Choosing a companion for a golfing holiday is at all times a serious
business, and the light and thoughtless manner in which some young
people perform the task is, in the interests of their own future golfing
welfare, deplorable. Young people are mentioned advisedly, for you do
not find the old golfers making their selections hastily, and they do
not live to regret those that they make as do the hot-blooded youths who
are swayed by the fancies of a moment. These select at haste, and often
enough they repent bitterly before the golfing trip is over. The same
nice discrimination should be exercised in the choice of such a
companion as would be, or ought to be, in the choice of a wife, and many
of the points that have to be taken into consideration are similar. As a
general principle, youth should not mate with age for the purposes of
many days’ golf in their own exclusive company away from home, when the
twain are cast upon their own joint resources and have their pleasure
and their welfare bound up with each other. It is a good thing that
there should have been a long and tolerably thorough acquaintance
beforehand, and there should be some approximate equality in playing
ability. The partners to this important contract should be satisfied
above all things that not only are their ideas and ideals concerning the
good game largely alike, and their tastes outside the game agreeable to
each other, but that their temperaments agree to the point that they can
make the necessary allowances for each other’s waywardness of conduct,
when in the interests of continued concord it becomes imperatively
necessary that this should be done. Trials of this kind will have to be
endured, and it is well that there should be a firm resolution
beforehand to bear with each other’s weaknesses, satisfied always of the
high value of the man. Some old golfers have said, and wisely, that it
is a good thing to go away on a golfing holiday with a man and never to
golf with him--to get the game with others, and to talk of it with the
companion of the trip at breakfast in the morning and at dinner when the
play for the day is over; and there can be little doubt that in this
maxim there is much wisdom, though it is not necessary to carry the
recommendation to the extreme. Too much familiarity with the game of one
man breeds some contempt for it, even though it be a game that is more
remunerative in holes than that possessed by the other; and while there
are no rivals like old rivals, still, if their rivalry is uninterrupted
it becomes dull and uninteresting.