The Happy Golfer Part 3

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 att.i.tudes in which good putting is possible. We are nowadays inclined to be more dogmatic, and to a.s.sert 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 circ.u.mstances 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 champions.h.i.+p at Hoylake, his putting for some time having been bad. He adopted it, won the champions.h.i.+p, 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 pa.s.s 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 coa.r.s.er 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 sc.r.a.pe along the gra.s.s 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 apt.i.tude 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 pus.h.i.+ng the club through it, and in the circ.u.mstances I have indicated there can be no doubt they have succeeded. b.a.l.l.s being so tricky now, these matters are worth considering.

You would perceive how boldly dogmatic was the writer of the early cla.s.sic 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.serting 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, "G.o.d 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 Champions.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.s 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," a.s.serting that the determination to be past the hole in putting, if not in it, leads with these lively b.a.l.l.s 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 Ma.s.sy, the French player who once won the Open Champions.h.i.+p, 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 champions.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.ds, 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 a.n.a.lyse the conditions and circ.u.mstances in which they gained their immortal glory, I can give reasons, ordinary worldly reasons, why they gained it; and can thereupon pa.s.s 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 compet.i.tion is so enormously severe, and when--this point being of towering importance--the luck of the game, always considerable, is, through a variety of circ.u.mstances, 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 Champions.h.i.+ps to the triumvirate, and eight Amateur Champions.h.i.+ps 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 champions.h.i.+ps 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 Champions.h.i.+p. 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 champions.h.i.+ps in succession, but there was only a handful of compet.i.tors 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 astonis.h.i.+ng results in the way of scores, we are reminded that they have far smoother courses to play upon and much improved clubs and b.a.l.l.s.

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 champions.h.i.+p, at all events, did not mean so much. The champions.h.i.+ps 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 circ.u.mstances 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 champions.h.i.+p.

After all, if comparison is fruitless and not properly practicable, this speculation as to the merits of the geniuses of nearly fifty years ago and now becomes enticing. One would like to reach some conclusion upon it, but cannot. It would be fine material for a golfers' debating society. Were I to regard myself as advocate for the moderns I should in an agreeable and inoffensive way suggest that time has done nothing to hurt the fame of young Tommy's skill. When what they call the golf boom began and the great game percolated through the ma.s.s 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 Fifes.h.i.+re 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 champions.h.i.+ps, 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 pa.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 Champions.h.i.+p at Prestwick, and I remember that Mr. Robert Maxwell, after a hard struggle against young Barry--who won the champions.h.i.+p--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 circ.u.mstances, 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated n.o.body. 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 a.s.sociate 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 Champions.h.i.+p. 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 succ.u.mbed 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 champions.h.i.+ps. Even to win one twice is to make a proof of superiority such as in existing circ.u.mstances seems nearly impossible. Any man, as one might say, may win a champions.h.i.+p; that would prove nothing save that he is as good a golfer as any other, or nearly so; but to win two champions.h.i.+ps 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 compet.i.tive 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 Fifes.h.i.+re, on 6th February 1870; Harry Vardon was born in Jersey on 7th May 1870; and Taylor was born at Northam, in Devons.h.i.+re, within a mile of where Mr. Ball won his eighth champions.h.i.+p, 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 Champions.h.i.+p 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 champions.h.i.+p an instinct settles in the public mind that they cannot be beaten. Considering what the Open Champions.h.i.+p 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 Champions.h.i.+p at Prestwick in 1893, and on that occasion the 75 that Taylor did in his first round stood as the lowest made in the compet.i.tion, although he did not win. At his second and third attempts in the champions.h.i.+p 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 Champions.h.i.+p 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 champions.h.i.+p, 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 champions.h.i.+p, 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 Ma.s.sy, 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 champions.h.i.+ps? 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 Champions.h.i.+ps when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly winning an Open Champions.h.i.+p as well. But if after considering the professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs in their match-play champions.h.i.+p, 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 Champions.h.i.+p 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 champions.h.i.+ps 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 champions.h.i.+ps 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 Champions.h.i.+p? Has he finished winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won for his seventh the only champions.h.i.+p ever played in Devons.h.i.+re, and he has won the event on all the regular amateur champions.h.i.+p courses on which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been something of a _bete noire_ among courses so far as he is concerned.

Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the international match, and then in the champions.h.i.+p 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 champions.h.i.+ps. 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 sportsmans.h.i.+p. 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 "n.o.ble 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 "n.o.ble" 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 n.o.ble art of squas.h.i.+ng 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 compet.i.tion 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 champions.h.i.+p kind, and match play wherein two good and keen players are really playing against each other, parry and thrust as it is in champions.h.i.+p 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 c.u.mulative, 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 champions.h.i.+ps how often has a man who has had a punis.h.i.+ng 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 champions.h.i.+ps 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 a.s.s. 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 b.a.l.l.s 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.