~ CHAPTER 5. ~

Match and Medal Play.

Turning back the pages of golf “as she was played” by our ancestors, we are surprised to see what a large place was held by foursomes in older golfing days. They, those ensemble men in top hats and swallow-tailed coats to whom we owe our being, were in the habit of playing more foursomes than anything else. Perhaps they were a more sociable folk than we, their descendants: for though we play and enjoy an occasional foursome, we should be very far from regarding golf so played as in any sense typical. The game as we understand it is a game of match play—a duel—where man is pitted single-handed against man. Foursome play we are rather disposed to regard as a piece of by-play—a pleasant relaxation from the real, stern business of golfing life, which we conceive to be golf in singles. The foursomes that our ancestors affected were not necessarily matches in which all the players were on an equality. Rather, as would seem, they preferred games in which a strong player and a moderate player were in partnership against a pair of similar relative calibre. These matches are certainly among the most interesting and enjoyable that can be played, and one may well regret that they are not more numerous. Apart from the merits intrinsic in the foursome, its popularity in the old days of golf may have arisen from the circumstance that, when golf was a more costly and less democratic game, not only did fewer people play it, but those that did play did not devote themselves to it with the single-minded fervour of the ardent golfer of to-day. Generally, the old-time golfer was a big laird, a lord—maybe a magnate, whose local duties were a heavy tax on his time, so that he played golf as relaxation merely.  Naturally he would not play it in its most finished and forcible manner, and naturally, therefore, it often pleased him to take as his partner a professional, who should help him over the hard places, retrieve his errors, point out to him their causes, and so make his day’s golfing a pleasure instead of a toil.  This, or something like this, we may conceive to have been a great factor in the popularity of the foursome in the days of our ancestors.

THE NEGLECT OF FOURSOME PLAY.

To find the reason of the wane of its popularity it does not need to seek far. Most golfers of to-day do a deal of their golfing by train, coming to the course by one train and leaving by another, being bound down therefore within strict limits of time.  The natural consequence is that they want to get all the golf they can within those limits. In a single one gets two knocks for every one that one gets in a foursome; moreover, a single goes quicker, and is more easily got together at the starting point. All these reasons make the golfer of to-day—a quickly moving day—prefer singles. Just at the moment there seems to be an indication of a turn in the tide. Golfers appear to be waking to a notion that they have perhaps treated the foursome with undue neglect, and are beginning to revert to it a little. Certainly it is the most agreeable kind of game for a spectator to watch. There is more variety of interest, both of strictly golfing and of the human kind. One of the best known humorous positions with which golf makes us acquainted is the position of being confidant to two partners in a foursome, both of them bewailing into your sympathetic ears the other’s misdeeds.

A further reason that has led the modern player to abandon, in large degree, his foursome is the selfish and not altogether satisfactory one that they do not give him equally good practice for the numerous competitions which the modern golfer takes a part in.  This love of competition by score is entirely a new feature of the game. If we look back over the minutes of any of  the older clubs—say, the Royal Blackheath, for instance—we find that not only were foursomes the most common form of such matches as seemed worthy of record, but that the interest even in singles, as compared with the absence of interest in scoring competitions, was infinite. Virtually there were no such competitions. No man ever dreamed of keeping his score; it would have seemed to him as vain a superfluity as counting the number of steps he took between Temple Bar and the Mansion House. They—these old golfers—were content to score their matches by holes, and did not care for the decorations of the monthly medal-monger. But they used to be rather heavily-much more heavily than we thing of betting to-day. Indeed, there is probably no game that is more free of this vice, if we are to call moderate wagering a vice, than golf. Its own intrinsic interest is found to be enough, without added incentives. It is difficult to see why the modern golfer is so fond of playing for prizes. Most of them are handicap prizes, so that no especially great glory attaches to their capture. Perhaps the desire to have a trophy to display is part of the inducement—a childish motive surely, if an innocent one. For certainly this so-called pot-hunting is innocent enough, in spite of all the hard things that some censorious critics have said of it. Men attend various meetings, and play for various prizes, it is true; but in very few cases is the value of the prizes sufficient to go an appreciable length, even when won, towards paying travelling expenses and lodging expenses. The real motive that makes men gather together, like eagles about the carcase, is an amiable and sociable one: they are glad to meet, and make matches, and talk. Being on the spot, they take the opportunity of putting in the best score they can, for the sake of the carcase; but it is altogether to mistake the reason of their gathering to suppose that any greed of lucre, as represented by the prize or medal, is a considerable factor in bringing it about. If men like to play by score, it is difficult to see why they should not do so, or what legitimate cause of offence they give to the golfer of the older and purely match-playing school.

WEAKNESSES OF SCORE PLAY.

Yet to most people that men should prefer score play to match play must seem, on reflection, an inexplicable thing. In the first place, the responsibility of score play, to use the cant term in art, is so infinitely greater. A single bad hole—the result, perhaps, of a single bad stroke, or even, it may be, of a single piece of bad luck—may ruin all the good that has been done before. So much depends, therefore, on each stroke that to the ordinarily constituted man, who is not a Napoleon or a Wellington, the constant risk is oppressively great, and score play should be a hateful thing. And half the men who start in a competition are apt to declare, when they are half-way round, that they will never play again in a scoring contest; but they always do. The fashion and the spirit of emulation, and the desire to retrieve the past, prove too strong for them; and on the next opportunity they are at it again as eagerly as ever. Another weakness of the scoring plan is that if the competitor does badly in the first two or three holes all the interest in the game is gone for him. He has no chance of recovery, and henceforth the rest of the round is a mere procession of weariness, which he tries to relieve by affecting an interest, which is merely platonic, in his partner’s fortunes.

The habit of mind needed for successfully playing competitions by score is rather different from that which is peculiarly favourable to success in match play. The former needs that a man should be peculiarly capable of playing up to his own best game, indifferent and equal-tempered alike in fair weather and foul, never succumbing to the temptation that proved fatal to Lot’s wife of looking back over past errors, never allowing himself to be frightened into unseasonable and unreasonable nervousness by the excellence of his score and consequent prospect of success. But in the match other qualities come into service. Here you are not only occupied with playing up to your own best capabilities, indifferent to your opponent, but you are on the contrary concentrating all your attention on your individual opponent, always trying, at every stroke, to “go one better” than him, always under the spur of his mutually emulous effort, prepared when he makes an exceptionally good stroke to do equally well, or, when he fails of his duty, to be certain of doing yours and so of getting the better of him in the end. In the match you have a hand-to-hand contest, in which the personal element, the magnetism, and all those subtle qualities that go to make one man master of another, are called into active being. In score play you are going along virtually by yourself, self-centred, heeding no other’s play. Both modes of competition have the defects of their qualities. One the one hand no one is likely to contest the fact that match play is the proper and original manner of playing the game whether in singles or foursomes, whereas score play is more or less of an expedient for comparing the results of the play of many individuals engaged simultaneously in playing a single round. There are only two ways, other than the scoring way, in which many players can be brought together and their execution compared—namely by tournament and by “Bogey.” The tournament way is well known. The players are drawn against each other and go on, knocking one another out, until only one, the winner, is left standing.  This is the method adopted in the Amateur Championship contest.

THE BAGNAL-WILD PLAN.

It is modified by application of what is sometimes known as the Bagnall-Wild plan, according to which so many blanks are added to the original entries as shall make their number a power of two—the result being that all byes occur in the first heat, and the tournament runs out smoothly to its issue ever after.  This is, of course, only applicable to those tournaments in which no halved matches are permitted, but in which, as in the Amateur Championship, the players continue playing, if they are equal at the round’s end, until they arrive at a decision. It is therefore better suited to those tournaments in which all start from scratch than those in which odds are given; for it is obvious that where one player is handicapped to give another one stroke in the round, this proportion cannot be maintained unless a full round be played, with the result that the competition might never finish. The fairest plan of all is perhaps the American tournament plan, in which each player meets every other in the competition, and the winner is he whose wins show the biggest proportion to his losses. But this, too, requires a longer life than the ordinary golfing span. “Bogey” is a score, determined before starting, against which the players compete as if the “Bogey” were a human opponent who had done each hole in a given number. The decision as between the human golfers is determined by their relative positions with regard to the bogey, reckoned by the holes at the end of the round. It is rather to be thought that the “Bogey” plan is the fairest of all those, after the American tournament, that golfing ingenuity has devised for bringing a number together in a single round. It is, in the first place, more like match play than score play, seeing that the play is by holes against the “Bogey’s” score at each hole. The human element, the “moral” effect of one nature on another, is indeed inevitably absent, for there is nothing in the least moral about “Bogey.” Still there does not perpetually hang over the player’s head, like the sword of Damocles, that fearful “responsibility” and sense of the doom possibly attending a single ill struck ball that oppresses him in play by score. Also the “Bogey” plan is free from a most serious drawback of the tournament plan, that in the latter the good players run a chance of being drawn against each other, to their mutual destruction, while the indifferent players may slide indifferently along meeting only their own equals, so that conceivably a man may arrive in the final heat without meeting any really very formidable opponent. A modification, or combination of the scoring and tournament plans, has been tried with some success. By this method the best eight scorers in a preliminary canter, which is conducted by scoring play, decide their mutual merits by subsequent tournament play. Against this combined method it is possible to urge that it is not just that the man who has distanced all competitors by several strokes, may be, on the score, should be called upon to start for the tournament on even terms, without any advantage derived from his previous play. All methods, therefore, it will be seen, have their demerits—the preference must be given according to individual taste. Ideally the American tournament is the best; but life is short.

Of match play there is a modification, other than that introduced by the giving of odds, namely, the play of a single man against a combination of two others, each playing his own ball, and the single man’s score for each hole being counted against the lower score of either of the allied side. This is a variety that makes the game very interesting. The stronger player is always reasonably sure of having to play up at each hole, for, if one opponent fails, the other is likely to be dangerous. No stimies are allowed; and partly for this reason, partly because the interest is generally so well sustained, some of the lowest scores have been recorded by a good player playing against the better ball of two moderate players, though the match is, of course, determined by the holes won and lost.

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