Fifty Years of Golf Part 11

A while afterwards I met the American manager of a big athletic outfitting house, and he told me that in his opinion, looking at the thing with the commercial eye of the manufacturer, if the Kite people had been "real cute," they would not have driven this fight to a finish.

Instead, they would have come to the Haskell people, when the case seemed likely to go in favour of the defendants, and come to a compromise with them. They would then have abandoned the case, as if despairing of success, under a secret agreement with the Haskell folk to allow them to make b.a.l.l.s on certain agreed terms. The effect of that would have been that the abandoning of the case would have frightened other companies out of ever bringing the like case against the Haskell Company, and the two might have gone on merrily working their monopoly, at the expense of the ball-buyers, "till the cows came home." That, as my friend the manager said, would have been "real smart," but I think we have to congratulate ourselves that this real smartness did not commend itself to the Scottish firm that fought and won this historic battle. We pay enough for our golf b.a.l.l.s even now, even under the relatively blessed conditions of compet.i.tion.

Surely it is not for me, who went no further in study of the law than to eat, though indifferently to digest, those singular dinners at the singular hour of six o'clock at the Inner Temple, to criticise the high findings of the law, but it does seem to my uninstructed wisdom that if ever there were a substantially new invention, making a new departure, it was this of these that we then called Haskells and now call indiarubber-cored b.a.l.l.s. n.o.body, before Haskell, had ever given them to us as reasonable things with which to play the game of golf. He gave them to us as the best b.a.l.l.s. .h.i.therto invented. They spoilt the game in a sense, it is true. The ability to hit the ball absolutely exactly has not the same value now as in the days of the solid gutty ball; nor does forceful hitting count for as much. On the other hand, the greater resiliency of the ball makes the game more pleasant, especially for weak muscles. But that, the quality of the ball, is another story. The story the Court had to sit in judgment on was woven round about the question whether substantially the ball was a novelty. They found that it was not, and we all should be very thankful that they did find so; but at the same time it is quite possible that we may think it a queer finding.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

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 d.i.c.k, 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 a.s.sume 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 gra.s.s-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 appet.i.te, 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 bra.s.sey. 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.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Walter Travis.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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-cla.s.s 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.]

CHAPTER x.x.xV

HOW GOLF HAS GRIPPED AMERICA

The difference in the golfing condition of the America which I had last visited in the early nineties and that to which I went again in 1910, was striking, and not a little amusing. On that former visit I had given an exhibition of golf to a few indifferent spectators at the Meadowbrook Club on Long Island, on which they had reported that it "might be a good game for Sunday"--conveying thereby a studied and profane insult both to the game and to the day. On my return in 1910 I found an America even more completely in the throes of golf than any portion of our native islands. But on this visit my approach to the American courses was made in an unconventional manner that is worth a word of notice.

Lord Bra.s.sey had asked my wife and myself to come with him, on the _Sunbeam_, to Iceland, across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, and up the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The first golfing place at which we put in, after joining the yacht in the Cromarty Firth, was Dornoch, where is as glorious a natural links as the soul of the golfer can desire or his most industrious inquiry discover. The conformation of Iceland, chiefly mountain, or plain strewn with lava-blocks, hardly seems to lend itself kindly to golf; but on arrival, after many days, during some of them rather storm-tossed, at St. John's, Newfoundland, we found there a golf course, still a little in the rough, carved out of primeval pine forest, of undulating surface, astonishingly good considering how new it was, and promising to give really amusing and good golf of the inland type in the future. Neil Shannon, a Troon man, is the professional, and I astonished both myself and him by beating him.

The next point at which we touched golf was Tadousac, a watering-place at the mouth of the famed Saguenay River which runs into the St.

Lawrence. It is the oldest fur-trading station in Canada. Here is a short course, much _accidente_, at two points traversing a deep ravine which has real sand in it. There is a more elaborate and carefully kept course at Murray Bay, a little further along the north sh.o.r.e of the St.

Lawrence.

At Quebec, on the Heights of Abraham, in a magnificent situation, is one of the oldest courses in North America. I was beaten by a putt by the better ball of two of the native golfers, Mr. Ash and Mr. McGreevy.

n.o.ble hospitality was shown us, both in Canada and in the States.

Scarcely could one be permitted so much as to pay for one's own caddie, and any question of green fees was dismissed as quite out of the picture.

We sailed up to Montreal on the night of August 12th, and on the 15th I find the following note in my diary: "Mr. Huntley Drummond took me around in his car, after luncheon, to the Bank of Montreal, where we picked up Mr. W. Clouston, and went out to the Beaconsfield course--not at all a bad green, of the inland type, flat in general, but with the club-house set on a hill from which most of the course is overlooked.

They do themselves very well in the matter of club-houses in this country--most commodious, with bathrooms and all kinds of luxuries." On the following day I played on the Dixie course, also quite near Montreal, "a really good one--inland in its type, as all are over here, but interesting and varied and very pretty at a certain corner where much use is made of a stream, with weeping willows, and so on. There is one respect in which the architects of the course might have been more clever, for they have so ordained things that all the hazards are on the left, all the penalty is for the pulled ball, and a man may slice and slice to his heart's full content, and never suffer. The turf and the greens are very good, and the b.u.t.terflies and gra.s.shoppers very numerous, and large and splendid of hue."

At Montreal we said good-bye, with many tears, to the _Sunbeam_ and her host, and made our next stop at Toronto, where are two excellent courses. On August 19th I find in my diary that "self and A.E. Austin beat Lyon and Breckenridge on the Lambton course." This Lyon is that Mr.

George Lyon whom we have seen over here competing in our amateur championship. He has not done himself justice on this side, for he is a very fine player. He has won the Canadian championship often--precisely how often, I forget. "Lambton Golf Club very comfortable," my notes record, "piano set out on balcony, lawn tennis court and all 'amenities.' Beautiful view of course from house--natural sand in bunkers--very pretty, with woodland, water and undulating open country.

The course is laid on several big levels in terraces. You play across a stream again and again--it is no course for non-floating b.a.l.l.s. Some of the greens are irrigated by sub-surface pipes from the stream, leading to porous tiles, from which the hot sun sucks up the water to the surface. I saw a thing this day that I never saw before--played a ball up to a hole that had the flag standing in it; the ball jumped up, wrapped itself up in the flag, and stayed there swaddled up in the flag.

Query--what is the rule that meets the case?"