may arise on the links when the golfer hits a ball, or that we have a full appreciation of the possibilities of their complexity. Very quaint are some of the difficulties that twice a year are presented to the Rules of Golf Committee sitting at St. Andrews for the special purpose of discovering solutions thereto.
From far Manawatu once there came a plaintive cry for help. These New Zealand golfers confessed that in all the holes on their greens there is an iron box with a small flag on the top to mark the holes. In an inter-club match the caddie of one of the players before leaving the green, when replacing the box, put it into the hole, flag downwards, exposing a sharp point on the top. One of the next two players, when approaching to that hole, landed his ball on the top of the box in the hole, and it remained there. Then the arguments began, and not until a letter had sailed the seas from the Antipodes, and the Royal and Ancient Club had sent her answer back to this outpost of her empire of golf, did they subside. The man who had executed this wonderful shot had held that he could reverse the box and put it into its proper position and claim the hole. It hurt St. Andrews to think that away there in New Zealand, left to their own resources, they should give themselves up to such queer-fangled contrivances as hole flags with boxes on them. If a bit of cloth and a stick of sorts is good enough for the old course, why should Manawatu want what these Royal and Ancients sarcastically referred to as “mechanical contrivances”? The high authority begged leave to observe that the Rules of Golf did not provide for such “mechanical contrivances,” and the New Zealanders were recommended to make local rules to suit them.
You may always tell from the form of the answer when the St. Andrews lip has curled at the question that has been asked of it. Nowadays the committee can hear the mention of a hedge without a rise in its temperature; but when the secretary, in reading out the problem of the moment, has to say “mud” there is uneasiness still. The committee move in their chairs, they fidget, they scowl, somebody mutters “Tut, tut!” and they all cough to hide their agitation. “Mud” is the word you must not say. I have not seen the committee in this agitation; nobody except its own members has, for it is a very private committee; but this sudden disturbance can be imagined most clearly. Yet these inconsiderate golfers will keep on mentioning mud, and St. Andrews answers them back with as much asperity as is consistent with the preservation of its own dignity. One time in a matter of this kind they gave a snubbing to a Kentish course. The club there, in all seriousness and innocence, propounded a very pretty point. “Playing in a foursome,” they said, “A is left by his partner’s approach shot a six-inch putt for the hole; but A’s ball pitched in a small piece of wet mud left on the edge of the green (presumably from the boot of a player in front). A small piece of this mud clung to the ball, and was on the side of the ball A had to strike. A played the stroke, and the ball and the mud stuck to his putter, and the head of the putter and the ball on it were exactly above the hole.” This was surely a most delightful situation! See how pretty is the combination of this foursome pair, and how they do play each the game to suit the other, thus: “His partner then with his putter tapped the ball off A’s putter and it fell into the hole.” A charming incident! “Did A or his partner lose or halve the hole, and would A have been within his rights in shaking the ball off into the hole, or what should they have done?” Said the Committee to the secretary, “Tell these good people that the Committee have no experience of such tenacious mud, and such a contingency should be provided for by the local rules,” and then they hurriedly spoke of the weather and the wind and the state of the eighteenth green, and how the Major got a bonny 3 there the night before—anything to get this taste of Kentish mud out of their St. Andrews mouths.
A point of some curious interest was that which arose in the course of medal play on the course of the Higher Bebington Club some time ago. A player had one of those most tantalising putts a yard in length to play, and, like many a man before him, he missed it! In his aggravation at the circumstance he snatched back his ball, and, without having holed it out, he replaced it where it was before, in order to try his putt over again, to satisfy his amour propre that the holing of such a putt was not beyond his mortal capacity. This is an old way of attempting to gain some small crumb of satisfaction from a very disappointing business. At the second attempt he holed that putt, but his partner then told him that he was obliged to disqualify him from the entire competition for not having holed out when making his putt. The competitor agreed that he had done wrong, and accepted this fate; but some time later, when he had fully thought over the business, and read up the rules, he protested. Yet his committee maintained that he really should be disqualified, and after much argument the seers of the Royal and Ancient were begged to give their decision. And it was a very interesting decision. The high court held that Rule 10 of stroke competitions applied, and that, therefore, if the player replaced his ball directly behind the spot it occupied after he had missed the putt, the penalty was two strokes only, the second putt thus counting as in the competition, though it is fairly clear that the competitor never intended it for it. “But,” said the committee, “otherwise he was disqualified.” Those who discover feelings and frames of mind behind the mask of simple sentences would be moved to say, in this case, that in that last simple sentence St. Andrews was trying to cover up somewhat the absurd position to which the rules brought this case; for it was clear that the essence of the problem in relation to the law was as to whether the player replaced his ball behind the spot where it first stopped, which came simply to this—Was he short of the hole the first time, or did his ball run to either side? If he was short, then he was saved, and he is allowed to go on under penalty of two strokes; but if he over-ran the hole—which from the golf point of view was better than to be short—or if he went to either side, then he would be disqualified. That ruling has grown since then.
Pity the club committees in their constant troubles. Was ever committee so sorely beset as that which had come, by devious means, to knowledge of the faults of its members, and when honour seemed to forbid that the knowledge should be acted upon, though otherwise would an injustice be done to the sinless golfers. It was in County Sligo. A medal competition had been played, and when all was over the members of the committee—as such high officers constantly solicitous for the welfare of things will—wandered through the rooms and the corridors of the club. And it came to pass that one of them overheard a conversation that he was not supposed to overhear, between two members of the club, in which it was alleged that certain competitors had played on the putting greens before starting. The committeeman knew then that these men should be disqualified; but how was he to act? He told his colleagues, but they likewise were sore in mind as to whether they were justified in taking notice of the fact that had thus come to their knowledge. Were they bound to investigate this matter, and prove it one way or the other, or was it sufficient if they waited for someone to lay a formal objection? In their despair they appealed to St. Andrews; but this again is one of the nice points that the chief authority would rather others settled for themselves, and they said accordingly, that the committee must use their own discretion as to whether it was a case for their interference.
Upon other occasions the committee at St. Andrews has been called upon to indicate the proper course of procedure when a ball, after being played, lodged in the turned-up part of a player’s trousers. It has been somewhat naïvely asked by Kenmare whether, in a mixed foursome, when the lady missed the ball off the tee, she should “try” again, or whether her gallant partner should rid the tee of that persistent ball. It had to tell the County Down Club that a player could not carry a special flat board round with him from which to make his tee shots; and it has had to straighten out some quite frightful mix-ups in ladies’ competitions. Sometimes it happens that some casual decision of this sort serves a good purpose in bringing the portion of the golf world that has been somewhat inclined to wander, back to its duty in the observance of the strict letter of the law, as in the autumn of 1906, when on the appeal of Aldeburgh it declared how, when in long grass or anything of the kind, the player was only entitled to move so much of the obstruction as would enable him to find his ball in the first instance, and was not entitled to arrange things so that he could see it while attempting to play it. A player is not so entitled to a full view of his ball, though he will sometimes tell you that he is.
That which was regarded by our ancestors as a most amazing feat, namely, holing with the tee shot, has become exceeding common. One week not long ago it was done in five different parts of the country, and in three other separate weeks there were four cases reported. Why this increase, then, of doing holes in 1? The reason is simple after all. It is not that it is any easier to do the trick than it used to be. Probably it is rather harder, since it is more difficult to flop the rubber-cored ball down plump on the green at the short holes than it used to be in the days of the late lamented gutta, and a good deal harder to make it sink down into the hole as it ought to do when it gets there, instead of running around it and then away, and generally behaving badly. If it were any easier to do than it was formerly, would not the champions be doing it? But they are not. Harry Vardon has still only one hole in 1 to his credit, and while Braid gets his 2’s very often, the 1’s don’t come his way. The simple reason for the frequency is the great increase of golf. Everybody plays golf now and is always playing, and in such circumstances somebody must always be holing in 1, or very nearly. That is the simple fact, and the man who now performs this feat is no longer worthy of a paragraph all to himself in the morning newspaper. He will simply go along with half a dozen others in the weekly list.
Still there is room for distinction in holing in 1 yet, and the men who crave for such notoriety need not despair. If every man can hole in 1, obviously the proper thing to do is to find some particular way of doing it that every man cannot equal, or at least is not likely to do. For example, J. S. Caird, the Newcastle-on-Tyne professional, was out playing the other day, when in the course of his game he took the fifteenth in 1 in a very strange way. He popped his ball up into the air with his mashie, and down it came plump into the hole, falling clean into the tin and never bouncing out again! Fancy pitching into the hole in 1! Luckily the caddie was standing there and took out the flag in time, and one cannot be surprised that he was so overcome with the strangeness of the thing that happened, that his imagination was fired until he saw something of the supernatural in it, and believed that his eyes had witnessed more than they really had. At all events, to the players and to the people afterwards he described in the most circumstantial and convincing manner how the ball at one time seemed to be flying far past the green, but how when just above him it came to a sudden stop in mid-air and then fell vertically into the hole! Why were we not told the name of this ball?
Another advance on the simple feat of holing in one stroke is to do it twice within a year. The first man to do this was Mr. L. Stuart Anderson, who took the tenth and fifteenth at Balgownie (Aberdeen) in 1 in 1895. Since then I have heard of three other men having done it, one at Fort Anne, another at Bristol, and the third at Tunbridge Wells. Mr. Anderson, by the way, who is now the secretary of the Royal Portrush Club, holds the record for the greatest number of times that one man has done a hole in 1; and here again is another suggestion to the ambitious one-stroke man. Mr. Anderson has done it seven times. He began by doing it at the expense of his sister, Miss Blanche, at North Berwick, which perhaps did not matter much, as sisters are indulgent, and wound up for the time being by doing it (the seventh at Tavistock) in the presence of and in a match against a parson, which, to say the least, was indelicate. I have heard of a lady who has done this thing four times. Another out-of-the-way feat is to hole in 1 just when you hear that someone else has done so. One April evening, when the course at Heaton Moor had not the appearance of stirring events happening upon it, such as would go down into history as records, two of the members of the club, not playing together, did two different holes in 1 each. At Christmas time in 1899 a most remarkable feat was performed by Mr. P. H. Morton, celebrated in his day as a Cambridge bowler, who took the first hole on the Meyrick course at Bournemouth twice in one day, morning and afternoon, with his shot from the tee. It is a better achievement than usual to take a tolerably long hole in one stroke, and, in this class, honours at present are with Mr. J. F. Anderson, who with a wind behind him and playing on a frost-bound course got the ninth at St. Andrews in a single shot, and the ninth measures 277 yards. It must be accounted excellent also to do the trick one-handed, as did an amateur with the promising name of Willie Park when playing to the eleventh on the relief course at Troon. Mr. Park had to do it with one arm or not at all, for he has only one, and he was certainly to be congratulated on the fact of his unfortunate state not preventing him from graduating as a hole-in-oner.
Men who seem to have an abnormal sense of humour say that it is killing to do a hole in 1 when the other man is giving you a stroke. The other man has then to do it in nothing to halve, or 1 less than nothing to win, and the situation is delightful. I have authentic information of this situation having arisen, and it was rendered all the more interesting from the circumstance that the man giving the stroke was an Open Champion, and the other party was a lady. It was at the twelfth hole at Walton Heath, and one need not hesitate to say that the man who was giving the stroke was James Braid, who thought awhile on the wonders of this most interesting world, and then took a short cut to the next tee without troubling to play the short hole.
Concerning the coincidence connected with the name of Park, just noticed, it may have been perceived that two of our greatest heroes in these matters are of the name of Anderson. This coincidence can be carried a long step farther, for perhaps the most valuable hole in 1 ever gained was by another Anderson, and that was Jamie, the champion. He was playing for the championship at Prestwick and making his last round. He knew he was very close up, and that he had nothing to spare. He was playing the next to the last hole on the course as it used to be—not as it is—and was just about to hit his tee shot when a girl standing close by remarked to her father that the player had teed his ball outside the teeing ground, and that accordingly, if he played his shot from there, he would be disqualified altogether. Jamie heard, looked, and quietly removed his ball and placed it within the limited space. Then he made his shot and holed out in 1, and very properly he raised his cap to the little girl and said, “Thank you, miss!” for she had done him a very good turn indeed. A few minutes later he was in possession of the Championship Cup. That was in 1878. It is clear that the Andersons are the men who do the holes in 1, particularly as another of them, Mr. W. W. Anderson, once in 1893 worked most gradually and systematically up to a hole in 1 at North Berwick by taking the fourth in 3, the fifth in 2, and the sixth in the minimum 1. One in 1 and three in 6!
The worst of these tricks is that you don’t get anything for doing them; you must pay instead. The injustice of this arrangement has been borne in to many minds, notably to that of Mr. Balfour. The right honourable gentleman has never holed in 1, but he has done a hole in two strokes when he received a stroke from his opponent at it, and his caddie ingeniously argued with him that this was exactly the same thing—2 − 1 = 1. It was Point Garry out at North Berwick, and Mr. Balfour was playing with Tom Dunn. “I am astonished!” said Mr. Balfour, pretending that he was. “Am I to pay you for looking at me doing this? Should I not rather receive the money for performing the feat?” But he paid.
There is one hole in the world where you do get paid for achieving a 1, that is if you happen to do it at either the Easter, Whitsuntide, or Autumn meetings. This is what is called the “Island Hole” on the course of the Royal Ashdown Forest Club in Sussex. It is an excellent hole, and a gentleman who played it on one occasion fell so much in love with it that he endowed it with a sum of £5, the accumulated interest on the sum to go to the competitor at any of the meetings named who should do this trick of getting it in 1. Ever since the endowment was made the interest has been growing and growing, and nobody has qualified for it. Money accumulates so fast once it gets a fair start, that we can imagine this interest some day amounting to a fortune, and then what a scene there will be at the Island Hole at Easter when the golfer, having been training at the Redan, the Maiden, and a few like holes for a whole month previously, comes here with weird clubs and balls made of lead, and has greed written in large characters across his face.
The moral of the hole in 1 is excellently stated by a great master of the game. It demands not only a perfect shot but a perfect fluke. It is a case of the gods giving to them that have, and those that have not are cast into the bunker in front of the green.
Curious, indeed, are some items in the list of the feats of golf. In the game heroic there is testimony to the pluck, perseverance, and enthusiasm of Mr. J. W. Spalding, who in the spring of a recent season came by an awful motor smash in France and lost an eye, but had no sooner risen from the hospital bed and been sent to Italy to recuperate than he was at his golf again, playing himself back with his single eye to the game of scratch quality that he enjoyed before, and—good for you, Mr. Spalding—but a few weeks went by ere one more scratch medal came his way. Nor shall we forget how a popular champion struggled home to the seventy-second green at Prestwick while the blood was oozing from his lungs.
There are feats of other kinds, as those which count as freaks, poor things enough but wondered at by some. What shall we say of the Pittsburg golfer who wagered four thousand dollars that he could play a ball over four and a half miles of the city streets in one hundred and fifty strokes? Beginning at five o’clock in the morning, he did this thing in one hundred and nineteen strokes, but lost a thousand dollars in damage done to property on the way. That man found an emulator in London who undertook to play a ball from Ludgate Circus to a fountain basin in Trafalgar Square. There are men who like to drive fine balls from the glass faces of other people’s expensive watches, and others who prefer the tamer sport of driving from the eggs of hens. There was the man of Sandwich, who, with a champagne bottle as his only “club,” played, and—Oh, shame upon it!—beat a neophyte who carried a full bag of the most improved clubs. There was the old-time golfer who lofted balls over the spire of St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, and another who tooled his gutty from Bruntsfield Links to the top of Arthur’s Seat. Better and more purposeful was the practice which Mr. Laidlay used to undertake before championships, when, with Jack White for caddie, he would play a ball from the first tee at North Berwick to the Roundell Hole at Gullane, six miles away, by way of the Eel Burn Hole, the sands along the shore, the neighbourhood of the fishermen’s cottages, and away over Muirfield and the rough country to the top of the hill, playing from whatever lie his ball chanced to find, and once doing this course in a total of ninety-seven strokes.
Do we not sometimes hear one sort of sportsmen make it a complaint against golf, that the player does not run any personal risk of injury to his life or his limbs? Some of these men will tell you that you only arrive at real sport when such dangers are incurred. It may be so, but we shall not on that account seek to increase the risks of golf. It is one of the glories of the game that it is such fine sport and commands the wild enthusiasm of the best sportsmen, though it threatens the life neither of the player nor any of the living creatures made by God that give the fulness to Nature, and add, though it may be unconsciously, to the golfer’s joy as he strides over the links on a fine morning. In other sports, when man goes wandering over the hills, he takes his gun with him that he may kill something. Leave him alone with Nature, and as the lord of creation he is impelled to go forward to the attack on the lesser beings. In golf alone does he roam over the country and by the side of the sea with never a thought of what he may kill passing through his mind. He has a great joy in his own life, and he is all benevolence and wishful for the happy life of others.
Things have been killed—accidentally—at golf. Many luckless birds have got in the way of tee shots, and even a fish lost its life on a golf course, and is now in a glass case in the clubhouse at Totteridge. By some devious means it got on to the course one day when there had been heavy rains and much overflowing all about. And—let it be whispered to the shooters and the mighty hunters!—men have been maimed, and even killed on golf links, though we pray that, despite the extra sport, there may be no more of them, and that the single pain of the game may be the skin-blisters and corns that sometimes will come up at the bottom of the left forefinger and elsewhere. I did not think better of golf as a sport when one day, in playing my way outwards on the North Berwick links, a ball from a hidden tee came upon me unawares and carried the pipe that I was smoking away with it for some twenty or thirty yards, while I stood to wonder what was happening. And even by his own deeds may a man court perils, for we heard the other day that one was playing at Ravenscar when he took a full mashie shot with the object of clearing a stone wall; but the ball struck the wall and rebounded with great force against his head. And from his head it rebounded again over the wall, so it was said; and it was not astonishing to hear that the player was slightly stunned! If adventure in the form of fierce conflict with wild beasts and reptiles is what the full-blooded sportsman wishes, he may have it. A member of the Royal Sydney Club played his ball down a hole, and he put his hand down it to see if he could recover the ball. He seized hold of something soft and drew out a venomous brown snake—which he hurriedly pushed back. I am told by my golfing directory that at Umtala, in Rhodesia, “the course consists of nine holes. In addition to other hazards, lions are occasionally in evidence.” I happen to have had some private confirmation of this report, and it is told me that if ever a golfer in Umtala indulged himself in such a freak as golf by candlelight, as players have been known to do elsewhere, he might not complete the game that he had projected, for the king of beasts is accustomed to prowl over the land at night, and picks up any little living thing that he may find about. In other respects there is something quaint about this golf at Umtala, for I am informed that in the daytime the course is frequented by crows with white bands round their necks, which go by the name of “Free Kirk Ministers.” They are thieves, and now and again they swoop down and fly away again with the ball.
They are fine pioneers of the game in South Africa, and it deserves to prosper there. They have needed strong hearts and much patience and forbearance. I have been to golf with a man who has lately come back from a short visit there, and he says that their “greens” look as if they were covered with millions of garnets; and poor as the putting may be from some points of view, it can be performed with marvellous accuracy, and the people of the Colonies deny that anybody loves the game more than they do, or is more enthusiastic in it than they are. Their trials are uncommon and severe, but they become accustomed to them. At Wynberg, or some place like that, there is a lake to carry at a short hole, and one knows what sometimes happens when there is a water hazard between the tee and the green, one shot away. Here the avoidance of it is not made any the easier, because a long line of Kaffir boys is formed up on the near side of the lake, stripped, with eyes aflame with eagerness, and wildly gesticulating with their arms and hands, and jostling and scolding at each other while they seem to be appealing “Me! me! me!” to the golfer on the tee. Away the ball goes from the tee, and at the slightest indication that it was struck with dangerous inaccuracy, splash go all the Kaffir boys into the water. It is very much like the game of throwing sixpences overboard when your ship of voyage is at anchor off some Eastern port.
Rummaging through a second-hand book shop in Oxford Street one day, I came upon an old volume of sporting anecdotes published far back in 1867, and long since out of print and forgotten. Turning over the pages in the evening, and encountering therein many stories of doughty deeds by river and on field and moor, I came at last upon what must evidently be the original version of the story which has been more briefly told by others of the golf match at night for £500 a hole, and I cannot do better than quote it direct from the book. One of the contributors was quoting from a letter he had received from a well-known sporting friend of his, in which this gentleman gave him a short description of golf, about which nobody else belonging to the book appeared to know anything. In his prefatory remarks concerning the game the correspondent said: “The game of golf is quite a Scotch game; it is played at Blackheath, Wimbledon Common, and a few other places in England; but the players are always Scotchmen. It is a game requiring a good eye and great skill; and people who get over the first difficulties of the game are generally quite as fond of it as the English are of cricket.” With no disparagement of the attractions of cricket, one would be inclined to say that in these days the English who get over the first difficulties of the game of golf, and even those unfortunates who do not get over those difficulties, are much fonder of it than the said English are of cricket.
Then, concerning that great match, the correspondent writes: “Lord Kennedy and the late Mr. Cruickshank, of Langley Park, were good players, and had frequent matches for large sums of money; but the most remarkable match ever played by them came off during the Montrose race week many years since. At the race ordinary they got up a match of three holes, for £500 each hole, and agreed to play it then and there. It was about ten or half-past ten p.m. and quite dark. No light was allowed except one lantern placed on the hole, and another carried by the attendant of the player, in order that they might ascertain to whom the ball struck belonged. We all moved down to the golf course to see this curious match. Boys were placed along the course, who were accustomed to the game, to listen to the flight of the balls, and to run to the spot where a ball struck and rested on the ground. I do not remember which of the players won the odd hole; it was won, I know, by only one hole. But the most remarkable part of the match was, that they made out their holes with much about the same number of strokes that they usually did when playing in daylight. I think, on an average, that they took about five or six strokes in daylight, and in the dark six or seven. They were, however, in the constant habit of playing over the Montrose course.” Surely this must be accounted one of the most extraordinary games of golf we have heard of.
In days gone by the position of the lady in the great world of golf was something of a doubtful quantity, but there can be no question that she is now an established institution, and that she will stay. There have been men who have said that golf is not a lady’s game, and many who still stoutly maintain that it is at all events only a game for very young ladies who have not taken upon themselves any serious domestic cares. But it makes little difference what they say. For the first time in history a married lady won the Ladies’ Championship in 1906. The ladies have a golf union of their own, which is the kind of thing that a large section of rebellious men have been sighing for for many years, but are apparently still far from getting. Moreover, they have an inter-county championship, which again is what men say they ought to have, but cannot get.
Some of the oldest but least common golf traditions have reference to women, and it seems to be the fact that one of the first monarchs in England or Scotland who ever sought pleasure and relaxation in trundling a golf ball over the links was Mary Queen of Scots, and that she played on golfing ground no less celebrated than St. Andrews. This was in 1563. During that winter Mary occupied a house in South Street, and it is generally believed that she yielded to the spell of the place and played golf on the links with Chastelard, the favourite, who was subsequently beheaded. Although the evidence that she did thus play at St. Andrews is not conclusive, it is very likely that she did so, for it is quite certain that she played at Edinburgh and elsewhere, and it is variously quoted as a specimen of her heartlessness on the one hand and of her enthusiasm for the game on the other, that she was found playing it only a few days after the murder of her husband.
It is suggested that the golfing ancestors of the present lady players were fish girls, and the evidence on the point is comprised in a minute of the Royal Musselburgh Golf Club, dated 14th December 1810, which reads thus: “The club to present by subscription a handsome new creel and shawl to the best Female Golfer who plays on the annual occasion on 1st January next, old style (12th January, new), to be intimated to the Fish Ladies by William Robertson, the officer of the club. Two of the best Barcelona silk handkerchiefs to be added to the above premium of the creel.—(Signed) Alex. G. Hunter, Captain.”
But the modern golfing ladies absolutely ignore all this ancient history, and, in a manner, started afresh with a Year 1 on the inception of their championship, like the French people did at the time of their big Revolution. What happened before did not count. Thus, from their point of view, they arrived at a sort of millennium straight away, having no brakes of custom and conservatism on their wheel of progress.
Consequently it is no business of the modern writer to argue as to whether the fair sex ought or ought not to play golf; the fact is there that they do, and that more of them do so every week. And they do it very whole-heartedly. In the box-rooms of the houses of golfing ladies are sundry old tennis racquets with their stringing limp, despised and rejected, and their once favourite croquet mallets have been cut down in the shaft and are now used for odd jobs of carpentering about the house. It is said that the golfing girl does not care a jot what she wears on the links or—mirabile dictu!—what she looks like, so long as she has boots or shoes on with which she can get a firm stance, or upper arrangements which enable her to swing with ease. Thus one hears that she has enormous nails in her footgear, wears the loosest of Irish homespun costumes, and wouldn’t be seen in a picture hat. And she is a fine, robust, healthy creature, who loves the game as much as anyone. The great professionals say that she is a splendid pupil—better even than the men. Harry Vardon holds that the American ladies—whom he has studied on their native links—are better and more thorough than ours; but he thinks that ours are very good when they roll up their sleeves and give up the big hats. “They seem (ladies in general, that is) to take closer and deeper notice of the hints you give them, and to retain the points of the lesson longer in their memories,” says Vardon, and James Braid concurs in the judgment. The only drawback to all this big hitting, hard tramping, and devil-may-care spirit of the girl on the links is that, according to Miss May Hezlet, one of the queens of the links, it enlarges the hands and feet! But think of the freedom!
When the ladies play among themselves—as they generally do—they employ, according to report, a golfing vocabulary of their own, which, though unconventional, let it be said in haste, is quite proper. Elsewhere than in happy England, the blessedness of whose sporting girls has been sung by Gilbert of the Savoy, it may not be the same; indeed it appeared in the newspapers a little while since that the minister of a fashionable church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, declared from his pulpit one Sunday that information had reached him that “women who went to church on Sunday, went to golf on Monday and swore like troopers!” When this was brought to the attention of the English ladies, they said that the information that had been given to the reverend gentleman was very likely true, as those ladies probably played such a very bad game. In England there was no occasion to make use of such expletives as were suggested, and a “Dash!” and “Oh, you naughty, naughty little ball” were generally found sufficient to meet the exigencies of the most trying situations. At one time there seemed to be some considerable rivalry and jealousy, quite characteristically feminine, between the British and American lady golfers. But Miss Rhona Adair as was went over to the States and won all her matches, the strain of the effort—believing that she really had the credit of her country at stake—being, so it was authoritatively said, largely responsible for the breakdown in her health that ensued. Then the Americans sent over a big team of ladies to try to capture our Ladies’ Championship with one of them. The battlefield was at Cromer, and such a scene was there as one by one the American flags were hauled down! At the end of the meeting the British lioness held undisputed possession of the field, and she placed the Cup on her tea table.
Perhaps there is more to be said for keeping one’s score for the round when playing a match than is allowed by many people who occasionally discuss this matter with some heat. It may be agreed at once that the golfer who consistently subordinates the importance and interest of his match to his anxiety regarding his aggregate score is to be condemned, and more than ever so when his reckoning of his figures is done openly and audibly, and when he is guilty of remarking, for example, a splendidly fought match being all square at the eighteenth tee, that he has a 4 left for 79, showing in what direction his strongest ambition lies for the time being. Such a person is an undesirable opponent, and a nuisance on the links. In match play the match is the thing, and those who do not want the match, but only the score, should go out alone with their caddies. Yet at the same time it must be remembered that a man’s scores for the round are often the only real indication that can be afforded him of knowing what exactly is his form for the time being, and how well or badly he is playing, and it is eminently desirable that he should from time to time be posted with this knowledge, which in either case should act as an incentive towards the improvement of his game. A man may be winning all his matches with two or three holes to spare, and if he is of a placid temperament and not given to any closely discriminating analysis of the details of his own game, he may often be living in a fool’s paradise with regard to the quality of his golf and the accuracy of his handicap. It may be true that handicaps are provided chiefly for match-play purposes, and that if a man can win half his matches with the handicap that is given him, there is not much cause for fault-finding; but, after all, handicaps are supposed to represent the relative strengths of all players, even though they do not, and it is reasonable to expect that the holder of a certain handicap should be able to go round his course, say, one time in three or four at a net score that would come out at par. One must doubt whether the average seven or eight handicap man does this, which, of course, leads to the usual conclusion that the general tendency in medium handicaps in these days is to make them too flattering.
And, again, when a player finds himself winning his match with so much ease that the match itself has really very little interest for him, if any at all, when he is playing well and his opponent’s game has gone completely to the dogs, it is surely pardonable for him to concentrate his chief attention upon his score for the round, so long as he does not do it obtrusively, and does nothing to indicate to his opponent that he has other things in mind besides the question as to whether he shall achieve victory at the twelfth or thirteenth hole. It is simply a matter of common sense and good manners, and all scores should be kept mentally, and should not be spoken of until the round is over. The keeping of a score will often urge a man to greater effort and the display of greater skill in a particular emergency, and will thus tend to the improvement of his game. Nearly all players of great skill and long experience agree that there is nothing in the world like much score play for the betterment of the golfer. It strengthens the sense of responsibility, and of the need for the utmost concentration of thought and effort upon every shot that is made, and when a golfer has taught himself to do this he has gone a long way towards the achievement of that severe self-discipline which is an essential characteristic of the good and sound player whose game has always to be feared. It is because they have not that self-discipline and have not cultivated that sense of responsibility, that the majority of amateurs are absolutely terrorised by a card and rendered incapable even of playing anything like their real game. They do not so much fear to make a bad shot when it will only mean a lost hole, which may be won back five minutes later; but it is a different thing when the bad shot may cost three strokes, which have to enter into the final reckoning. Yet the bad shot is equally bad in either case and ought to be equally regretted, but is not. And if an amateur does not keep some mental account of his score when engaged in matches, he has scarcely any other opportunity of practising medal play, since it is not customary and is not desirable that pairs should go out together matched with each other on the strokes for the round and not on holes.
Apart from the objections which have been urged against it, and which it has been suggested may not be quite so well founded as some people appear to think, one is inclined to fancy that in many cases one of the drawbacks to the continual counting of one’s score is the inclination that is bred in the player to self-deception, and in the course of our golf we come across many curious instances of it. The simplest and most frequent is the waiving of the lost stroke for a stymie. If the player’s ball is within two feet of the hole when the stymie is laid him, it may be legitimate enough for him to reckon that if he had been engaged in pure score play he would have holed the putt that he was in the actual circumstances unable to hole, and therefore to deduct a stroke from the actual number taken on the round. But in the weakness of their human nature many who are thus engaged in score counting go much farther than this in giving themselves the benefits of doubts. It is difficult or impossible for them to draw any line between that which it was very likely they would do and that which they might possibly do. If for the purposes of their score they give themselves the two-feet putt which they would have holed but for the stymie, then surely there can be no objection to giving themselves a thirty-inch putt, and if that, then one also at a yard, and a yard and a half—two yards, three yards, four. And, pursuing this process of self-cheating, you will find the golfer submitting it to himself that he may count it as one stroke to get down, when he is fifteen or twenty feet from the hole, on the reasoning that many a time in his life before he had holed such putts, and was certain to do so again, so why not this time?
This is but one of the many frauds that players are brought to practise upon themselves in their yearning for a good round. Have we not known them to give themselves a four or five feet putt when their opponents had already given up the hole, because, though they had the time and opportunity for making the stroke, they were afraid that they might miss it, and so spoil that nice score which they were building up? They say to themselves that if they did putt it they would be certain to succeed, so what matter. And worse still is the case of the man who goes up to his ball in such a circumstance and putts at it, perhaps with one hand, pretending to himself that he is not trying! Yet if the ball goes in he feels a wholesome satisfaction of having done his duty by his card; and if it does not go in he still counts it as having done so, because it would have done if he had tried properly. There is also the case of the other man who, having missed such a putt by half an inch, perhaps unluckily, makes a bargain with himself that if he can do that putt immediately and successfully four times one after the other, he will count it to him after all, having thus proved that it was well within the scope of his ability, and that his first failure was an accident and not likely to occur again. And I have heard of men who, counting their scores, and having obtained a lie of most exceptional badness after a good shot, have declined to include in their mental reckoning the fruitless stroke that followed, on the ground that the chances of their getting such a lie in a medal round were a thousand to one against!
Strangest case of all, I once played with a man who told me at the end of his round what a good score he had done, and proceeded to detail the figures 4 5 5 3, etc. “But,” I said, “you were in the bunker at the first hole and took 6.” “Yes,” he said, “but in counting my score I always give myself a 4 at the first hole, no matter what I take; because, don’t you see, if I were out to make the best return possible, as if trying to break a record, I could play the first hole two or three times, if necessary, until I got my par 4, and then go on with that round. I would be giving up the round each time when I failed, and starting a fresh round; so, you see, the 4 at the first is always certain, and so I always count it, whatever I do.” I saw,