Golf is obviously the worst game in the world. I doubt indeed whether
it is a game at all.
It is played with a ball, about which, though I could say much, I will
say little. I will not decide whether it should have a heart of oak
or a heart of gold, whether it should go through a 1·6-inch ring or
a plate-glass window, whether it should sink like the German Navy or
float like the British. Enough, if not too much, has been said about
the standard ball.
Golf is also played with a number of striking implements more
intricate in shape than those used in any other form of recreation
except dentistry. Let so much be agreed.
Now, quite plainly, the essential idea underlying all games played
with a ball, whether a club, stick, mallet, bat or cue be added or no,
is that some interference should take place with the enemy's action,
some thwarting of his purpose or intent. In Rugby football, to take a
case, where no mallet is used, it is permissible to seize an opponent
by the whiskers and sling him over your right shoulder, afterwards
stamping a few times on his head or his stomach. This thwarts him
badly. The same principle applies, though in a milder form, to the
game of cricket, where you attempt to beat the adversary's bat with
your ball, or, if you have the bat, to steer the ball between your
adversaries, or at least to make them jolly well wish that you would.
Even with the baser and less heroic ball games, like croquet and
billiards, where more than one ball is used at a time, action inimical
to the interests of the opponent's ball is permitted and encouraged.
Indeed in the good old days of yore, when croquet was not so strictly
scientific, a shrewd sudden stroke--the ankle shot, we called it, for,
after all, the fellow was probably not wearing boots--well, I daresay
you remember it; and I have once succeeded in paralysing the enemy's
cue arm with the red; but this needs a lot of luck as well as
strength, and is not a stroke to be practised by the beginner,
especially on public tables.
We come then again to golf, and see at once that, with the miserable
and cowardly exception of laying the stymie, there is no stroke in
this game that fulfils the proper conditions which should govern
athletic contests involving the use of spherical objects with or
without instruments of percussion.
And yet we read column after column about fierce encounters and
desperate struggles between old antagonists, when as a matter of fact
there is no struggle, no encounter at all. Against no other ball game
but golf, unless perhaps it be roulette, can this accusation be laid.
Ask a man what happened last Saturday. "I went out," he says, rather
as if he was the British Expeditionary Force, "in 41; but I came
home"--he smiles triumphantly; you see the hospital ship, the cheering
crowds--"in 39." Whether he beat the other fellow or not he hardly
remembers, because there was in fact no particular reason why the
other fellow should have been there.
Golf matches ought to be arranged, and for my part I shall arrange
them in future, as follows:--
_He._ Can you play on Saturday at Crump?
_I._ No, I'm not playing this week.
_He._ Next week then?
_I._ Yes, at Blimp.
_He._ I can't come to Blimp.
_I._ Well, let's play all the same. Your score this week at Crump
against mine next week at Blimp, and we'll have five bob on it.
I'm not quite sure what his retort is, but you take my point. It
is manifestly absurd to drag the psychological element into this
cold-blooded mathematical pursuit. After all that England has done and
come through in the last few years, is a man in baggy knickerbockers,
with tufts on the ends of his garters, going to be daunted and foiled
just because a man in slightly baggier knickerbockers and with
slightly larger tufts on his garters has hit a small white pellet a
little further than he has? Hardly, I think.
That is why, when I read long letters in the principal daily papers
about the expense of this so-called game, and calculations as to
whether it can be played for less than twenty-five shillings a time,
I am merely amused. In my opinion, if the relatives of members of
golf-clubs cannot afford to support them, these institutions should
either be closed or the inmates should be provided with some better
game, like basketball. That is what I feel about golf.
All the same, if Enderby really thinks and believes that, because in
a nasty cross-wind I happened to be slicing badly and didn't know
the course and lost a ball at the twelfth, and he holed twice out of
bunkers and certainly baulked me by sniffing on the fifteenth tee,
and laid a stymie, mark you, of all places at the seventeenth, that
I can't beat him three times out of five in normal conditions and not
with that appalling caddy ---- well, I suppose one must do one's best
to relieve a fellow-creature of his hallucinations, mustn't one?