~ CHAPTER 7. ~

Rules and Technical Terms.

RULES.

There is rather a tendency at the present day to regard the rules of golf as though they were like the American Constitution, “struck off at one time by the hand and purpose of man.” There could not be a more radical mistake, nor one which, in a small way, has more troublesome consequences. For the truth is that so far from having been formed in this catastrophic way, they are the product of a very gradual growth, constant addition being made to them as the occasion has arisen. It therefore follows that they are not to be regarded as crystallised, and immutable, in their present form, but that we must continue to change them to suit the changing conditions of golfing life. Without this they must constantly fail to meet the ends for which they were designed; but this is so little understood that golfers of experience have now and again got up at general meetings of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the fount of all golfing wisdom, and have solemnly proposed that no further alteration in the rules shall ever again be made. Such propositions have never been very gravely entertained, but the fact that such an idea could have entered into the mine of a fairly reasonable man shows the misconception that exists in regard to the nature of the rules.

In the first place the old Blackheath rules differed in many essential points from the rules that are in general use to-day, and in the second place the actual rules in use by the Royal and Ancient Club, now generally accepted as the law-giver, have been altered constantly as now and again seemed necessary to the golfing welfare. Within the space of comparatively few years the premier club has recognised the wish of the golfing world for a uniformity in rule, and has therefore collected into one main body such of the rules as seem of universal application, placing in a separate category under the head of “Local Bye-laws” such provisions as apply to the links of St. Andrews only. Such are rules regarding balls driven into the Eden, the “Station-master’s garden,” and the railway. These are separable accidents, which do not necessarily come in as hazards at all golf grounds, and therefore these rules are not generally needed. On the other hand, other greens have their own similar accidents of like nature, which they too can legislate for specially, under the head of local bye-laws, while using the general text of the Royal and Ancient rules.

The authority of this famous club to make laws of this general nature for the golfing world is fully though tacitly understood. No authority has been delegated to it, by any special golfing “social contract”; but it has fallen into this position of law-giver without seeking it; the honour has been forced upon it, and it has accepted it with no greedy, but even with a reluctant, hand. Lately some attempt has been made to form a body that shall hold an express, rather than a tacitly conceded, authority, to legislate for the golfing world, but it was long found impossible to conciliate all jealousies, and the state of matters remained, at the time of writing, as ever of old—St. Andrews was de facto legislator; de jure, there was none. Since the above words were written the committee spoken of has been embodied.

It needs not to go into the discussion of the rules in detail; such a discussion would be more than wearisome. But it would also be more than presumptuous to deny that on the whole they fulfil their purpose fairly well. On the other hand, it may not be amiss to point out a detail or two in which they are obviously faulty. Extraordinary as it may seem, they give no information at all as to what happens in the very conceivable case—which, one would thing most often have occurred in the course of actual play—of both players losing their balls at the same hole. We are left in blank darkness in the face of this very probable contingency. Again, there is a rule that when a ball is knocked away by the other ball, the former may be replaced at the option of the owner of the ball so knocked away; but the rule does not inform us when this option is to be exercised; whether the knocked has to declare his intention before or after the next stroke has to be played by the player whose ball is further from the hole we ought to be told very definitely whether the relative distances from the hole are to be reckoned before or after replacement. Also replacement may result in stimy—or non-replacement may have that result. There is no end to the bother that this hiatus in the rules may cause. But for the defect of this rule there is an excuse; namely, that it is a very young rule, not yet arrived at years of discretion—in the sense that, by reason of its novelty, its defects are only just becoming apparent. Until it was passed there was no such option of replacing a ball knocked away, therefore the time question never was raised. But men have been losing their balls presumably ever since golf began to be a game; and that no legislation should have been passed to enlighten them about their duty where both balls are lost simultaneously would be quite incredible if only it were not true. But the fact remains, beyond all dispute, so that we are able to admire the long sufferance of the golfing race, despite that it is engaged in the pursuit that, of all athletic exercises, is admittedly the most trying to the temper.

TECHNICAL TERMS.

The origin of some of the technical terms of golf is so obscure that the rules do well to make no attempt at tracing it. They do not define, they describe. The manner of playing the game is the subject of their initial description, and if the description is vague it is at least sufficient, though perhaps few are dependent on it for their knowledge of the game’s nature. Even the origin of the name “golf” is shrouded in impenetrable obscurity, no less deep than that which seems to conceal the etymology of the term “cricket.” In former years, before criticism was so active, we were content with the origin given in the dictionaries from a Teutonic word “kolbe,” a club. That sounded good enough for most people; we were quite ready to accept the statement of philologists as to the easy transposition of “b” and “f”: “k” in a Teuton mouth would sound much like the “g”—and “there we were.” Unhappily the subtle Mr. Andrew Lang has gone to work in his enquiring way, and has proved that “golf” has no more likeness to the old game “kolf” than it has to cricket; and hence one of the arguments in favour of this derivation receives so severe a knock on the head that it can scarcely make any show at all of coming up to time. We were the more ready to accept the Teutonic derivation, because golf is fairly proved to have been a Dutch game—though the Hollanders seem to have forgotten all about it now—by an act of Scottish Parliament—often quoted, forbidding the importation of golf balls from Holland, apparently because it interfered with the Scottish industry. This is something like proof positive but at that time Holland was a great nation with vast sea power. It is all of a piece with her general degeneration that she should have fallen away from the practice of the great and good game. So golf remains an obscurity as to its etymology, though we may still have leanings towards the Teutonic origin, as the most plausible, although the game of “kolf” was played in a barn. Most of the technical terms in golf, however, bear a suspicious likeness to French, rather than Teutonic, forms. “Dormy,” for instance, it is difficult, in the absence of any opposing French theory, not to connect with the sense and sound of French “dormir”—indicating that it is a condition of the game in which he who is “dormy” may allow himself to go to sleep, or that though the game is not yet “dead,” in the sense of being lost, it is in that half-and-half stage between life and death—the sleeping state—in which it is impossible for him who is at a disadvantage to rouse it into active life, though by heroic measures it is possible for him to keep it going and to finish the match by a tie. This is fanciful, likely enough, and certainly the theory is one that is very liable to abuse by him who is in the state of “dormy,” since according to the maxim, a match is never lost till it is won, and it behooves him to be careful that the victory is not stolen from him after all. But still, if it be only a man of straw, it may perhaps stand upright till some man of flesh is brought against it. There are so many of the old Scottish words undoubtedly borrowed from the French that their origin lends some support to the straw man, and certainly games of a nature similar to golf are played and have been played in France: e.g., the present crosse and the ancient Franco-Flemish chole.

The origin of that cant term stimie is not too obvious, but its meaning in more general language is indicated for us by Jamieson as being “a little bit of a thing,” a “small portion”—the writer has not the dictionary in question at hand for reference, but this is the sense of its meaning. Stimie, in the golfer’s sense, evidently meant originally that one could see only a small portion of the hole, by which one could hope to enter it, on account of the intervention of the other ball. The glossary in the “Badminton” book gives “Stymie”—(sic)—though more often written with an “i” in the first syllable as the “faintest form of anything.” Most of the names of the clubs tell their own tale, but there is also a tale that is told by the names of some of the clubs that have come into use of late years, so lately that very many of us can remember their introduction, and this tale is to the effect that it is a superfluity of labour to try to find too exact a definition for the names of certain things connected with golf, and perhaps of the cant terms used in names in general. One may instance the “mashie,” commonly so spelt. It is a club that was unknown, say, to be on the safe side, twenty years ago. It is a short-headed heavy club of iron, a cross between an iron and niblick. But why was it so called? It has no etymology worthy of the term, it only acquired its baptismal name because of its weight and aspect, as if a thing that could hit a smashing, mashing blow, could make a mash of anything it hit. This is hardly worthy of being called a derivation; yet it is the way the club got its name. Another club of recent invention is a little approaching cleek, not so universally used as the mashie, but affected by some. It is called a “jigger.” How it arrived at its designation is as hard to say as it is difficult to decide the etymological derivation of the mashie. Possibly it is only because its office is to make the ball jump up and loft a little way, with some suggestion of dancing a jig. At all events there is its name, and if other clubs have derived their names, and the other can terms been baptized, on similar methods, it is clearly a waste of time to spend much philological attention on them.

Golf has spread so widely that the “local bye-laws” sometimes have to deal with peculiarities that are not met with in our temperate climate. In India we are told that the crows are so curious about golf balls that they frequently swoop down and carry them off, and in places special rules have been framed to meet cases of theft by these corvine robbers.

Rabbits are a more common pest. They do not carry off the balls, but they dig holes, even—such is their irreverence—on the very putting greens. Special rules where rabbits are inordinately numerous, are commonly framed, permitting the lifting of the ball from a rabbit scrap without penalty.

Delicate problems in natural history often, under these circumstances, occur to aggravate the already sufficiently troublesome questions strictly incidental to golf—such as whether the particular cavity in which the ball was lodging was actually made by a rabbit or by some other agency. The owner of the ball in question is generally specially insistent on the rabbitty origin of the hole, and the doubt should perhaps, as in cricket, be given in the striker’s favour.

But the rule have other provinces, besides the mere execution of the game, to govern, such, for instance, as the definition of an amateur. These do not come within the covers of the book published at St. Andrews of the rules of  golf, but they have something to do with golf nevertheless. They are made by the body that has the management of the Amateur Championship Competition. Roughly speaking, we may say that an amateur golfer is defined to be one who does not derive an income from playing the game, or from any direct connection with it, but that a man is not precluded from playing golf as an amateur by the fact of being a professional at any other branch of sport. This is not the case in most branches of athletics—professionalism in one is a bar to the amateur status in another. British golf is on a different footing. On the other hand, the American Golfing Union has ruled otherwise. With them, if a man is a professional in one department of athletics, he is professional in all, golf included. Possibly there is a deal to be said on both sides of the question. In spirit one wishes to open golf as widely to all who are genuinely amateurs; but on the other hand, it is one of the best features of golf that the evils incidental to over-professionalism are quite absent from it. It is to be hoped that it will never become a gate-money game; and in that case there is every prospect that it will escape the troubles that other sports, less fortunate in this respect, have encountered..

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