III
That which was regarded by our ancestors as a most amazing feat, namely, holing with the tee shot, has become exceeding common. One week not long ago it was done in five different parts of the country, and in three other separate weeks there were four cases reported. Why this increase, then, of doing holes in 1? The reason is simple after all. It is not that it is any easier to do the trick than it used to be. Probably it is rather harder, since it is more difficult to flop the rubber-cored ball down plump on the green at the short holes than it used to be in the days of the late lamented gutta, and a good deal harder to make it sink down into the hole as it ought to do when it gets there, instead of running around it and then away, and generally behaving badly. If it were any easier to do than it was formerly, would not the champions be doing it? But they are not. Harry Vardon has still only one hole in 1 to his credit, and while Braid gets his 2’s very often, the 1’s don’t come his way. The simple reason for the frequency is the great increase of golf. Everybody plays golf now and is always playing, and in such circumstances somebody must always be holing in 1, or very nearly. That is the simple fact, and the man who now performs this feat is no longer worthy of a paragraph all to himself in the morning newspaper. He will simply go along with half a dozen others in the weekly list.
Still there is room for distinction in holing in 1 yet, and the men who crave for such notoriety need not despair. If every man can hole in 1, obviously the proper thing to do is to find some particular way of doing it that every man cannot equal, or at least is not likely to do. For example, J. S. Caird, the Newcastle-on-Tyne professional, was out playing the other day, when in the course of his game he took the fifteenth in 1 in a very strange way. He popped his ball up into the air with his mashie, and down it came plump into the hole, falling clean into the tin and never bouncing out again! Fancy pitching into the hole in 1! Luckily the caddie was standing there and took out the flag in time, and one cannot be surprised that he was so overcome with the strangeness of the thing that happened, that his imagination was fired until he saw something of the supernatural in it, and believed that his eyes had witnessed more than they really had. At all events, to the players and to the people afterwards he described in the most circumstantial and convincing manner how the ball at one time seemed to be flying far past the green, but how when just above him it came to a sudden stop in mid-air and then fell vertically into the hole! Why were we not told the name of this ball?
Another advance on the simple feat of holing in one stroke is to do it twice within a year. The first man to do this was Mr. L. Stuart Anderson, who took the tenth and fifteenth at Balgownie (Aberdeen) in 1 in 1895. Since then I have heard of three other men having done it, one at Fort Anne, another at Bristol, and the third at Tunbridge Wells. Mr. Anderson, by the way, who is now the secretary of the Royal Portrush Club, holds the record for the greatest number of times that one man has done a hole in 1; and here again is another suggestion to the ambitious one-stroke man. Mr. Anderson has done it seven times. He began by doing it at the expense of his sister, Miss Blanche, at North Berwick, which perhaps did not matter much, as sisters are indulgent, and wound up for the time being by doing it (the seventh at Tavistock) in the presence of and in a match against a parson, which, to say the least, was indelicate. I have heard of a lady who has done this thing four times. Another out-of-the-way feat is to hole in 1 just when you hear that someone else has done so. One April evening, when the course at Heaton Moor had not the appearance of stirring events happening upon it, such as would go down into history as records, two of the members of the club, not playing together, did two different holes in 1 each. At Christmas time in 1899 a most remarkable feat was performed by Mr. P. H. Morton, celebrated in his day as a Cambridge bowler, who took the first hole on the Meyrick course at Bournemouth twice in one day, morning and afternoon, with his shot from the tee. It is a better achievement than usual to take a tolerably long hole in one stroke, and, in this class, honours at present are with Mr. J. F. Anderson, who with a wind behind him and playing on a frost-bound course got the ninth at St. Andrews in a single shot, and the ninth measures 277 yards. It must be accounted excellent also to do the trick one-handed, as did an amateur with the promising name of Willie Park when playing to the eleventh on the relief course at Troon. Mr. Park had to do it with one arm or not at all, for he has only one, and he was certainly to be congratulated on the fact of his unfortunate state not preventing him from graduating as a hole-in-oner.
Men who seem to have an abnormal sense of humour say that it is killing to do a hole in 1 when the other man is giving you a stroke. The other man has then to do it in nothing to halve, or 1 less than nothing to win, and the situation is delightful. I have authentic information of this situation having arisen, and it was rendered all the more interesting from the circumstance that the man giving the stroke was an Open Champion, and the other party was a lady. It was at the twelfth hole at Walton Heath, and one need not hesitate to say that the man who was giving the stroke was James Braid, who thought awhile on the wonders of this most interesting world, and then took a short cut to the next tee without troubling to play the short hole.
Concerning the coincidence connected with the name of Park, just noticed, it may have been perceived that two of our greatest heroes in these matters are of the name of Anderson. This coincidence can be carried a long step farther, for perhaps the most valuable hole in 1 ever gained was by another Anderson, and that was Jamie, the champion. He was playing for the championship at Prestwick and making his last round. He knew he was very close up, and that he had nothing to spare. He was playing the next to the last hole on the course as it used to be—not as it is—and was just about to hit his tee shot when a girl standing close by remarked to her father that the player had teed his ball outside the teeing ground, and that accordingly, if he played his shot from there, he would be disqualified altogether. Jamie heard, looked, and quietly removed his ball and placed it within the limited space. Then he made his shot and holed out in 1, and very properly he raised his cap to the little girl and said, “Thank you, miss!” for she had done him a very good turn indeed. A few minutes later he was in possession of the Championship Cup. That was in 1878. It is clear that the Andersons are the men who do the holes in 1, particularly as another of them, Mr. W. W. Anderson, once in 1893 worked most gradually and systematically up to a hole in 1 at North Berwick by taking the fourth in 3, the fifth in 2, and the sixth in the minimum 1. One in 1 and three in 6!
The worst of these tricks is that you don’t get anything for doing them; you must pay instead. The injustice of this arrangement has been borne in to many minds, notably to that of Mr. Balfour. The right honourable gentleman has never holed in 1, but he has done a hole in two strokes when he received a stroke from his opponent at it, and his caddie ingeniously argued with him that this was exactly the same thing—2 − 1 = 1. It was [Point Garry] out at North Berwick, and Mr. Balfour was playing with Tom Dunn. “I am astonished!” said Mr. Balfour, pretending that he was. “Am I to pay you for looking at me doing this? Should I not rather receive the money for performing the feat?” But he paid.
There is one hole in the world where you do get paid for achieving a 1, that is if you happen to do it at either the Easter, Whitsuntide, or Autumn meetings. This is what is called the “Island Hole” on the course of the Royal Ashdown Forest Club in Sussex. It is an excellent hole, and a gentleman who played it on one occasion fell so much in love with it that he endowed it with a sum of £5, the accumulated interest on the sum to go to the competitor at any of the meetings named who should do this trick of getting it in 1. Ever since the endowment was made the interest has been growing and growing, and nobody has qualified for it. Money accumulates so fast once it gets a fair start, that we can imagine this interest some day amounting to a fortune, and then what a scene there will be at the Island Hole at Easter when the golfer, having been training at the Redan, the Maiden, and a few like holes for a whole month previously, comes here with weird clubs and balls made of lead, and has greed written in large characters across his face.
The moral of the hole in 1 is excellently stated by a great master of the game. It demands not only a perfect shot but a perfect fluke. It is a case of the gods giving to them that have, and those that have not are cast into the bunker in front of the green.