ST. ANDREWS, FIFE AND FORFARSHIRE.
Really to know the links of St. Andrews can never be given to the
casual visitor. It is not perhaps necessary to be one of those old
gentlemen who tell us at all too frequent intervals that golf was golf
in their young days, that we of to-day are solely occupied in the
pursuit of pots and pans, and that Sir Robert Hay, with his tall hat
and his graduated series of spoons, would have beaten us, one and all,
into the middle of the ensuing week. Such a degree of senile decay is
fortunately not essential, but one ought to have known and loved and
played over the links for a long while; and I can lay no claims to such
knowledge as that. I can speak only as an occasional pilgrim, whose
pilgrimages, though always reverent, have been far too few. I do not
know by instinct whether or not my ball is trapped in 'Sutherland'; I
only just know the difference between 'Strath' and the 'Shelly' bunker;
I could not keep up my end in an argument as to the proper line to take
at the second hole--I am, in short, a very ignorant person, who means
thoroughly well.
There are those who do not like the golf at =St. Andrews=, and they
will no doubt deny any charm to the links themselves, but there must
surely be none who will deny a charm to the place as a whole. It may
be immoral, but it is delightful to see a whole town given up to golf;
to see the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker shouldering
his clubs as soon as his day's work is done and making a dash for the
links. There he and his fellows will very possibly get in our way,
or we shall get in theirs; we shall often curse the crowd, and wish
whole-heartedly that golf was less popular in St. Andrews. Nevertheless
it is that utter self-abandonment to golf that gives the place its
attractiveness. What a pleasant spectacle is that home green, fenced in
on two sides by a railing, upon which lean various critical observers;
and there is the club-house on one side, and the club-maker's shop
and the hotels on the other, all full of people who are looking at
the putting, and all talking of putts that they themselves holed or
missed on that or on some other green. I once met, staying in a hotel
at St. Andrews, a gentleman who did not play golf. That is in itself
remarkable, but more wonderful still, he joined so rationally, if
unobtrusively, in the perpetual golfing conversation that his black
secret was never discovered. I do not know if he enjoyed himself, but
his achievement was at least a notable one.
[Illustration: ST. ANDREWS
_The town in the distance_]
I am writing this chapter, when I am but newly returned from St.
Andrews, after having watched all the champions of the earth play
round the course for three strenuous days. The weather was perfect;
there was scarcely a breath of wind, and violent storms of rain
had reduced the glassy greens to a nice easy pace. Scores of under
eighty were absurdly plentiful, and, indeed, if someone had come in
with a score of under seventy I think the news would have been received
without any vast degree of astonishment. Yet, with all this brilliant,
record-breaking golf being played over it, the course never looked
really easy. The champions certainly got their fours in abundance, but
they had to work reasonably hard for most of them. Nor did one suffer
from the delusion, as one does when playing the part of a spectator
upon simple courses, that one could have done just as many fours
oneself. St. Andrews never looks really easy, and never is really easy,
for the reason that the bunkers are for the most part so close to the
greens. It is possible, of course, to play an approach shot straight on
the bee line to the flag, and if we play it to absolute perfection all
may go well; but let it only be crooked by so much as a yard, or let
the ball, as it often will do, get an unkind kick, and the bunker will
infallibly be our portion. Consequently the prudent man will agree with
Willy Smith of Mexico, who declared that it was unwise to "tease the
bunkers"; he will not attempt to avoid these greedy, lurking enemies by
inches or even feet, but he will give them a good wide berth and avoid
them by yards. The result of this policy is that the man who is getting
his string of fours has to be continually laying the ball dead with his
putter from a reasonably long way off, and so St. Andrews is a fine
course for him who can do good work at long range with a wooden putter.
Let not the reader hastily assume that his only difficulty at St.
Andrews will be to keep out of the clutches of the bunkers lying close
to the greens; he will find plenty more stumbling-blocks in his path.
There is the matter of length, for instance. The holes, either out or
home, do not look very long when Braid is playing them with the wind
behind him, but it is an entirely different matter when we have to play
them ourselves with the wind in our teeth. Then we shall very often
be taking our brasseys through the green, and yet be doing tolerably
well if we have nothing higher than a five. There are a great many
holes that demand two good shots, as struck by the ordinary mortal;
there are three that he cannot reach except with his third, and there
are only two that he can reach from the tee, of which one by common
consent is the most fiendish short hole in existence. Thus we have
two difficulties, that the holes are long, and that there are bunkers
close to the greens; now, for a third, those greens are for the most
part on beautiful pieces of golfing ground, which by their natural
conformation, by their banks and braes and slopes, guard the holes very
effectively, even without the aid of the numerous bunkers.
Providence has been very kind in dowering St. Andrews with plateau
greens, and they are never easy to approach. A plateau usually demands
of the golfer that a shot should be played; it will not allow him
merely to toss his ball into the air with a lofting iron and the modest
ambition that it may come down somewhere on the green. Again, a plateau
never gives any undeserved help to the inaccurate approacher, as do
the greens that lie in holes and hollows. Even in a more marked degree
than at Hoylake, the ground is never helping us; in its kindest mood
it is no more than strictly impartial. Finally, the turf is very hard,
and consequently the greens are apt to take on a keenness that is
paralyzing in its intensity.
Having by alarming generalizations induced in the unfortunate stranger
a suitably humble frame of mind, the time has now arrived to take him
over the course in some detail. The first thing to point out to him is
the historic fact that there were once upon a time but nine holes, and
that the outgoing and incoming players aimed at the self-same hole upon
the self-same green. That state of things has necessarily long passed
away, but the result is still to be seen in the fact that most of the
greens are actually or in effect double greens, and consequently the
two processions of golfers outward and inward bound pass close to each
other, not without some risk to life and much shouting of 'Fore!'
With this preliminary observation, we may tee up our ball in front
of the Royal and Ancient Club-house for one of the least alarming
tee-shots in existence. In front of us stretches a vast flat plain,
and unless we slice the ball outrageously on to the sea beach, no harm
can befall us. At the same time we had much better hit a good shot,
because the Swilcan burn guards the green, and we want to carry it and
get a four. It is an inglorious little stream enough: we could easily
jump over it were we not afraid of looking foolish if we fell in,
and yet it catches an amazing number of balls. It is now a part of
golfing history that when Mr. Leslie Balfour-Melville won the amateur
championship he beat successively at the nineteenth hole Mr. W. Greig,
Mr. Laurence Auchterlonie, and Mr. John Ball, and all three of these
redoubtable persons plumped the ball into this apparently paltry little
streamlet with their approach shots.
The second is a beautiful hole some four hundred yards in length, and
with the most destructive of pot-bunkers close up against the hole.
Here is a case in point, when the attempt to shave narrowly past the
bunker involves terrible risks, and it is the part of prudence to play
well out to the right and trust to the long putt. There are, indeed,
those who deem the hole unfairly difficult when it is cut in the
left-hand end of the green and quite close to the bunker; I have not
sufficient experience or pugnacity to argue with them.
The third is something similar in character, though shorter in length;
while the fourth again is a little longer. Indeed there is something
in these three holes that make them quite ridiculously difficult for
the stranger to disentangle one from the other. The fourth is guarded
in front by a small grassy mound, which has a wonderfully far-reaching
effect, since wherever we may place our drive the mound must needs play
some part in our calculations as to the second shot. I should add that
at all three of these holes a tee-shot that is badly sliced will be
caught in the fringe of rough ground that divides the old course from
the new; this rough, however, is not so severe as it once was, and
would be none the worse for a little artificial assistance in the way
of bunkers.
The fifth is the long hole out, when we shall need our three strokes
to reach the green, which stands a little above us on a plateau of
magnificent dimensions, where we rub shoulders with the incoming
couples who are plying the 'Hole o' Cross.' In ancient days, when the
whins were thick and flourishing on the straight road to the hole, the
only possible line was away to the left towards the Elysian fields. It
was from there, so Mr. James Cunningham has told me, that young Tommy
Morris astonished the spectators by taking his niblick, a club that in
those days had a face of about the magnitude of a half-crown, wherewith
to play a pitch on the green. Till that historic moment no one had ever
dreamed of a niblick being used for anything but ordinary spade work.
At the heathery hole we have a fine sea of whins on our right (there
are still some whins left at St. Andrews), although only a very bad
slice will make us acquainted with them; there are furthermore some
pots on the left to trap a pulled ball, but altogether the hole is, if
one may venture to say so, of no enormous merit, and by no means as
good as the High Hole, where is a green of horrible glassy slopes and
bunkers that eat their way voraciously into its borders.
At the eighth we do at last get a chance of a three, for the hole is a
short one--142 yards long to be precise--and there is a fair measure
of room on the green. So far the golf has been very, very good indeed,
but with the ninth and tenth come two holes that constitute a small
blot on the fair fame of the course. If they were found on some less
sacred spot they would be condemned as consisting of a drive and a
pitch up and down a flat field. What makes it the sadder is that ready
to the architect's hand is a bit of glorious golfing country on the
confines of the new course. However, we had better play these two holes
in as reverent a spirit as possible and be thankful for two fairly easy
fours, because the next is the 'short hole in,' and we must reserve
all our energies for that. The only consoling thing about the hole
is that the green slopes upward, so that it is not quite so easy for
the ball to run over it as it otherwise would be. This is really but
cold comfort, however, because the danger of going too far is not so
imminent as that of not going straight enough. There is one bunker
called 'Strath,' which is to the right, and there is another called the
'Shelly Bunker,' to the left; there is also another bunker short of
Strath to catch the thoroughly short and ineffective ball. The hole is
as a rule cut fairly close to Strath, wherefore it behoves the careful
man to play well away to the left, and not to take undue risks by going
straight for the hole. This may sound pusillanimous, but trouble once
begun at this hole may never come to an end till the card is torn into
a thousand fragments. With a stout niblick shot the ball may easily
be dislodged from Strath, but it will all too probably bound over the
green into the sandy horrors of the Eden. From there it may again be
extracted, but as it has to pitch on a down slope, it will almost
certainly trickle gently down the green till it is safely at rest
once more in the bosom of Strath. This very tragedy I saw befall Massy
in the Championship of 1910, and he took six to the hole. Many a good
golfer has taken far more strokes than that, and, indeed, it is a hole
to leave behind one with a sigh of satisfaction.
The next hole would in any case fall almost inevitably flat, but the
thirteenth, the Hole o' Cross, is a great hole, where having struck
two really fine shots and escaped 'Walkinshaw's Grave,' we may hope to
reach the beautiful big plateau green in two and hole out in two more.
The long hole home comes next, and here we drive along the Elysian
fields, taking care to avoid a swarm of little pot-bunkers on the left,
which are called the 'Beardies.' A second, played cautiously away to
the left, will very likely bring us into collision with some outgoing
couple, while a bold shot straight ahead of us may see the ball plump
down into 'Hell,' a bunker that is now hardly worthy of its name. There
is a pretty approach to be played, with yet another plateau to climb,
and a five means good work, as does a four at the fifteenth, which is a
thoroughly admirable two-shot hole.
Although home is now in sight, there are yet two terribly dangerous
holes to be played. First of all we must steer down the perilously
narrow space between the 'Principal's Nose' and the railway line--the
railway line, mark you, that is not out of bounds, so that there is no
limit to the number of strokes that we may spend in hammering vainly at
an insensate sleeper. We may, of course, drive safe away to the left,
and if our score is a good one we shall be wise to do so, but our
approach, as is only fair, will then be the more difficult, and there
are bunkers lurking by the green-side.
The seventeenth hole has been more praised and more abused probably
than any other hole in the world. It has been called unfair, and by
many harder names as well; it has caused champions with a predilection
for pitching rather than running to tear their hair; it has certainly
ruined an infinite number of scores. Many like it, most respect it,
and all fear it. First there is the tee-shot, with the possibility of
slicing out of bounds into the station-master's garden or pulling into
various bunkers on the left. Then comes the second, a shot which should
not entail immediate disaster, but which is nevertheless of enormous
importance as leading up to the third. Finally, there is the approach
to that little plateau--in contrast to most of the St. Andrews greens,
a horribly small and narrow one--that lies between a greedy little
bunker on the one side and a brutally hard road on the other. It is so
difficult as to make the boldest inclined to approach on the instalment
system, and yet no amount of caution can do away with the chance of
disaster. There was a harrowing moment in the Championship of 1910
when Braid's ball lay in the little bunker under the green. Even if he
got it safely out, it was practically certain he would be two strokes
behind Duncan, with one round to go; if he did not get it out, or got
it out too far and so on to the road, his chances would be terribly
jeopardized. It was, as I say, an agonizing moment, but no one plays
the heavy 'dunch' shot out of sand quite so surely as Braid. Down came
the niblick, up spouted the sand, and out came the ball, to fall spent
and lifeless close to the hole and out of reach of that cruel road.
After this hole of many disastrous memories, the eighteenth need have
no great terrors. We drive over the burn, cross by the picturesque old
stone bridge, and avoiding the grosser forms of sin, such as slicing
into the windows of Rusack's hotel, hole out in four, or at most five,
under the critical gaze of those that lean on the railings.
No account of St. Andrews would be complete without some mention of the
new course, which runs more or less parallel with the old; the two,
to say nothing of the Jubilee course that runs along the spurs of the
sandhills, being all squeezed into a wonderfully narrow compass.
The new course has many merits, but it is curiously unlike its
next-door neighbour. Partly, of course, this is on account of its
youth. Myriads of feet have not trampled it into a state of adamantine
hardness, and when the greens on the old course are keen and fiery, the
new course remains soft, slow and easy. Besides this, however, there is
another difference, in that the new course is infinitely more ordinary,
and this comparative commonplaceness, if further inquired into,
resolves itself largely into the fact that there are not nearly so many
good natural greens. At both the third and the fifth there are plateau
greens, and the latter especially has the quality--so characteristic
of the old course--of demanding that the shot be played exactly right.
Most of the greens, however, are quite ordinary, and lack that
priceless gift of being naturally protected by their own conformation.
Mr. Low has written that "the new course is probably the second course
in Scotland," but I cannot help thinking that here he is a little too
enthusiastic. If we were to light upon the course somewhere else than
at St. Andrews, no doubt we should do it ampler justice than we do
now, when it is so completely overshadowed, but should we declare it
better than Prestwick, to name only one other famous Scottish course?
Personally I do not think so.
No doubt the new course does suffer some considerable injustice, and
always will do so. It has 'relief course' plainly written all over it.
On the last occasion on which I played there the daisies were growing
freely, and daisies, though extremely charming things in themselves,
are not pleasant to putt over, and do not give a workman-like air to
a course. It is a pity, because it is a good course, and we should
be delighted to play over it anywhere else, but with the old course
there--well, it is a waste of time.
Still there occasionally comes a time when we grow sick to death of the
crowding and waiting on the old course, and then we are glad enough to
steal away on to the new course and have a round, which will probably
be at any rate a comparatively quick one. We cross the burn; walk
through the middle of the putting course, where are many ladies armed
with wooden putters (since the sacrilegious cleek is wholly forbidden),
and tee off not far from where they are playing to the second hole on
the old course.
The first two holes are not at all exciting, but the course improves
as we go along. Three is a good hole, and five is an excellent short
one, with a most difficult iron-shot on to a plateau green. Nine,
again, is rather an attractive little hole, although there are two
opinions about this; a very accurate drive between bents and sand,
followed by rather a blind pitch on to a sunk green. Personally I like
it, though it is not at all the type of hole one expects to find at
St. Andrews, nor, for that matter, is the tenth. This is nevertheless
a really fine one, running down a narrow gorge between two ranges of
hills, with a fine, slashing second shot with the brassey, albeit more
or less a blind one. The twelfth is as good as the eleventh is weak,
and sixteen and eighteen are both long and difficult, but the two short
holes, thirteen and seventeen, are decidedly not exciting. Quite good,
difficult golf it is, but the "second course in Scotland"--no. Perhaps
it might be, but, my dear Mr. Low, I am sure on reflection you will
admit that, in fact, it isn't.
Though St. Andrews naturally enough dwarfs them all, there are other
courses, and fine courses, in Fife. There is Elie, which has produced
at least three very great golfers indeed, Douglas Rolland, Jack Simpson
and James Braid; and there are also, amongst others, Crail and Leven.
Leven, a truly charming course, has, alas! ceased to exist in its old
form. Nine of the old holes now belong to a new and reconstituted
Leven, and the other nine belong to Lundin Links. It is a sad pity,
but the difficulty of two different starting places made it in these
crowded times inevitable.
Forfarshire, too, is a county of many courses. Barry, Broughty Ferry,
Edzell, Monifieth, Montrose, and, best known of all, Carnoustie.
=Carnoustie= is comparatively unknown, save by name, to the English
golfer, but very popular indeed in its own country. So much so that
its popularity has rendered necessary an auxiliary course, and the
auxiliary course has taken a piece of good golfing ground that could
ill be spared. It is a fine, big, open sandy seaside course; very
natural in appearance; and in places, indeed, natural almost to the
verge of roughness; but it is none the worse for that, however, and
indeed it is altogether a very delightful course.
There is one curious feature, in that the taking in of some new ground
has caused one hole to be of a completely inland character. Certainly
this hole seems at first sight to be dragged in by the heels, but we
readily forgive it its inland character, because it is really a very
good hole indeed. This is number seven, 'South America' by name. It is
a good long hole, well over four hundred yards in length, and the green
is on an island guarded by a ditch. The soil is completely inland in
character--the green once formed part of an old garden--and as if to
emphasize that fact, a solitary tree has been left as a hazard, and
naturally plays a prominent part in the landscape.
[Illustration: CARNOUSTIE
'_South America_']
Burns, _anglicé_ streams, are a great feature of Carnoustie. Indeed one
friend of mine returned from a visit there declaring that he had got
burns badly on his nerves, and that the entire course was irrigated by
them. However, it is not so much burns as sandhills that are likely
to cause our downfall at the beginning. Of these hilly holes,
the second, by name the 'Valley,' is a really fine one, and decidedly
one of the best on the course. It is dog-legged in character, and has
a distinct flavour of some of the holes at Prince's, since with the
tee-shot the player carries just as much of the hill in front of him as
he dares, and gains a proper advantage for a bold and successful shot.
The drive is directed towards a guide flag on a hill top, and if all
goes well we are over in the valley. Then follows a beautiful second
shot up a narrow neck, with a bunker on the left and other trouble on
the right; 385 yards is the Valley's length, and Bogey does the hole
in four. It is certainly one of the holes that he plays in his best
form, for he very often takes five over holes that are no longer and
not nearly so difficult or so interesting. Of the other holes on the
way out, most are decidedly long, except the fifth, which is a simple
enough short hole, and 'South America,' before described, is as good as
any of them.
On the way home there is a somewhat awe-inspiring second shot at
the tenth, where we have to carry a hill, out of the face of which
two bunkers have been cut out and appropriately christened the
'Spectacles.' The twelfth has a pleasing name, 'Jockey's Burn,' and
the thirteenth has a pleasing putting green. The fourteenth, by name
the 'Flagstaff,' is a good long and narrow hole, where the hills crowd
in close upon us, and we must keep straight along the valley. The best
hole on the way home, however, is probably the sixteenth, or 'Island,'
where there is but one way to secure an easy and comfortable approach,
and that consists of pushing your tee-shot out to the right so that the
ball comes to rest upon a very narrow neck. Take an easier route from
the tee, and you will be left with as unpleasant a pitch as need be,
and the greedy waters of a burn running between you and the hole. Burns
play an important part at both the last two holes also, for one has to
be carried from the seventeenth tee and another menaces the pitch on
to the home green. There really is some justification for the nervous
golfer who has water on the brain after a round at Carnoustie.