FOOTNOTES:[7]Alas, if writing to-day, in 1919, it is in the past tense that this and some following passages would need to be phrased. He was gallant in volunteering, joined a Scottish regiment, and met a soldier's death.
[7]Alas, if writing to-day, in 1919, it is in the past tense that this and some following passages would need to be phrased. He was gallant in volunteering, joined a Scottish regiment, and met a soldier's death.
[7]Alas, if writing to-day, in 1919, it is in the past tense that this and some following passages would need to be phrased. He was gallant in volunteering, joined a Scottish regiment, and met a soldier's death.
One night I was going North by one of the sleeping trains and, having business late in the afternoon in Holborn, did not return to the civilized parts of the town, but dined at the Inns of Court Hotel. There are little tables for two, and at mine was dining also a man with whom I got into conversation. He told me he came from Glasgow and was in town on a business which he dared say I should think a very curious one—a big lawsuit pending about such a small matter as a ball used in the playing of the game of golf. Did I play golf? I said, "A little." I also said that in all the history of coincidences this was just about the most singular, for that I, too, had been engaged as a witness in the very same case. It was the case that the manufacturers of the Haskell ball were bringing against the manufacturers of the Kite ball. The point was to prove the Haskell patent good for their protection in a monopoly of making rubber-cored balls. The Haskell people had asked me to give evidence, because I was the first man to play with these balls in England, and because I considered them, andpacethe law, still consider them, an absolutely new departure in golf-ball manufacture.
It would be ungrateful not to think that providencedesigned this meeting at the Inns of Court Hotel, for my new friend was able to tell me what the right fee was for me to charge as an expert witness. He told me that that was what I was—an expert witness. I did not know it before, although I knew, without his telling me, the ancient divisions of the species "liar," into "liar," "d——d liar," and "expert witness." I was prepared to play my part, especially when I heard, with pleased surprise, the large fees paid for witnesses of this expert and unimpeachable character.
So, in due course of time, I was summoned up to London to attend the trial. I suppose other trials are sometimes as humorous, but I could not have believed it possible that there could be such good entertainment as I found in that Court, where I sat with much enjoyment calculating, between the acts, the sum to which my expert witness fees were mounting up as I waited. The Judge, Mr. Justice Buckley, if I remember right, was not a golfer; yet the way in which he kept his eye on the ball during the three days or so of that trial was above all praise. And the ball took a deal of keeping of the eye on itself, for there were many balls of different sorts brought into Court, and they were constantly running off the judge's desk, and tumbling and jumping about in the body of the Court, where learned gentlemen knocked their wigs together as they bent down to search for them. There was an old lady who said she had made balls which were practically identical with these Haskells all her life—balls for boys to play with. So she was commanded to go away and to come back with all her apparatus and to show in Court how the balls were made. She returned, and it appeared that, aftersome winding of thread about a core, the next proceeding was to dip the balls into a molten solution of some boiling stuff which smelt abominably. She cooked this up in Court, and the whole business was very suggestive of the making of the hell-broth of the witches in "Macbeth," only that perhaps the Court of Law did not give a striking representation of the "blasted heath." The balls were apt to escape from the old lady when they were half cooked and to go running about the Court where the barristers, retrieving them, got their fingers into the most awfully sticky state and their wigs seemed to be the appropriate places on which to rub the stickiness off.
Willie Fernie was there, enjoying himself hugely too. He, it seems, had long ago made a ball resembling the Haskell. There, too, was Commander Stewart, whom I had known in the early eighties at St. Andrews. He was the maker of the "Stewart patent" balls, which had a vogue for a time, though they had not the least resemblance to the Haskell balls. They were of some composition, quite solid, and with iron filings in them. Nevertheless, Commander Stewart, as it appeared, had made a ball similar to the Haskell, though it could not have been the one known as his patent. All these were testimony to what the lawyers call "previous user."
Then an old gentleman was called who said that he had played at ball as a boy with another old gentleman whose name he gave, with a ball similar in all its essentials to the Haskell golf ball. The other old gentleman was called then, and he was asked whether his memory corroborated this, and whether it was in essentials the same ball. To which he answered, to the delight of the Court, that it was not the same ball at all. "What then," asked the Counsel, in aprofoundly shocked voice, "do you mean to say that you think your old friend is a liar?" "No," he replied quite readily, "I don't think so, I know it." I looked out to see these two old friends going out of Court, to discover whether they were quite as good friends as they had been before, but I could not see them.
I do not remember much about my own testimony. I think what I said was true, but I am nearly sure that it was quite unimportant. The present Lord Moulton, I remember, examined, or cross-examined me, but he did not turn me inside out very badly, and I believe I left the Court "without a stain on my character," according to the stereotyped phrase. At all events the conclusion of the whole matter was that we lost our case very handsomely. The Judge, considering the evidence of the old lady, of Commander Stewart, of Willie Fernie and so on, said that he thought there were sufficient witnesses to "previous user," and no doubt "Messrs. Hutchison, Maine and Co."—I think this was the name of the firm opposing us—fought a good fight in the best interests of the golfer, for it would have been a bad job for us all if there had been a monopoly in the hands of one firm of the manufacture of the rubber-cored balls. They put the prices up against us fairly high as it was, without that. Had there been a monopoly of manufacture we might now be paying five shillings each perhaps, instead of half-a-crown, for the balls—a very solemn thought. They carried this case to the Court of Appeal, but that Court only confirmed the finding of the Court below, and thereto added this further comment, that whether there were "previous users" or no, they did not think that the invention in itself had sufficient novelty forthe patent to be good. So that "put the lid on," to use homely phrase.
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 balls 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 balls even now, even under the relatively blessed conditions of competition.
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-coredballs. Nobody, 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 balls hitherto 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.
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 awayto 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 Dick, 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, andI 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 assume 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 balls, 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 thefirst 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 grass-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 havenearly as good an appetite, 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 brassey. 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 yourhand. 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.
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.
Walter Travis.Walter Travis.
CharlesCharles 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 startthere 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 thatbusiness. "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 workas 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-class 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:[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.
[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.
[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.
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 Brassey had asked my wife and myself to come with him, on theSunbeam, 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, muchaccidenté, 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 shore 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.
Noble 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 butterflies and grasshoppers very numerous, and large and splendid of hue."
At Montreal we said good-bye, with many tears, to theSunbeamand 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 balls. Some of thegreens 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?"
The next day I played with Mr. Edgar on the Toronto Club's course, but this is being given up to the builders, and the Club is moving to a course further out along the lake. There is a third course, also, for the Toronto folk—Rosedale—which is well spoken of. On the whole I was very much struck with the quality of these Canadian courses of which we hear but little over here. Among inland courses they take a very high place.
Thence we went on by night, a sixteen hours' journey to Boston, where Charlie Macdonald, the creator of the National Golf Links of America, met us. Immediately on arrival we started out for the Myopia Club, where Macdonald and I beat T. Stephenson and Leeds. The last is the constructor of the Myopia course, and for its construction deserves no little credit. From what I have seen of American courses I put the National Golf Links first and this Myopia second, a very good second. The National is that much-talked-of course of which it was said that it was to be composed of replicas of the eighteen best holes that its creator could anywhere discover, and he journeyed over all the courses in Europe discovering them. My notes on Myopia course run: "fine inland course—rather many blind shots" (but some of these, I know, have been eliminated), "steeply undulating, sloping greens,no trees—good test of golf, long and trying. Record in competition 75."
My next golfing note touches the Brookline course. "Went out in Willett's car to Brookline, the County Club. This is a tree-y course, like New Zealand, really good, good greens, well bunkered, a trifle on the short side, but full of interest. At all the American Clubs great care is taken in bunkering the courses." This last note is worth attention, because I see it is a comment of Vardon, after his visit in which he and Ray had to lower the British flag to Mr. Ouimet, that the bunkers on the American courses were not severe enough. But he did not see the National Links. That would have satisfied even his passion for bunkers.
My notes continue: "Lunched at Brookline, then motored thirty miles to Essex Club, where Charlie MacDonald and I again beat, as we had already beaten in the morning at Brookline, T. Stephenson and Willett. The course tree-y, like Brookline, with great hills here and there. Natural sand in the bunkers—a fine course. Rather in transition state, as I saw it, but with all the making of a good thing."
I see that I was at Myopia again on the 23rd, when Charlie MacDonald and I again beat Stephenson and Leeds. In the afternoon we went to see Mr. Fricks' grand collection of pictures at his house on North Shore—a fine sight, though "not golf." But there was little rest from golf when we arrived, at 3 p.m. on the 24th, in New York, very hot and dusty. Macdonald motored us out to his house at Rosslyn and then took me for a round at Garden City in the evening, where I beat him in a single. "Course very brown and baked," according to my diary, "but quite long, and putting greens good. Rather ugly surroundings, but fine test of golf. No trees as hazards, except a line of them on right of the 17th, which is a very good hole. The finish is to a short hole over a pond. Doubtless a good course, but not very inspiring."
On the 25th I see that "Charles Macdonald and self played F. Herreshoff and L. Livingstone, at Garden City, in morning, but lost by a hole, and in the afternoon Herreshoff and self played our better ball against the best ball of C. Macdonald, L. Livingstone and R. Watson, but lost by a hole again." I have a note appended to this day's golf: "Never played worse—eyes bad with heat and motoring."
I may break off here to give a hint to the British golfer visiting the States. I doubtless got a little "touch of the sun" on this day at Garden City, and it is a thing that the Briton coming fresh to American golf has to be very carefully on his guard against. He is menaced, really, by three dangers—the blaze and glare of the sun, the abounding energy of the native golfers and their abounding hospitality. Between the three he is in much peril of being overdone, as I quickly was. I played golf on various courses afterwards—on the Shinnecock Hills, finely undulating, but too short and with too many blind shots, where natural advantages have not been turned to the best possible account; at Easthampton, where, for two holes, you actually find yourself among real seaside sand dunes (unhappily this blessed dispensation does not last); on the National Links, of which I have already noted my high appreciation; at Baltusrol, very tree-y and very hilly, but a good, interesting course, and others too many to name.
Their witness suffices. It suffices to show the zealand kindness of your American hosts in taking you vast distances to play on many courses. It shows the vengeance that golf has taken on them for that comment on it of a quarter of a century ago when I exhibited to them some feeble sample of it and they said that it might do "for Sundays." There are men in America now who will play golf even on a week-day. In fact golf is, with many, the real interest of their lives. They do a bit of work, no doubt, urged by the painful necessity of earning a livelihood, but there are many whom their work does not grip. A quarter of a century ago the business men of New York talked dollars: to-day they talk golf. It is a very sanitary change. And not only will they talk golf, but they will spend money on it. The care that they take of their putting greens would hardly be credited, without being seen. It is not enough for them that the turf shall all be of grass, with no blend of weeds: it is demanded that it shall be all of one variety of grass, and that variety the finest. The National Golf Links has not only every green watered; it is watered all through the green, from extensive sprinklers kept going all night long in the dry weather.
I did not see the finish of the amateur championship of 1905 when Gordon Barry beat Osmond Scott, but I understand what the moral of that match was—that indiarubber handles are not good things for a soaking wet day. We have had one or two terrible soakers for the finish of the amateur championship, and for the open championship too, in the last few years. The worst that ever I saw was that in which Johnny Ball beat Palmer in 1907 at St. Andrews. Almost the whole links was water-logged, it had been raining during most of the week. Johnny Laidlay prophesied that the man who would win the championship would be the man that had most changes of clothes, for one got wet through every round. I do not know how many changes Johnny Ball had, but I do know that he looked dead beat both in the semi-final and in the anti-penultimate heats, and that anybody else would have been beaten. It was only his wonderful match-play ability that took him through. He was not playing at all well, in spite of his win. In the final it never looked for a moment as if he could fail to win, and his greater power, in weather like that, gave Palmer, who was his opponent, mighty little chance with him. After that, to commemorate his sixth amateur championship, the Royal and Ancient Club did itself honour by electinghim an honorary member. But he was far from having finished with the championship even then; and I much doubt whether he has finished even now.
One of the interesting features of recent golfing story is the rise of fine players of the working-men class in England, as well as in Scotland, and at Ashdown Forest, where I lived for some years, the Cantelupe Club, and especially the great golfing family of Mitchell, has become famous. They became famous even before one of the family, Abe, rather took a big share of fame to himself. I had a cousin, Tom Mitchell, in my garden, who was nearly as good as Abe, and when I had a golfing guest staying with me and did not want to play golf myself, I used to say, "There's a boy in the garden will give you something of a game, if you do not mind playing with him." That guest always came back from his game in a very chastened frame of mind. Abe Mitchell chiefly made good his name by fine play in the amateur championship, and most of all in that of 1912, when the tournament was played for the first time at Westward Ho! That is the last of its kind that I attended, and I had to go to that because it was on my own old home course. I drew Denys Scott to start with, and I am afraid neither of us played very faultless golf. But he redeemed the match by some very fine runs up with his aluminium putter, and beat me.
One of the episodes of the match was that the poor "Old Mole" came out to watch it, bringing with him a small pack of whippet dogs which danced about us as we played, to the exasperation of tried nerves. I have already paid due honour to the great work that he did in early days for English golf, and it is only while these pages were in course of writing that hisdeath happened, where so much of his life had been passed, at Westward Ho!
Johnny Ball won his eighth championship at this Westward Ho! meeting, and his final opponent was Abe Mitchell. I was referee and saw the whole of that match. Johnny had only escaped by the skin of his teeth, and by his imperturbable match-playing ability, from the hands of Mr. Bond, in an earlier heat. Mr. Bond had been five up, no less, and eight to play. And then he drank a bottle of ginger-beer, and never did a hole in the right number afterwards. But it is all to Johnny Ball's credit, and just like him, that even when his fortunes were thus apparently desperate he never did despair. He, for his part, went on doing the holes in the right number (which was more than he had done on the way out, when he lost five holes), and won at the nineteenth after a halved round.
Abe Mitchell was not hitting the ball at his hardest in the match with Johnny, but both played well. In the afternoon it came on to pelt with rain, which suited Johnny, but Abe did not mind it either. The match stood all square with three to play and Abe laid Johnny what looked like a very dead stymie at the sixteenth, but Johnny somehow got round it. Abe won the seventeenth, thus making himself dormy, and both were on the last green with two shots each. Johnny holed out in two putts, Abe just failed to do so. Then they halved the thirty-seventh hole—not with quite blameless golf on either side—and at the thirty-eighth Abe topped his tee shot heavily, and that was the end of it.
I regret to say that I did not go to Muirfield in 1909; for they had one of the finest finishes there of any championship. Cecil Hutchison was a hole up andtwo to play in the final against Bobby Maxwell: he did the last two holes in four and five, and the last on that day was very hard to reach in two. We may almost say that he did both in the right number. Yet he lost both, and therewith the championship, to Bobby, who did them in three and four. The three was scarcely human.
It is not very easy to find a man who, all through his golfing time, has delighted more in the storms and the rain than Johnny Ball, but I believe there is one—that same who came as a little flaxen-haired boy to our house at Northam—J.H. Taylor. He is open champion, for the fifth time, as I write, and he won that championship at Hoylake in weather as villainous, especially on the second day, as any that has generally been served out to us for the finals of the amateur championship. One cannot say worse of it. He had a stroke or so in hand, of the whole of his field, at the start of that second day, but the curious thing is that when the rest of the professors saw what kind of day it was, they never doubted that Taylor would win. He has a mastery over the ball in these circumstances, both in the drive and in his low and heavily cut approaches, that none other can rival—not even Vardon nor Braid themselves.
In respect of these more recent years I find that my reminiscences begin to deal more and more with things I have seen and less with things I have done—which is as much as to say that they must begin to lose the vivid personal touch. In 1908 the Royal and Ancient Club did me the high honour to elect me, first of Englishmen, as their Captain. As one of my wife's relations was good enough to say—"I'm glad they've made Horace that—it will look so well in his obituary notice."So it will; but I hope not yet. I had great ambitions to win the medal on the day that I struck off the ball whereby I played myself in as Captain, but though I contrived to hit that ball, and actually to hit it into the air, I was not well enough to take part in the medal play. In the winter of 1909 a little party of us—Tony Fairlie, Charles Hutchings and myself had been at Westward Ho! I had not seen the course for seven years, and it struck us all, with one accord, as the finest thing in golf (did we make reservation in St. Andrews' favour? I hardly think so) that we had ever seen. And during that visit I had played better than I had played for years and years before. I was in great delight and really had visions of a renewed youth and of having "got it back." And then returning home, I caught the worst go of influenza that I ever have had, which is a great deal to say, and never played golf properly again.
At the moment of writing it is most unlikely, according to all the doctors say, that I shall ever play, properly or improperly, again; but it would not do for me to grumble. I have had a very full and pleasant golfing day—much interrupted, it is true, by illness, but still as extensive as a reasonable man could ask. And if all active part in the game is to be denied in the future, at all events I can still take interest undiminished in the work and play of others. Golf is not only the best of games to play: it is also, in many respects, the best to look on at. You cannot sit still, it is true, in the comfort of the pavilion, nor are aeroplanes as yet fitted with silencers so efficient that a match can be watched from them without discomposure of the golfer's nerves, but in the very fact that you must walk, and even run, if you are to see much of the game—such a meteor as Duncan is not to be caught without much sprinting—there are compensations. Watching a modern golf match means a good deal of healthful exercise and produces a more hearty appetite than sitting in the pavilion at Lords. As for the rival merits of the games, I need not raise so vexatious a question now at the very finish of the long round which the reader may have been patient enough to endure with me. Let it suffice to say that, whatever other games may be, golf is good enough. If golf, taken sanely and considered in all its various aspects, fails to satisfy us, we must be hard to please; and I will ask you to note, as one of the aspects worth considering, the very striking growth of the game in favour during the half-century over which this record runs.
So the last stroke is played.
Or is it, of a certainty, the last stroke after all?
That is a question which at once is raised—not fancifully, but in all seriousness—if we are to place any credence whatever on such revelations as, for instance, Sir Oliver Lodge gives us inRaymond, as we have inClaud's Book—Claud actually states that he has been golfing—or as Sir Conan Doyle strenuously affirms to be proven true to his satisfaction. If any one of these even so much as approximate to the fact, in regard to that world to which we go after death, it must then be evident that it is a world so like that in which we live and labour and play golf for our relaxation now, that it is impossible but to think that there must be something of the nature of the same pastime in that "beyond." Such revelations, if we attach value to them at all, inevitably carry the inference that we shall there find golf, together with otherconditions not widely different from those that we have known on earth—not any "fancy" golf on illimitable Elysian Fields, with never a bad lie on the whole immense, monotonous expanse, but real golf, difficult golf, golf with bunkers and all incidental troubles to be overcome—not without vexation of spirit—golf in which (for we cannot presume an infinity of halved matches), one or other player will be beaten.
So it may be. It needs at least equal boldness to deny it as to affirm it. And, if it be so, arises then the further question: "Will those who are champions now, be champions then? Are we to carry on, into that beyond, any portion of the skill acquired so painfully here below? Will Harry Vardon still be, golfily speaking, Harry Vardon there?"
It scarcely seems an equitable prospect. Have we not more reason, and even some high authority, to suppose that the blessed law of compensation will be in operation: that the first here will be the last there, and the eighteen-handicap man, now the scratch player, or better, of that bright future?
This is the vision splendid, for the many—on which they may gratefully close the page.
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