VARIOUS CHAMPIONSHIPS AND THE WANDERING SOCIETIES
Whether on account of ill-health, or for what reasons, I do not know, I
was not a very sedulous attendant at the championships in the later
nineties. The consequence was that I missed seeing one or two very
notable finishes. I was not at St. Andrews, for instance, that year when
Leslie Balfour-Melville won, having carried each of his last three
matches to the nineteenth hole, and each of his three opponents being
obliging enough to plop his ball into the burn at that very crucial
point of the business. What made it the more notable is that the last of
these burn-ploppers was no other than Johnny Ball himself. Neither was I
at Muirfield when Dr. Allan won, bicycling over each day, from a
considerable distance, to the course, and playing without a nail in his
boot--surely the most casual and unconcerned of champions. And I missed,
too, that great finish between Johnny Ball and Freddy Tait, at
Prestwick, when they were all even at the end of thirty-six holes, after
playing the ball out of water and doing all kinds of conjuring tricks at
the thirty-fifth hole: and then Johnny settled the affair by getting a
scarcely human three at the thirty-seventh. But I was at Sandwich a year
or two before when Freddy Tait did win the championship, beating Harold
Hilton in the final. I was even one of his victims on that occasion. He
was playing well, but he gave me a chance or two going out and I was two
up at the turn. Then, at the tenth hole I had a bit of bad luck: I lay,
off the tee shot, in the middle of the course, right in a deep divot-cut
left by a never identified but never to be sufficiently execrated
sinner. So Freddy won that hole, and he out-played me soundly on the
long holes coming in. I remember that I had a great fight the day before
with that very gallant golfer, who never did himself full justice in the
big fights, Arnold Blyth. We halved the round and I only beat him at the
twenty-second hole.
[Illustration: Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1901.
J.L. Low (driving) and H.H. Hilton.]
[Illustration: Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1895.
John Ball. F.G. Tait (studying his putt).]
I was at St. Andrews, too, in 1901 and saw the finish between Harold
Hilton and Johnny Low, one of the best that ever has been played. Here,
too, I was the victim of the ultimate winner; and I do not know that I
had any need to be beaten by him, for though Hilton won this
championship, he has said himself in his memoirs that he was not playing
as he should, at the time. I believe the truth to have been, as he
himself suggests, that we were all a little frightened of him. I
remember we started in pouring rain, and he won the first three holes
off me. Then the weather improved and so did I, so that I wore off these
three holes and got one up with five to play. At this fatal point I
pulled my tee shot into one of those pernicious little bunkers on the
Elysian Fields called the Beardies, and the final holes Hilton played
more strongly than I did and won by two and one to play. It is a curious
thing that the only other time of my meeting him in the amateur
championship, which was at Hoylake in the year that Johnny Ball won from
Aylmer in the final, the match was almost a replica of this former one.
Again he won the first three holes, again I wore him down and got one up
with five to play, and again I chucked away the advantage, and it looked
almost sure that he would again win by two and one. But I holed a good
putt at the seventeenth to save that hole. He gave me no chance of
winning the last, and so again he beat me. These are the only two
meetings we have had in the championship, and neither, from my point of
view, is very glorious in the telling.
The year 1900 was a very unhappy one in the history of golf. In that
year a Boer bullet ended the life of one of the most gay and
gallant-hearted fellows that ever took up a club, Freddy Tait, and
incidentally took a good deal of the interest out of the golf of our
generation. That year, and also the next, Johnny Ball was out at the
war, and did not take part in the championship; and I think that these
are actually the only two occasions since the institution of the amateur
championship that he has not had a hand in it. He is very capable of
taking a master hand still.
I have said little of the open championship during these years, for the
reason that it has never had anything like the same attraction for me,
either to play in or as a spectacle, as the amateur, in which golfers
are brought together in matches, and there is the clash of temperaments,
the man to man contest, the one bringing out (or driving in, as the case
may be) all that is best in the other. I cannot see that any scoring
competition ever competes, in the human and psychological interest, with
such duels as these.
But the story of the open championship for very many a year now--that is
to say, from 1899 right away to 1913--is the story of the repeated
triumphs of three men, Taylor, Vardon, Braid, one or other accounting
for the championship in no less than fifteen of these years, and for the
rest allowing a win each to Harold Hilton, to Herd, to White, to Massy
and to Ray--a wonderful record, but one which shows a certain monotony.
Of the championship of 1902, both amateur and open, the story has its
peculiar interest, because this was the year of the introduction of the
indiarubber-cored--then called Haskell--balls, about which many fables
are to be narrated. And I am going to cut the story of these
championships rather short, at this point, because I seem to have so
much to say both about the first Haskell ball championship and also
about the amateur championships of 1903 and 1904, that either one of
them cries aloud for the dignity of a chapter all to itself.
These, or just about these, were the years of the formation of the
wandering teams, notably of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society,
formed on the model of the wandering cricket clubs, such as the I.
Zingari and the Free Foresters. These admirable institutions had no
club-house, no green, only a corporate existence, and they said to the
various Clubs, "Now, you give us the free run of your course and a free
luncheon and other entertainment, and if you do this we'll be so good as
to come down and play a team match against your members and probably
give them a jolly good beating." That was the kind of proposal which
they made to the Clubs, and the pleasant sign of the times and of good
sportsmanship and feeling is that the Clubs were so very ready to
entertain it--both the proposals and the societies. There were the Bar
Golfing Society, the Solicitors', the Army--every self-respecting
profession had to have its Golfing Society. The Oxford and Cambridge, of
which I had the honour to be first president, being succeeded in that
honourable post by Mr. Arthur Balfour, went on pilgrimage actually as
far as the United States; and very well they did there, under the
leadership of Johnny Low and with Johnny Bramston, the Hunter brothers
and other fine golfers assisting. But as for the most part of these
golfing enterprises of the wanderers, who, generally speaking, had their
headquarters in the great metropolis, it is evident that they had to
find their happy hunting grounds somewhere round about London, within
reasonable reach, and that was only possible by virtue of the rise of
all those inland greens within a short distance of the big town, which
has had the further effect of drawing down into what we call the
"Southern Section" the very big majority of the best professional
players. This geographical golfing phrase of "Southern Section" is one
that has arisen only out of the conditions created by that great
tournament for the professionals promoted by the _News of the World_
newspaper; and that competition itself is a witness to the growing
recognition by the English world of the importance of golf and of its
financial meaning. Golf was of use in the way of big advertisement.
Also, the largest proprietors of the _News of the World_ were, and are,
very good golfers and sportsmen, and doubtless appreciate all the good
sport that this tournament provides. But, at the same time, we should, I
think, wrong their commercial instincts if we did not realize that they
see good advertisement in it besides. Men's motives are mixed. How well
that team of Oxford and Cambridge graduates that went to America
performed, we hardly realized at the time. We had a tendency to
under-rate the American ability for golf, and the very fact that these
pilgrims did so well inclined us all the more to make light of the
American prowess. We are now, in course of the story, within sight of
the year when Mr. Walter Travis, coming over here, was to give us a very
different idea of the American capacity. We then began, perhaps, to go
to the other extreme and to over-rate what they could do. They seemed to
have "established a funk," to put it in homely phrase, which only Harold
Hilton, going to America as our amateur champion and coming back with
all the glory of the American amateur championship about him too, could
altogether dissipate. But before that happened a lot of water had to run
under the bridges.