V
Golf is a jealous sport, and often takes it ill when any of its patrons devote their attention occasionally to other diversions of the open air, and exacts from them such a penalty in failures and aggravation when they come back to their true love as is calculated to make them hesitate before committing further offences. Perhaps it is natural in a way that golf, which has so much of wild nature about it, should be least inclined to brook the rivalry of games of the namby-pamby order. Fine field sports such as shooting and fishing do not put you off your golf, in fact we have generally concluded that a few days’ fishing sandwiched in a golfing holiday rather does good to your game. Perhaps it stimulates your thinking qualities, and if you are not reflecting upon the other and the better way in which you might have played the seventeenth hole the day before, when you should be noticing the significant manœuvres of something in the water, all is well. But a game that golf cannot and will not tolerate acquaintanceship with upon any consideration, is croquet. The royal and ancient one has decided apparently that it will not recognise it in any way whatever, and that it will give a bad time to any golfer who potters about on a lawn with hoops and bells and wooden sledgehammers. And it does so. There is no more sure way of disturbing your putting than an hour or two’s croquet. This putting poison is most deadly efficacious, and its effects sometimes last for a couple of days. The man has not yet been born who can putt well after a game of croquet. Croquet is really putting, but putting with a big heavy ball after the style of a cannon ball, and it has to be putted on a woolly green of rough grass in which a golf ball would do something towards burying itself. Your accommodating eye and touch soon become accustomed to the big ball and the mallet, and you begin to putt through the hoops exceeding well, feeling then that you hold an advantage over others through usually having to manage a smaller ball under more difficult circumstances. But the awkward part of the business is that the eye and touch won’t go back again so readily to their golfing adjustment, and while they are out of it some funny things are likely to happen. At such times the golf ball looks impossibly small, and, while one is overcome with the idea that it will need remarkably delicate management, one finds it impossible to wield the putter as it should be. Here is the story of a recent happening:
A and B are keen rivals on the links—so keen that there is always great haggling when it comes to adjusting the odds for a match, B usually giving A three strokes. On the present occasion A informed B that he would be glad to play him a match on the afternoon of the following day. B wanted to know why they could not make a full day of it and play in the morning as well, but A pleaded that he had to take part in a tom-fool croquet match to which he was committed at the house where he was staying. They settled the terms of the next afternoon’s encounter at the same time, and B said that as A would be playing croquet in the morning he would be willing to give him five strokes. This was really foolish of him; but no matter. A thought something, but said nothing. The golf match was duly played on the following day, and, to the mortification of B, the croquetter putted like an angel the whole way round, won his match by 6 and 5, won the bye, and, holing a ten-yarder to wind up with, took the bye-bye as well. B was naturally in a most unhappy state of mind, and moaned that he had never before known a man to be able to putt after playing croquet, and that it was because of this that he had given A two extra strokes on that dismal day. “Croquet! croquet!” exclaimed A, “but I haven’t been playing croquet!” B stood aghast. “You haven’t!” he shrieked; “then what the dickens were you doing this morning?” “Oh,” said A, “I took the hint from what you said yesterday, and cried off the croquet match. I spent an hour instead in practising putting on the carpet, and stuffed the fire-irons underneath to make undulations!” There are one or two very good morals in this pathetic little story.
If you need to putt perfectly you should do nothing with your hands, and as little as possible with the remaining parts of your physical construction for a whole day beforehand. The fact is that everything puts you off your putting, but some things more than others, which is another reason for that old saying that putting is the devil. An old golfer has said that the ideal preparation for really fine putting is to lie in bed for twenty-four hours with your wife to feed you with a spoon. A few hours’ penmanship is certainly fatal to one’s putting, and typewriting is worse. A man may depend upon it that if he goes in for a motor-car and drives it, he will henceforth be about three or four strokes worse on the greens than he used to be, which accounts for the anxiety of so many golfers to sell their new cars. And oh, that my best golfing enemy would buy a motor-cycle! A player once told me that he could not putt in the afternoon after having found it necessary to beat his dog at lunch-time; and it has been observed to be quite a bad thing for one’s putting to use a walking-stick in one’s ordinary pedestrianism. The putting muscles and nerves are the most delicate, subtle things in the whole of animal creation, and the pity is that circumstances generally preclude their more careful preservation during the periods in one’s life when they are not needed for holing-out purposes.