Can anything in a mechanical sort of way be done to overcome this awful
difficulty? I fear not, though one or two new putters are invented every
week, and some of them are acclaimed as being the philosopher’s stone
for which we have been looking. The golf world began to buzz as if its
mainspring had got loose when Mr. Travis won the championship at
Sandwich with that Schenectady putter--the most epoch-making putter of
all. But where is it now? Very few people use it.
Putters have been made of every conceivable shape and of every possible
material. Counting all variations, there are thousands of kinds of
putters. They have been made with the heads bent back, forwards, and
sideways. Some of them have had very thin blades, and others have had
thick slabs instead of blades. They have been fashioned like knives,
hammers, spades, croquet mallets, spoons, and riddles, and some even
like putters; and they have been made of iron, gun-metal, steel,
aluminium, nickel, silver, brass, wood, bone, and glass. I have here
beside me a putter made in nickel, and consisting of a large roller,
running on ball bearings! It is no good. The simplest are the best. We
cannot obtain will-power by machinery or mechanical appliances.
Mr. James Robb tells me that the putter he always uses is an ordinary
cleek which he got when a boy. His sister won it in a penny raffle, and
having no use for it herself she gave it to him, and he has putted with
it ever since. Three times has he putted his way to the final of the
championship, and once has he won it. Again, Mr. J. E. Laidlay conveys
the information to me that when he was a boy at Loretto School he came
by the first golf clubs he ever had in his life in his second or third
term, these being a cleek and a brassey. That cleek-head has been his
putter ever since, and it is getting so light with wear that his friends
are beginning to tell him that it will soon do for him to shave with.
Harry Vardon won his first championship with a putter which was not a
putter at all, but a little cleek that he had picked up only the day
before in Ben Sayers’ shop at North Berwick. He fancied it as a putter,
and he has never putted better than on that day at Muirfield. He has
never used it since, and now he has taken to the aluminium putter. And
do you know that just before the famous championship at Sandwich,
Mr. Travis was using a putting cleek that he, too, had got at North
Berwick, and it was his intention to putt with it in the tournament? But
he was not putting very well in practice at St. Andrews, and one of his
compatriots then introduced to him for the first time in his life the
Schenectady, which, after one successful trial, was forthwith
commissioned for Sandwich. What a subject for a great historical
painting to be hung up in the Temple of Golf that we shall have some
day--“Emmett introducing the Schenectady to Travis, 1904.” I think it
was Emmett; if it wasn’t, then it was Byers. Anyhow, golf history was
changed in consequence of that introduction, for I am sure that
Mr. Travis would not have won at Sandwich with his North Berwick putting
cleek. It wasn’t the Schenectady that did it, but it was the player’s
then confidence in the Schenectady. He had, for the time being, got that
little devil of golf in chains, and putting had become a great joy.
V
Golf is a jealous sport, and often takes it ill when any of its patrons
devote their attention occasionally to other diversions of the open air,
and exacts from them such a penalty in failures and aggravation when
they come back to their true love as is calculated to make them hesitate
before committing further offences. Perhaps it is natural in a way that
golf, which has so much of wild nature about it, should be least
inclined to brook the rivalry of games of the namby-pamby order. Fine
field sports such as shooting and fishing do not put you off your golf,
in fact we have generally concluded that a few days’ fishing sandwiched
in a golfing holiday rather does good to your game. Perhaps it
stimulates your thinking qualities, and if you are not reflecting upon
the other and the better way in which you might have played the
seventeenth hole the day before, when you should be noticing the
significant manœuvres of something in the water, all is well. But a game
that golf cannot and will not tolerate acquaintanceship with upon any
consideration, is croquet. The royal and ancient one has decided
apparently that it will not recognise it in any way whatever, and that
it will give a bad time to any golfer who potters about on a lawn with
hoops and bells and wooden sledgehammers. And it does so. There is no
more sure way of disturbing your putting than an hour or two’s croquet.
This putting poison is most deadly efficacious, and its effects
sometimes last for a couple of days. The man has not yet been born who
can putt well after a game of croquet. Croquet is really putting, but
putting with a big heavy ball after the style of a cannon ball, and it
has to be putted on a woolly green of rough grass in which a golf ball
would do something towards burying itself. Your accommodating eye and
touch soon become accustomed to the big ball and the mallet, and you
begin to putt through the hoops exceeding well, feeling then that you
hold an advantage over others through usually having to manage a smaller
ball under more difficult circumstances. But the awkward part of the
business is that the eye and touch won’t go back again so readily to
their golfing adjustment, and while they are out of it some funny things
are likely to happen. At such times the golf ball looks impossibly
small, and, while one is overcome with the idea that it will need
remarkably delicate management, one finds it impossible to wield the
putter as it should be. Here is the story of a recent happening:
A and B are keen rivals on the links--so keen that there is always great
haggling when it comes to adjusting the odds for a match, B usually
giving A three strokes. On the present occasion A informed B that he
would be glad to play him a match on the afternoon of the following day.
B wanted to know why they could not make a full day of it and play in
the morning as well, but A pleaded that he had to take part in a
tom-fool croquet match to which he was committed at the house where he
was staying. They settled the terms of the next afternoon’s encounter at
the same time, and B said that as A would be playing croquet in the
morning he would be willing to give him five strokes. This was really
foolish of him; but no matter. A thought something, but said nothing.
The golf match was duly played on the following day, and, to the
mortification of B, the croquetter putted like an angel the whole way
round, won his match by 6 and 5, won the bye, and, holing a ten-yarder
to wind up with, took the bye-bye as well. B was naturally in a most
unhappy state of mind, and moaned that he had never before known a man
to be able to putt after playing croquet, and that it was because of
this that he had given A two extra strokes on that dismal day. “Croquet!
croquet!” exclaimed A, “but I _haven’t_ been playing croquet!” B stood
aghast. “You _haven’t_!” he shrieked; “then what the dickens were you
doing this morning?” “Oh,” said A, “I took the hint from what you said
yesterday, and cried off the croquet match. I spent an hour instead in
practising putting on the carpet, and stuffed the fire-irons underneath
to make undulations!” There are one or two very good morals in this
pathetic little story.
If you need to putt perfectly you should do nothing with your hands, and
as little as possible with the remaining parts of your physical
construction for a whole day beforehand. The fact is that everything
puts you off your putting, but some things more than others, which is
another reason for that old saying that putting is the devil. An old
golfer has said that the ideal preparation for really fine putting is to
lie in bed for twenty-four hours with your wife to feed you with a
spoon. A few hours’ penmanship is certainly fatal to one’s putting, and
typewriting is worse. A man may depend upon it that if he goes in for a
motor-car and drives it, he will henceforth be about three or four
strokes worse on the greens than he used to be, which accounts for the
anxiety of so many golfers to sell their new cars. And oh, that my best
golfing enemy would buy a motor-cycle! A player once told me that he
could not putt in the afternoon after having found it necessary to beat
his dog at lunch-time; and it has been observed to be quite a bad thing
for one’s putting to use a walking-stick in one’s ordinary
pedestrianism. The putting muscles and nerves are the most delicate,
subtle things in the whole of animal creation, and the pity is that
circumstances generally preclude their more careful preservation during
the periods in one’s life when they are not needed for holing-out
purposes.