THE COMING OF THE THREE GREAT MEN
I have said that a little white-haired boy used to carry my clubs at
Westward Ho! in my Oxford days. Also that, a few years later,
reappearing as an assistant greenkeeper on the course, he was put
against me, representing the Northam village club against the Royal
North Devon, and gave me a beating. The next year the Club organized a
professional tournament. Archie Simpson, at that time in the best of his
form and one of the most likely champions, though he never did win the
championship, came down to take part in it, and at a certain point in
the competition word came in to the club-house that Taylor (he was the
little white-haired boy, and the lad who beat me for the village club)
was leading the great Archie, and likely to beat him. Therefore there
sallied forth a gallery to see this great thing happen; and thereby
effectively prevented its happening, for the gallery affected the
untried nerves of the lad, he fell away from grace, and Archie Simpson
just got home on him.
Soon after that, Canon, now Monsignor, Kennard, carried him off to take
charge of the green at Burnham in Somersetshire, and a year or two
later, at the open championship at Prestwick (I think in the year that
Auchterlonie won) Taylor electrified everybody by putting in a first
round which was better than ever had been heard of before. But he could
not keep it going and failed to make good.
[Illustration: _From "Golf and Golfers" (Longmans, Green & Co.)_
J.H. Taylor.
(With his eye on the place where the ball used to be.)]
[Illustration: Harry Vardon.
"Will it go in?"]
In 1894 the open was at Sandwich. From first to last there was one, and
one only, most likely winner--J. H. Taylor. His driving was of so
marvellous a correctness that it was said that the guide flags were his
only hazards, and his pitching was perfect. He was but twenty-three, and
I feared all the while lest he should not be able to keep it up. Coming
to the last hole he had strokes to spare to win it. I think a seven
would have served him. I found myself beside Philpot, so long at
Mitcham, but an old Northam man, and said, "He's bound to be right now,
unless he goes to pieces altogether." Philpot answered with confidence,
"He won't do that, if I know anything of 'un." And he did not. He played
that last hole quite sufficiently well. The championship was his.
It meant a great deal, that championship. It meant a great deal not only
to Taylor personally, but also to all English professional golf. You
see, Taylor was really the first English professional. Hitherto, when we
wanted professionals, we had always been importing them from the North.
It did not occur to the English caddie that he might become a
professional, that there were possibilities, and money, in it. But all
these possibilities the success of Taylor revealed to the English.
Moreover, Taylor in himself was not only a very fine golfer; he was also
a very fine, in some respects a very remarkable, man. He had a
character. He was determined to go straight, to give himself all
chances. He was teetotal. He had himself perfectly in hand in every
way. He was a great example to the profession and to all the English
that should take it up, following his example. It is not easy to
over-rate what that success of Taylor's meant for the professional golf
of England. It was an influence which re-acted upon Scotland too.
The next year, at St. Andrews, Taylor won again, and really there seemed
no particular reason at that time why he should not go on winning
indefinitely. He was distinctly more accurate and certain than any of
the older men, and there seemed no immediate sign of any younger man
coming up to dispute his supremacy.
And then at Muirfield, the following year, I heard (I was not there) to
my surprise that one Harry Vardon, a Jersey man, had tied with him. We
had heard of the Vardons by this time, but the common idea was that Tom,
the other brother, was the stronger man. It was not Taylor's idea,
however. He told me afterwards that he had realized, even then, even
before the competition, what a terror this Harry Vardon was. Perhaps it
was the consciousness of this that helped Harry Vardon to beat him in
playing off the tie; for beat him, to my great surprise, he did, and so
there we have the second of our great men already arrived.
In spite of this defeat by the great Harry, whose unique greatness even
then we did not at all fully appreciate, the big man in golf was still
Taylor. He was still at the very top of his game. And about the same
time we began to hear that there was a young fellow working as a
club-maker at the Army and Navy Stores, who was capable of playing a
very good game of golf. He was said to be a cousin of Douglas Rolland,
the great driver, and, like him, to come from Elie, in Fifeshire. His
name was James Braid. Few people knew much about him, but the few who
had seen him play had the greatest opinion of his game. He was brought
forward, on half-holidays when he could get away from the Stores, to
play exhibition matches, and amongst these matches was one that he
played against Taylor at West Drayton; and he played that great man to a
level finish.
That was a result which caused a buzz of talk. The young fellow at the
Stores was evidently worth watching, perhaps worth exploiting. Not very
long after this the newly formed club at Romford, in Essex, found itself
in want of a professional. James Braid was engaged for the post.
I had a game with him shortly after he was appointed to that job, and
what impressed me about him more than anything else was the enormous
distance that he could smite the ball with the cleek. I remember that
this ability to get huge distances with the iron clubs was the quality
that had most struck me when first I became acquainted with the game of
Rolland, and I said to Braid, "It seems to me you can drive just as far
as Douglas Rolland can." He looked at me a moment, as if in a kind of
mild surprise that I should make such a comment, and said, "Oh yes, sir,
I think I can do that."
It was an amusing answer: also it was an answer which meant a good deal,
coming from a man so absolutely unable to swagger or to over-rate his
own power as James Braid. I realized that we had here a great force in
golf; but it was rather a long while before he made that force fully
felt. Nevertheless it was there: he too had "arrived," though it was
not for a year or two that he was fated to begin the writing of his name
first on the championship list. But he was there: the triumvirate was
complete.
Never, as leaders at any game, were there three men so closely matched
with methods so widely different. You may put that down in large
measure, if you please, to the physical, anatomical differences of the
three: there was Taylor, square, short, compact, stubby; there was
Braid, long, loose-jointed; and there was Vardon, a happy medium between
the two, and really a very finely-shaped specimen of a powerful human
being. It is hardly to be questioned which of the three had the most
perfect and beautiful style. Vardon hits up his body a little, away from
the ball, as he raises the club--that is a movement which we should tell
a learner was apt to unsettle the aim a little. It did not upset
Vardon's aim; but then Vardon was rather past the learner stage. For the
rest his style was the perfection of power and ease. Taylor, with the
ball opposite the right toe and every stroke played rather on the model
generally approved for the half iron shot, had a style as peculiar as
his "cobby" build, and specially adapted for it. Braid swung in a
loose-jointed way at the ball that did not suggest the mastery and the
accuracy which he achieved. I have spoken of a kind of "divine fury"
with which he launched himself at the ball. Those were long before the
days of his studies in "Advanced Golf" and so on. I doubt whether he
played according to any very conscious method. But the results well
justified the method, or the method-lessness. For a while there was
little to choose between these three great ones.
[Illustration: James Braid.]
[Illustration: Horace Hutchinson and Leslie Balfour Melville at the
starting box at St. Andrews.]
But by degrees it became evident that there was a choice: that one really
was distinctly better than the other two. Certainly there was a while,
just before he had to go to a health resort, with a threatening of
tuberculosis, when Harry Vardon was in a class by himself. For a while
he was, I think, two strokes in the round better than either Taylor or
Braid, and, I believe, better than any other man that we have seen. He
was the first professional I ever saw play in knickerbockers, and with
the flower at his button-hole he set a mode of gaiety and smartness to
the rest which younger men were not slow to follow. There was a gay
_insouciance_ about his whole manner of addressing himself to the game
which was very attractive. It was as different, as their styles were
different, from the imperturbability of Braid or again from the tense
and highly strung temperament of Taylor. The three great men provided a
striking contrast in every particular. But they had this in common, that
they all took the game earnestly and kept themselves very fit and well,
in order to do their best in it; therein marking a new point of
departure from the usual mode of the Scottish professional of old days,
who was a happy-go-lucky fellow, not taking all the care of himself that
he should if he was to excel in such a strenuous game as golf. And the
example of these men was infectious, so that we have now arrived at the
date of the coming of the great army of English professionals.