II

When the sun shines the putting greens get keen. There is an old saying

that driving is an art, iron play a science, and putting is the devil.

Just that--the devil. I agree entirely, and I have ascertained that the

greatest exponents of the game are in sympathy with the suggestion.

Well may the writers of text-books of the game declare, when they come

to the chapter on putting, that there is really nothing to say, and that

they must leave the reader to find out the whole business by instinct

and practice, as there are no rules to be laid down for his guidance.

What would be the use of their pretending that they can really teach

putting when, if they had to hole an eight-feet putt for a championship,

the odds would be slightly against them? In June 1905, while I was

smoking my pipe on the top of the bank on the far side of the home green

at St. Andrews, I was being provided at intervals of no great length

with much food for reflection and philosophy, better than which no man

who ever talks or writes of golf could wish for. The Open Championship

was being played for, and there duly came along Vardon, Braid, Taylor,

and Herd, all more or less favourites for the event in progress, and it

is a real fact that of these four men three of them missed putts at

this home hole of less than a yard. I think the average length was about

eighteen inches; one of them was not more than a foot, and the way in

which the ball was worked round to the far side of the hole without

going in was wonderful--quite wonderful. It will be noticed that I give

four names and mention only three misses. This is because even the

greatest players are sometimes very tender on this subject of missing

short putts, and to spare them any annoyance I do not name the

particular individuals who failed. It is enough that one of them, and

one only, did not.

The history of every man’s golf is covered with metaphorical gravestones

as the result of all the short putts he has missed. Every season the

whole course, and the result of almost every event of importance, would

be changed if one or other of the parties did not miss some of these

apparently unmissable putts. One need go no farther back than last

year’s Amateur Championship meeting. I saw Mr. John Graham miss a

two-feet putt in his match with Mr. Robb on the fourteenth green. This

was the all-important match of the whole tournament, and in the light of

what happened afterwards it was made to appear that the missing of this

putt cost Mr. Graham the best chance he ever had in his hard and

deserving golfing lifetime of winning the blue ribbon of the game.

Mr. Robb himself fancied that Mr. Robert Andrew would be the ultimate

winner of the championship that time at Hoylake, but on the eighteenth

green in one of his rounds Mr. Andrew missed a putt of less than a foot

for the match, and then had to go on to the nineteenth hole, where he

was a well-beaten man. And in the final tie of all, if Mr. Lingen had

never missed a short putt, who knows but what he would have been the

champion of the year after all?

Therefore we may take it as established that the very greatest players

cannot do the very shortest putts with anything approaching to

certainty, when it is of the very greatest importance that they should

do so. They are no better at this game than quite moderate players, and

the chances of their holing such putts decrease according to the

importance of the occasion--that is to say, the more necessary it is to

hole the putt in order to promote one’s success in the encounter in

progress, the less likely is one to do so. This is one of the

fundamental principles of the thing. Anybody can hole a putt of four or

five feet when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no particular credit

in doing it. It is when it does matter that you cannot do it. The hole

is 4¼ in. wide, and the ball is about 1½ in. in diameter. You may use

anything from an umbrella to a lawn-roller in order to putt that little

ball into that huge pit, and yet at that distance of three or four feet

you cannot do it--that is, as often as you ought to do. Training and

practice are no use. Do not beginners always do these putts well? That

is because they do not know how difficult they are. They will by and by,

and then they will begin to miss them! At home I have a little baby

girl, and sometimes she gets one of my putters out of the corner, and

begs for the loan of a ball. Make a sort of hole on the carpet, or even

go out on to the lawn and play at a real hole in the real way, and that

little thing will hole the putts of a yard and two yards every time! She

never bothers about any particular stance or anything of that kind, and

takes no count of the blades of grass or where she ought to be looking

at the much-talked-of “moment of impact.” She just putts, and down goes

the ball every time! It is wonderful, one of the most wonderful things

in sport that I have ever seen! Here she does that, and we others who

know so much about these things, cannot do them--at least, not with the

same certainty.

Here is another point. It may need only an exceedingly delicate stroke

to putt a ball properly, yet if you take the clumsiest, horniest-handed

labouring man--say a road-mender or a railway navvy, who had never

either seen or heard of golf before--he would never miss those three to

five feet putts. Again it is because he does not know how really

difficult they are. It is said that a mighty hunter of great renown, a

man who had bagged all the big game of India in great variety, once

declared in an agony, “I have encountered all the manifold perils of the

jungle, I have tracked the huge elephant to his retreat, and I have

stood eye to eye with the man-eating tiger.” All of which was quite

true--he had. Then he added, “And never once have I trembled until I

came to a short putt.”

I have thought the matter out, and I suggest the reason. It is one of

the prettiest points in psychology that one will encounter in the whole

of a long lifetime of the most careful thought and study. You don’t

really want any mind at all for putting purposes. The whole thing is too

simple, and instead of a mind and brains being any use for the purpose

in hand, they are a positive disadvantage, and are continually getting

in the way.