OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A
SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME.
If men who play games are not proud of their champions, of what then
shall they be proud? If we advance the proposition--which is done here
and now--that no other game or sport that was ever conceived and played
has produced such remarkable strength and mastery in its champions as
golf has done, the cynics will find that with the resources of the world
and history at their disposal this position of ours can be well
maintained, even though we have less than sixty years of championships
for our support. And let it be said also at the beginning that we of
golf declare to win, not with the Morrises or Parks, as might be
supposed--good men they were too--but with the moderns, and especially
with our Harry Vardon, our Taylor, our Braid, and the amateurs, John
Ball, Harold Hilton, and the Frederick Guthrie Tait of immortal and
beloved memory. I have long since grown accustomed to the mysterious and
the inexplicable in golf, and pass them by on their fresh occurrences in
these days as like the commonplace, something for which indeed there may
be some explanation and a simple one, but one which the gods, with their
humour and their teasing, are hiding from us. We who in this game have
fed so long on wonders are now disposed to overlook phenomena. We tire
of sensations and the extraordinary, and would revert to a smooth
placidity of plain occurrence. It is in such mood that we often
contemplate the records of the past, and then we dismiss them quickly
with the comfortable judgment that the Morrises were themselves, and,
being fixed on a permanent pinnacle, must not be disturbed. They have
become a creed. One might imagine little plaster figures of old Tom, his
left hand in his trousers pocket, thumb outside, and young Tom in
Glengarry bonnet all complete, to have been placed in some over-zealous
golfers' homes along with representations of Homer, Julius Caesar,
Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Cecil Rhodes, and no questions are to be
asked about them. It may be right to place them there, those early
champions of the game, but when sometimes steeled to sacrilege and
careless of all risk, I set myself to analyse the conditions and
circumstances in which they gained their immortal glory, I can give
reasons, ordinary worldly reasons, why they gained it; and can thereupon
pass them as satisfying every reasonable requirement of human champions
of the first degree. But with the others it is not at all like that.
Golf being the game it is, the repeated successes of those three great
players we call the "triumvirate," Taylor, Vardon, and Braid, at a time
when competition is so enormously severe, and when--this point being of
towering importance--the luck of the game, always considerable, is,
through a variety of circumstances, greater than ever, appear to me,
having seen most of them accomplished, and now looking upon the plain
printed records of indisputable fact, to have still some elements of
impossibility. One has a fear that three or four hundred years from now
the golfers of the period may not believe that these things did happen;
they may decide that we of this imaginative and progressive age, a
little fearful perhaps of greater wonders that might be accomplished in
the future, had prepared a little trick for posterity and had set forth
false records of what we had done, so absurd that their falsity was
self-evident, and so we were to be pitied for our simplicity. In our
humble way, and by stating the records of achievement in the coldest
way, admitting moreover that even to us of the time they appear
incredible, we do our best to gain favour and acceptance with our
descendants. Fifteen Open Championships to the triumvirate, and eight
Amateur Championships to Mr. John Ball himself. It is indeed impossible;
but it is one of those things in golf that are to be described in the
terms that Ben Sayers (who might have been given a championship by the
fates for services rendered and skill displayed before the era to which
he chiefly belonged was closed, as men are made lords when governments
give up) applied to the victory over him by Fred Tait on his own course
at North Berwick once by something like seven and six--"It's no
possible, but it's a fact!" All of us know one man--perhaps more than
one, but we do know one for certain--who nearly all the time that Mr.
Ball has been winning those championships might have been winning them
himself, has been almost good enough to do so. But he has won nothing,
and after all it may not be a matter of much surprise if we consider the
enormous odds against victory in a championship because of the luck of
the game, the fact that it is not like running or rowing, billiards or
chess, where strength and stamina, knowledge and skill, work out almost
exactly every time, but a game in which skill has this element of luck
blended so largely with it. But Mr. Ball, Amateur Champion eight times
over, and the triumvirate as well!--when "the truth stands out as gross
as black from white," with my eyes I can scarcely see it. These persons
have forbidden the caprice of chance that was set to worry them, they
have overthrown the laws of averages, they have annihilated the
weaknesses of flesh and blood, and they have laughed at fortune and at
fate which, defeated, have joined up with them. Then clearly they, with
the collection of champions in general for their garnishment, are to be
regarded as the sixth wonder of the game.
It is now too late--as it always was too late--to make any fair
comparison between the great players of our own time and those who were
members in the early years of the Open Championship. There is not so
much argument now as to whether Harry Vardon is better than young Tom
Morris was, though such argument was common only ten or a dozen years
ago. How may you compare these men? Young Tommy won four championships
in succession, but there was only a handful of competitors each time,
and the opposition was feeble almost to nothing in comparison with what
it became a very few years later. Vardon, Taylor, and Braid have each
won the championship five times, and many of these victories were gained
against their own fellow-champions and the strongest opposition
conceivable. Yet though such as Vardon produce what are in a sense more
astonishing results in the way of scores, we are reminded that they have
far smoother courses to play upon and much improved clubs and balls.
Also they have better rivals to sharpen their game. From this one might
argue that it would be strange indeed if they were not better than young
Tommy was, that it is quite inevitable they should be. But our modern
champions have done more than fulfil the obligations laid upon them.
They have established an amazing supremacy at a period when golfers are
reckoned in the hundreds of thousands; young Tom was champion when there
were the hundreds without the thousands. His championship, at all
events, did not mean so much. The championships gained by our
triumvirate are proof beyond all possibility of doubt or question that
these men are the most exalted geniuses, that they have such a clear
superiority over all other golfers of their time as is, seeing the
circumstances of the case and knowing the waywardness of golf, almost
incredible. The success of the younger Morris proved, as some will hold,
only that he was quite the best golfer of a few eligible to compete for
the championship.
* * * * *
After all, if comparison is fruitless and not properly practicable, this
speculation as to the merits of the geniuses of nearly fifty years ago
and now becomes enticing. One would like to reach some conclusion upon
it, but cannot. It would be fine material for a golfers' debating
society. Were I to regard myself as advocate for the moderns I should in
an agreeable and inoffensive way suggest that time has done nothing to
hurt the fame of young Tommy's skill. When what they call the golf boom
began and the great game percolated through the mass of ignorant
English, there was babble all at once about St. Andrews, and men of
southern towns just discovering that the right hand on the driver should
be the lower one whispered of the ancient city in a hypocritical manner
of respect and awe as if it were high up above the blue instead of a
day's journey up the northern lines from Euston or King's Cross. The
name of the place was taken in vain, and to this day there are neophytes
who lisp of "the Mecca of golf," as they say it, and its eleventh and
seventeenth holes, though they have never been in Fifeshire and maybe
never will. At the same time and by the same people there was
established the vogue of young Tommy Morris, as one might call it. It
was nearly sacrilege in the circumstances, for more people were living
then than are living now who had known young Tommy, and fervently
believed he was the best golfer who ever played the game. But what we
may call the Morrisian traditions were established in this way, and they
have laid a shoddy veneer on the really sound reputation of the young
champion that it never needed. So the proposition is advanced that
through ignorance and affectation and carelessness we posterity are
being abundantly generous to young Tom and his father--forgetting Allan
Robertson, such is the effect of championships, who was before them, and
of whom it was said when he died that they might toll their bells and
shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest was gone. We
posterity are of another golfing world completely from that in which
those early champions of St. Andrews lived and golfed. I have here in my
room a driver with which old Tom played, and I see that the other day
some rash fellows, unafraid of ghosts, took out from their receptacles
some clubs which had belonged to him and others and played a game with
them. But the handling of the old clubs and the looking on the picture
of Tom which he once signed for me cannot bring the feeling of his time
to ours, and I pass it on as a suggestion to our own posterity that our
judgment in this matter, as it has been made, is nearly worthless.
It has been coldly stated that lies are told by golfers. That allegation
may be dismissed with no consideration, but it is certain that fancy
traditions of flimsy origin gather about golfing history and soon
establish themselves in the most remarkable manner. I know many
incidents of the past ten or fifteen years, things I myself have
witnessed, the truth of which has become completely obscured by masses
of imagined stuff that has gathered on them. To take a good example,
more than half the golfers in the world will tell you that Lieutenant
Fred Tait won a championship at Prestwick after wading into water at the
Alps to play a shot from there in the final; if they will look at the
records they will find that splendid Tait did not win that championship
at all, and they should be told that the shot that Mr. Ball made from
the wet sand in that same bunker was nearly as difficult and, in the
circumstances, more trying. Again, the victory gained by Mr. Travis at
Sandwich, so recently as 1904, is now already described in many
different ways, but one feature common to all of them is that the
American holed a putt of twenty yards on nearly every green, that his
driving was childlike in its shortness, and that he was smoking himself
to death at the time. Still later, the very next year, there was an
Amateur Championship at Prestwick, and I remember that Mr. Robert
Maxwell, after a hard struggle against young Barry--who won the
championship--had to loft over a stymie on the eighteenth green to keep
the match alive, and then at the nineteenth the student was left with a
short putt to win that hole and the match. I saw the play in that match
and saw the putt, and I believe it was one of about a couple of feet. It
was certainly too much to give in the circumstances, far too much, but
Mr. Maxwell, great lover of golf as he is, had even by that time begun
to tire of the strenuousness and the officialdom and the graspingness of
championship tournaments, and he waved his club in token of presentation
of the putt to his young opponent and generously shook hands with him.
The Scottish spectators did not like it at the time, because "oor
Bobbie" was their best and greatest hope, and it seemed like feeding the
devil with chocolates to give putts like this to English golfers. By the
time that we had returned to the club-house, only three hundred yards
away, it was being said that that putt was three feet long, by the
morning it had gone up to three feet six, and increasing gradually it
even touched the five-feet mark within the next few years. At that point
there was a reaction and, from what I can gather, the putt has settled
down in history at four feet. It was half as long.
So I think that golf posterities are fickle bodies, and even the best of
them are not nearly so responsible and accurate in their judgments as is
believed by those people who trustingly say that they will await the
verdict of posterity. I remember that M. Anatole France urged that
posterity was not infallible, because he himself and all human beings
are posterity in regard to a long succession of works with which they
are imperfectly acquainted, and he quotes the case of Macbeth whose
reputation posterity has murdered, though Macbeth himself did no crime
at all. Macbeth was really an excellent king. He enriched Scotland by
favouring her commerce and industry. The chronicler depicts him as a
pacific prince, the king of the towns, the friend of the citizens. The
clans hated him because he administered justice well. He assassinated
nobody. And as M. France remarks, we know what legend and genius have
made of his memory. It is that way reversed with all our golfing
traditions, and so we must handle them carefully. It is a principle of
this game that no man can be a good golfer and a bad man, that those who
are bad at heart have not the human qualities necessary for being
golfers at all, cannot associate happily with the rest of the community,
and so they get themselves properly out of it betimes. Hence it happens
that of no golfer is there anything that is bad to be told. We have no
Macbeths in this sport of ours, though it embraces some pensive Hamlets,
and a number of the moderns would be golfing Romeos if their swings were
finished in the old free style. But if tradition had indeed given us a
foul Macbeth who improved his lie we should surely purify the
remembrance of him, believing that his immediate posterity had almost
certainly judged him wrong.
This case which the advocate has set up against young Tom, with all this
blame cast on posterity, will seem a weak thing yet to some. If we were
counsel for the boy, who made a fine and a lovable figure in his day,
should we bandy with words like that, or put evidence direct and plain
before the tribunal, the evidence of those who saw? There are still a
few of them left, and for myself I should not have far to send to gain a
willing witness. I have a good and valued friend, Mr. Charles Chambers
of Edinburgh, member of a distinguished golfing family of many
generations, and a fine player himself, who was in the semi-final of the
first Amateur Championship. He saw young Tommy at the game, and played
it with him. And Mr. Chambers, once answering my plea for some of his
remembrances, said, "As a youngster at St. Andrews, I was a great friend
of young Tom, the champion, and on a summer evening often accompanied
him alone, when, with a club and a cleek, he played out as far as the
second hole. He was, I believe, the greatest golfer the world has ever
seen, those giants of the present day not excepted. His driving, which I
remember so well, was of the long, low, wind-cheating style so seldom
seen now, with great distance and carry. He never struck a ball anywhere
except on the centre of the club, and this was reflected in the faces of
his driving-clubs, which had a clear and distinct impression in the
centre, the wood above and below being clean and fresh as when last
filed. His putting was perhaps even more deadly, and in ordinary matches
I recollect he was seldom or never asked to hole out a yard putt. In
driving from the tee, his style may be described as an absolutely
correct circular sweep, with great accuracy and follow-through, and
this applied equally to his iron play. It was his custom to wear a broad
Glengarry bonnet, which very frequently left his head on the delivery of
the stroke.... Without doubt he succumbed to his private sorrows and a
broken heart." That is strong testimony, and the abiding conviction is
that young Morris was great indeed, but in the nature of things
comparisons cannot well be made between then and now, and are better
left undone.
* * * * *
I am glad that we have thus condemned posterity, for we strengthen the
positions of our triumvirate and Mr. Ball at their only point of
weakness, which is that their successes have been so marvellous as to be
incredible to those heirs of ours who, not being of this period, will
not have witnessed them. Posterity may suggest that such persons could
not have lived, since none of us will hesitate to say that such
posterity will not itself produce a man to win three championships. Even
to win one twice is to make a proof of superiority such as in existing
circumstances seems nearly impossible. Any man, as one might say, may
win a championship; that would prove nothing save that he is as good a
golfer as any other, or nearly so; but to win two championships is to
prove that he is appreciably better than the others, that he is so much
better as to balance with his skill the chances of the game--the putts
he missed and the long ones that his opponents holed--that were flung
against him. During a period of nearly twenty years the success of
Taylor, Vardon, and Braid has been so complete, so overwhelming, so
dazzling, that among them they seem almost to have solved the problem of
perpetual victory. Each of these men is a genius, a great master of the
game; each of them, had he lived in an age apart from the others, would
alone have been enough to make a separate era in competitive golf; and
it is a strange freak of fate that they should have been pitchforked
into the arena at the same time. It is as if three Ormondes had been in
the same Derby, or three Graces at the crease, when at their best;
indeed, it is more wonderful than those things would have been. They
were born within thirteen months of each other; Vardon and Braid within
three months. The last-named is the eldest of the group; he was born at
Earlsferry, in Fifeshire, on 6th February 1870; Harry Vardon was born in
Jersey on 7th May 1870; and Taylor was born at Northam, in Devonshire,
within a mile of where Mr. Ball won his eighth championship, on 19th
March 1871. They are of different race; for Braid is a pure Scot, Taylor
is pure English, and Vardon, while, of course, we are proud to regard
him as belonging to us, is really half-French and half-English. They are
of different build, different temperament, and of very different style
in golf; but there they are. Among them they have won the Open
Championship fifteen times, and when one of them has succeeded it has
generally happened that the other two have been his most dangerous
rivals. There must be a limit to the period of success as there is to
human life, and for years people have murmured that these three are not
like the little brook that purls down the hill, and they cannot go on
for ever. And yet at the beginning of each new championship an instinct
settles in the public mind that they cannot be beaten. Considering what
the Open Championship is, what a fearful strain it exerts on
temperament, mind, body, and muscle, how a single slip may mean failure,
and then how many really magnificent golfers are in the lists, some of
them old champions themselves, this is a strange state of things. I
recall that when a championship was played at Muirfield in 1906 the
sceptics were then loud in their prophecies that a "new man" would
arise, and that the triumvirate would be cast down. And then? James
Braid was first, John Henry Taylor was second, and Harry Vardon was
third, though a hundred and eighty other players had done their best to
beat them! Taylor, the Englishman, although the youngest of the three,
was the first to score success. He and Vardon both made their initial
appearances in the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1893, and on that
occasion the 75 that Taylor did in his first round stood as the lowest
made in the competition, although he did not win. At his second and
third attempts in the championship he took first place each time, and on
the second of these occasions an Englishman's victory was at last
accomplished at St. Andrews, the Scottish headquarters of the game. He
won there again in 1900, and is the only Englishman who has ever won the
Open Championship on this hallowed piece of golfing ground. A year after
the others began, James Braid entered the lists, and very quickly then
did these three establish their triple supremacy. An injured hand kept
Braid out of the great event in 1895, but since then each of the men has
played in every championship, and among them have won fifteen times out
of twenty-one. At the "coming of age" of the triumvirate in 1913, when
it was twenty-one years after Taylor and Vardon started in the event,
Taylor, the first to score in it, won his fifth and became "all square"
with his friends. That was a remarkable occurrence. Since 1894, when
Taylor won his first championship, there have only been five years when
one or other of the triumvirate has not won the cup. In 1897 Mr. Hilton
got it; in 1902 Sandy Herd, playing with the rubber-cored ball on its
introduction, scored; in 1904 Jack White was the winner, both Braid and
Taylor having a putt to tie with him on the last green; in 1907 Massy,
the Frenchman, triumphed; and in 1912 the hope of Edward Ray was
realised. And in each of these years one of the triumvirate was second.
* * * * *
But if each of the triumvirate is a phenomenon and collectively they are
super-phenomena, in what terms then are we to describe Mr. John Ball,
and how shall we account for his eight amazing championships? Mr. Harold
Hilton, as all the world understands very well, is a great master of the
game, a magnificent golfer who knows it through and through, and a
tremendous fighting man. There has hardly been anything in all golf's
history so splendid as his coming again and winning two more Amateur
Championships when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly
winning an Open Championship as well. But if after considering the
professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs
in their match-play championship, it is John Ball who is the wonder man.
The luck of the game that was emphasised in the consideration of score
play is surely greater in the match. At all events, the professionals
themselves to a man declare that the score play makes the better test,
and therefore is the fairer. If that is so, there is, inferentially,
more luck to be conquered by a good man in the amateur event, and Mr.
Ball has eight times beaten his fields and beaten all the luck against
him. Twenty-four years after winning his first Amateur Championship at
Prestwick he wins his eighth at Westward Ho! and, for all the great
players that the game has yielded, no other man has gained more than
half those wins, and only Hilton has done that. Surely it is a mystery
very profound as to how he has won so often. And yet it is less of
mystery if we accept the proposition that he who plays golf for the sake
of golf and fears not to be beaten is the most dangerous of opponents.
Mr. Ball's early championships were won by his own skill and his perfect
temperament; undoubtedly some of the later ones, which through
increasing numbers of opponents have or should have been harder to win,
have been gained because he cared little whether he won or not, and
because his opponents feared to lose, and feared the more as they felt
their impending fate when they had the master of Hoylake laid against
them. To a little extent they have beaten themselves, and Mr. Ball has
done all the rest. Has there been more than one of his championships in
recent times that he has keenly desired to win, that being the one he
gained at St. Andrews in 1907, because he wished to be victor at the
headquarters where he lost long years before, after a tie with Mr.
Balfour Melville? At eight o'clock on the morning after he won his
seventh at Hoylake I saw him in the garden at the back of his house
giving his chickens their morning meal. It was as if nothing had
happened. How many other men would have been feeding chickens so early
in the morning after winning an Amateur Championship? Has he finished
winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won
for his seventh the only championship ever played in Devonshire, and he
has won the event on all the regular amateur championship courses on
which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been
something of a _bete noire_ among courses so far as he is concerned.
Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the
international match, and then in the championship he went down in a
surprising way to a youngster of Dornoch. Shall he not add Muirfield to
his list?
Despite a certain beauty of his style and the ease and elegance with
which he plays the game, Mr. Ball's golf is strongly individual to
himself. There are many pronounced mannerisms in it, and they are of a
kind that if any one tried to copy them, he might find his game being
injured rather than improved. They are the ways of the genius who cares
nothing for convention. Few can drive a better ball. At the outset of
his career he was a long driver. His first big match away from his
native Hoylake was one against Douglas Rolland. It was a home-and-home
affair in England and Scotland, and Rolland was greatly celebrated in
those days for the length he gained with wooden clubs. Yet he outdrove
Mr. Ball but little in that engagement. He obtains his length not to a
large extent from run, as most men get it now, but by a ball that starts
on a beautiful line, makes a very long carry, and leaves it at that,
with a little pull to finish with. It has seemed that he has had more
control over his wooden club play than almost any amateur except another
of fame who was bred in the same great school. An outstanding
peculiarity of his method is the way in which he grips his club, which
is done not in the fingers and lightly as by other men, but by a good
firm grip in the palms of his hands with the fingers facing up. He makes
small use of the thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand. His
stance is an open one. His play with his iron clubs again is
unconventional. Even for his shortest shots he swings his clubs, meaning
that he makes less of a jerky hit at the ball than others do, and he
resorts less to cutting the stroke than other great men. But what a
master of judging of heights and distance he is! To see him just plop
the ball over a bunker in the way and then watch it run the necessary
distance afterwards is to understand what marvellous properties of
control can be invested in such perfect human golfing machinery.
Another of his peculiarities is that he carries no niblick in his bag,
and I think he never has carried one. He has certainly not had one in
any of his recent championships. And among many other of his
characteristics is that peculiar gait with the bent knees that, because
of their climbing over the hilly links, golf seems to develop in men
(Harry Vardon has it), his extreme modesty in manner, and the splendid
excellence of his sportsmanship. Some one once set forward a curious
theory that children born in the winter-time are likely to become better
golfers than others; their temperaments are supposed to be favourably
affected by the prevailing rigour of the weather conditions! It is,
anyhow, a curious fact that a very large proportion of our best players
were born in mid-winter months, and of them all John Ball is the
greatest, and he, if you please, was born on a day so far removed from
midsummer as Christmas Eve.
* * * * *
There has been lately a sort of revival of the game of attempting to
punch another man so very hard that he can stand up no longer to make
the smallest punch in answer. He has to be battered and pounded until he
is made practically lifeless for a period of ten seconds, and then the
other man is given the money. This is what we call the "noble art of
self-defence," but, obviously, it is nine parts of such defence to
reduce the other man to such a jellified condition that no more defence
is needed. When well played it is a good game. Now golf never has been
called a "noble" game at all. It is "royal" and it is "ancient," and it
leaves its qualities to speak for themselves, as most eloquently they
do. The boast has indeed been made for golf that, while in so many other
English sports something flying or running has to be killed or injured,
golf never calls for a drop of blood from any living creature. It is
then inferred that it is a gentle game, as in some ways it really is.
Also it has been demonstrated that it is a game at which elderly men may
play and play quite well, as was proved in a recent year when golfers
who are becoming older than they like to think of won so many of the
trophies. But the result of this boom in the noble art of squashing
another man for a prize of a few thousand pounds and the brave words
that some of the lovers of this sport sometimes use, telling us that
things like this made English hearts so strong, nearly giving us to
understand that Sayers and his like had some influence on the fortunes
of the British Empire, is that a kind of reflection is cast upon some
other sports for their mildness and their timidity. Girls do not fight
in rings and nearly kill each other, but girls can play golf and do, and
they even play with men.
Let us consider the proposition that golf is a game that needs a greater
and a stronger heart than any other game. It demands fine manliness,
such determination as strong Englishmen are made of, and courage of the
best. The strain of a severe golf competition on the men who win, or
nearly, is enormous. No weakling has ever won success at golf, and never
will. The truth is that it is such a game that if the charge is made
that it is a brutal sport we can barely stand for its defence. For there
is cruelty in golf, cold hurting cruelty in this game. If now you
hesitate, consider. The difference between the effect of boxing and the
effect of golf on the human system is that golf hurts more and the pain
is more enduring, for it is psychological. That may seem like an
attempted escape from the proposition, because it may be suggested that
maiden aunts can and do bear such psychological pain at golf, and bear
it well. But we discuss real golf of the championship kind, and match
play wherein two good and keen players are really playing against each
other, parry and thrust as it is in championship golf, with the issue in
even balance most of the time, not taking sevens and eights and so being
nearly indifferent to what the other may do until the clerking takes
place on the putting green and the state of things is calculated.
Golf, as we know, is a game for the emotions. We agree that it plays
upon them continually, and chiefly through the medium of the supreme
emotion, hope. While this hope is the most uplifting of emotions, it is
also, with the strain it makes, by far the most exhausting. Now every
golfer knows that in the real game if a good stroke is made by one party
the gain is not only in the extra nearness to the hole that his own ball
obtains, but also by the "moral effect" the shot has on the other man.
This other may have been in a good state of hope before; now he receives
a sudden shock--and it is indeed a shock sometimes when in a second, as
the result of the other's effort, his hope is reduced to fear or
complete dejection. Do you think the man who made the shot does not know
that? He knows it well. There! he knew! The dejected man has foozled,
and the hole has gone. This bout is ended. There is a rest of a few
seconds, and then the contestants start again and smash each other on
the mind, just as they did the other time. Some may suggest that the
effect of these mental hurts is small, that they draw no blood, and that
they are not to be compared with a left hook on the jaw which sends a
boxer toppling. To that there are replies to make. In the first place it
has to be remembered that a match at golf between two good players (we
do not now write of habitual foozlers in whom the golfing emotions
cannot, in the nature of things, be well developed) is taken very
seriously indeed, and therefore the emotional effect is greater than
might be supposed by one who does not play. Second, the effect is
cumulative, and every golfer knows again how intensely depressing is the
continual fight against a relentless opponent who scores with nearly
every stroke and never lets one's hope burn bright again. Bang goes
every shot of his on the sensitive temperament of his foe, and that is
exactly why temperament has all to do with success at golf. It is the
man who can stand punishment who wins; no other sort ever has won in
greater golf, or ever will. And then again, if it is suggested that
mental pain is after all not such a hard thing to bear with courage as
pain of body, let us ask which has the longer effect, remembering also
that, with full respect to boxing people, the golfer is a man of keener
feelings. In championships how often has a man who has had a punishing
match in a morning round, one that has gone to the nineteenth hole or
after before victory has come to him, won again in the afternoon? Not
frequently. If you had merely with a fist blow knocked that man
senseless for a little while before his lunch, he might have been
readier for his golfer opponent in the afternoon. It is notorious that
some of the finest play in championships has been accomplished by men
who were enduring much physical suffering at the time. And again, how
exactly is the effect of the winning putt on the defeated man like that
of the knock-out blow. His last hope is extinguished with the suddenness
of vanished consciousness. So this psychological pain is a very
discomforting thing. The law recognises it, and herein the law is surely
not an ass. We have the legal cruelty of the divorce court. Husband who
tells his wife he dislikes her new hat or gown is held to have been
cruel as though he had smacked her pretty face, or something worse than
that. He could kiss away a red mark from a dimpled cheek, and surely if
permitted he would do so, but nothing could change the judgment on the
hat. And in golf the mental injury is more real than that.
Never was more absurdly untrue suggestion made against this game than
that it is not like others where men play directly against each other
and foil each other's shots, that it is a game in which each man plays
his own ball independent of the other. Each stroke we make has effect on
the stroke made by the opponent. That effect may be discounted by the
opponent's own strength and resource, but yet it is produced. In no
other game does a man play right and hard on to his opponent as in
match-play golf, for it is a game in which the whole temperamental
strength of one side is hurled against the strength of the other, and
the two human natures are pressing bitterly and relentlessly against
each other from the first moment of the game to the last. It is the
whole man, mind and body. That is the meaning of the temperamental
factor in golf, and that is why a great match at golf is great indeed.
Yes, it is a cruel game, one in which the primitive instincts of man are
given full play, and the difference between golf and fisticuffs is that
in the one the pain is of the mind and in the other it is of the body.
* * * * *
A climax in our wonderment has been reached, and though a volume could
be written on the romance of the rubber-cored ball, the seventh of the
wonders of the game and the most modern, the story after all is known.
Golf would have gained on its old degree of popularity if there had been
no such invention and men had continued to play with gutties; but that
the golf boom as we know it would have been created, that the game
would have risen to be the enormous thing it is, giving pleasure to
hundreds of thousands of people all the world over, there is much reason
to doubt. One night in the early summer of 1898 Mr. Coburn Haskell sat
at dinner with a magnate of the American rubber industry, at the house
of the latter in Cleveland, Ohio. They were both golfers, and naturally
they talked golf during their meal. They agreed that a kindlier ball
than the harsh and severe gutty was needed, and they thought that surely
it might come through rubber. Eventually they settled on the idea of
rubber thread wound under tension to give the necessary hardness, and an
experimental ball was made accordingly. With the very first shot that
was made with that first of rubber-cored balls a professional player to
whom it had been given to try carried a bunker that had never been
carried before! From that moment the great revolution was begun, the
most extraordinary that has ever taken place in any game. There were
set-backs, it was a little slow in starting, but its success was sure.
In 1902, when Sandy Herd won an Open Championship with the new ball,
after prejudice had held it back in Britain previously, the gutty was
done for, and it quickly disappeared from the links.
And oh, the ravings and the riotings of argument there have been about
that ball since then! And the hundreds of thousands of pounds that have
had to be spent on courses to make them suit it! Never was there such a
giant commotion nor such a costly one caused in any sport before. We
need not argue any more whether it has improved the game or spoiled it.
These discussions are for the schools. It has anyhow made the game in
the modern popular sense, and now we are informed that of this little
white ball, that was first invented at the dinner-table on those Ohio
summer nights, half a million are used on British courses in one week
in a busy season, and a million pounds' worth are bought and consumed by
golfers in a year. Then you may be sure that more than a million
dollars' worth are driven and putted on the courses of the United
States. Marvellous little ball! Indeed you are the seventh wonder of
your game.