V
“Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.”
So Keats did sing. And, alas! there are even strange golfers who are sighing always for newfanglements, feeling that the things they cannot or must not have, are much better than the things they are blessed with. Yet are the things that are in golf better than the things that might be if out-and-out Progressives had their way, and in this matter we shall sing a hymn of praise to the old school and its famous traditions, being something of a brake on these Progressives. Consider what were otherwise the possibilities of the game if it fell into the hands of innovators.
Lately a story was printed and spread all about, that in some secret fields a great champion was practising with a new ball of extraordinary manufacture, with which he was constantly getting at least fifty yards farther with his drive than he could with the ordinary rubber-cored affair, that is to say, he was regularly driving from 250 to 300 yards! Now, some of us have heard of that ball before, but shall believe in it only when we see it, and shall then cry aloud for its extinction, even if that dreaded Golf Union has to be established for the purpose, as probably it would need to be. But some people ask why it is wrong to sigh for more and more length in the drive; why should not our old men drive all the long holes in two, and our young men do them with a drive and a pitch, and play the short holes with their putters? They say there is enormous pleasure in length, and that the rubber-core has given increased enjoyment to scores of thousands of players. Which is true, the last. But the more length you get the less golf there is in your play. If length is all that is wanted, why not go shooting instead of golfing? You can shoot a bullet a whole mile, and are not bothered to trudge after it. Fatal points against the 300-yard ball are, that a large proportion of golfers would lose sight of it before it came to rest—and where would be their pleasure then?—and that it would upset the construction of all our courses, since all the bunkers would be in the wrong places, and the links would all be too short. More land and huge sums of money would be needed by every club. The clubs had one experience of this when the rubber-core came in; depend on it they will not have another. By all means improve our present sort of balls, which is what makers are doing, and incidentally they are making them go a little farther, which is excusable. But no more revolutions. As it happened, the story of the professional and the new ball was untrue.
The news of something that took place recently in golfing India came over the sea, and the committees and members of very small clubs were fired with a new idea. They are rather whimsical with their golf in our colonies and dependencies at times, and it has been said facetiously that the ships that come home from there ought to be put in quarantine near St. Andrews for a while, to make certain that there are none of these ideas on board. The Royal Bombay Club, thinking possibly that bunkers in the same places always are monotonous, and moreover that, being in the same place, they upset one’s calculations so much when the wind changes, went in, according to report, for movable bunkers! They made them from hurdles, and they could move them about the course according to the weather and the committee’s fancy.
In some places, as already hinted, they have been trying a strange kind of game called “a four-ball foursome against bogey,” being a blend of many things most objectionable to the old spirit. This is the kind of golf that would be exceedingly popular if people generally went mad with the revolutionary idea and held executions in Trafalgar Square. In the meantime it does not “take on.” And a new kind of multi-match lately came over from America. [They] play, say, six a side, but only one ball to each side, the whole dozen players starting off together. They do not play alternately, but each man is chosen for the team according to his special abilities. One man is a specialist in long driving, another in his brassey play, a third with his irons, a fourth with the short approaches, a fifth with his niblick, and a sixth with his putter. When within fifty yards of the green the captain sings out for No. 4, and No. 5 is wanted when the ball is in a gutter. A man might not have a shot to play the whole way round. Great skill would be needed in the selection of the team. For a match on a short course the wise captain might leave out his brassey man and put in, say, a fisherman, if there were many water hazards on that course. But it is not golf, and never will be.
From the same source there emanates another idea in competitions. This is for stroke play, and all the men who enter play the first hole, one after the other. Those men who take most strokes to it retire from the competition. The others proceed, and there is the same weeding out process at the second hole, and so on until there are only two players left, and then the first man who wins a hole from the other wins the competition.
A possibility, which is none the less dreadful because there is some good common sense in the idea from which it springs, is that there will be examinations in the rules, which all must pass either before being elected to full membership of a golf club or before being allowed to take part in competitions. It is a certain fact that two golfers out of every three—at least—are hazy on many important points in the rules. Three British clubs have already held such examinations, with startling results. Scratch men were plucked! How curious it would be if the favourite for a championship were disqualified in this way. Of course the examiners would trip up the candidates by tricky riders to the rules, and as my artist friend, Mr. E. W. Mitchell, suggested, good questions will be: “A is your ball, B is your banker’s ball, and C is the hole (all being within a circle ten inches in diameter). Play one off two and lose!” Also, “What happens when a bull sits on your ball—(1) in match; (2) in medal play?”
As it is said, there is no telling what we may have next, particularly as a patent was recently applied for on behalf of a new club which had a sliding lid bottom, covering a receptacle in the head of the club, in which the golfer might keep his matches and his money!