VI
There is nothing like the winds of March for testing the golfer in every department of his play. Quite timid golfers are sometimes heard to say that they don’t mind rain; but if a man does not mind big winds, regards them both from the sporting and scientific standpoints, and manages to make some respectable golf while they are in charge of the air, he is a worthy player, and he may make his mark some day. It often happens that you can apply test after test to two different golfers, and they will both answer equally to them; but the wind test will separate them at once. The man who can play the real game in a high wind, and use it to his advantage at every opportunity, knows golf as others do not. He is a finished player, and he rather likes the days of March for the rich sport that they afford—the real big game of the links. The other man, when he hears the wind playing like a German band round the side of the house as he tries to get himself off to sleep at night, thinks to himself that he will have to give up the idea of golf in the morning. He should not. Even if he never learns the scientific treatment of wind in golf, he would find his game improved generally and made more powerful by playing it at times like these under severe difficulties, and it is worth playing in a wind if only to taste the sweet joys of golfing in a calm afterwards, just as there is one point of satisfaction in getting wet through on the links because the change afterwards is so delicious.
You always find that a golfer is very much the better for a short season on a very windy course. When he goes back to his home course, very likely inland and protected, driving seems such a simple, easy thing, and he lets out at his tee shots with a freedom and a certainty which make for a greater boldness and strength in his game. North Berwick is one of the windiest courses. You do get wind there in the spring months, and there are hundreds of golfers who testify to the good that a short stay there has done to their game. They have simply got to learn to golf in all kinds of winds. It is like throwing a non-swimmer into seven feet of water with only a thin piece of rope round his middle. He very soon invents a way of making greater security and comfort for himself. Stay at North Berwick long enough, and it may affect your style for life. Mr. Robert Maxwell has a peculiar punching, but withal very powerful style, which is attributed to his upbringing at North Berwick. A man disposed to probe very deep down for causes and effects might arrive at the conclusion that the reason why, speaking very generally, there are better players and better courses, and more of each on the east coast of Scotland than on the west, is because it happens that the links there are more exposed, and there are more windy days upon them than on those on the other side of the country. Not that there are not big winds very frequently to be dealt with in the neighbourhood of Troon and Prestwick, which surely have their full share, and it was at a championship at Prestwick that old Willie Park delivered himself of his famous remark, “Guid God! When I get ma club up I canna get it doon again!” so strongly was the wind blowing on that occasion.