THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN
MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES.
"When we were in Madrid----" I have sometimes begun in conversation, and
then invariably from one or more in the company there has been a quick
interruption with--"But there can be no golf in Madrid! You do not go to
Spain for golf!" But one who knows may answer that there is as good
reason to go there for it as to most other places out of Britain, that
in different parts of Spain there is fair golf to be had, that in Madrid
there is a new course which is excellent and embraces some of the
prettiest holes we would ever wish to play after passing by the
Pyrenees, and that I have found there Spanish gentlemen to play with who
have been among the happiest and most agreeable companions and opponents
I have encountered. In a reflection upon my own experiences I dare to
say that I would recommend a doubtful stranger to go to Spain only if he
is a golfer, for by the agency of the game will the life and facts of
the country be best presented to him, and mysteries be explained. The
magic passport of golf is indispensable in all such circumstances. The
truth is that it was golf that led me to Spain on my second visit to the
country, and I had then one of the most interesting and instructive
holidays I have had in my travelling life, during which I had the
opportunity of seeing something of the inside of Spanish life and
government, of discovering truth about the forces that work in the
regeneration of this old country, for really an awakening is taking
place, and one dares to say the firm establishment of golf is a symbol
of it. I had some interesting conversations with the Count Romanones,
who was then the Prime Minister, with his brother, who is the Duke of
Tovar, a man of broad sympathies who takes a leading part in many social
movements of high importance in Madrid, and with other persons of much
importance. These talks, with the open sight of all that was passing in
Madrid, made a deep impression.
"You are a golfer, and we of Spain may give you some good golf to play!"
said the Prime Minister cordially when by invitation I called upon him
at his palace in the Paseo de la Castellana. He is a man of forcible
appearance and manner. The face is thin, and its lines of character are
strong--cold and strong. The aquiline features have something of
Spanish--no Italian--fierceness about them, and the Count makes a
piercing look which is considered discomforting to nervous strangers.
But he is a very attractive companion in talk; his verve, his vivacity
are wonderful. When discussing a subject in which he is interested his
whole being becomes aflame; eyes sparkle and features quiver; he beats
his fingers in the palms of his hands; he leans over towards you and
gesticulates like an artist in enthusiasm. A man of hot nervous energy,
one of keen purpose and determination is this statesman of Spain. He
suggested that the new sports of his country were symbolic of her great
awakening, of which he said he would talk to me that I might tell others
what Spain is now and what she would be. "Europe does not understand my
country," he remarked, "True, there has been little occasion to
understand her. But a change occurs. Spain at this moment is passing
through a most remarkable process of transition. You are right in a
suggestion you have made to me; unsuccessful wars do not cause
interminable loss and disasters. The war with the United States was not
all bad for Spain. We may have lost Cuba, but the development that has
taken place since then in our country at home, in its agriculture and
its mining, and again in its healthy natural feeling, has been enormous,
and is a good substitute for many islands." And then he went on in a
deeply interesting conversation to tell me of the great awakening of
Spain indicated in many different ways, and of all her political,
social, and other ambitions.
The Duke of Tovar, who is also coming to take an interest in the golf of
Spain, smoked his cigar on a divan in his palace, and a Moorish boy
brought coffee to us. The Duke travels much, and brings things and
people back with him. I see that he has been an ambassador-extraordinary
to the Pope of Rome and has received the most gracious papal thanks. A
little of a statesman, he is much of an artist, and a marble bust of
Alfonso _rex_, his own sculpture, casts a shadow beside us. In
innumerable ways this Spanish nobleman associates himself with the life
of the people, goes among them, attends their meetings, and he began
telling me that one of the secrets of the new Spain was the important
fact of the nobles taking to business, becoming the promoters and
managers of industrial companies, as they were. He told me of dukes who
were doing things. One of the new movements, in which he has assisted to
his utmost and thoroughly believes in, is the boy scout movement, which
has caught on like wildfire in Madrid. Three thousand Spanish boys were
enrolled within a few weeks of the establishment of the system in the
city, and the Duke became a president of a section. All class
distinctions are avoided in this matter. "My son is going with the son
of the porter," said the Duke of Tovar. And he most certainly believed
in golf for the people, and would tell me stories of its beginning and
its development.
As to Madrid, never was such a quick transformation accomplished in any
city of the world, save when 'Frisco perished and was made again, as is
being done here in the city on the plateau of Castile. The Spaniards
having decided on the regeneration of their country and on persuading
foreigners to come to it, have determined they must have a capital
befitting a first-class power. The result is that Madrid is being torn
to pieces and rebuilt. Everywhere there is a fever of building raging.
Think of it: but three years ago and there was not a single first-class
hotel in Madrid; now there are two fine ones. The Alcala, where the
Madrilenos stroll and mount up the hill to the Puerta del Sol, the great
bare square where the idlers lounge, where the bull-fighting papers are
sold, where there are many offices for the sale of lottery tickets,
where there are cafes and yellow tramcars (run by Belgian companies, if
you please!) and much life but no gaiety until very late at night, is
soon to be deposed from being chief street of Madrid, for they are
making a new ideal street, very wide and one mile long, which is cut
straight through the heart of the city and is to be called the Gran Via
when it is done. Millions and millions of pesetas' worth of property
have been demolished to allow for the straightness of this street, which
is to ask for comparison with a part of the Fifth Avenue across the
water. Thirty-seven millions of pesetas were lately voted by the
Municipal Council for the removal of the cobble stones of Madrid, their
places to be taken by asphalte and wood. The cobbles of Madrid are
picturesque; they make good harmony with those antique watchmen who seem
to have been reincarnated from our own eighteenth-century London,
walking the slumberous streets at night, lanterns in their hands and
jangling bunches of giant keys suspended from their girdles, their
business being to open the outside doors of blocks of flats for
late-returning occupiers who in an unthinking languorous way of Spain
would carry no keys, but leave the affair of their homecoming to the
fortune of the night, the vigilance of the watchman, and the blessing of
Providence. But the cobbles are not convenient. They are seldom
repaired, and even in such a spacious public place as the Prado, which
is a kind of Hyde Park Corner, there are sometimes deep holes which fill
with water when it rains and make such pools as ducks might like and
dogs would drink, but which take a leg of mine some way upwards to the
knee when the night is dark. There was an old Madrid of which trills of
love and passion have been sung. Fevered lovers sang to ladies whose
lips were red, and whose skin was dark, as their hearts were
gay--voluptuous women. Guitars and flowers; blood and life. That Madrid
has nearly passed away. A few steep and narrow streets and some dirty
open spaces, with little of the delicate charm of age to recommend them,
are most of what is left of it in a quarter near to the royal palace.
The city of later times, the Madrid of to-day, is already and quickly
giving way to a third Madrid which will soon be made.
In this that I have written I may seem to neglect my theme, and yet the
state of Spain does most closely concern the strange case of golf in the
country. Here is an answer to interrupters who are quick to say that one
does not go to Madrid for golf. When Spain was all romance and colour,
all dirt and laziness, it was no place for games like this. Bicycles
were not popular then because they had to be pedalled ceaselessly, or
the riders would fall: they, being as symbols of action, did not permit
of lounging or a little slumber. In the days of the first and second
Madrids, athletics could not be contemplated; the corrida was supreme
and solitary for Spanish "sport." Now there is an athletic movement.
There are many football clubs; there is a national cup competition and
the King has given the cup. Still the corrida flourishes, but it is
threatened. In the new movement for the third Madrid there are social
clubs such as we have in London. There is an inclination for strong,
healthy sport, and the King encourages it with all his royal might and
influence. Don Alfonso has been the good leader of the royal game in
Spain. The main point is that golf in these days is a token of a
healthier disposition and a new progress, and it is a strong influence
upon character. In the old Spain such a sport as this was quite
impossible; now it grows, and, to me as one who has considered the birth
and rise of golf in many countries, the case of Spain is deeply
interesting. When I went there I remembered what some of the thoughtful
and candid Americans had said about this game exerting a needed and
subtle influence upon their own national character. It is such
influences that are needed in Spain, and I shall go again among the
Madrilenos to see this one in the working. Already they have courses,
nice and tolerable, in Barcelona, Bilbao, and many other provincial
places. When I went to San Sebastian, one of the most beautiful and
fully equipped seaside resorts in the whole world, the municipal
authorities assured me that they felt a fear that the bull-fights were
becoming a doubtful attraction to foreign visitors, and they were giving
their attention to the establishment of a municipal golf course. It
will be the first municipal golf course on the continent of Europe.
* * * * *
Let me plunge to my revelation and state that Madrid, in New Castile,
land of the toreador, country where so much of the Middle Ages does yet
survive, where games till lately have been almost unknown, this Madrid
comes now to be possessed of such a first-class course as might be the
envy of many a British seaside resort. While I lingered in the city
Senor Fabricio de Potestad, one of the most active members of the
general committee of the Madrid Golf Club, and of its green committee
too, was a kind counsellor and guide. Just as might happen at home,
while at breakfast at the Ritz there came to me notice that the car was
waiting. Senor de Potestad, his clubs and mine inside the car, had the
golfer's expectancy upon a genial Spanish countenance, rubbed hands, and
declared it was a fine day for the game. We sped away from the Prado,
and considered handicaps and odds as golfers must. But first we went for
object lessons in the progress of Spanish golf. Three or four miles out
we reached the hippodrome where some nine years back the game was born.
Don Alfonso had been learning golf in England; he had striven with it in
a left-handed way while he wooed a British princess in the Isle of
Wight, and he gave a Spanish decoration then to the professional who
showed him how to hold his hands and where to put his feet. Then nine
simple stupid little holes were laid out in this hippodrome, and there
they still remain as relics of the earliest age in the golf history of
this country, the uncultured time when the ball was missed, the days
when a hole in nine might have been considered good and a seven enough
to make the soul of a great grandee quiver with a new found joy. Three
Spaniards stood forward with the King as the pioneers of Spanish golf,
and still they are among its leaders. There was a great sportsman, the
Duke of Alva, president of the club; there was the Marquis de Santa
Cruz, and there was the Senor Pedro Caro, perhaps the only Spanish
golfer of early times besides Don Alfonso himself who learned his
strokes and swings in England, where he was schooled, and who with the
Count de la Cimera and the Count Cuevas de Vera, cousin of my guide, is
one of the three best players of Spain. Two of them are Spanish scratch,
and the Count de la Cimera lately achieved the distinction of being the
first of his land to rise to the eminence of plus one. Thus you may
perceive that the golf of Spain is helped by the best people, and that
is not because it is fashionable, and it is not only because the King
has shown a liking for it, but because the Spaniards have found in it a
quick fascination, an awakening pastime, such a strong diversion from
the often heavy life of their country as they had not imagined. Had you
seen, as I did, the Duke of Aliaga bunkered one afternoon before a high
steep cliff in front of the eighteenth green on the second oldest course
of Madrid; had you seen him pensive as he felt the extraneous sorrows of
a Spanish nobleman of riches and high station; had you seen the gleam of
gladness in two Spanish eyes when the ball was heaved somehow to the top
in one (the gods may know how he managed it; but we said to him that it
was a splendid shot, and I do believe it was!) you would not doubt that
golf was meant for Spain as these people declare it was--"the thing of
all others that we needed," so they say.
This second oldest course, the "old course" as they begin to call it
now, marks the transition period of Spanish golf. It is not the
primeval course of the hippodrome, but one which was made in 1907 at a
place apart and a little farther along the road. The land is worth a
million and three-quarters of pesetas now when Madrid has become so much
bigger than it was, and the course falls within the city zone; and as
the players became educated they yearned for something better, and they
moved again. But fond memories will cling for long enough to this old
course of Spain; with a little help from fancy one may look upon it even
now as a kind of old Blackheath of Spanish golf. There is a small
club-house with dining-room, dressing-rooms and all complete, in quite
the English way, on a spot of rising ground, and from the verandah we
may look over a part of the course, with a short hole to begin with and
some curious bunkering here and there, with a highly modern attempt to
adopt the system of humps-and-hollows bunkering that has been so well
established on inland courses at home. Somehow one gathers the
impression that the Spaniards have been striving all the time towards
some kind of indistinct ideal, realising that the sport they had
discovered was a great one and trying to improve their practice of it.
And I recall that it was J. H. Taylor, the old designer, the old
constructor, the quintuple champion, who was pioneer in the planning of
courses in Madrid, and he laid out this one of eighteen holes very well
for the early Spanish golfers.
One of the curiosities of the course is the putting green at the
eleventh hole, which is quite round and is surrounded by an evenly
shaped earthen rampart. On seeing it for the first time the average
Englishman observes to the Spaniard who is with him, "How like a
bull-ring!" The remark is justifiable and it seems appropriate; but the
Spanish gentleman has heard it many times. Playing the bull-ring hole is
a satisfying experience, most exceedingly contenting. We play what we
shall consider a perfect approach shot to our Plaza de Toros hole. The
ball is pitched into the ring just over the near side of the barricade.
A big bound and it is by the hole side, a smaller skip and it is away to
the other side of the circle, and then there is one nervous little jump
up towards that enclosing height. The perplexed ball seems in our fancy
to claw up the steep slope, which is about four or five feet high; it
nearly reaches the top. We, the player, feel a little pitter-patter in
the heart. Is that little white bull of a ball of ours going to get over
the fence and spoil the thing? It should not; we pitched him as nicely
as human skill could ever pitch. He is vicious; but he is spent. The gay
life which he had at the beginning of the stroke is flickering out. He
cannot escape. Our cuadrilla of one, the little Spanish lad with the bag
of clubs, advances and hands the putter, taking back the mashie which
has done its business. The ball comes trickling back from the bank--back
and back, and it comes on to within some seven or eight feet of the side
of the hole. Then it falters and stops, done for. Meanwhile there is
another white bull of a ball only four feet away; this also had come
back from the bank, but a little more. I, as an espada, take my steel
putter for the finishing touch. I see the line, I have the momentary
hesitation, the nerves are tightened, and then I make the stroke, and
happily it is a good one. The ball has gone down. In truth both balls go
down, and "Four, senor!" and "Four--a half, _amigo_!" and the play to
the eleventh hole of old Madrid is done. Even if there is a slope to the
hole and there is the bull-ring rampart round it, we say that a four at
this piece of golf is good. We also argue out that bull-ring with our
consciences. I have seen nothing like it. It was clearly the object of
those who made it to pen the ball up towards the hole, to make the golf
a little easier, for it was found to be hard enough (as you and I have
found it hard enough at home) to catch the ball and keep it and lead it
to its hole. This hole, the rampart, seems to be a concession to the
frail humanity of man. Conscience murmurs chidingly, "You know, you
English golfer, that you should never have been so near to that Spanish
pin! You should have been bunkered, my friend, perhaps badly bunkered,
beyond the green!" But being in Spain, and doing as Spaniards do, we are
a little independent, have a freedom of idea, and with some peevishness
of manner, an arrogance, a way as of telling conscience to attend its
other business and get back to London--where in some places they do
place bunkers and hills upon the greens to keep the golfer, as it seems,
from holing out at all--I retort, "I played a good shot anyhow; I only
just pitched over the bull-ring fence; I pitched the ball up high and
let it drop straight down, and cut every leg from it that it ever had.
No man could do better with the ground so hard. It was right that the
ball should come back."
I shall hope that with their attachment to a new love that is so
beautiful and good, the Spaniards will not give up their old course here
that has served them faithfully and brought on their game. Besides, it
is a course that is pretty in its situation. Away beyond, many miles
away, are those snow-topped Guadarrama Mountains, fine rough things.
Though it was March, and untruths are told about the wickedness of the
Spanish climate, we lunched with Senora Elena de Potestad in the open
outside the club-house in warm sunshine glistening on a pretty scene.
Senora Elena is quite the best lady golfer of Spain; but writing the
truth as she told it, the charming wife of my friend is not Spanish, but
is a Russian lady from Khieff. I suspect her of being the best Russian
lady golfer and the best Spanish too; it is curious. She has done the
first nine holes here at Madrid in something less than bogey. Next to
her on the championship list is the Marquesa de Alamoncid de los Oteros,
six strokes behind. Queen Victoria sometimes plays, and I have seen that
extremely popular lady of Spain, the Infanta Isabella, golfing here with
the professional and a maid of honour. The game is doing well with the
ladies of the peninsula; they like it. I had a gentle argument with the
Senora Elena, who seemed a little doubtful whether golf were quite a
ladies' game, for all her own skill and love for it. She pleaded the
other feminine occupations and interests, even the distractions, and the
difficulty of surrendering to the tyranny of golf. In her view it seemed
to be of the ladies' life a thing apart, while we have known it to be a
man's complete existence.
As our speedy car skimmed the road on the way back to Madrid that night,
Senor Fabricio would talk of the good influence of the game, and the
special benefits that it might and did confer upon his hopeful
countrymen. "Twelve years ago," he reflected, "I might meet all my
friends at the corrida. All were for the bull fight--and the ladies too.
But now--if I went myself, as I do not--I should see none. They are all
for golf. At my club in Madrid we say one to another about the time of
lunch, 'Do you go to golf this afternoon?' It used to be, 'I suppose you
go to the corrida, eh?'" One thinks and wonders.
I took tea in the lounge at the Ritz, and gossiped with a man who had
just come along from Portugal and told me of some exciting times they
had been having there. They had decided on having more golf, and were
about to make a municipal matter of it near Lisbon. Hitherto, as I knew,
they had had only one golf course in the whole country, and that was at
a place called Espinho, some eleven miles out from Oporto, and it was
said that bulls intended for the fights were fed up there and did their
roaming exercise on this course. It is not a comfortable idea. The new
course is out at Belem on the banks of the Tagus near to Lisbon, and
this is the exact place at which Vasco de Gama landed on returning from
his greatest voyage of discovery. It is an eighteen-holes course; it has
been well planned; and much money is being spent on it. The Portuguese
having started a new form of government and begun a new national
life--as they hope--have come quickly to the conclusion that they need
golf and much of it, for already a second course for Lisbon is being
arranged, and there are to be others in different parts of the country.
If King Manoel goes back, he will be prepared for them, for he has
cultivated a fair game at Richmond.
* * * * *
In the evening we went to stroll among the cafes of Madrid, and
presently peered into the old parts of the city, where life is simple
and strong, where the humbler Madrilenos resort, and there are dancing
entertainments of a strange kind. On a little stage there is some
jingling music worked out from a bad piano, and a troupe of girls with
some gypsies among them will make a dance that, for all its art and all
its naivete, is somewhat coarse. Other girls will sit round them in a
semicircle and keep up a kind of barbarous wail, occasionally bursting
into a mock shout of approval. A song will follow, and a chorus with it,
and by and by the entertainers will descend and drink wine with the
people in the cafe, and all this will continue until the night is very
late. But out in the Puerta del Sol the lights are bright and there is
more gaiety than there has ever been. So we wandering golfers, reckless
of the game of the day that follows (after all we are to give a bagful
of strokes to these Spaniards and can beat them yet--but not always, one
remembers), turn in to one of the music halls which have three shows a
night, the third beginning at midnight, and we see La Argentinita dance,
see the rumba done. Then down the Alcala and over the Prado home. We
shall insist that this is a part of our golf in old Madrid; it is not
the conventional golfing holiday, as I try to show. Another day we will
run out for many miles to El Escorial (thanking the Duke of Tovar for
the offer of his car) and ruminate in this most sombre architectural
creation of the great Philip--palace, monastery and tomb in one--and
another day out to Toledo, a grand dead city of a long past of many
phases and eras, a mummified city it seems to be, with halls and places
that look sometimes as if they had but just been left by the rich grand
caballeros of the time when Spain was great. You can nearly see their
ghosts, gay in satins and crimson silks, leaning over flowered
balconies, singing, kissing, laughing, and always living.
I dislike the corrida. It is horrible. Its time has gone. I had enough
of it once when south at Algeciras. But a Spanish golfing companion said
that it was a very special day, and for the experience, and as a matter
of being guest, I should go. There were eight bulls done instead of six,
and horses in proportion, and a county councillor of Madrid took us
behind all the scenes, into the hospital, into the matador's chapel, and
explained everything. He was a courteous gentleman. He said they would
have golf in Madrid, that the corrida would leave in time, but for the
present the people must have the corrida. It takes time to make great
changes, he said, even in Madrid--where it does take more time for
movements than anywhere else. But the point of this reference is the
harsh contrast that is indicated--our peaceful game of golf in which
nothing is killed, no blood spilled, nobody hurt, and yet, as we think,
the greatest, fullest sport of all, stirring the emotions better than
any corrida in Madrid or Barcelona, and this awful feast of blood and
death. I have seen golf in many places, but never in one where its
setting seemed so utterly impossible as here. And yet golf in Madrid is
strengthening, and by ever so little the corrida, so they tell me, is
weakening. That the game can begin and can hold and grow in such a place
is surely the utmost testimony of its power. Games like golf have some
work to do in Spain. It is because of such considerations, because of
the extraordinary environment in which this peaceful, excellent sport is
set, that I have found golf in Madrid such a remarkable and interesting
study, and have dwelt upon it and provoked the contrasts when I might.
See contrast now again, yet more wonderful. The next morning broke
bright and blue, and Senor Fabricio was round betimes in the Prado with
his car. We were to go to the new course that day. We sped away on the
Corunna road for some four or five miles from Madrid, and then turned up
towards the higher land. All this was King's land; El Pardo it is
called. Here is the new golf course of Madrid, which takes the place in
the Spanish golfers' hearts and plans of the other one of which I have
already written, that with the bull-ring hole. This of El Pardo is part
of a great new sporting establishment, embracing a magnificent polo
ground, tennis courts, and all the advantages and appurtenances of a
thorough country club in the manner of those which began in America and
have since been copied in England, and more recently at Saint-Cloud near
Paris.
Considered in some ways 1 am a little disposed to count this new golf
course of Madrid as the eighth or ninth wonder of the whole golfing
world, just as the Spaniards themselves set up a claim for El Escorial
to be ranked as the eighth of the world at large. There are sound
reasons for the nomination. I have shown that it might well have been
held that the Spanish people's character and dispositions were a soil in
which no good game might grow, and yet that it was being urged and
proved that there was a great process of regeneration going on and that
golf indeed had been given a very good start. Now we come to the
astonishing climax for the time being in this little story of contrasts.
Here, if you please, at El Pardo on the estates of Don Alfonso is just
one of the nicest, best, and most interesting courses for golf on which
the excellent game might ever be played. It is quite new and it is most
thoroughly up to date. It is a course of which good clubs in Britain
might be exceedingly proud. You and I would be glad to play there nearly
always, and we should have little fault to find. When I was there it was
only just being finished. Its history is a nice romance. The golfers of
Spain had risen to that state when they felt they needed something
better for the improvement and the enjoyment of their play than the
rough primitive course with the bull-ring hole which had ceased to
satisfy their needs and tastes. They were restive. Came Don Alfonso to
their comfort and their happiness. At El Pardo was the ideal golfing
land--wide undulating sweeps of lovely country, majestic undulations,
grand environment, with the splendid Guadarramas in full view. It was a
scene sublime. The land was wooded, trees would have to be felled, the
ploughshare would have heavy work to do; but that is how courses are
made to-day. Not in Don Alfonso's power was it to give the ground
outright, but he passed it to the golfers for a nominal rent of a
thousand pesetas a year, which, being converted to English reckoning,
would be some L37. There was land for the polo and the tennis hard by.
Estimates were procured, and it was discovered that to do the work of
felling and ploughing, sowing and construction, building and finishing,
a sum of just about twenty-two thousand pounds in English money would be
needed, and most of the money would go to England too. Then with zest
the golfers and other sportsmen of Madrid came forward, each one
subscribed according to his means and ability, and in a very little
while all that great fund of money was obtained, and it was in the bank
before the work was started. That was a splendid achievement; the golf
of Madrid deserves to prosper now.
It was determined that with such a beginning everything should be done
most thoroughly afterwards. Thousands of trees had to be cut down, the
ground cleared, ploughed, and raked, and the putting greens sown. On
hardly any course in any country has the work of construction been done
more thoroughly. Then Mr. Harry Colt was brought from England to design
the holes, and he gave of some of his most cunning, most artistic work,
having a fine field for his quick imagination. The result is eighteen
holes as good and rich as Spanish holes need be. Some of the short ones
are as good short holes as I have seen. One with the green on a hog's
back, the seventh, is a most appetising thing. At the third there is a
quick slope on the left of the green and the approach is one of those
twisty things that are a strong feature of the Coltian style of
architecture, demanding a skill and calculation from the player that
many bunkers would not exact. There is a dog-leg hole for the fifth that
leads to a green partly framed in a corner of trees. Parts of Spain are
treeless, the great plain above which Madrid is placed, the long lone
sweep of land that you look down upon from the palace, down to the
Manzanares and beyond to a far horizon, is one of the most desolate
countries that my eyes have seen. But here at El Pardo there are trees
enough. Chestnuts and cork are everywhere, and the course has a look of
our sweet Sunningdale at home. Harrows, rakes, and spades have done
their work most wondrous well, and the nicest gradients have been given
to the putting greens. But there is something even more remarkable still
that has been done. Make it as you would, tend it as you might, but if
Nature were to be depended upon the loveliest course in all Spain would
have to perish, for the climate forbids. So the climate had to be
foiled. Water was needed, water everywhere, water always, always. The
Madrid golfers, wise beyond all British example, determined they would
have their water at the very beginning of things. Some way distant there
was a river or canal, and it was tapped for their supply. Great cemented
aqueducts were built to carry it across valleys; it was piped through
hills. The water in abundance was brought up here to the course; and it
was laid on to every teeing ground and putting green and to the entire
fairway so that everywhere, always, the water should be poured on, the
fine grass that grows should be kept always green, and the turf, which
is of full sandy kind, should be always golf-like and moist. That was a
splendid achievement. I enjoyed the round of the new course, delighted
in a pretty valley hole towards the end, and admired the enterprise of
the Spanish golfers exceedingly. They have golf in Madrid. As the
express climbed with me upwards back to France I reflected again on
these wild contrasts, and the struggle for light by Spain.
* * * * *
As a pursuit golf differs from all others in that there is no
exclusively right way and no utterly wrong way of doing anything
connected with it. Those engaged with it are constantly, to use their
own expression, finding out what they are "doing wrong," and then with
great eagerness and activity and newly revived hope are setting forth to
repair their errors and place their game upon a new foundation. Yet
despite this eternal discovery of faults and remedies, only a little is
ever found out of the full truth that is hidden somewhere, by even the
very best of players, and herein lies the consolation of the humbler
people in that, if they know little, their superiors, being champions,
know only a little more compared with all that there is to be known.
Thus upon every disappointment an encouragement ensues. If these points
are considered it will appear that there are deep truths in them, while
at the same time they convey morals and point the way to a betterment of
one's game. And the most important point is that there is no one
exclusively correct way of doing anything, and this, with all the
circumstances surrounding the proposition, leads us inevitably to the
conclusion that this is no game for narrow-minded and conventional
people, who would always do as others do, and have not the will to
exercise their own convictions which, along with their admiration for
some of the tenets of the political party to which they do not belong,
are stifled in their consciences and put away. Golf is indeed a game for
extensive individualism, for the free exercise of convictions and for
continual groping along unknown channels of investigation in search of
the truth. Those who do not investigate and explore in this way miss a
full three-fourths of the intellectual joy of this pastime. And the
investigators must have the courage to reject things of information that
are offered to them, even when conveyed with the very highest
testimonials for their efficacy from the best champions of home and
foreign countries, while at the same time they should have the will to
put into exercise even the most fantastic scheme of their own
imagination.
All dogmatic teaching in golf is wrong. There are two or three essential
principles as we have called them--the keeping of the still head, the
fixed centre in the body, the eye on the ball, and such like--which must
be obeyed under the certain penalty of failure, because these might be
said to be the laws of Nature as applied to golf, and have nothing to do
with the eccentricities of human method. But, these being properly
respected, there are innumerable ways of building upon them structures
of golf which, in the goodness of results in the matter of getting
threes and fours and winning the holes, are much the same at the finish.
One of the structures may be precise, another may be plain, a third may
be ornate, and a fourth may be rough and vulgar. Yet in efficiency and
in results they may be just the same, and in most cases the man is led
to his style of golf building largely by his own temperamental case. So
long as the essential principles are observed in each case, being the
same always but kept hidden in the recesses of the building, many things
may be done that the books do not teach. The books are valuable to the
utmost for their suggestions and for bringing the player back to his
base, as it were, when he has wandered too far in his explorations,
piled theory on theory and got his game into the most hopeless tangle.
For corrective purposes they are in this way quite essential. They stand
for the conventions and for the middle ways; they enable us to make a
fresh start. And the golfer is always making fresh starts. What is the
cherished belief of to-day is abandoned next week, the discovery just
made and looked upon as solving the last problem that keeps the handicap
man away from scratch, is found later to be a temporary convenience only
and to be dependent on something else in the system of a highly fleeting
and uncertain kind. These beginnings, this starting over again with
increased hope, add always to the pleasure.
What players need to remember above all things is that the games of no
two men are quite alike, any more than the men themselves are quite
alike, and that among the very best the widest dissimilarities exist,
that the best game that any man can possibly play is not one copied from
others, but that game which is his very own, the one built up on his
physical, intellectual, and mental peculiarities. Every man has a game
of his own somewhere which is quite different from any other, and that
game, when he can play it, will be more effective than any other that he
could play. What he has to do, therefore, is to find out that game in
all its peculiarities, and this is what the explorer and investigator is
constantly trying to achieve. He is finding out the mysteries not of the
game in general, as he sometimes imagines, but of his own game, and the
more he discovers the better is he as a golfer. Surely there is proof
enough of the absolute soundness of this proposition in the fact that
the discoveries as they are made, meaning not those which are found
later to be worthless, but those which become established in the
permanent system and are invaluable, are often absolutely opposite to
those made in another case and which become permanent in the same way.
Why, even the champions differ more widely than any others--yet one
remembers that this should not be a matter of surprise, but something
that by this argument is quite inevitable. The champions have been
marvellously successful in the mining of their own golfing seams, and
that is the chief reason why they are champions. And all this helps to
make golf the game it is--the eternal finding out, the progress, with
its occasional set-backs, towards the discovery, the completion of the
golfing self. I have only met one man in my life who has golfed and
never found anything out, and that was Mr. John Burns, the Minister of
State, who assured me that once in the old days of the Tooting Bec
course he was persuaded by a number of political persons to go with them
to play the game there one day. He had never handled a golf club in his
life, but having some practical knowledge of cricket, felt that golf
could not offer any serious hindrance to him. Consequently he agreed to
take his part in a foursome, and in the progress of this match usually
drove the best ball, with the result that his side was well victorious.
There seemed nothing in his game that needed improvement. Herein we
observe Mr. Burns displayed many of the qualities of the highest
statesmanship, but he rose majestically in his determination that from
that day he would never play golf again, much as he liked it, and he
never has. He has these three distinctions--that he has played golf once
and once only in his life; that being a golfer, as all are who are once
initiated, he has never lost a match; and that he has never found
anything out. I shall hope to be present at the second game he plays,
the resolution having broken down, and then we shall see discoveries
made.
But once again, "Golfer, know thyself" is the supreme moral drawn from
the experiences of the players who have golfed and studied most. Every
golfer worth the name has found out hundreds of things and hopes to find
many more; some of them are quite different from any of the other things
that have been found out; he has his own private collection, and in it
almost any person might find something that might with a little
alteration be added to his own. So I remember that when we came up out
of Spain, where the golfers are in that happy state that they have at
this present stage almost more to discover than any other golfers in the
world, a new spring season was beginning in the homeland of the game and
all players were looking over their stock of knowledge and seeing what
they had found out in the most recent times. It occurred to me then to
send out a demand to a number of good players whom I knew for their
enthusiasm, for their individualism and their strength of mind, and for
their conscientious investigations, and ask them what they had lately
discovered in an original kind of way which had beyond question
materially improved their game. The answers were enlightening, and some
of them, which I may quote, are worth pondering upon. One of the best
players of my acquaintance sent to say that he had made a discovery,
which, applied as a resolution, had done him more good than any other
half-dozen he had ever thought of. The essence of the new idea was that
on the teeing ground especially, and when approaching his ball through
the green, he would see to it that the stepping of the feet, the
movements of the arms, hands--everything involving action--should be as
slow and deliberate as possible, even the very speech itself, for the
reason that this slow sureness created an irresistible tendency in the
golfing action that was to follow, the back-swing was then slow and
deliberate, and the whole movement was harmonious and precise. The
probable value of this idea is suggested by the fact that the man who is
slow and deliberate in his waggling--not meaning one who prolongs it
unduly or does it in a hesitating way--generally does his swinging
better. Another player said the best discovery he had ever made was the
idea of imagining his weight during upswinging to be on his left foot
without really throwing it there, at the same time holding his legs a
little more stiffly than had been his wont and keeping his heels on the
ground as long as he could. By these things, which could all be grasped
in the one general idea of making himself conscious of his legs all the
time, he has come by a firmness and steadiness of system that have added
enormously to his driving capacity; in fact, it has converted him from
being a man who could not drive at all to a very good driver indeed.
I remember that once I was watching Taylor teaching a scratch man and
giving him hints for curing some considerable cutting and slicing to
which he was addicted. The champion turned round to us and said that one
of them was the best tip he had ever suggested in his life. It is the
simplest thing. In addressing the ball he would have the patient turn
over the face of the driver until that face is positively hanging over
from the top, pointing to the turf, at such a fearsome angle--no limit
to it--as to make it seem impossible to do anything but smother the ball
when coming down on to it. The back-swing has to be begun with the face
in this threatening situation. The truth is that the nervous fear that
it inspires is the secret of the success of the method. The man believes
that if he comes down on to the ball like that there will be a horrible
disaster, and all the time in the down-swing he is subconsciously
(another to that long list of most important subconscious movements)
making corrections and allowances, and his wrists are doing a twist to
get the club right by the time of impact. It is this wrist action, with
the left hand managing it, that is wanted, and the arm action that it
induces. The club reaches the ball properly, and the ball goes off
without a slice. If sometimes it is smothered it does not matter; the
cure will take effect in time. But, you say, you do not want to go on
for ever addressing the ball in this seemingly grotesque way. No; but,
again subconsciously, when the ball is being hit and driven properly and
the arm and wrist action become natural, there is a sure tendency
towards a settling down to normal ways, and without the man bothering
about it any more the club will gradually get itself straight.