No class of man looks forward to the spring with keener anticipation
than the golfer. Overburdened with his winter’s discontent, he fancies
it as a time of sunshine, of dry courses, of sprouting young grass that
holds up the ball on the suburban links and gives us the first good
brassey lies that we have had for some months, of the frequent
retirement of the energetic worm, of the quickening of the greens, of
the leafing of the trees and the hedgerows, and the brightening of the
face of Nature. The golfer is generally a strongly human man, who is not
careless of natural beauties as are too many in these increasingly
prosaic and strenuous days. Perhaps he likes the coming of the
springtime best of all, because he is then enabled to play his game in
the best degree of comfort. He is less hampered with heavy clothing, and
his hands and wrists keep warm without any cumbersome artificial
assistance. And then also he is persuaded, and he is evidently right,
that the balls fly very much better in the spring sunshine than they
ever did through the heavy and often murky atmosphere of the winter
days. Even the golf ball welcomes the coming of spring, and given that
it is properly struck it gets a better and longer flight through the air
when it is dry and light, and it runs better on the dry turf when it
comes down, so that the player finds himself being given encouragement
that helps him wonderfully on to his game. And so the man who usually
goes by the name of the Average Golfer believes all through every autumn
and winter that he comes on to his game best of all in the spring, and
that that is the only time of the year when he really does play his
best, his real game. The only time when he does not believe that he
plays his best game in the spring is in the spring.
The fact is that the conditions of springtime are rather made up of a
set of contradictions of a very aggravating character, and they often
play the devil with the game of this Average Golfer, the system of which
is not too firmly consolidated. This person, one takes it, is a man of
medium young to middle age, a great enthusiast, of good means, one more
or less constantly engaged in business, having a fair number of social
obligations to attend to in evenings, and a golfing handicap of
somewhere between six and twelve. This man is possibly afflicted with a
troublesome liver, and this organ has a peculiar and most aggravating
way of asserting itself in the springtime as it has at no other season.
Then it is up to all kinds of tricks, the entire physical system of the
man is disarranged and thrown out of gear, and the result is that when
all Nature is smiling and the larks are piping as though their little
throats would burst with the fulness of their melody, the erstwhile
hopeful golfer is in a wretched state of mind, trying new stances for
his drive, new ways of gripping, a swing much longer or much shorter
than usual, and manœuvring with his strokes in all other kinds of ways,
in the vain hope that he might be permitted to drive at least as well as
he did in January, instead of foundering one ball in three and lifting
up one of the others high towards the heavens. But there is compensation
in the increased hopefulness of spring. The game may be poor, weaker
than it was hoped to be. But it will mend; it will surely mend.