It is a glorious thing to play a game that one need never give up,
however long one may live. And what is more, the game can be played well
by the veteran, and he enjoys it almost as much as ever, and does not
merely take part in it for the sake of the fresh air and the exercise.
Possibly if he had not been a golfer in his middle age, and perhaps in
his youth as well, he would not be able to play any game, even a
fireside game, by the time he was due to become an octogenarian. For
some years previously his pleasures would have been with the angels. One
cannot discover who is the oldest golfer, but there are many still
active on the links who are nearing ninety, including a celebrated
peer-patron of the game. Considering the matter from the other point of
view, we have the remarkable fact that nearly every professional golfer
of note in these days (and a large though decreasing proportion of
amateurs) began to play golf of some sort as soon as his baby
intelligence had developed sufficiently to make him understand that if
he hit a ball with a stick it would move. They began to play as soon as
they could walk, and almost to a man they declare that the very first
memories they have of anything in life are associated with playing some
kind of childish golf, and aping their elders in every possible way.
It is to the fact of their having done so that they attribute most of
their success in their after life at the game. As children they
developed a free, easy, natural swing that has stood them in good stead
ever since, and it has become so rooted into their system that they are
far less liable than other golfers who began much later, to be
constantly going off their game and dropping out of their proper swing.
Harry Vardon, James Braid, J. H. Taylor, Alexander Herd, Willie Park,
Jack White, and all the rest of them played golf as the very smallest
children. The two last-named both declare that they developed their
extraordinary putting faculties when they were mere babies. Park, a king
of putters, it is certain, gained his extraordinary delicacy of touch,
and fine discrimination in selecting the line to the hole, through
practising as a very small boy with marbles on the stone or brick floor
of his father’s workshop at Musselburgh, a slight hollow in the floor
being regarded as the hole. He got a passion for such putting practice,
and at nights would surreptitiously borrow the key to the shop and hie
there with some other boys for putting practice. He says that he has
never had such hard putting to do since, and that when in due course he
went out on the links to play the real game, putting seemed very easy to
him. The first clubs that Alexander Herd ever used were glued together
for him by his mother, and his first golf was obtained in the streets of
St. Andrews. It was much the same with several of the best amateurs,
though from the evidence that one can obtain they do not appear to have
been such keen golfers when babies as were the professionals.
Mr. Hilton, one of the most skilful amateurs of any time, thinks he was
about six when he first went forth to try to play with a full set of his
father’s clubs.
Then, practising all through their childhood and youth, at what age did
these men first begin to play first-class golf, and to give signs of
their future greatness? From an analysis I have made of their own
statements, and the events of their careers, I find that in nearly every
case it was at about seventeen--just when their stature and physical
powers had fairly fully developed. In practically all cases men who were
subsequent champions were good scratch players at this age. But you will
always find that it takes them many more years after this to make their
game perfect--many years of the hardest and most persistent practice
conceivable. Mr. Hilton came on very quickly, being in championship form
when he was twenty-two, and Taylor had fully matured by the time he was
twenty-three. But Harry Vardon was twenty-six, and Braid was thirty-one.
Generally a man who is destined to play the great golf, and who has been
at it all his life, does not begin to settle down to the steady
brilliant game until he has passed twenty-five, and from that point he
usually improves a little until he is thirty, at which he is at his very
best. Thirty is the golden age for golf. Look back through history, and
see how formidable have been the great men at that age. The fact may be
useful evidence against those who sneer about the “old man’s game,” as
showing how long it takes to attain perfect golf when everything is in
your favour. Mr. Barry’s victory in the amateur event when he was
nineteen, and those of Mr. Travis and Mr. Hutchings when these
gentlemen were quite middle-aged (anyhow, Mr. Travis, the younger, was
forty-three), have to be regarded simply as phenomena, and as the
exceptions which prove the rule. The tale of the ages, as gathered from
all experience, seems to be that the ideal golfer begins as a baby, is
scratch at seventeen, a champion at twenty-five or twenty-six, and
perhaps again at thirty-two, and that thenceforth he plays serenely on
until at eighty-five or thereabouts he engages in a great foursome with
other old warriors. And, taking it all round, a very good time he has
had.