The Spirit of the Links

by Henry Leach

I

The golfers and other people who know nothing of St. Andrews are often inclined to fancy that some of the enthusiasm professed by those who have a tolerable golfing acquaintance with it is affected, because it “is the proper thing,” and because it harmonises with the feelings of many revered members of the old school of the game. Perhaps such scepticism is pardonable, particularly when it is known that there have been many hundreds of golfers who have gone to St. Andrews once and failed to be impressed by it, and have not hesitated to declare their doubts about its supremacy on their return to their native links. These people belong to one of three classes. The first is the smallest of the three, consisting of good golfers of sound discrimination, whose idiosyncrasies of taste lead them honestly to the conclusion that St. Andrews is greatly overrated, and that it has superiors in various other greens. The second and largest batch is composed of men who lack both the necessary golfing knowledge and the true golfing spirit. The third consists of those who have not had sufficient time to know, for verily St. Andrews is, to a large extent, a cultivated taste, and there are many worthy golfers to whom its first appeal has not been entirely convincing. There is a more or less vague something that attracts instantly, but the rest only comes to the Southron stranger after two or three, or even more, visits of fairly long duration.

The English golfer does not generally love St. Andrews at first sight, but he shows that interest in her which leads him to talk about her and awakens the suspicions of his friends. Then he may speak of her with indifference, but he goes back to her again and again, and at last one day, when he returns to his home after one of these visits, he feels an exquisite soreness at heart, a sweet longing, a strange exaltation, and he knows that a change has come over his golfing life, that he is at last in love with St. Andrews, and that he cannot do without her. Forthwith his plans for future golfing expeditions are changed and modified. He must now always think of St. Andrews. If he is a man of leisure he must go there at least once a year, and even if he has but little time to spare he will be going to Scotland once in a twelvemonth with his bag of clubs, and must so arrange his itinerary that he shall touch Leuchars Junction going or coming, and shall run down that little strip of railway which makes to the golfer the finest travelling in the world, for two or three days of heartening play on the premier links. All golf is good, but there is something subtle about the St. Andrews golf which makes it not quite like the other, and the man who learns to love it, though the love come in his riper years, when the emotions are slow of action and may be weak in result, is faithful to it for the rest of his golfing days.

Probably no man has been able completely to define the charm of the place. Its charm is of its golf, for though it has some natural beauty, and is greatly historic and of celebrity for its ruins, it casts no enduring spell over the man who does not know the use of a driver. The constant talk of it and its tradition has something to do with the charm, no doubt. The stranger, who has never struck a ball there, feels something of nervous ecstasy as he hears the brakes go on the train that slows down on its approach to the station. There, during the last two minutes of his journey, is a view of the links, the Swilcan Burn, the players going out to the second and approaching the seventeenth—and there goes a ball on to that famous road!—just like the fathers of golf used to do in the olden days as it is written in the books. Then, walking in St. Andrews, one seems to breathe golf as never before. All the men and boys one sees are players or caddies; there is a knot of men at the street-corner talking about the 76 that one of the professionals did in his evening round; there are many golf shops; it is all golf. On the walls, and in the hotels and post offices, there are displayed official notices, giving the warning that those who play on the course with irons only, or who practise putting on the eighteenth green, may be fined 20s. or—wonderful enactment!—be sent to prison for a period. A personage of no less consequence than a Cabinet Minister, this being Mr. Asquith, has been stopped under this rule. The pipes that one hears seem to be skirling a song of the greatness of the game and the glory of the men who used to play it here in the olden days. Above all, one comes instantly by a deep sense as of walking on hallowed ground, of being one of the heirs to a great heritage in golf, and to a great responsibility. Life and the game are stronger things than they used to be. That same subtle oppression of soul is felt as when one has a first glance at the Pyramids or at the tomb of the great Napoleon in the Invalides. These things stand for what was a great might, and in its golf St. Andrews is truly mighty.

And so it comes that the spirit of the game seems to brood over this hallowed spot, and stirs the golfer with fine imaginings and gives to him great impulses. It is all so different from anything else. On the evening of his first day he knows that St. Andrews is not like the other places, and when, after his first rest, he kisses the morning, he is glad and he is exalted, because he is at St. Andrews, and there is not a man or woman in the place who will not talk to him of the game that he loves and sympathise with him in his ardour. The golfer has come home at last.

It is difficult to describe the merits of the wonderful old course. It is there. The people who do not know it cannot be made to understand, and the people who do know it have not to be told. It would be hard for anybody to prove that it is not the best, if the severest, test of scientific golf. Nothing but scientific golf will avail the player here. Of late years people have been railing against the bunkers on the course, and the increase thereof; but after all it is to be remembered that the placing of the majority of these bunkers has been the result of the aggregate of thought of some of the best golfers in the world for a period of scores of years, and they must be considered in the spirit that Mr. John Low suggests, that no bunker can really be unfair. It is there to be avoided, and it is the best shot that avoids it. No doubt this view might lead to awkward conclusions if pressed in some cases, but it is apparently sound as a general principle of scientific golf, as apart from the mere pastime and the sensual passion for hard hitting. If a bunker is in the middle of the course at just the distance of a good drive, it is obviously the duty of the driver to play to one side or the other and avoid it; and that is just the characteristic of proper play at nearly all of the St. Andrews holes, that the tee shot has not only to be cleanly played, and at the proper strength and so forth, but that over and above all these things it has to be so accurately placed as on no other course. Position means everything at St. Andrews, and the number and variety of the undulations of the course, the constant bunker, and the extreme diversity of the glorious putting greens and the approaches thereto, bring it about that a man may play a hole a thousand times and it has something new to offer him every time, and he might play rounds on this course all the time from his childhood to his old age, and those of his last years would be riper with interest than any that went before. Here, indeed, is a course for character; there is nothing like it.