~ CHAPTER I. ~

General and Introductory.

It is only about fifteen years ago that any man travelling in England with golf clubs among his luggage was an object of no common interest and even of some suspicion to his fellow-travellers, and when they had made enquiry and ascertained the strange purpose of the leather-handled and heavy-headed sticks, they still regarded him as an amiable lunatic whose amiability was more questionable than his lunacy.

To-day—that is, fifteen years later—more golf is played than any other game.

This is a bold saying, but it is not beside the truth. It is true that more people assemble to watch a cricket match or a football match. You can sit and watch these; to watch a golf match you have to walk, which is not so good. But all these people thus assembled are spectators merely; they have no thought of taking part in the games that they assemble to see—would as soon dream of going to the North Pole with Nansen as adventuring themselves in a football scrimmage, or of volunteering to march on Johannesburg with Jameson as facing an over from the only Australian Jones. They go to look on. But the people who take an interest in golf have an active—athletic as far as their years and muscles admit—interest in it; they all mean to play. If a large concourse, as often happens, gathers to watch the final of a Championship, so that the players drive down a dense human lane, with occasional excursions into the hedges, much to the latter’s discomfort—every ill weed or shapely tree in this human hedge is a golfer, is watching the play not only with a spectator’s interest, but with the interest of a pupil and an imitator, studying how he, by the great examples before him, shall improve his own future performance. There are more golfers in the world than players of any other out-of-door game; if anybody doubts the truth of it I will refer him to statistics or ask him to wait at the High Hole at St. Andrews in September while seven couples hole out of the Short Hole in front of him. Either method of proof is convincing—the former is the less tedious. And not only do more men play golf than any other game, but the men who play golf play more golf than the men who play other games play of those said games. For one thing the golfer golfs all the year. The cricketer only crickets in the summer; the footballer only foots the ball in winter. But golf is always with one. And besides this there are more professional golfers than professionals of the other game—by this I do not mean the men who are paid for giving lessons and keeping small boys off the putting greens and so on—I mean men who so devote their lives to the game that it may be said of them that it has become their profession, so that when one asks with reference to one of them:

“What is so-and-so?,”—meaning is he in the Church, the Stage, the Stock Exchange, or the Bar?—the answer is apt to be:

“Oh, he! He’s a golfer!,”

It is a sufficing life business—he is a golfer. Well, anything corresponding to this you would say about men who pursue other games, for a short time of their lives only, and for a few months only in each year.

“He is a cricketer,” you could only say of a man during the few years between his schooldays and his thirtieth year, and during a few months in the summer. Even of the great “W. G.,” you are surprised to hear it said now and again: “He is a doctor. He has patients!,” Even of the professedly professional cricketers (those who are paid, frankly and above board, for playing cricket) there are many who have another supplementary profession to fall back on in the winter of their discontent. The football player, similarly, needs a resource for the idle summer.

But the golfer is always active. The swallows come and the swallows go, but the season makes no difference to him; he does not have to emigrate—to Australia or the West Indies—for cricket in winter. He is always at it. His profession, whether it pays him or not, fills all his time. Of course, it is not the same to say that a thing is good and to say that it is popular. I am not concerned in proving the goodness of golf; I am only pointing out its popularity. But if such popularity does not prove its worth it at least seems to prove one thing, that it must be supplying one human need; and if that need be a healthy and reasonable one it comes, after all, to very much the same thing as proving that which supplies such a need to be good.

And surely the need is reasonable—the need for good air, healthy exercise, distraction from worry. All this golf supplies, and supplies it more adequately than any other game we know. Of course good exercise is not to be taken as a synonym for violent exercise. Football provides that, and, in less degree, cricket; but violent exercise is not good exercise for middle-aged men, and most men are middle-aged; for most men, therefore, the exercise of golf is better. And certainly no game will better provide immunity from worry. There is little fear of the golfer thinking about anything but his game while he is engaged in it. The trouble is rather to get him to think of anything else while he is not playing it. And if all open air is good, no open air can be better or more open than the free breezes of the golf links—generally with a pinch of sea-salt in them. Golf proves itself equal to the supply of the reasonable need in the fullest degree.

And equal to supplying it, too, all happy, out of the life of man through—all down the seven stages. There is an age of marbles, and there is an age of “bumble-puppy,” whist; but there is no age of golf—it is the game of every age. And it satisfies every age. You can put a child out into the back garden with a little club and an old ball and he will be happy and all in peace till he knocks his little sister’s front teeth out with it. But then that is her fault—girls always get in the way. Or you can send your undergraduate son out on the links and he will golf away, healthy and happy, out of mischief, all day long. Or your grandfather can be given a putter and sent to amuse himself, without danger to anyone, all the afternoon on the ladies’ links. No other game will serve all ends so fully.

An old man’s game! That is the reproach that is most often levelled at it, with a reference to “Scotch croquet,”and the like. It is true that a man can play it in his old age. Is that much of a drawback to it? But the meaning of the reproach, no doubt, is that as a game it is senile, demanding none of youth’s force or vigour. But of this it is only to be said that it is an untruth. Old men play it, and play it tolerably, though not as youths play it; but this only with the proviso that they learnt to play it when they were boys. Set an old man, a man of middle age, any man you please who has come to adult years, to learn golf, you will find that he produces quite a different game from that which he would have learnt as a boy—a very poor parody. He will enjoy it equally no doubt—the child of the old age is always precious—but he will not play it as well.

The history of the Championships—amateur and professional—reads us a lesson. Take the last decade or so of years—in which, alone, the Amateur Championship Tournament has existed—do we find the names of old men writ on the scroll? I do not think so. One there is, in the course of these years, who won the Amateur Championship when he was forty. None have won the open event at that age; and the majority of the winners of both have been under thirty. And that exception, in regard to the Amateur Tournament—Mr. Leslie Balfour-Melville, namely—is so young a man, so active, strong, and muscular for his years, that he may take rank with the exceptions that help to prove the rule.

But the old man, who learns the game senily, has as much fun as any champion of them all—more. All that he does well is on the credit side, better than expectation. The champion has less pleasure in his success, a profounder grief at his aberrations. For this golf is not like cricket, tennis, football, or the rest, where the bad player amongst the good is a misery to himself and a nuisance to the world in general. At golf he does not go among the good, except with the pleasant assistance of a strong player as his partner. And even to his partner’s  strength he is no direct—only an indirect—source of weakness. He does not interfere with his partner’s stroke or game—does not upset all balance like the weak partner in a tennis set whom the opponent will bombard with all his volleys from across the net. The feeble player at golf does not interfere with, or suffer from, the stroke of the strong.

Since England has taken up the game of Scotland she has played it with success, having champions both in the amateur and the open events. And why should she not? She confesses no inferiority in her links of Sandwich, Westward Ho!, and Hoylake to those of St. Andrews, Camoustie, and Prestwick, and she will not be likely to confess an inferiority in her men. Golfers had an idea, for a while, that it was impossible to play golf anywhere but beside the sea, on that quality of sandy soil that is especially known as “links.” It is true that all England, and Scotland too, knew that the Club at Blackheath was the oldest in the world; but men were a little scornful of Blackheath as a golf green, one having actually ventured to suggest that the nature of the heath accounted for the tardy spread of golf in England—irreverent scoffer. But growing needs, and the ubiquitous demand for golf greens, have taught men a broader, less exclusive, wisdom. Ghosts of old golfers must be turning in their graves, with Scottish-accentuated grumbles, at the grounds sometimes used for golf by their descendants. Labour and intelligent care can make a tolerable ground for golf out of anything. The application of these qualities has made Byfleet, near Woking, a most pleasant inland course, out of a raw material of pine forest. Again, at Las Palmas, in the Grand Canary, the golfer may play golf, and enjoy it, though not a blade of grass gladden his eye. It is all on the clay. There have to be some special rules to allow you to do a little in the way of scraping away loose crumbling clay and stones lying about your ball, but with that concession it makes good practice and good fun. The putting greens, which are brown, are excellent, pounded hard with a beater so that they are quite level, with a dust of fine sand grit on them that holds the ball and invites firm putting. On no quality of soil need a man despair of playing enjoyable golf.

The qualities that make the good golfer are those that go to make the good man—with a few extra. He must have all the moral equipment of soberness, industry, control of temper, patience, firm nerve, and the rest of them that go to the composition of merely human goodness; and he will need, besides, a little private outfit of health, strength, and opportunity. The opportunity can scarcely in these days fail him, and the health and strength he may best pick up, by the way, while avail­ing himself of his golfing opportunities. Wonderfully exact or keen eyesight, it appears, is not an essential. One of our greatest players, who has twice been champion, was rejected (mercifully) for the Navy, for indifferent eyesight. By way of compensation, perhaps, this player seems to keep his eyes fastened with peculiar steadfastness on the ball: and no doubt to look at the ball with all the eyes you have while you strike at it is of greater importance than the quality of the organs. There is a limit—it is as well not to be blind.

For the rest, whether you have these endowments or lack them, whether fortune made you for the select band of champions or the gloriously numerous throng of duffers, you will get equal enjoyment out of the game. Therefore the outcome of the whole matter is that every man should be a golfer. But what man is not?

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