JOHNNY BALL AND JOHNNY LAIDLAY
I have not said very much, or not as much as the subject deserves, about
Johnny Ball as a golfer; have not attempted any appreciation of his
game. He would not, as I have indicated already before, do himself any
kind of justice at the beginning of his career, when he was off his
native Hoylake heath, and this failure was a source of bitter
disappointment to his friends at home. They began to be afraid whether
he ever would make that mark which they knew his golfing talents ought
to put within his achievement. They need not have feared.
So now that I have brought the course of this faithful history to the
point at which he and the Scottish Johnny--Laidlay--came together in the
final of the amateur championship, it seems as if both of them had at
length "arrived." They have set their names on the scroll of Fame and
will grave them constantly deeper as the years go. The one, to be sure,
was destined to perform many more deeds of glory than the other, and the
English Johnny to win a big balance of their matches, but they were in
constant competition with one another, and for four successive years at
this time one or other of them was amateur champion. It was not indeed
until after that great tournament had been going for six years that
another name than theirs and my own was inscribed on the championship
cup.
[Illustration: John Ball.
As a Yeoman (S. African War).]
[Illustration: _From "Golf and Golfers" (Longmans, Green & Co.)_
J.E. Laidlay.
Characteristic throw forward of the body at the finish of approach
stroke.]
I may have suffered--probably I have--under many illusions with regard
to my ability to play golf, but I never so deluded myself as to suppose
I was as good a player as Johnny Ball. I believe I am right in thinking
that Johnny Laidlay has just the same opinion of him, in comparison with
himself. He, too, I believe, would put Johnny Ball on a pedestal by
himself, and leave him there, as the best match-player that we ever have
had among the amateurs. I say match-player with deliberation, for of all
amateurs by far the best score-player that we have seen is, in my
judgment (and I cannot believe that anyone is likely to think
differently), Johnny Ball's younger schoolfellow at Hoylake, Harold
Hilton. But of course his is rather a younger story, and so, too, is
that of Jack Graham, another Hoylake prodigy, of Freddy Tait, of Bobby
Maxwell and others. Still, I make no exception of any of those later
ones when I claim that Johnny Ball is the best amateur that has ever
been seen, for a match. It did not need that he should win the open
championship and the amateur championship eight times, in order to prove
this. I knew it well, even before he ever won either championship once.
It has always amused me, as it has amused Johnny Laidlay too (we have
compared notes about it), to hear people in some of these latter years
saying, as Johnny Ball won championship after championship, that "he is
as good as he ever was." But the one who has always been most of all
amused by these statements is Johnny Ball himself. Perhaps the most
humorous thing about it is that they are invariably statements made by
those who never saw Johnny Ball at all when he really was at his best.
Those who did see him then know better than to make them.
I know that I never started out to play a match with Johnny Ball without
the full consciousness that if we both played our game I was bound to be
beaten, or, rather, that it could only be by an accident if I should
win. It is a feeling I have never had, when I was playing tolerably
well, with any other amateur, except when playing Bobby Maxwell over
Muirfield. But then I cannot pretend that I was playing at all as
strongly as I once might have played when I had to encounter that great
man. Still I do not suppose I could ever have held him at Muirfield. He
was not quite as terrible elsewhere.
Curiously enough I have had rather the better of the exchanges, in the
so-called "big" matches, amateur championship matches, and the like,
that I have played with Johnny Ball. He would sometimes miss a short
putt--in fact, I always rated him as good for a couple of missed short
putts in the round--and that just gave one a chance to come in. But as
to "friendly" matches--though I am sorry to say I have had but few with
him--I think he has beaten me every one. It is true they were always on
his native Hoylake. With Johnny Laidlay, on the other hand, of whom I
never had the same consciousness of being in the hands of a stronger man
as I had with the English Johnny, I have had the worse of it in the
"big" matches. I beat him, I remember, in an international match, but he
beat me at least twice in the amateur championship, and I have not a win
from him to my score in that encounter. Yet in the "friendly"
matches--and we have played a great many, for I have very often been
the guest of his kind hospitality, both at North Berwick and
elsewhere--I do not think that I have come off at all the worse.
But Johnny Ball, at his best, and especially at Hoylake, was a terror.
For one thing he was so very long. Generally driving with a hook, the
ball carried very far and then set to work to run till it made you tired
watching it. And then he had that wonderful long approach with his
brassey, banging the ball right up to the hole, with a concave
trajectory--you know what I mean--the ball starting low and rising
towards the end of its flight, then dropping nearly perpendicularly, and
with no run. It is a shot that I have seen played in any perfection only
by three players, and all young ones--Johnny Ball, Hugh Kirkaldy and
Jamie Allan. Only the first is still alive, and he does not, probably
cannot, play the stroke now. I believe it is a stroke that was easier
with the gutta-percha balls than with the modern rubber-hearted things.
At all events no one plays the stroke now. Perhaps that foolishly named
"push-stroke" of Vardon's comes most near to it, and now and again
Taylor gives us something of the sort: but this is with iron clubs, not
with wood. In the old days Bob Ferguson had the stroke, with his irons,
played up to the plateaux greens at North Berwick with great accuracy;
but he did not achieve it so well with the wood.
Then Johnny could drive that gutta-percha ball most ferociously with his
cleek. I remember Colonel Hegan Kennard saying to him, as he and I were
playing a match, "I wish you could teach me to drive as far with my
driver as you can with your cleek."
Johnny had just driven a huge cleek shot to the end hole. And Kennard
was a very fair scratch player of the day. Johnny was full of resource
too. When you had him, as you thought, in a tight place, he would bring
off some _tour de force_, with a great hook or slice, and lose very
little. He delighted, too, in an evil and windy day: the harder it blew
the better he could play and the more he enjoyed controlling his ball
through the storm.
The short game was where he gave you your chances. If you could live
with him at all through the green and up to the hole you need not
despair of stealing a shot or two back from him, now and then, on, and
from just off, the putting green.
And that was the very last point at which you might think to have any
advantage over that other, the Scottish Johnny. He never could quite
trust his wooden clubs. The occasional hook or slice was apt to put in a
sudden appearance, after he had been playing perfectly straight for a
number of holes. On the putting green he improved very much after I had
known him for a year or two. But always, from first to last in a golfing
career which has been crammed full of glorious achievement, once he came
within ironing reach of the green there was no man, till Taylor came,
that was his equal. That is my humble opinion. Bob Ferguson, who was
really his teacher, on that fine old nine-hole course at Musselburgh,
may have been even better at the full iron bangs up to the hole: he had
the concave flight and the straight drop which are worth anything in the
approach; but Johnny Laidlay was better than his master at the little
chip shots. He learned them, no doubt, at North Berwick, where you are
undone, if you cannot play them, and where the other man is undone if
you can. And, then, Johnny Laidlay was a very fine finisher in a tight
match. How many times I have known him do that last hole at North
Berwick in three--a hole hardly to be reached from the tee and guarded
by a very tricky valley--when the match depended on it I should be sorry
to say. I always thought his stance, as he addressed his ball all "off
the left leg," an ungraceful one, and am inclined to think it the cause
of the occasional uncertainty of his driving, but his manipulation, by
which I mean his hand and finger work, of his iron clubs was beautifully
delicate. I do not think he had given much thought to the way in which
the different strokes were played--the slice and the pull and the rest
of them--but there was not, so far as I know, a stroke or a subtlety
with the iron clubs that he was not master of. His clubs were all
curiously thin in the grip, and one of his great theories was that the
club should be held as lightly as possible. There is not a doubt that
most men can put more cut on the ball with a lightly than with a tightly
held club, but further than that, there is not any very general
recognition, so far as I know, of a virtue in the light grip.
After I lost the amateur championship at Prestwick in 1888, these two
Johnnies, the English and the Scottish, held it between them, winning
two apiece for four years, so that it was not until Mr. Peter Anderson
won, in the seventh year of its institution, that we let it go out of
the hands of one of the three. Neither Johnny Laidlay nor I were fated
to win again, but as for the other Johnny, there seems to be no saying
when he will be done with it. To be sure he has a few years' advantage.