THE AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP OF 1903
In the twentieth century I was no longer regarding myself with great
seriousness as a likely champion, and it is very certain that I should
not have troubled to go to Muirfield for the amateur championship of
1903 had it not been for a kindly invitation from David Kinloch to stay
with him for it at his place Gilmerton, about nine miles from the
course. I was salmon fishing on the Wye at the time, and the river was
in good order, so it was a wrench.
I remember that there was staying also at Gilmerton on that occasion
poor Harold Finch-Hatton, most humorous of good companions. We used to
drive the nine miles in a high dog-cart, the horse generally taking
fright at the railway crossing at Drem each morning; so the excitement
of the day began long before we came to the links.
I only arrived the day before the fight began, and I remember my first
tee-shot in that championship as if it were yesterday. I was playing Mr.
Frank Booth, affectionately known as "Father Booth" to men of Sandwich.
The spectators were drawn up in a line parallel with the line of play to
the first hole, and I hit my tee-shot on the extreme tip of the toe of
the club, so that it went out to cover point and right away to the
right of the spectators altogether. I had to play back over their heads,
up to the hole.
After that promising start I played quite steadily and beat Booth
comfortably. Then I went along uneventfully till I met A.M. Ross. A.M.
Ross was already something of a veteran, but he gave me some extremely
tough work. The match had its element of humour. We had not, at that
time, the rule that all putts should be holed out, and very early in the
match he did not give a putt which I thought to be stony dead. Therefore
at the next hole, where he had a putt still more stony, I did not give
that to him. He repaid me again by making me perform a still more
ridiculous task of holing out; and so I him again, until at the end of
that match we were scrupulously, but without a smile or a word said on
either side, holing out putts of two inches with the solemnity of a
religious rite. But it was all with quite good temper on both sides: I
think both of us were too old stagers to take offence. In the last eight
I beat Dick, playing very steadily, and then I met Angus Macdonald. I
had never played him before. He was, no doubt, an immensely strong man.
He was so strong and big that he seemed unable to swing round his body,
as it were. He was the shortest driver for a player of his ability I
ever met; but he was also the longest putter. Time and again, when I
thought I had the hole, having arrived on the green a stroke before him,
he upset calculations by holing a gigantic putt. He smoked all the time,
a long meerschaum pipe, and had all the air of a man playing the game
for pleasure--which is not at all a common aspect for a man to wear when
he is playing a championship heat. And after he had been holing these
prodigious putts time after time, and I had been following them up by
holing humble little things of a yard and a half or so, he fairly
petrified me with astonishment by remarking, in a tone of almost pained
surprise, "You're putting very well!" I looked at him to see whether he
was chaffing, but his face did not show the twinkle of a smile, and I
had to assume that it was simple honest comment, and that he was
accustomed, that he expected, to hole these gigantic putts, but that he
did not expect his opponent to hole the little ones after him. Perhaps
that explains how, being so short a driver, he was yet so good a golfer.
But eventually I defeated him, and thus came into the final.
In the other semi-final tie a terrific battle had been raging between
Bobby Maxwell and Herman de Zoete. Of course I did not see it, being
very fully occupied with Macdonald, but I heard all about it, and what I
heard was that Herman de Zoete was driving tremendous balls, very seldom
on the course, and following up these huge erratic efforts by wonderful
recoveries and putting, so that, as they said, if he had beaten Bobby,
who was playing a sound steady game down the middle of the course, it
would have been a crying iniquity. But it was an iniquity that was as
nearly as possible perpetrated: he had Bobby, as a matter of fact, stone
cold. This was at the nineteenth hole, which they had to go out to play,
having halved the round; and at that hole I believe that Bobby's first
shot was in the neighbourhood of the wall and the second still some
little way from the hole. Herman's first was short of the green, but not
very short. It looked as if he had but to do that hole in four to win
the match, and it did not look as if he could fail to do it in four. But
then, as he told me afterwards, for the first time in the whole match
nerves got hold of him, and having hold of him they seem to have taken
their hold very hard. He was unable, he said, to see the ball with any
distinctness. It looked all in fog; and, playing at it through this
obscuring atmosphere, he sent it about a foot. The end of the hole was
that Bobby, by holing a very missable putt, did get a four, and Herman
took five and lost the hole. The tale, as told me, was peculiarly
painful to listen to, for though Bobby Maxwell is a very pleasant fellow
to play with, still, for the final round of a championship, especially
over Muirfield, I would rather have had to play Herman de Zoete.
However, there it was. And then an unfortunate thing, for me, happened.
On the next day we found the wind exactly opposite in its direction to
what it had been all the week before. Of course that did not make any
difference to Bobby, to whom every grass-blade on Muirfield was a
personal friend and every distance known to a foot, no matter in what
trend or force of wind. But to me, who had been painfully learning the
distances all these days, the right about face of the wind put a very
changed aspect on the business. Not that I believe for a moment that the
ultimate result was affected by it. I have no delusion that in the year
1903, or possibly in any other, I could make a match with Bobby over
Muirfield. Elsewhere it might be another story. As it was, I did make a
very good match with him for fourteen holes, for at that point we were
all even. But then I made the fatal error of letting him win the last
four holes of that round. I hardly know how it happened, for I do not
remember that I played these holes extraordinarily badly, but I do know
that I did not have nearly as good an appetite, when we went in for
luncheon, as I should have had if the break had come at the end of
fourteen, instead of eighteen, holes. To start out, as I had to,
afterwards, to give Bobby four holes up, was rather a large order, and I
found it a good deal too large for me to fill.
I did not play badly. I had a vision of bringing him down to quite a
reasonable number of holes up, and making a close match of it, at one
point on the way out, but there--it was the hole before the windmill--he
made a great recovery out of the rough and won the hole which I had
looked forward to winning. I took three on the green and he only took
one. That was the final touch. He played the rest of the round, as far
as we had to take it, far better than I did--drove much farther, for one
thing, which is always useful--and finally hammered me out by the tune
of seven and six to play. He deserved to win by quite that margin; but I
still cannot help rather regretting that attack of nerves which seized
Herman de Zoete so unfortunately at the approach to the nineteenth hole
the day before. One thing, however, that championship taught me, that if
I was to live with some of these younger golfers and harder hitters I
must do something to add yards to my driving. And the way I tried was by
adding, as soon as I went South, inches--to the number of six--to my
wooden clubs, both driver and brassey. And it had its effect. The extra
length was useful at all angles of the wind, but especially against the
wind, and for some years these long clubs did me very good service. Of
course, the longer the club the lighter you must have the head. That has
to be understood, for otherwise you get a weaver's beam that is quite
unlike the club of the balance that is familiar to your hand. But if
you reduce the head-weight judiciously you can lengthen the shaft
unbelievably without making accurate hitting any harder. And with the
longer shaft it seems, according to my experience, that you get a longer
ball.