Some footpaths count for very much in the playing of a hole, and at
times call for and produce fine shots that would never be made if there
were no path there. So sometimes they are good to the game; but
generally they are merely an aggravation. You could hardly call a path
or a road famous, but if you were asked which were the most notable you
would probably call to mind first of all the path that goes across the
first and eighteenth holes at St. Andrews, which is distinguished from
others because of the devil-may-care spirit in which the general public
defy injury and death by the way they saunter along it when such men as
Edward Blackwell are standing on the first tee, and it is also a path
among paths, because it has led to the cultivation of the most
magnificent voice ever heard on any golf course. The man who has not
heard Starter Greig fire his blast of warning through the hole in his
box down the fairway--with a clap, and a bang against the horizon, for
all the world like a discharge from a small brass gun--is still ignorant
of one of the minor wonders of the golf world, and has a very inadequate
perception of the possibilities of calling “Fore!” Likewise, one would
say that of all roads--as superior to mere paths--that which skirts the
seventeenth green on the same old course is the most remembered by the
majority of good golfers--remembered sadly. How many golfers have had
their brightest hopes dashed by that road when within sight of home and
victory it would be a sorry task to count, but there lingers in my mind
a dreadful scene when J. H. Taylor’s ball went there in the course of
the 1905 championship meeting, from a not by any means unworthy shot,
and of his trying, time after time, to get it back to the green, until
when he had done so his nerves were tingling as would have been those of
any man.
The paths and roads of Blackheath are altogether probably responsible
for the making of a bigger and more enduring piece of golfing history
than any others. Other footways may have despoiled great players of
deserved honours, but thus their effects are chiefly destructive, and it
cannot be claimed for them that they have made anything for the game.
But the Blackheath paths and roads have been constructive in their
effect upon the game, for they made the brassey. There is a fair
consensus of opinion that this most necessary of modern clubs was first
introduced on this course as a consequence of these paths and roads that
had to be played from, and also partly on account of the gritty nature
of the turf. In those days of the use of the brassey, when a Blackheath
golfer appeared on a Scottish course, the caddies knew his headquarters
at once. “He comes frae Blackheath,” they would say with some
deprecation. “There’s naething but gravel pits and stones at
Blackheath.”