TRAVIS'S YEAR
In 1904, the amateur championship being that year at Sandwich, Frank
Penn[8] entertained me for it at Bifrons, near Canterbury, about fifteen
miles from the arena of action. He used to motor me in each day, and the
driving of a big motor through the streets of Sandwich town appears a
very cork-screwy business. Nevertheless he accomplished it perfectly and
never once bunkered us by the way.
I came across a lot of old friends and enemies at that meeting--first
Johnny Laidlay in the International Match, then Mure Ferguson, if I
remember right, in the first round of the championship; I forget whom
then, but I know that a few more heats brought me up against Johnny
Ball. All these adventures, even that last and worst, I succeeded in
getting through with success, and then I had to meet Bobby Maxwell on
the last day but one of the play. I was playing fairly well, being much
helped by the longer clubs I had taken to since the Muirfield
championship, where Bobby beat me in the final.
[Illustration: Walter Travis.]
[Illustration: Charles B. MacDonald.
From a portrait in plaster by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, presented to the
National Golf Links of America of which Mr. Macdonald is the founder.]
Staying, as I was, with Penn fifteen miles away, I did not hear much of
the gossip going on at this championship, but from time to time I did
find one man or the other coming to me and saying, "Have you seen that
American who is putting with an extraordinary thing like a croquet
mallet? He's putting most extraordinarily well with it." Of course I had
not seen him: I had been too busy myself, putting by no means
extraordinarily well. That sort of thing was said, now and then, but no
one thought any more about it. It was known that some Americans had come
over and had entered for the championship, but if anybody had prophesied
that one of them was likely to give trouble or to get into the final
heats he would have been looked on as a lunatic. The truth is, that we
much under-rated the American amateur at that time. Partly, I suppose,
this was our "d----d insular insolence," but partly, too, it was due to
the very successful tour in the States, a year or two before, of a team
of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society. They won their matches so
consistently as to give us the idea that the Americans could not play
golf. The man with the mallet putter was in process of teaching us
better, though even yet we did not realize it. Mr. Harold Reade, the
Irishman, ought to have beaten him, for he was two up and either two or
three to play, but the American played the final holes very finely and
just won. So he survived, until in the heath before the semi-final,
wherein I had to meet Bobby, he had Hilton to play. But Hilton was in no
sort of form and Travis beat him as he pleased. Meanwhile I beat Bobby
and had revenge for the year before, in the Muirfield final, but it was
by no means as I pleased.
I started badly and let Bobby win the first three holes. Then I steadied
down and he gave me chances. It is always a different thing playing
Bobby anywhere else than at Muirfield. Had he gained this start there I
should never have seen the way he went. But he let me get hole after
hole back until on the eighteenth green we were all even, we had played
three apiece, I was stone dead and my ball laid him a dead stymie. It
was not a stymie at all difficult to loft. There was nice room to pitch
the ball and let it run on into the hole. Still, at that crisis of the
match, it was a fine piece of work on Bobby's part to play it perfectly
as he did. Then I holed my unimportant little putt and we had to start
out to play extra holes.
My second shot to the first (or nineteenth) hole, I put carefully into
the bunker guarding the green. Bobby, I suppose, determined to be over,
seeing that I was in, rather over-ran the green. A bunker near the hole
never had the terrors for me that it has for some people: we were too
familiar with them at Westward Ho! Tom Vardon said to me afterwards,
respecting the stroke which I played out of that bunker: "That was a
plucky shot of yours, to go straight for the hole like that." Of course
it is always pleasant to be told one is a hero, but really there was
nothing very heroic about this. If the sand were taken at the right
point behind the ball there was no trouble about the stroke. If you hit
differently from your intention there was bound to be trouble, but that
is the case with most golfing strokes.
What happened in this case was that I howked the ball out fairly near
the hole, about a couple of yards off, perhaps, and Bobby, playing from
the far end of the green, put his just inside it. But whereas I had a
straight up-hill putt to the hole, he had to come along the curve of the
slope, so that my putt was far the easier. I holed it all right. Bobby
allowed a little too much for the slope and that was the end of that
business. "Now see, Horace," he said, as we walked back to the
club-house, "that you don't get beaten by that American."
I started out in the afternoon without the smallest idea in life that I
was to be beaten by "that American"; but I had not played two shots
before I knew that all the best of the fight had been taken out of me by
that stiff morning match. As Andrew Kirkaldy said to me afterwards:
"That," pointing to Bobby, "that was your murderer." He had, in truth,
done most of the killing, and Travis had but to finish it. He did not
really play very well. Still, he was one up on me going to the
thirteenth hole, and there gave me every chance of winning it and
squaring the match, but I played a very bad shot, and followed it with
another indifferent one, and so let him win that hole which I ought to
have won. He gave me no further chances, and beat me by, I think, three
and two. But I reckoned things up afterwards and found, by the score of
the holes, that if I had played as well as I did in any of the previous
matches, I should have been up on him, instead of down, at the point
where he beat me. That, however, is what makes an amateur
champion--that, amongst other things--the ability to "stay" through a
long fight and not to suffer reaction after a hard match.
In the final, Travis had to meet Ted Blackwell, and I never had great
hopes for England as to the result of that encounter. I say this, with
all respect for Ted Blackwell's great game as he developed it almost
immediately afterwards; but he was not his great self then. At that time
he was still putting with a thin-bladed little cleek which must have
been forged about the date that Tubal Cain was in active work as a
smith. Very shortly afterwards someone, who deserves to suffer lingering
death at the hands of all Ted Blackwell's later opponents, induced him
to take to an aluminium putter. The difference it made in his game was
nearer a third than four strokes, as I reckon it. From a really bad
putter he became all at once a very good putter indeed. I knew all about
it, for I had been playing him and beating him comfortably in several
matches at St. Andrews, in course of a little party which Lord Dudley
took up there. I met him again in an international match at Hoylake only
a little later, when he had exchanged the tinkling cleek for the
aluminium putter, and he beat me--not by length of driving, but by
length of putting.
As for this final at Sandwich, which was played in his pre-aluminium
days, Travis has put it on record that he felt confident of winning from
the start; and he looked like a winner all through. With the black cigar
and the deliberate methods, including the practice swing before each
stroke, he was perhaps rather a hard man to play against, but at the
same time, and although I have said that he did not play very well when
I met him, I think those critics make a great mistake who say that he
was not a first-class golfer. He was, and is, a wonderful putter. I know
that, not only by the wonderful week of putting that he put in over here
at that time, but by what Jim Whigham and others who have played a great
deal with him in America have told me. Whigham said that you were
grateful, thinking that you had a lucky escape, if you were his opponent
and he did not hole the ball from fifteen yards. This was at Garden
City, where he knows the greens better than his drawing-room carpet.
Indeed, all Travis's record disproves the statement that "he was not
fit to win the championship." That he was "lucky to win" we must think.
Unless a man is a head and shoulders above his field, he has to have
luck if he is to live through a tournament such as our amateur
championship; and Travis had no such head and shoulders advantage as
this. But put him down at a hundred and eighty or any less number of
yards from the hole, and there was no player, amateur or professional,
better than he. Perhaps there was no amateur as good. His weakness was
out of bunkers and rough ground, but that was a weakness which troubled
him little because he very seldom got into these difficulties. I hardly
know whether he would have won our championship if Ted Blackwell and the
aluminium putter had been introduced to each other a few years earlier;
but it is no use arguing about "ifs." As soon as he had won that final,
the price of Schenectady putters went up a hundred per cent., and Bobby
Maxwell, by way of insult, made me a present of one of them, with which
I often putted till our legislation banned them.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: Again I have to append the sad note, so often written, that
in the interval between the telling of this tale and its publication,
he, too, has been taken from the world of living men.]