VI
“Now, just consider the ball,” the M.P. responded. “Pretty little pimpled thing, isn’t it? Stuffed full of delight! Full of promise for at least two hours’ fine health-giving enjoyment! We used to think a half-pound tin of our favourite tobacco was the most heartening sight to see; but a box of new balls has it now. One ball is such a tiny little thing. You can hold sixteen of them in one hand! I have seen a man hold eighteen, and possibly that is the record. Giving a ball four rounds of life, two men could play together morning and afternoon for more than a fortnight with the balls that are held in this hand. But just see how many are needed by the great world of golf!
“To begin with, there are said to be 300,000 golfers in this country. It has been reckoned that at the height of the summer golfing season, when the players are busy everywhere, not less than 500,000 balls are used up every week. This, indeed, seems to be a most reasonable estimate—less than two balls per man per week, with an enormous percentage of players out on the links four or five days a week. It was semi-officially stated last June that one firm of makers, and that not by any means the biggest, was working night and day, and turning out 100,000 balls a week. Decidedly half a million is well within the mark. Taking the whole year round, if you say one ball per golfer per week, that is surely a very modest reckoning. It is practically a certainty that it is an underestimate. At that rate we have a grand total of 15,000,000 balls used up every year by the British golfers on British links. Fifteen millions!”
“Good gracious!” the Parson exclaimed. “One would hardly believe it!”
“Yes, let us see what we can do with these 15,000,000 besides play 6,000,000,000 shots with them, which is what may be done, allowing four rounds to each ball and a hundred strokes to each round, and what with foozlers, women, and children, you will find that a hundred is a very fair average, even if it is only the medal-winning score of the 20-handicap man.
“Seven balls go to the lineal foot, and thus there are forty-nine of them in the square foot. It seems hard to believe that all the balls of a year could, if packed nicely together after the fashion of eggs, be laid out in a fair-sized field of seven acres. But stay! I can give you some fancy idea of what this annual ball crop really means after all. There are seven to the foot—in one little lineal foot you have sufficient balls to last a careful week-end player for a couple of months. Now, bring out the army of caddies that there are in the country and set them to work teeing the balls up right against and touching each other in a line, beginning with the first at Charing Cross, or, to be more appropriate, on the Mid-Surrey course at Richmond. Then proceed northwards. There will still be a few balls left in the pockets of the caddies when they have continued that long line of one year’s balls right away through Rugby, Stafford, Carlisle, and over the Border range to Edinburgh, and on to the Braid Hills course. We can join the premier courses of two capitals with the balls of one year, for the line we make is 405 miles long, and at 11s. or 12s. a foot it would be considerably more expensive than the ordinary permanent way. It is a wonderful line. Nine yards of it will last a busy golfer a whole year, and he need never be reproached for putting down a dirty ball.”
The Hon. Member for North-East Fife was fairly warmed to his theme by this, and he pursued enthusiastically: “There is some food for reflection in the incidental mention that I have just made that the British golfers play 6,000,000,000 shots every year. Puck boasted some time ago that he could ‘put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’ It might surprise this sprite to know that the British golfers could do the job in ten minutes, which is the time we might give them to drive a dozen balls each from the tee. If those were fair drives, and were put end to end, they would easily go round the world, with a little to spare. Evidently, then, the British golfers go the distance of the circumference of the world many times over in the course of the year. You may take it that the average player, what with going off the line, waddling about on the putting greens, walking from green to tee, and so on, does a tramp of four miles in every round of eighteen holes that he makes. At four rounds a week, that is sixteen miles a week, or eight hundred in the golfing year of fifty weeks, a fortnight’s holiday for illness, dissipation, and foreign travel, being allowed in all these annual calculations. So our 300,000 British golfers in the course of the year walk and tool their balls for a matter of 240,000,000 miles. Most of this abundant exercise would not be taken if there were no golf.
“This 240,000,000 of miles means that if the British golfers had a links round the middle of the earth they would collectively play 60,000 times round it in the course of the year. They would be almost jostling and continually driving into each other. There would be a shriek of ‘Fore!’ from the Gulf of Guinea to Borneo, and it would be wailed across the wide Pacific. It would prevent overcrowding and blocking at the short holes if a course were laid out to the sun and back, and the British golfers were started off at five minutes intervals. It would be nearly 93,000,000 miles to the turn, and the same back, and if the British golfers then did a short round to Venus and home again, putting on another 50,000,000, they would nearly have done their usual year’s golf.
“But this little glimpse into the fairyland of golf,” said the Hon. Member in a tone of conclusion, “has all come about through the contemplation of that simple-looking pimply little ball, and it is time we wound up our consideration of it. It has been said that there are 15,000,000 used in Britain in the year. Suppose the average cost is 1s. 6d., which it probably is. That means that the nice little sum of £1,125,000 is spent by the British golfer in the course of the year in golf balls.”
“Prodigious!” exclaimed the Parson.
“Well, I don’t know what you think, William,” put in the Colonel, “but my recommendation is that all facts which indicate the extensiveness of this game, and the enthusiasm of its followers, such as some of those you have quoted, had better be kept to ourselves. On one day in April we shall be having a Chancellor of the Exchequer coming along with a fine scheme for paying the National Debt off by means of golf. And now, boys, we’d better be off. Next Thursday, we said, didn’t we? And it’s to be red balls then, if necessary!”