Perhaps the greatest illusion about golf is that it is a sociable game.
The fact is, that, next to solitaire, golf is the most unsociable game
that man has invented. One of many such stories tells of two Scotchmen,
brothers, who played together in perfect silence up to the twelfth
hole, when one of them let fall a trifling remark; whereupon the other
flew into a passion, declaring that his brother’s gabbing had spoiled
his day. An exaggeration, but only for artistic purposes. On all golf
courses one sees the same twosomes or foursomes going the season through.
Players avoid other players as they would the plague. If a round, even
with old friends, is played sociably, it is at the expense of the game.
Silence and obsequial gloom brood over the putting greens. A match for
the president’s cup is a funeral procession. Golf a sociable game? About
as sociable as a hand at Canfield in the morgue on a rainy afternoon, in
November.
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The second great illusion about golf is that to play par, especially to
win important matches, a man must possess a mysterious something called
“temperament.” Now, the only comprehensible temperament is what an
English writer has happily termed the wooden temperament. Combine this
with a maximum amount of skill, and par golf is possible seven days in
the week. Golf rhapsodists are fond of declaring that the successful
match player must have a great heart, and an indomitable soul, and all
that rot; whereas the requirements are great skill and almost perfect
muscular control. Great players with the so-called temperament have blown
up under pressure; even the wooden temperament is not proof against an
occasional loss of muscular control. Harold Hilton won the finals in
this country through a fluke; what good would his temperament have done
him if his ball had not struck a rock and bounded to the green? A heart
as big as an ox is no assistance if skill and luck are lacking, and
many an indomitable soul has topped a critical shot. The only really
temperamental player is the man whose score fluctuates between eighty and
ninety.
* * * * *
Concerning our giving up smoking, it had to be either that or golf.
When a man misses a twenty-five-foot putt he should ask himself whether
tobacco is unsettling his nerves.