CANADIAN COURSES, AND A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AT TORONTO, WITH MATTERS
PERTAINING TO MAKING A NEW BEGINNING.
Towards the end of an afternoon in September, rounds being done, I stood
with Mr. George Lyon (who is a kind of John Ball of the Dominion of
Canada, having won the championship of his country seven times) on the
heights where stands the club-house of the Lambton Golf and Country Club
in Ontario, and we looked across the valley along which the course is
traced to the woods on the opposite side where there were some fiery
crimson spots to be seen as if burning amid the mass of foliage that was
olive or tinting down to brown. They were the maple leaves of Canada,
the emblem of the new land, of which it is prophesied that it shall be
the greatest country of the earth. In early days the Canadians dabbled
with the lacrosse which the Indians played, and some of the invaders,
too, brought their cricket with them and taught it to others whom they
found there. Then the people who are near to the borders of the United
States, and are somewhat impressed with the American ways of doing
things, have been cultivating an interest in baseball for its
spectacular properties. Rounders revised is well enough for those who
are within shouting distance of Buffalo and for places like Toronto, but
I could never believe that such a game or pastime, whatever its
merits--and I know that it has many--could suit such a very serious,
contemplative, cold, and earnest people as the Canadians are. I regard
the nature of these people, as I have had the opportunity of considering
it, as more serious and intense than that of any other, and I know only
one recreation beyond those that are the simplest and most essential, as
of roaming in the untamed country, fishing, shooting, and hunting, that
is agreeable to such a nature. They also know it; they have declared for
a national game.
There is this to be said at the beginning for Canadian golf and its
courses, that the general atmosphere of the game in this great country,
rough and often bare and primitive as still it is, seems to be much
nearer the atmosphere of golf in Britain than that of any other country
different from us. One misses the sea-coast links, courses are long
distances apart, fine players are comparatively few, for the men of
Canada are still so busy and so earnest that they have not even time to
play, but yet there is a fine chain of the game all the way from St.
John's to Vancouver. There is more of the peculiarity of British
sporting instinct in the Canadian than in any other person out of the
British Isles; he likes what we like, and he likes it in the same way
and for the same reasons. Except that the coldness, like that of the
Scot, is sometimes too much exhibited in him, and that even on suitable
occasions he is reluctant to demonstrate his enthusiasms, so serious he
is, so deep he looks, I have found him to be a splendid opponent with an
agreeable persistency, and a most desirable partner in a foursome. Here
in Canada there are trestle tee-boxes, a few--but only a few--of the
club-houses are built and equipped in the manner of the Americans,
betokening an existing prosperity and a provision for that greater one
which is felt to be as sure as the fruit and the corn of the following
season; but otherwise golf seems much like what it is at home, and
especially do we feel like that when we reach the old places where the
game first took root out there. There is a Canadian Golf Association to
rule the affairs of the game in the country with a certain subservience
to home and St. Andrews as the Dominion holds to Westminster, and such a
ruling authority is necessary in a new and wide country like this where
so much pioneering is being done, just as it is necessary in the United
States and in Australia. The chief function of such an authority is to
keep the game together, hold it compact and maintain it in even
uniformity with the game elsewhere. There is no blame to the Canadians
because they have not associated themselves with the subtle and
insoluble mysteries of the British handicapping system, but have
followed the American lead in this matter and put their best champions
at scratch. Otherwise they are full British still, and even if they have
their doubts upon the wisdom of the edict of St. Andrews which banned
centre-shafted clubs and the Schenectady putter of American origin, they
have remained loyal to the law without dissenting as the Americans did.
So in Canada you may not use the Schenectady. You may putt with it on
one side of the Niagara Falls but not on the other side.
It is fortunate that a ball cannot be played across the Falls, or over
those whirling Rapids, or some puzzling international complications
might arise. The adventures are called to mind of two great scientists,
the late Professor John Milne, who made such a fine study of earthquakes
and could feel them in the Isle of Wight when they were taking place in
Asia, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the eminent Cambridge pathologist,
when they went to the meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science when it was held in South Africa. They travelled
to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, and there they contemplated
a mighty carry of a hundred and sixty yards over roaring, foaming water.
The keen golfer is always prepared, for the emergencies of the game are
constant and attractive, and Mr. Milne produced driver and ball, and,
with a fine nerve and eyes that were controlled most marvellously,
delivered a golf ball from one side to the other for the first time
since the world began. The pathologist admired the achievement and
emulated it. He also carried the Falls of the Zambezi. It were better
that these greedy men had left it at that and been well satisfied.
However, they came to think they might go on with this majestic carry
continually, and generous Fortune chided them. Crocodiles took the balls
that they drove into the Zambezi.
* * * * *
Let us take a look at Lambton. From my room in Toronto I rang up Lyon,
whom I had met several times in England, and asked him to guess the name
of the caller; he gave the name without hesitation, though he had no
more reason to know that I was in Canada than in Tasmania. So quite in a
matter-of-fact way we met on the following day in a Grand Trunk car
starting from the Union station, and inquired of each other as to the
ball that each was using. The journey from Toronto is one of only a few
minutes, and soon after the stopping of the train the feet may tread on
some of the nicest golfing turf that is to be found out of England, and
the reason is palpable, for here are the big bunkers of the proper kind
made of real yellow sand, which is natural to the place. When they need
new sand bunkers at Lambton they cut them open and there they are. So
sandy is the place that sometimes they have a difficulty in making the
grass grow properly, and one result of these favourable natural
conditions is that the course is better bunkered than most others on the
American continent. Tee shots and approaches must be played well, and at
the very first green the hint is given that the short game must be well
done. The fourth hole is one of the jewels of Canadian golf. The teeing
ground is on a height, and below it is a series of descending plateaux
like giants' steps until the level is reached. When he has made a very
passable drive the player is called upon with a very proper second to
carry the Black Creek which guards the green and is coiled like a snake
about it. The shot must have fair length and it must be very straight as
well. Normally the hole is 365 yards long, so that in mere distance it
is not a terrible thing, but when medals are being played for its length
is stretched out to the four hundred yards. At the sixth the stream
which they call Humber comes into the reckoning. It is a nice two-shot
hole, and the seventh is an excellent short one with the inky creek here
again. With the stump of a tree protruding from the water, large leafy
growths upon the surface, a general sleepiness and the green in a
sequestered corner beneath a shading hill, this is quite one of the most
attractive of water holes. It is a strong hole, too, with fear about it,
for the carry is one of 165 yards, and I was told that when Miss Rhona
Adair, now Mrs. Cuthell, several times lady champion, was in these parts
some years ago she twice did the carry and a third time her ball skimmed
the water and reached the green after all. This was good work for a
lady, especially as I rather fancy she must have been using the gutty
ball at that time.
The greens at Lambton are generally excellent, and they have adopted a
means for keeping them in good order which, though it has been tried in
other parts of America, has not to my knowledge been employed elsewhere.
I have heard objections raised against it, but the results at Lambton
are uncommonly good. Nearly all the greens here are kept properly
moistened by a process of sub-irrigation, and are never watered on the
surface. Below the green there is a deep bed of cinders, and over this
and about eighteen inches from the grass there is a network of water
pipes made of a hard porous clay, "weeping clay" they call it, the
entire under-surface of the greens being covered with them. At the
corner of each green there is a feed pipe connecting with this network,
and once a day the water supply is laid on to it and all the pipes under
the green are loaded. The heat of the sun then slowly draws the water
through the porous pipes and up to the surface, and the results of the
process are uniformly good. Lambton is a fine institution altogether.
There is a short ladies' course as well as the other, a fine toboggan
chute down the slope in front of the club-house, and the latter is in
all respects an admirable place, well fitted with baths, bedrooms, and
public apartments that are elegant and comfortable. This place has
something to do with Toronto life of to-day. There are seven hundred
members, and now it costs a new one the equivalent of six hundred
dollars in his first year. He has to get a hundred-dollar share in the
club to begin with, and these are at such a premium that he has to pay
five hundred dollars for one. On one of the walls of the club-house is a
life-size portrait of the champion of the country in a characteristic
attitude with his brassey under his arm.
* * * * *
The case of Toronto is very interesting. The club, which takes the name
of the city and is one of the oldest in the country, was started in
1876, and completely reorganised some eighteen years later. The pretty
little course that it had until lately was on the outskirts of the city,
with an old and quaint farm-house, which had from time to time been
enlarged, for a club-house. As to the course, it was quite nice. It was
very undulating, ravines, gullies, and belts of trees being prominent
everywhere. The turf was good, and some of the holes were excellent. In
the club-house there were fine trophies and some old prints, and a plan
of the old course at St. Andrews, with a photograph of old Tom Morris
attached to it, signed "From Tom Morris, to the members of the Toronto
Golf Club, 1896." Everything belonging to this old course was sweetly
mellow, and one's visit there made a pleasant experience. But it met a
fate which has been common enough near London but rare elsewhere. The
speed of Toronto's expansion brought it about, and, owing to the
encroachments of the builders, the club had to move. I was there at the
parting, and it was a sad one. Its members, however, being a very
wealthy and enthusiastic body of gentlemen, determined to make for
themselves a new home which should be as good as anything that could be
done, and their ambition was fulfilled. Etobicoke! It is one of the
wonders of the west, and I was the first wandering British player to set
his foot upon it.
Etobicoke is several miles out from Toronto, and here with the money
that the club obtained from the sale of the old course they bought 270
acres of what was virgin land, being for the most part covered with
trees at the time. This they had cleared, ploughed, and properly
prepared, and Mr. Harry Colt came out from England to lay out the
course. His finished work, as I have seen it, must rank as one of his
masterpieces. As on so many of the Colt courses there is something of a
Sunningdale look about the holes, and nearly all are extremely good. A
very fine short one is the fourth and one with which the architect
himself was much in love when he had completed the design from the
natural materials that were at his hand; and the tenth is a wonder of
its kind, the hindmost tee being on a hilltop from which a glorious view
of the course is to be had, with Lake Ontario beyond it, while some way
lower down the slope are second and third tees, making the distance
shorter. The soil is sandy, the turf is good, and the course must be
considered to rank as first class absolutely. Mr. W. A. Langton, who
went over it with me, said he believed they had come into possession of
what would be the finest golf course in America when it has matured, and
his judgment may be right.
Many parts of the world were laid under tribute for the making of this
course at Etobicoke where the club is still called by the good old
simple name, the Toronto Golf Club. It was designed, as I have said, by
an English architect, and in order to give a grass to the course that
would stand the rigours of the climate better than the ordinary grasses
with which courses in North America are generally sown, seeds were
obtained from Finland. Then nearly all the rough work of construction
was done by Bulgarians and Roumanians, these immigrants being splendid
for work of this kind. They were paid at the rate of about seven
shillings a day, and they lived in huts which they made on the ground
and saved the greater part of the money that they earned. A little over
L16,000 or 80,000 dollars were paid for the land, and about the same
amount was spent on its preparation and completion as a course; while
L20,000 or 100,000 dollars were spent on the building and equipment of a
splendid club-house, embracing the utmost comfort and convenience, with
about fifty bedrooms. This is a members' club, and the club has all the
members and money that it needs, and it is not a speculative enterprise
in any way whatever. But British golfers must surely pause with wonder
when they hear of a place like Toronto spending L50,000 on a new golf
course! Such is the enthusiasm of the Canadian for the game, that while
this enterprise was afoot a six-holes course was being constructed
alongside it, at a cost of L10,000, for a gentleman who intended to
build a house near by to which he might ask his friends.
* * * * *
One pleasant day when staying at Montreal I went out to Dixie, a few
stations along the Grand Trunk line, where there is the course of the
Royal Montreal Club, to be regarded now as the oldest properly
established club in the Dominion. This one alone has that title of Royal
which Queen Victoria gave it permission to use in 1884. In its early
days the course was in Mount Royal Park, overlooking Montreal. Out here
at Dixie a certain flavour of the old spirit and good strong sporting
simplicity of the game are tasted. The course is somewhat flat and
parky, and big banks of bunkers stretch across the fairway, making the
general style of the architecture very much of the Victorian, but the
undulations and unevennesses of the banks and hollows are redeeming
features. Some of the holes are good and the putting greens are
excellent, but generally the course suffers from the absence of testing
second shots. There is a magnificent view up the river from the seventh
tee. A house agent might honestly declare that the club-house is
commodious and comfortable. It was made before it was the fashion to
erect palaces on golf courses, and sheet-iron bulks largely in its
composition; yet it is cosy enough inside, and contains many relics of
peculiar interest. In a glass case there are some ancient clubs with
which members played in the early days, and a leather belt for which
they competed, the names of the winners being written on the inside.
There are many other courses in Montreal and round about it. There is
the Beaconsfield Club with its place situated some way up the river,
reached by the G. T. R. at Point Claire. The part of Fletcher's Fields
in Mount Royal Park, on which the Royal Montreal Club first played, is
now in the occupation of the Metropolitan Club, and is only about five
minutes' ride by car from the centre of the city. On the eastern slope
of Mount Royal is the course of the Outremont Club, which, at the time
of my visit, was about to go forward to a new and great enterprise;
while on a plateau at the western end of Mount Royal are the nine holes
of the West Mount Club, most charmingly situated, with fine views of the
city and the river.
At Ottawa there is a course which ranks high among the very best on the
continent. It is different in character from that at Dixie, for here
there are ravines and gullies, and the land is strongly undulating
everywhere. The bunkers and other hazards are natural, the putting
greens are smooth, and the subsoil is of sandy loam. It is on the other
side of the Ottawa River, beyond Hull, and owing to its being exposed to
a broad reach of the stream it is seldom that there is not much wind
blowing across it. And there are courses all the way from east to west
of this wonderful, blossoming Canada. We find that wherever we wander in
the Dominion we are not much distant from a golf club. Even when on a
day I sailed across Lake Ontario and made the Gorge Valley trip to the
Niagara Falls there was golf near by had it been wanted. Winnipeg,
Edmonton, Calgary, round and about the Rockies, and up them
too--everywhere the game is played. I was told that when the course at
St. John, New Brunswick, was started in 1897, Mr. H. H. Hansard, who
made the opening stroke, holed from the tee in one. Holes in one have
been done in many curious circumstances, but surely this is one of the
most interesting of all. Compare the excellent beginning of St. John
with what happened the other day when a new course was being started
here at home. I am sorry to say that the municipal dignitary upon whom
the chief responsibility was cast missed the ball the first time, and
also the second, but contrived to move it from the tee at the third
attempt.
A note has just reached me from a friend in the Dominion saying that out
on the Gulf of Georgia, on the coast of Vancouver, they are reaching
forward to a golf ideal. They have planned and started there a new town,
which they have called Qualicum, of which the golf course is the central
feature. They have laid out a fine one along the shore, one that has
splendid natural qualities, and they are doing their best to make it
understood that here is a golf city if ever there was one, for they have
christened the streets and roads by such names as St. Andrews Road,
Berwick Road, Portrush Road, Rye Road, Sandwich Road, and Dollymount
Road; and there are others with the names of Hoylake, Sunningdale, and
all the rest of our British best.
Friends whom I consulted in the matter declared there was no golf in
Quebec, little but French people, French talk, and French games of two
generations back, the Canadian French not yet having adopted the sport
to which so many of the Parisians have attached themselves with great
earnestness. I was barely satisfied with such denials, and when, after
another night on the C. P. R., I found myself on a glorious Sunday
morning on those famous heights of Quebec, whence the view is one of the
most magnificent in the world, I set about investigating the matter all
alone. I can hardly say why, but somehow I strongly suspected the Plains
of Abraham, the big, bare piece of land on the heights overlooking the
St. Lawrence, on which Wolfe and Montcalm, more than a century and a
half ago, fought that great fight, and died. I have always found it as a
most remarkable thing that where great battles have been waged, and big
encampments made, golf courses in a great number of cases have been laid
out there later. Sure enough, then, the game was here on the Plains of
Abraham. I had just been looking upon the pillar with the simple
inscription, "Here died Wolfe victorious," and had walked for the length
of two or three good drives towards the citadel end of the plain,
called, I think, the Cove Fields, when putting greens came to view, with
sticks not two feet long and bits of red rag attached to them in the
holes. The greens and the teeing grounds were rough as could be, and
there were no proper bunkers on the course, but plenty of trouble for
all that, the ground being coarse and stony. The public could roam about
the place just as it pleased, and did so, and there did not seem to be
anything to prevent any one from playing the game on this course. It
looked just like public golf on common land, and though it is a far cry
from Blackheath to Quebec, there is something in the nature and
character of this golfing ground at the historic Canadian port to remind
one of England's oldest and crudest course. I discovered afterwards that
the Quebec Golf Club, a club without a club-house, had acquired the
rights to play on it; that this club is one of comparatively early
origin; that its members are clearly primitive in their tastes, but
sincere and earnest; and I am led to the belief that the course has
another point of similarity with Blackheath, being the oldest now in
existence on the American continent. It is said that a daughter of old
Tom Morris, who married a Mr. Hunter and went to America, was largely
responsible for the beginning of golf at Quebec. Men and boys were
playing on it on this beautiful Sunday morning when the bells in
countless steeples of Quebec and at St. Levis on the other side of the
St. Lawrence were ringing their music through the stillest air. I sat
down on the edge of the course overlooking the precipitous depths to the
river, far down below, where the smoke from a warship at anchor came
lazily from the funnels, and looked for long enough to gain an undying
impression of one of the grandest panoramas in the world, seen at its
most peaceful and its best. Nature had a grand inspiration when she made
Quebec as now we find her.
* * * * *
This marvellous country is a rare place for making the new beginning.
Everything is so raw, so suggestive, so encouraging to earnest failures
who would, like Omar, if they could, conspire with fate, shatter the
existing scheme of things and "remould it nearer to the heart's desire."
Canada is indeed a fine place for hope for the future. I met several men
in the country who told me, that on leaving England and Scotland, they
had perforce, with all the hard work before them, to give up the game
for a long period; while another reason was, that those having been much
earlier days, there were fewer courses there. So years after, when the
fortunes had been made, they came back to golf again, and they were
making another new beginning, and felt a certain gladness as they
remembered some of the faults and the torments of the old game with all
its vast imperfections. In everything they would start over again as if
it were all quite new, and they knew nothing about it. Generally they
have made successes of their second golfing lives on earth in this way,
but yet they have found that they needed to act warily and be on their
guard always against old enemies, for golf poisons are marvellously
subtle and enduring things; and it has been found that when once a man
contracts a habit that is bad it will last for ever, whether he plays
the game continually or not, and the worse the habit the more incurable
it is. The best that can be done is the application of a system of
subjection, by which the disease is kept under, and does not pain or
hinder. But men who have fallen into bad and hopeless complications with
their golf, and found that it never could be improved any more, have
tried to begin it all over again as left handers--the most drastic
change--and even that has failed. They have then realised that the only
way to die happy is to give up the game for a matter of half a
generation and start again, with the determination to keep the head
still, to begin the back-swing with the wrists, and not to start
pivoting on the left toe as soon as the driving is begun, as if it were
necessary to do this thing, as so many of the teachers have suggested,
to the ruin of their pupils, for the unsteadiness it has produced. One
learns to do this pivoting after an hour's practice at the game, and can
pivot well when nothing else can be done at golf. But it takes years and
years sometimes to get rid of such a stupid custom. The left heel must
rise, but let it rise as little as may be, and of its own accord. Its
rising should be always a result of something, and not a cause of
something else.
What is needed at a beginning, or a fresh start in any golfing life, is
a thorough grasp of essential principles. Considering the subject the
whole way through, we may feel that there are really only two essential
and compulsory principles applicable to all cases, instead of two
hundred or more as the bewildered player is often led to imagine. These
two are, first, that the eye must be kept upon the ball until it has
left the club; and, second, that in addition to the still head there
must be one fixed and practically motionless centre in the human system
while the stroke is being made. It is neglect, generally accidental, of
one or both of these principles that causes most of the bad shots that
are made. Let us remember that. Never, or hardly ever, should we neglect
these principles, and if we do not our handicap is almost sure to come
down, not only because so many bad shots will be avoided, but because
the exactness, certainty, and quality of all the strokes will be
steadily improved as they cannot be when hampered by neglect of the
principles. The eye makes the connection between the captain in the
brain and the engineers of the physical system. It is the speaking-tube
or the telegraph apparatus. There can be no union without it. But, as we
all know, it is not such an easy thing to keep the eye on the ball as it
ought to be kept on it, and the more anxious the player the more liable
is he to err in this matter. As to the fixed centre--somewhere in the
interior of the waist--we should reflect that the golfing swings, when
carried out properly, consist of the action and movements of thousands
of different muscles, operating in different ways, different directions,
and at different times. Perfect harmony and correlation among them all
is necessary if the general result is to be smooth and exact. Make no
mistake about it, the golfing swing, with all its complications and the
acute precision that is necessary for its good and proper effect, is one
of the most wonderful things of which the physical system is capable.
When I reflect upon it I think it is marvellous that the human man can
make it as he does. To obtain harmony among all these thousands of
movements there must be one centre from which they are all regulated. If
we think it out we see that this is so, and then we appreciate the
importance of what is too baldly described as keeping the body still, as
we have perhaps never done before. As a point of truth, the body as a
whole cannot be kept still, but there must be one centre that must be
fixed from the moment that the club addresses the ball until the latter
has left its place after impact. The captain in the brain, the eye, and
the fixed head and centre are the great trinity who manage the whole
concern. Only one man who has neglected this law has ever raised himself
to eminence in golf, and that man is Edward Ray, who has done it by mere
physical strength. When the fixed centre is held secure a great host of
evils which constantly cause failure are avoided--swaying of the body,
collapse of the legs, improper foot work, dropping of the right
shoulder, falling forward, and more of such a kind of fatal faults.
* * * * *
In the biggest dictionary that I can find neither the word "futurism"
nor "cubist" is given a place, and yet these words, meaning certain
movements, are probably on the tongues of art folks with much frequency
in these times. In the same way the word "subconsciousism" and
"subconsciousist" are not in this or any other dictionary; but they may
yet be coined and made legitimate to fill certain vacancies, and they
represent definite golfing systems. The principle of subconsciousism in
essence, then, is that of showing a visionary picture to the mind for a
moment, banishing it, and, in a certain measure, forgetting all about
it, and then going on with the game as if the incident had been closed.
But the mind retains its record more or less vaguely always; and the
picture thrown on the mental screen makes an impression there which
stays; and that impression is an influence upon the succeeding physical
actions. Subconsciously the player does something--it may be little or
much--to imitate the movements in the mental picture that he saw. He
cannot avoid it; the influence upon him cannot be wholly resisted. If,
as it were, he saturates his mind with impressions of this kind, of the
strokes he would like to play, of the way he would like to play them, he
will gradually and almost surely begin to play them just like that. It
has been recognised for ages that the best golf is that which is played
entirely subconsciously, that is to say without conscious effort, and
without thinking in detail of the stroke that has to be played. When a
man is "on his game" he has none of this thinking to do, and does none.
There seems to be only one way of playing the shot, and that way is
unavoidable to him and quite natural. He does not need to shuffle about
to find his proper stance, and he is not anxious about any part of his
swing. The moment a clear consciousness of detailed action asserts
itself, and the man does think about the movements of his swing, and
does shuffle about for his stance, he goes off his game, and the
stronger the consciousness the more he goes off. These points are
disputed by nobody. A little while since a new writer on the game
declared that the golfer at the beginning of his swing thought of the
advice of one professional; half way up he thought of the suggestion of
another; at the top he remembered the recommendation of a third man; and
coming down, the hint of a fourth flung itself into a mind that must
have been working with amazing rapidity in the most difficult
circumstances. What the result of such strokes is was not suggested;
but if any number of golfers carried out their scheme of swinging in
this way we should know exactly why it is that so much bad golf is
played. As a matter of truth nobody has ever been able to mix up his
plans in such a manner; but the statement suggests the extreme of
consciousness, and fear with it also. With subconsciousness there is no
fear, no hesitation, and no doubt.
Now we can show how our subconsciousism, when unaided and not encouraged
(there is nearly but not quite a contradiction in terms here), has had
its effect upon the player hitherto. If a man watches the play of any
golfer much better than himself, say a first-class professional, very
closely for some time he takes a little of that man's style into his own
system without knowing it, and, it may be, without making any conscious
effort to imitate it. He is much more likely to succeed in this way than
by making any deliberate attempt to copy. Again, you will often find
players telling you, that after a week of watching a championship
meeting, and without having paid attention to any player in particular,
certainly without attempting to imitate any one, they find on resuming
their own game that a new influence is upon it; that in particular they
address the ball in a more businesslike way, with more confidence; that
their swing is less flabby, and that they play their iron shots with
much greater sense of wrist, and with more firmness. This has been
noticed over and over again, and it is a most interesting result of the
influence of impressions involuntarily recorded on the mind. Consider
another way in which the impression acts. A player may be removed from
the game through illness or some other reason for a time, and during
that period he works some of the problems of golf out in his mind, and
constantly pictures a new and particular way of playing a stroke that
has troubled him. When he returns to the links he plays the stroke like
that without any effort to do so, or perhaps without even thinking of
it. Another remarkable example of subconsciousism was afforded to me
recently by a good golfer, who said that to develop a certain stroke
which he had found beyond his best efforts--conscious efforts--he had
three enlarged photographs made of that stroke as executed properly by a
first-class man, one showing the beginning, the other the top of the
swing, and the third the finish. He had these pictures placed alongside
each other on one of the walls of his room, and there they were all the
time, not to be avoided. He made no effort to study them, but his mind
simply absorbed them, and then subconsciously he found the stroke coming
to him until in the end he played it just like that. In these matters
subconsciousism is shown to be at work without being understood or at
all suspected.
Having this valuable agency at command the next thing is to apply it,
and make it of more thorough practical effect without permitting it to
change to interfering and dangerous consciousness. In the cases that
have already been cited certain methods are plainly suggested. Here is
another which has, as I know, proved amazingly effective at times. The
player, we may say, is not driving as well as he should, or in the way
he would like to do. At the moment of taking his place on the
teeing-ground he runs through his mind, as it were, a cinematographic
picture of his favourite model player doing the drive. He sees, in
imagination, the man taking his stance, swinging the club back, down on
to the ball again, and finishing. He just sees it once, and bothers
about it no more. Then he sets about his own drive without any further
reference to the mental picture that his mind has absorbed. The mind
does the rest. The drive may not be made in the ideal way that was
imagined. It may be done in the old way. It may even be foozled. But
there has been an influence at work, and if that influence is always
employed in the same way the good result will come in time, always
provided--and this is important--that the model is one that is suitable
to the player, and can be copied by him. It would be useless for a man
who is far past forty, very fat and very short, with no athletic quality
in him at all, to take Harry Vardon and his graceful lithesome swing for
his mental cinema show.
Another way in which practical subconsciousism may be made exceedingly
valuable is by imagining a place to which the ball has to be delivered
without looking at it when it ought not to be looked at, as when a very
short running or pitching approach has to be made. The very best of men
often find it impossible to keep the eye fixed on the ball until the
stroke is done. A little while since there was the case of one of the
finest amateur golfers of the time flopping his ball into the bunker
guarding the green of the first hole at Sandwich from the bank thereof,
when, if he had played an easy shot and kept his eye at rest, he would
almost certainly have avoided this trouble, and then won the St.
George's Cup for which he was playing. I remember an exactly similar
case in the final of the Amateur Championship of 1908, at Sandwich, when
Mr. Lassen, who did win, knocked his ball into the big bunker in front
of the old tenth green there from the top of the cliff overlooking it.
What is needed in such cases, or in like cases when presented to
inferior players, is something to keep the mind's eye contented, and it
has been found to serve if a picture of the hole is flashed into the
mind just before the stroke is made. This is what is certainly done,
though unintentionally, when putting. The man does keep his eye on the
ball when making his stroke this time; but yet it is most desirable that
his mind should retain a very clear and exact impression of the place
where the hole is, the distance of it, and the features of the green in
between. In other games that may be compared with golf, the player has
his eye on the object at the moment of striking; in billiards the very
last glance is given at the object ball, and the eye is on it at the
moment the stroke is made. That is because the player is sure of his way
of striking, as in putting he is not. If you try a method of putting
which was once attempted by some players, but was severely and properly
discountenanced by the authorities, of lying down on the green and
putting with the end of the club, billiard fashion, you will find that
then the eye is on the hole when the stroke is made. In golf, the
player's eye being wanted for the ball, a last look is given at the
hole, and the picture of it is kept on the mind when the stroke is being
made, and it influences the application of strength more than the player
often realises.
This application of strength is always done subconsciously, and here
again there is a part of professional teaching which does not recognise
the fact when it ought to do. The teachers tell us that to strike the
ball a certain distance with an iron, the club chosen should be swung
back to a certain point, that to get twenty yards more it should be
swung upwards so many more inches or degrees, for a farther distance so
much more swing should be made, and so on, throwing the onus of swinging
the proper distance on to the conscious effort of the player. By a
moment's thought it will be realised that players do not consciously
regulate the lengths of their swings in this way, that they could not do
so, and that any deliberate stopping of their swing at a certain
carefully calculated point would be ruinous to the stroke in hand. What
is done is, that an estimate of the distance to which the ball has to
travel is made; this is taken into the mind, and the mind, having much
experience, influences the swing so that it is quite subconsciously made
of the proper length, or at all events the length that the mind
suggested. In this way the swing is certainly made short for short
shots, and longer as the greater distance is needed; but it is wrong to
suggest that the matter is carefully and consciously arranged by the
player. The truth is that not one player in a thousand could tell you,
when about to make a swing with an iron club, exactly how far he intends
to swing, or having made the shot successfully, how far he did swing.
His mind subconsciously arranged the whole affair.
An interesting case was quoted to me some time since of the success a
man achieved in lofting over stymies, and the reason why. This person
never seemed to miss. He related that he found previously that his
failures were due to looking at the other ball too much when in the act
of making the stroke. He then found that he succeeded frequently when he
did not look at either that ball or his own but at the hole itself.
Doing this enabled him to carry his club through, failure to do which is
the chief cause of missing these shots. But he did not altogether
believe in this system, which seemed dangerous, and he compromised by
keeping his eye fixed on his own ball, but at the same time imagining
the hole and seeing mentally his ball dropping into it. Since then his
success has been wonderful. In much the same way and by the same
principle it will be found that the best way in the world to encourage a
good follow-through, and to stop jerky hitting with wooden clubs, is to
look at the ball properly and yet imagine it a couple of inches farther
on.
The principles of this subconsciousism suggest one earnest
recommendation to the player who is bent on making a change in a faulty
or ineffectual style, and it is that such change is better brought about
gradually and in the way of a coaxing influence rather than by a quick
drastic alteration. Thus the player whose swing is too upright and who
wants to obtain a flatter one, or he who desires to change from a long
swing to a short one, or the other way about; or again he who would
bring the ball more over to the right foot (one of the most difficult of
all changes to make for a player accustomed to have it nearly opposite
the left toe, but a desirable one in these days when the rubber-cored
ball shows no disinclination to rise as the gutty did); all these
players would do better to make their changes slowly and gradually and
by way of subconscious influence. If the ball is moved three inches to
the right all at once the entire swing is upset and the whole driving
arrangement is likely to go to pieces. But when done in the other way
the gradual change is not noticed, and when the ball gets to the desired
position it would be as difficult to play it from the old one, as the
new one would have been, if assumed suddenly. It is sometimes said of
golf that the most exasperating part of the whole thing is, that the
more you try to succeed in it the more you fail. There is more truth in
that sad reflection than may have been fancied, and a fine moral in it
too. To "try" in this case means to make conscious effort.
* * * * *
After all, in this teaching about subconsciousism we are merely going
back again to Nature, to simplicity, and to an original idea that there
is undeveloped golf in all of us just because all the movements of the
game are so natural, and natural because they are so true and
rhythmical. In everything Nature encourages always the best in a man,
and she likes most the graceful movement, the perfect poise, the equal
balance. The easier, the more natural, and the more rhythmical our
movements are in golf the more successful will be the efforts always.
The undeveloped golf is always in the system, and with fair
encouragement or a hint that is sufficiently obvious the instinct will
surely lead a young subject to its cultivation on good lines. Man when
old becomes awkward and contrary, and so the aggravations of the game
arise.
I have always maintained that if we placed a young boy who had never
seen or heard of golf on a desert island and left him there with means
for his subsistence for a few years, together with a set of golf clubs
and a few boxes of balls, the people who might be wrecked on those
lonely shores thereafter would find him playing a good scratch game and
in want of nothing but a caddie, for which part the arriving boatswain
might be indicated. But these wrecked miserables, with their shiverings
and their grumblings, would jar unpleasantly upon the happy peace of
this purely natural golfing youth, in all the ecstasy of the discovery
of his own world. Probably he would wish the others--all except the
boatswain--to leave him there when a white sail of relief was seen upon
the horizon. A pretty speculation arises instantly. Suppose at the same
time we had placed upon another desert island four thousand miles away
another raw child, innocent of the simplest, vaguest thought of what
golf is or could be, and left him also with clubs and balls and
directions for obtaining fresh meat and fresh water when the human
desires in food were felt. He would surely take to the game in the same
way as the other boy did, practise it and probe into its mysteries with
just the same enthusiasm, would become a good scratch player also, and
would probably make use of the same simple expression of condemnation
when a shipload of people uncivilised to golf were wrecked that way. But
here is the point: this second scratch desert-island boy would probably
be just as good as the first scratch desert-island boy, no better and no
worse, and if they were to play for the Championship of the Most Lonely
Islands, nothing is more likely than that their excellent match would
have to go to the thirty-seventh hole or beyond it. They would, being
good material to begin with, attain approximately equal results so far
as playing the holes in a certain number of strokes is concerned, and
each youth's system would be perfect for himself, but between the two
there would be the very widest differences, and the basic principles
that were common to the games of both players would be so encrusted with
masses of individual detail and coloured with temperamental attitude
that they would be scarcely discernible.