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Some of those cantankerous people who have no sympathy with games, and but a limited confidence in the wise precept that the healthy mind is most frequently to be found in association with the healthy body—practical people they like to call themselves—will sometimes ask you what is the good of golf. It is generally useless to attempt to humour them by advancing the proposition that it returns a dividend of fifty per cent. in mental and physical efficiency, and seventy-five in the general happiness of the subject.
What are really the least convincing examples of the practical value of golf are the most effective in argument against such folks. With them it may count a word in favour of the game that a man once playing it found that his ball from a full drive came to rest on a sixpence which had evidently dropped through a hole in the pocket of a previous player. Here, indeed, was a material practical gain! They will be impressed also with the possibilities of the game when they are told a little story of how a man, who was not in quest of art treasures at the time, discovered an old master accidentally, and entirely through the medium of his golf. It was in this way. A Montreal art dealer was playing the game on a country course one day in 1903, when he sliced a ball so badly that away it went through the window of a cottage hard by. Thereupon there came out from it an old lady, a French Canadian, who was possessed of remarkable power of speech, of which the golfer was given much evidence. Presently, when her attack was somewhat exhausted, the poor golfer offered to recompense her for the damage done to the window; but then it was put to him that the broken glass was not the only casualty. The ball, after passing through the window, had continued its course of destruction by breaking the glass that covered the picture; and without making any examination of the nature of this damage the player agreed that he would give a matter of a pound for the picture besides paying for the broken window. This soothed the feelings of the lady of the cottage, and she pressed upon him the picture, for the damage to which he had paid so handsomely. He took it away with him, and at home in the evening he was led in a spirit of curiosity to make some examination of it, when, to his astonishment, he discovered that it was a Dutch interior by Teniers, which he sold a few days later for £500. To the credit of this golfer be it said, he sent a cheque for half the amount to the cottager. This is an excellent story to tell to the absurd and practical people, and a true one.
It might be of service to add to it an account of a shot that was played on one occasion by a gentleman of no less scientific importance than Professor John Milne, who is known as a great seismologist, the man who is most in evidence when earthquakes are troubling. When the earth is still the Professor will leave his instruments in the Isle of Wight to their own care for a period, and he will wander away to the links for some golf. To what great feat has the golf of this professor led him? Why, he of all men became the first to drive a golf ball across the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi River—a hundred and sixty yards of roaring, foaming water. That was when the British Association went for its annual meeting to South Africa, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the celebrated Cambridge pathologist, was so much impressed by the achievement, that he too attempted to drive the Zambesi, and succeeded. But these are the things that may be done by Professors once, and not always. Two more balls were teed on the bank, and the Professors smote them with their clubs, but those balls were claimed by the Zambesi, and perchance they have been digested by the crocodiles. Now here you have something done by golf which was not golf, but which marked the advance of civilisation into the dark regions of the African continent. Our practical friends must allow this to the credit of the game, not only for the achievement in itself, but for the possibilities that it suggests, for is not a picture at once conjured up of the resourceful golfer driving a ball from the shore to a sinking ship, when all other means of establishing communication therewith had failed? To the ball there will be tied a silken thread, and the thread will help a string across, and the string will drag a rope. Thus must we plead for golf!
While in these serious aspects of the battle of life the game is thus to come to our aid, it shall be of similar service also in the gentler paths. Once upon a time a maker of golf balls told me how he had suspected a rival of putting cores from old balls made by him A into all so-called new ones made by the rival B. Therefore A for a little while wound a tiny piece of tissue paper with the rubber of his cores, and on the paper there was written A’s name and address. Some time later the tissues came home again through the medium of the balls that bore the name of B. There was this damning evidence of the pilfering of the cores. This story is not told as a hint to the trade, but surely it will convey one to ingenious persons who wish for a mode of secret communication with others which will be sure and safe. May it not be that some Romeo of to-day has already come by the device of lofting a ball or two on to the balcony of the fair Juliet, who in the seclusion of her chamber may be discovered in operation upon the cover with hair-pins and fire-irons, and presently in raptures upon the endearments expressed in the billet doux of her Romeo?
Perhaps it will not avail us as golfers to tell our practical friends that the principles of the application of physical force which have been taught us in the game, as of the steady body, the fixed centre of movement, and of the hand being under the constant leadership of the eye, have benefited us not merely in the playing of other games, such as billiards and tennis, but in the attainment of greater proficiency in some of the most practical and useful of domestic occupations, so that the man of all others who may be depended upon to hang up the pictures in a new house as pictures should be hanged, is the golfer who has got his handicap down to 6. We will tell also to the critic of our game that it affords a scope for a kind of humour that is of occasional service to some wits and others. It helps them to raise a laugh over the tea-cups when they say that they will take the odd or two more in sugar. We do not like this jugglery with the terms, and it is only to be excused in such exceptional cases as when the doctor tells the new golfer that his temperature is 99° and the patient inquires anxiously as to what the bogey is; or when, in discussing the frowning fortunes of some unfortunate acquaintance who has had a hard time in life, and is called upon for severe labour in his last days, it is said of this poor chap that he is playing the nineteenth hole and has made an indifferent drive. But, in seriousness, we like our golf to be kept sacred to itself, and unassociated with the generally duller pursuits of this workaday world.