However humble its merits may be, it is well that a man should be
faithful always to his mother course, respectful of her, and that he
should not speak and very tardily admit to himself the blemishes of her
features. For it is always for him to remember that she, and she alone,
gave the game to him that has yielded him so much happiness, and he owes
to her a debt that he can never repay, save in constancy and gratitude.
Therefore it is to be reckoned as a good thing in a golfer that,
wherever the necessities and vicissitudes of life may take him to live,
and for whatever other courses he may in mature years find a fondness
and become attached to by membership, he should, if he can do it, always
remain an associate of his first club, and should from time to time
display some public attachment to its course, even though it be at some
inconvenience to himself. It is a little act of filial homage that
should not be neglected.
At such times he will be kind to her and will not chide her for her
weaknesses. He will humour her good-naturedly. The sixteenth may be a
better hole on another course, but do not say so now. Think how rich did
that sixteenth here seem in those far-off days when the teething to the
clubs was first being done. What terrors had its bunkers! What a big,
lusty, and not to say a brutal one, did it seem then; but now to the
time-worn golfer, if the truth must be whispered for once to himself,
that old sixteenth seems something of a milksop, and can be played in
ten different ways with a half-hearted drive and something of a mashie
or iron. How happy we were despite the constant troubles in those olden
days, when we were always with our mother links, and knew no others! The
old men of golf came and told us of the great courses that they had
encountered in their travels--such wonderful holes, such amazing
bunkers, such marvellous putting greens! These travellers’ tales were
pleasant to listen to, and they fired the imagination; but after all we
returned with some content to our mother links.
And then, what golfer does not remember the day, particularly if he was
then no longer a child in years, when he went away for the first time
from that course and paid a visit to one of those celebrated of which so
much is written in the books and on which so many fine matches and
championships are played? This is always an epoch, and a stirring one in
every golfing life. There are many wild emotions in the man when for the
first time he takes his club to play a shot on this foreign course of so
much renown. If he is an intelligent man, and an impartial one, he sees
the merit and the glory, and he admits it without reservation. He feels
that now he has gone out into the great world, and that there are more
wonders in it than even his utmost fancy had suspected. He is like the
Queen of Sheba who went to see the magnificence of Solomon, confessing
then that it was a true report that she had heard in her own land,
though she believed not until her eyes had seen, when she knew that the
half had not been told her. Out alone on this wonderful course the
feeling of loneliness and helplessness will come upon this immature
player. Truly the half had not been told to him, and in mortal agony in
some “Hell” or other, or in a Devil’s Kitchen or a Punchbowl, or it may
be in the sandy wastes of a Sahara or in a crevasse on the heights of
the Alps or the Himalayas--how, then, will he be reminded of the tender
indulgences of his mother links, of her constant kindness, and of the
way in which she humoured his youthful caprice and smiled patiently upon
him when he was fretful! Perhaps she was too indulgent, and the maternal
laxness did something towards the spoiling of the child for the manhood
that was to follow. But no matter, let the golfer always be kind and
well disposed to his mother links.