The Spirit of the Links Part 14

"Rather good," commented the Author at the end of this recital. "Wasn't it that young Norris who circulated the jest that if he could play his mashie pitches properly he would be down to scratch and in the running for a small kind of office, and that if he could get to plus 7 he would be the President of the British Republic?"

"That's the man," the M.P. answered. "Very nice sort of chap, too. We must bring him down here one day. Richardson took him down to Rye for a week-end once, but had to go back to town again without him at the end of a whole week."

"Ha!" said the Colonel, "but that's nothing in comparison with the true story of the non-golfer who went to Sandwich for a week-end nine years ago, and at the invitation of his friend experimented with the game, and has been down there ever since, playing it!"

"Good man!" exclaimed the Author.

"But what about these statistics, William?" the Colonel inquired.

"Well," said the M.P., "I have calculated that at the present time there are over a million acres under golf in Great Britain, and that a sum-total of about 4,700,000 a year is now spent on the game in this country. But you get the queerest results when you come to consider the b.a.l.l.s that are used in a year, and what happens to them."

"Proceed," said the Colonel.

VI

"Now, just consider the ball," the M.P. responded. "Pretty little pimpled thing, isn't it? Stuffed full of delight! Full of promise for at least two hours' fine health-giving enjoyment! We used to think a half-pound tin of our favourite tobacco was the most heartening sight to see; but a box of new b.a.l.l.s has it now. One ball is such a tiny little thing. You can hold sixteen of them in one hand! I have seen a man hold eighteen, and possibly that is the record. Giving a ball four rounds of life, two men could play together morning and afternoon for more than a fortnight with the b.a.l.l.s that are held in this hand. But just see how many are needed by the great world of golf!

"To begin with, there are said to be 300,000 golfers in this country. It has been reckoned that at the height of the summer golfing season, when the players are busy everywhere, not less than 500,000 b.a.l.l.s are used up every week. This, indeed, seems to be a most reasonable estimate--less than two b.a.l.l.s per man per week, with an enormous percentage of players out on the links four or five days a week. It was semi-officially stated last June that one firm of makers, and that not by any means the biggest, was working night and day, and turning out 100,000 b.a.l.l.s a week. Decidedly half a million is well within the mark. Taking the whole year round, if you say one ball per golfer per week, that is surely a very modest reckoning. It is practically a certainty that it is an underestimate. At that rate we have a grand total of 15,000,000 b.a.l.l.s used up every year by the British golfers on British links. Fifteen millions!"

"Good gracious!" the Parson exclaimed. "One would hardly believe it!"

"Yes, let us see what we can do with these 15,000,000 besides play 6,000,000,000 shots with them, which is what may be done, allowing four rounds to each ball and a hundred strokes to each round, and what with foozlers, women, and children, you will find that a hundred is a very fair average, even if it is only the medal-winning score of the 20-handicap man.

"Seven b.a.l.l.s go to the lineal foot, and thus there are forty-nine of them in the square foot. It seems hard to believe that all the b.a.l.l.s of a year could, if packed nicely together after the fashion of eggs, be laid out in a fair-sized field of seven acres. But stay! I can give you some fancy idea of what this annual ball crop really means after all.

There are seven to the foot--in one little lineal foot you have sufficient b.a.l.l.s to last a careful week-end player for a couple of months. Now, bring out the army of caddies that there are in the country and set them to work teeing the b.a.l.l.s up right against and touching each other in a line, beginning with the first at Charing Cross, or, to be more appropriate, on the Mid-Surrey course at Richmond. Then proceed northwards. There will still be a few b.a.l.l.s left in the pockets of the caddies when they have continued that long line of one year's b.a.l.l.s right away through Rugby, Stafford, Carlisle, and over the Border range to Edinburgh, and on to the Braid Hills course. We can join the premier courses of two capitals with the b.a.l.l.s of one year, for the line we make is 405 miles long, and at 11_s._ or 12_s._ a foot it would be considerably more expensive than the ordinary permanent way. It is a wonderful line. Nine yards of it will last a busy golfer a whole year, and he need never be reproached for putting down a dirty ball."

The Hon. Member for North-East Fife was fairly warmed to his theme by this, and he pursued enthusiastically: "There is some food for reflection in the incidental mention that I have just made that the British golfers play 6,000,000,000 shots every year. _Puck_ boasted some time ago that he could 'put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.' It might surprise this sprite to know that the British golfers could do the job in ten minutes, which is the time we might give them to drive a dozen b.a.l.l.s each from the tee. If those were fair drives, and were put end to end, they would easily go round the world, with a little to spare. Evidently, then, the British golfers go the distance of the circ.u.mference of the world many times over in the course of the year.

You may take it that the average player, what with going off the line, waddling about on the putting greens, walking from green to tee, and so on, does a tramp of four miles in every round of eighteen holes that he makes. At four rounds a week, that is sixteen miles a week, or eight hundred in the golfing year of fifty weeks, a fortnight's holiday for illness, dissipation, and foreign travel, being allowed in all these annual calculations. So our 300,000 British golfers in the course of the year walk and tool their b.a.l.l.s for a matter of 240,000,000 miles. Most of this abundant exercise would not be taken if there were no golf.

"This 240,000,000 of miles means that if the British golfers had a links round the middle of the earth they would collectively play 60,000 times round it in the course of the year. They would be almost jostling and continually driving into each other. There would be a shriek of 'Fore!' from the Gulf of Guinea to Borneo, and it would be wailed across the wide Pacific. It would prevent overcrowding and blocking at the short holes if a course were laid out to the sun and back, and the British golfers were started off at five minutes intervals. It would be nearly 93,000,000 miles to the turn, and the same back, and if the British golfers then did a short round to Venus and home again, putting on another 50,000,000, they would nearly have done their usual year's golf.

"But this little glimpse into the fairyland of golf," said the Hon.

Member in a tone of conclusion, "has all come about through the contemplation of that simple-looking pimply little ball, and it is time we wound up our consideration of it. It has been said that there are 15,000,000 used in Britain in the year. Suppose the average cost is 1_s._ 6_d._, which it probably is. That means that the nice little sum of 1,125,000 is spent by the British golfer in the course of the year in golf b.a.l.l.s."

"Prodigious!" exclaimed the Parson.

"Well, I don't know what you think, William," put in the Colonel, "but my recommendation is that all facts which indicate the extensiveness of this game, and the enthusiasm of its followers, such as some of those you have quoted, had better be kept to ourselves. On one day in April we shall be having a Chancellor of the Exchequer coming along with a fine scheme for paying the National Debt off by means of golf. And now, boys, we'd better be off. Next Thursday, we said, didn't we? And it's to be red b.a.l.l.s then, if necessary!"

VII

When the short days, wet and cold, come on, some golfers speak of the virtues of close seasons for games. There never can be any regularly ordained close season in golf; such is neither needed nor desired. But now and then some men will try the imposition of such a season on themselves.

They oil and put away their clubs, give away their stock of b.a.l.l.s, put everything connected with golf away into the box-room, and settle down to a course of winter reading, study, and attention to those domestic and social matters which have for so long been sadly neglected. All goes well for a week, and then they think there will be no harm in getting out an aluminium putter and practising on the hearthrug for five minutes or so in the evening. This is found to be a wonderfully interesting occupation, and presently they unstore the mashie or well-lofted iron in order to practise negotiating stymies--a form of practice which cannot fail to be useful in the forthcoming season. Ten days later they ask themselves what is the use of being strong-minded and miserable, they ring up somebody on the telephone, and they catch the next train down to the course.

In the majority of cases the particular way in which the cold affects the members of the close-season party and crabs their shots, is in reducing their wrists and hands to a state of numbness in which it is certainly difficult for anybody to play the game as it ought to be played. Such people may be recommended to adopt a very simple device, which is in favour among the best and st.u.r.diest players, namely, that of wearing knitted cuffs or mittens over those wrists and coming some way up on the hands. Mr. Hilton carries this idea to the extent of wearing a special kind of thick, warm cuffs made of fur, and the effect is to keep warm those important and much exposed veins in the wrists which feed the hands with blood. The difference is wonderful; but if it is still insufficient to enable the man to do what he considers justice to his game, and if he is still miserable, there is no harm in his imposing a close season upon himself. But he must not talk like the fox who lost his tail, and try to induce others to stop the game as well. It is no use pretending that the game generally would be any the better for it.

But let us take the question as to whether a man's golf, supposing it is normally good golf, ever can be any better for a more or less lengthy stoppage, and upon it I have taken the opinions of several different authorities, with the result that, though they do not all agree, there is a strong balance in favour of keeping your golf going all the time if you want to improve or even maintain it at its best standard. You will generally find that it is only the amateurs who ever get really stale.

The professionals rarely do. Mr. Horace Hutchinson is apparently one of those who do not believe in giving up one's golf for any length of time.

He thinks the results are generally disastrous, and he tells how on one occasion in his earlier days, when he was reading for the Bar, he did not look at a golf club for some months, with the result that when he resumed the game he found that he had forgotten a great deal of it, had to relearn it, and found even then that it was not the same good game that he had been bred up with. He now counsels all who are going anywhere for a long holiday or anything of that kind, on no account to go near a place where there is no golf course, for the result will be that life will never be the same again as regards its golf. "You never play again," he says, "with the same confidence, the same fearlessness, the same certainty that you can control the ball and make it do what you tell it to do. You may make something of the game afterwards, but I am sure that you will lose immensely. You do not play in the same instinctive way as before." Men like Braid and Vardon would not say "Thank you" for a month's holiday in which they could not play golf regularly, despite the fact that they are always playing. One recent winter Harry Vardon was sent to Bournemouth for his health, and they took good care to see that his clubs did not go with him, and solemnly warned him that he must not play there, for he might have been equal to borrowing somebody else's clubs. Then he would write to London in a most pathetic manner, saying, "They won't let me have my clubs and play," as if he were being deprived of food and the necessaries of life.

There are some exceptions to this rule of continual play that may be taken as proving it. There is the case of Andrew Kirkaldy, who, after being second for the Open Championship in 1879, went for to be a soldier, was sent to Egypt, fought at Tel-el-Kebir and other places, came back in 1886, and soon afterwards tied for the Open Championship.

Mr. Edward Blackwell had two separate spells of farming in California, each lasting about five years, during which periods he never saw a golf club or ball, but each time he came home he regained his best form almost immediately, and captured Royal and Ancient Club medals. But, after all, in golf every man must be to a large extent a law unto himself; and the fact that he is so is one of the glories of the game.

VIII

It is a glorious thing to play a game that one need never give up, however long one may live. And what is more, the game can be played well by the veteran, and he enjoys it almost as much as ever, and does not merely take part in it for the sake of the fresh air and the exercise.

Possibly if he had not been a golfer in his middle age, and perhaps in his youth as well, he would not be able to play any game, even a fireside game, by the time he was due to become an octogenarian. For some years previously his pleasures would have been with the angels. One cannot discover who is the oldest golfer, but there are many still active on the links who are nearing ninety, including a celebrated peer-patron of the game. Considering the matter from the other point of view, we have the remarkable fact that nearly every professional golfer of note in these days (and a large though decreasing proportion of amateurs) began to play golf of some sort as soon as his baby intelligence had developed sufficiently to make him understand that if he hit a ball with a stick it would move. They began to play as soon as they could walk, and almost to a man they declare that the very first memories they have of anything in life are a.s.sociated with playing some kind of childish golf, and aping their elders in every possible way.

It is to the fact of their having done so that they attribute most of their success in their after life at the game. As children they developed a free, easy, natural swing that has stood them in good stead ever since, and it has become so rooted into their system that they are far less liable than other golfers who began much later, to be constantly going off their game and dropping out of their proper swing.

Harry Vardon, James Braid, J. H. Taylor, Alexander Herd, Willie Park, Jack White, and all the rest of them played golf as the very smallest children. The two last-named both declare that they developed their extraordinary putting faculties when they were mere babies. Park, a king of putters, it is certain, gained his extraordinary delicacy of touch, and fine discrimination in selecting the line to the hole, through practising as a very small boy with marbles on the stone or brick floor of his father's workshop at Musselburgh, a slight hollow in the floor being regarded as the hole. He got a pa.s.sion for such putting practice, and at nights would surrept.i.tiously borrow the key to the shop and hie there with some other boys for putting practice. He says that he has never had such hard putting to do since, and that when in due course he went out on the links to play the real game, putting seemed very easy to him. The first clubs that Alexander Herd ever used were glued together for him by his mother, and his first golf was obtained in the streets of St. Andrews. It was much the same with several of the best amateurs, though from the evidence that one can obtain they do not appear to have been such keen golfers when babies as were the professionals.

Mr. Hilton, one of the most skilful amateurs of any time, thinks he was about six when he first went forth to try to play with a full set of his father's clubs.

Then, practising all through their childhood and youth, at what age did these men first begin to play first-cla.s.s golf, and to give signs of their future greatness? From an a.n.a.lysis I have made of their own statements, and the events of their careers, I find that in nearly every case it was at about seventeen--just when their stature and physical powers had fairly fully developed. In practically all cases men who were subsequent champions were good scratch players at this age. But you will always find that it takes them many more years after this to make their game perfect--many years of the hardest and most persistent practice conceivable. Mr. Hilton came on very quickly, being in championship form when he was twenty-two, and Taylor had fully matured by the time he was twenty-three. But Harry Vardon was twenty-six, and Braid was thirty-one.

Generally a man who is destined to play the great golf, and who has been at it all his life, does not begin to settle down to the steady brilliant game until he has pa.s.sed twenty-five, and from that point he usually improves a little until he is thirty, at which he is at his very best. Thirty is the golden age for golf. Look back through history, and see how formidable have been the great men at that age. The fact may be useful evidence against those who sneer about the "old man's game," as showing how long it takes to attain perfect golf when everything is in your favour. Mr. Barry's victory in the amateur event when he was nineteen, and those of Mr. Travis and Mr. Hutchings when these gentlemen were quite middle-aged (anyhow, Mr. Travis, the younger, was forty-three), have to be regarded simply as phenomena, and as the exceptions which prove the rule. The tale of the ages, as gathered from all experience, seems to be that the ideal golfer begins as a baby, is scratch at seventeen, a champion at twenty-five or twenty-six, and perhaps again at thirty-two, and that thenceforth he plays serenely on until at eighty-five or thereabouts he engages in a great foursome with other old warriors. And, taking it all round, a very good time he has had.

IX

In the dampest and gloomiest days of the British winter, the golfer's fancy often flies to Riviera and Egyptian courses; and a while later the golfer follows his fancy, so that he may have a dry game in the sunshine again. Golf in Egypt is a thing to itself. "Through the green" it is mere sandy desert, for bunkers there are chiefly mud walls, and the putting "greens," which vary a little on the different courses, are generally made of rolled mud. Yet this golf is eagerly partic.i.p.ated in and most thoroughly enjoyed by the large British population. They would not be without it for a thousand Pyramids. They have their compet.i.tions and they have a championship of their own. Egyptian golf has a curious history. It is nineteen years since the game was first played in the Land of Pyramids--that is to say, since two players drove from a tee and holed out on what they called a "green"; but some time before that a ball was. .h.i.t by a golfer. The circ.u.mstances are remarkable and are worthy of the baptism of an ancient country like Egypt to a Royal and Ancient game. Rameses II. and Cleopatra would have approved.

This is the true story. A full-blooded Scottish golfer, imbued with all the best traditions, and all the better for being a clergyman, none other than the well-known Rev. J. H. Tait of Aberlady, went for a holiday to Egypt, and duly climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid.

Arrived there he rested, and to do so the more effectually he put his hands into his pockets, when, curiously enough, he felt a golf ball in one of them. In a moment the golfer was ablaze in the parson, and he determined that right there on the summit of the Great Pyramid of Cheops he would play the game for the first time in Egypt. So he teed up the ball and addressed it most elaborately and conscientiously with his umbrella, for, of course, he had no clubs with him. There were none in Egypt. Then he made a bonny St. Andrews swing: the ball went spinning away through the fine desert atmosphere and was never seen again--by the man who hit it, at all events. There were some great jokes about this shot afterwards. They said that in future days some old antiquary would find this ball in the desert sand, and would try to make out the hieroglyphics (the name of the maker, Tom Morris) upon it. As they would then be indistinct it would be suggested that they stood for Moses, and the inference would be that the lawgiver of Israel was a golfer.

Some years after that a course was laid out near Cairo. The men who made that course and played the first golf were none other than Mr. J. E.

Laidlay, twice Amateur Champion, and Sir Edgar Vincent, who won the Parliamentary handicap in 1905. This was in 1888, and Sir Edgar had only had one taste of golf previously, that being in the previous summer, but he thought it would be as well to take his clubs with him to Egypt. Mr. Laidlay, going to Egypt also, thought the same thing; but when they got there they found there was no golf at all. They did not know each other; but Sir Edgar knew Mr. Laidlay by reputation, sought him out, and they conferred together on the miserable character of the situation. Mr. Laidlay was famishing for some golf, and stirred up a great enthusiasm in the other, so they agreed that they would go out into the desert together and make a course.

"We made a survey of the outskirts," said Sir Edgar, "and found the material to be of the most unpromising description--seven parts sand and one part scrub everywhere. There was one comforting fact, and that was that our bunkers were ready made, for there were bunkers everywhere.

Mr. Laidlay's enthusiasm overcame everything, and by dint of hard labour and perseverance we soon had a nine-hole course laid out. In this way we were certainly the pioneers of golf in Egypt, and, as I believe, in Africa." When Mr. Laidlay went home again he entered for the Amateur Championship and won it for the first time. One of the first converts to golf in Egypt was Lord Cromer.

There are now nine clubs and courses in Egypt. At Cairo the round usually consists of twelve holes, although there are two more which are very seldom played. It is desert golf, and the "greens" are brown patches of puddled earth, over which sand is sprinkled daily to true them up and slow them down a bit. Some say that the golf at Helouan is the best in Egypt, and others prefer the a.s.souan course, in the making of which Mr. John Low had much say and which he has visited since. Here the greens are made of rolled Nile mud. But most prefer the Mena House course, which is laid out on a bit of the very small area of gra.s.s there is in Egypt, which is so precious that players are requested to play only in rubber-soled shoes for fear of breaking it. For part of each year the course is under water. Not only is there gra.s.s here, but the course is laid out alongside the Great Pyramid, the shadow of which is thrown across it. This Great Pyramid--2,000,000 cubic feet of stone--gives golfers a queer feeling if they catch sight of it when swinging for their drive. When Napoleon was beginning the battle of the Pyramids hereabouts, he said to his men, "Soldiers! from the summit of yonder Pyramid forty ages behold you." That is so, and the golfers may wish they did not. They may think it is no game for spectators of this kind.

X

Many golfers, like others who are not golfers, have come to the conclusion that in the twentieth century it were better for them and their game to think and grow thin. One of the most enthusiastic and determined says that success in the game depends chiefly on the stomach, and one is half inclined to think that he is right. He is, to this extent, that it is hard to play fine golf when the interior mechanism is in bad working order. And it is quite apparent that we modern golfers, like other people who are outside the pale of our n.o.ble game, are not the possessors of such strong heads and tough digestive apparatus as our ancestors of the links used to be. The man in the street dare not for his life walk into the c.o.c.k Tavern and call the "plump head waiter"

to bring him a pint of port just because it is five o'clock, as Tennyson used to do as regularly and deliberately when he was Fleet Street way, as if it were nothing more fortifying than tea that he demanded. The modern man would be too much afraid, lest perchance he should not know when it was six o'clock. We are not like our forefathers, and we can never be like them. There is a queer tale of a comparatively modern golfer who drank deeply overnight, so that his path to his bedchamber was one of tortuous difficulty, but who, nevertheless, got up in the morning to win a championship; and it is not many years since a picture was drawn for a text-book on golf in which it was suggested that "the man to back" was he who was sitting down to something in the nature of a Porterhouse steak with a not very small bottle of wine at the side of his plate.

From a high moral point of view those ancestors of ours who bred inferior stomachs for us were, of course, wrong, and yet they did many fine things on their pints of port. They wrote great prose and verse, they painted fine pictures, their taste and skill in handicrafts were superb, they won the battle of Waterloo and the battle of Trafalgar, and they could--most undoubtedly they could--play golf. Having regard to the quality of their tools and the state of the upkeep of their links, they made many fine rounds, which showed that they had great skill, that they had a fine steadiness of hand and eye, and even that they upon occasion went in for thinking golf!

And of all the types of the modern Britishers' ancestors, give us for great courage at the board and for a capacity for high enjoyment according to his lights, the golfing ancestor! He was a rare fellow. He went out to play his round by day, and he foregathered the same evening with the others of his golfing society and celebrated the day as many persons say that a good day should be celebrated. And it was a matter of duty with him too, not merely inclination. On the morning of the play and dinner days of some of the fine old Scottish golfing societies, it was the custom to send the boy of the club round to each member's house summoning him to the meeting, and taking his name if he promised to be present at the evening meal.

The old golfers saw to it that the quality of all the fine things of which they partook was of the very best, for leading features of their dinners were the gifts of various members of their own company, and it was the common custom before each gathering was ended to make large provision for the next one in the way of promises of food and drink, and these promises once made were exacted to the last ounce and drop, under penalty of fines of dozens and cases of wines and spirits.

No club has richer traditions in this respect than the old North Berwick. The viands that its own company sent to its table for its constant meetings were fine things. One time Mr. Hay of Rockville sent along a round of beef stewed in hock. Sir D. Kinloch sent Shetland beef, the Duke of Buccleuch contributed large quant.i.ties of venison and venison pasty, while the Earl of Eglinton, as an apology for his absence from one meeting when captain, sent a fine buck. As for liquids, Sir David Blair presented the club at the start with three dozens of champagne, and thereafter it became the custom to fine a member exactly that for any delinquency or omission on his part. Thus we have a minute on the books for 23rd September 1835, which reads: "At dinner it was voted unanimously, on the motion of the captain, that Mr. John Sligo be fined in a case of three dozen champagne for not sending a cook as proposed by himself, by which means the turtle, venison, and other delicacies were entirely destroyed." Judging by the temper of these old North Berwickers, and of the importance that they attached to these things prandial, one would have been inclined to congratulate Mr. Sligo on the leniency with which his grave offence was treated. Whisky by the dozen and half-dozen came from Campbell of Glensaddell and Macdonald of Clanra.n.a.ld, shrub from Mr. Whyte-Melville, rum from Major Pringle, casks of beer and porter from various other members, and so on; claret, withal, which was presented in large quant.i.ties, being the favourite drink.