Men of other races, whose skins are not white, are afoot with this game.
Black men are playing; yellow men are becoming expert; red men have
achieved great skill. A few years since a golfer traveller found his way
to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and he saw the wild Red Indian
at golf, and thought that it suited him better than his old game of
lacrosse. Spotted Horse drove off along the prairie--a plain prairie
with only a few shrubs about--and he followed and played the ball for a
couple of miles to the turn, and then played it back. There were no
holes; the game was to play the course in the fewest strokes. Here,
indeed, is the primitive golf. Some of the Indians are said to have made
fine drives--as good as the best that white men do--and this was all the
more remarkable inasmuch as it is the Red Indians’ pretty custom to yell
and howl in a frightful chorus while one of their number is addressing
the ball preparatory to making his stroke. So it does not seem easy to
put the red men off.
Golf, indeed, is the one world game; it is in essence that very simple
sport which so easily and certainly spreads over the planet. Everywhere
the British are pioneers, and they are by far the more numerous players;
but native proselytes are coming in fast in almost every quarter of the
globe, so now it may fairly be said that no other game is being played
everywhere by so many different sorts of people as this game of ours.
Sit on a magic carpet and be transported to any place, and there,
somewhere about you, will be a golf course.
I have lately had some talk with men from the East, who tell of the good
game that half-naked tribesmen, standing and walking in bare feet, have
learned to play; and, moreover, of the beautiful clubs, most exquisitely
finished and sometimes inlaid with ivory and fancy woods, that they have
made. I am assured that the “professional champion of Ceylon” is a
Cingalese caddie who holds the record for the Ridgeway course, made when
he was playing against a British golfer of thoroughly good class. The
Japanese are beginning to play, and good judges have been led to express
fears that their qualities and temperaments will bring them to a higher
state of perfection in the short game than has ever been attained
before, and which will surely threaten the supremacy of the white man.
Golfing at Kobe is a peculiar experience. The course is at Rokkosan, on
the top of a high mountain, and you must therefore climb the mountain
before you can golf on the course. You go by rickshaw to the foot of the
Cascade Valley, and are then carried up the mountain slope by coolies
for an hour and a half, when the tees and the bunkers come into view.
Those who play there hold that the view from this course is the finest
from any, though it can hardly be better than that from the course on
the top of Senchal Hill at Darjeeling, for from here there is
Kingenjunga, 28,000 feet high, to be seen, and from the summit of Tiger
Hill, overlooking the course, there is Mount Everest itself in view.
And there is golf in China too, six clubs for it. We had no sooner come
to the conclusion and officially announced some years ago that
Wei-hai-wei was a very desirable resort, than the golf club was duly
established there. In these days the building prospector first settles
upon his golf course, and advertises it, and then he builds his houses
round about; and in the same way it is realised that it is the proper
thing when seeking to make a new centre of Europeans abroad to start
with a golf course. I have been with men on shipboard who, having golfed
on the queer course of Tangier, have then speculated unceasingly in the
smoke-room as we sailed along the smooth waters of the West African
coast about the kind of golf that would be vouchsafed to them on
reaching the Canary Islands. Some time since I had a letter from a
highly-placed British official at Chinkiang on the Yangtse River, and he
told me how they had just begun to play the game out there on a new
course which was covered with crater-like excrescences. These are
Chinese graves, and they are said to make most excellent hazards. There
are pig-tailed fellows for caddies, and it was carefully ascertained
that no Chinese sentiment is injured in the matter.
There are golf clubs in all the States of Europe. There are very many in
France, and there are more each year, and it is remarkable that the
Frenchman is now establishing them for his exclusive use. At Boulogne
the Englishman and his friends of France golf together on a course where
some of the hazards were the earthworks of Napoleon’s camp--the camp
that held the Grand Army that lay in readiness for the invasion of
Britain. What irony is here--that the British golfer should play over
the Emperor’s camp! The Master-General must himself have walked many
times over the lines of our tee shots, and the shadow of the monument
that he built to commemorate his invasion of Albion, almost lies across
the course from which Albion herself, uninvaded, may be seen. And the
Mayor of Boulogne gives prizes to the British golfers who make the best
golf on Napoleon’s camp. I come to realise the depth of the meaning of
the lines cut into a marble tablet that I saw on the side of a staircase
in the Museum at Boulogne one day--“France and England have more good
sense than all the world,” and those lines were put on the stone more
than sixty years ago.
France is fair and free, but the game is played in Europe where the
times and conditions are not at all the same. There is golf in Russia,
and to it there was added a new course but recently. At the first
thought it seems a little odd that such a peaceful game should be played
in holy and revolutionary Russia even by Britishers. They have had two
courses in Russia for a long time past--one near Moscow and the other at
Mourino, a small village a few versts out from St. Petersburg. The men
who play here are of a hardy, determined strain, fine men for pioneers.
To get their golf they have to drive thirteen miles out from the capital
over bad roads; and in order to obtain a fair amount of satisfaction
from their game they have to returf their putting greens almost every
year, owing to the extreme sandiness of the soil. The Kaiser is
encouraging the game in Germany, and has given prizes for it; there are
eight clubs in Italy; and others in Austria, Holland, Belgium, and all
the rest. The game has flourished for twelve years past in the dominions
of the Sultan of Turkey, that is to say at Bagdad, and the golfers
there are pleased to tell you that their course is no miniature affair
as are so many at the outposts of the empire of St. Andrews, but that it
consists of full eighteen holes, and that, in the desert, they are very
sporting indeed.
It goes without saying that the game flourishes greatly in all the
Colonies. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the
others there are little booms of golf in progress, each of its own kind.
At Pretoria and at many places at the Cape the greens consist of
diamondiferous gravel, smooth and sparkling, and the first local rule of
the Kimberley Club startles the newly-arrived golfer from the homeland,
for it tells him that “It shall be lawful for a player to level the
ground on the putting green in any manner he pleases.” In India there
are some forty flourishing clubs, and that at Calcutta, with its five
hundred members and two courses of nine holes each, having been
established for nearly eighty years, takes rank as one of the premier
clubs of the world. There is the Aden Club in Arabia, the Royal Bangkok
in Siam, where an old and very imposing Siamese temple does duty for
clubhouse, and others all over Asia, as one might almost say. There are
many golf clubs in the Argentine Republic and the other South American
States. The Sandwich Islands are full of the game, for there are five
clubs there. In the East Indies there are three, and in the West Indies
there are eight. Wherever the Britisher goes he leaves his trail of golf
behind him. There is a story of Captain Adair holding a golf competition
in his camp when pitched on one of the passes leading into Thibet, at a
height of sixteen thousand feet above the sea-level. I have no
information about the game having been played in the North Polar
regions; but I am told that when the recent British Antarctic Expedition
was made in the _Discovery_, the Commander, Captain Scott, who is a keen
golfer, took some clubs down there with him, and in some leisure moments
“had a knock,” by way of reminding him of the old links at home, and of
seeing what the sensation of South Polar golf was like. It is said that
forged iron has a peculiarly cold and numbing touch in the frozen south.
It is the same game everywhere, and the law is always taken from
Fifeshire; but the conditions and makeshifts are sometimes peculiar. We
have said how at the Cape they putt on gritty earth that smacks of
diamonds, how in China there are graves for bunkers, and how across the
Channel, Napoleon’s trenches serve for the same purpose. Boulogne, after
all, is only in the nature of a corollary to our courses at Walton Heath
and Huntercombe, for hereabouts the golfers play where the legions of
mighty Cæsar were encamped, and the stables and the kitchens that Cæsar
made, huge pits deep in the earth, are in the line of play, and things
are so arranged that they constitute fine traps for erring balls, and
offer remunerative opportunities for skill with iron clubs in playing
out of them. And yet, if one must play bad shots, it is well that they
should be played in the direction in which Cæsar dug, for these pits
were made so long ago and are so deep that they are often beautifully
turfed with soft springy stuff, which anywhere except in a pit would be
a delight to play from, being so congenial to one’s iron. We must
applaud the Romans in this matter. It is nearly a pleasure to go into
their kitchens and stables; they were made so long ago and they are so
green and nice. There is golf at Old Calabar on the West Coast of
Africa, and there the putting “greens” are made of fine coal dust. So
they are “blacks.” At Mexico and many other places they are merely
“browns.” In Egypt, where there is much golf, they are often made of
rolled and baked Nile mud.
It is not necessary to say that there is nearly as much golf played in
America as there is in Britain, and that the time may possibly come when
there will be more. But it is not generally appreciated on what
old-established foundations American golf is played. The game has
traditions in America now, even as in Britain. In the archives of
American golf there is still preserved a document which shows how little
of a new thing is the game in the United States. It is an invitation,
reading as follows: “Golf Club Ball.--The honour of Miss Eliza
Johnston’s company is requested to a ball, to be given by the members of
the golf club of this city, at the Exchange, on Tuesday evening, the
31st inst., at seven o’clock. (Signed) Geo. Woodruff, Robert Mackay,
Jno. Caig, Jas. Dickson, Managers; Geo. Hogarth, Treasurer. Savannah,
twentieth December 1811.” The original is in the possession of the
granddaughter of the recipient. There seems to be some suggestion that
these pioneers of American golf were of Scottish origin, as pioneers of
the game until lately mostly were, and it might be appropriate to
mention that Savannah, whose people are said to be celebrated for their
love of pleasure, piety, and sport, has in it the oldest theatre in the
United States, while it also claims to have started the first Sunday
school in the world, founded by Wesley and perpetuated by Whitefield. If
it started here, this was not a bad place for American golf to start at.