THE COMIC COMING OF THE HASKELL BALL
In 1891 my brother-in-law, returning from a visit to America, came down to stay and to play golf with me at Ashdown Forest, and brought with him a dozen or two of a new kind of ball which, he said, had lately been invented in the United States and was the best ball in the world. The balls were called, as he told me, Haskells. We went out to play with them. He, as it happened, played very badly, and in a very short time he was perfectly ready to go into any court of law and take his oath that they were the worst balls in the world. I had formed my own opinion of them, much more in accord with the verdict with which he had first introduced them to me than with that condemnatory one which he passed on them after two days of being off his game; but I refrained from expressing my opinion too emphatically, with the result that when he went away he said that, as for the remnant of the balls, he was not going to be bothered "to take the beastly things away," so that I found myself the possessor of a couple of dozen or so of excellent Haskell balls—being, as he had said, in the first instance, the best balls in the world—at a time when no one else in Great Britain had such a ball at all!
Duncan. Taylor. Braid. Vardon.
Gutty v. Rubber Core.
It is quite true that some months previously, at North Berwick, I had been given to try, by a professional who had just returned from the States, a ball which I now recognized to be the same, in some of its essentials, as these Haskells which my brother-in-law brought over. It was the same, except for one external but extremely important essential—its nicks were ridiculously too light and slight, not nearly enough indented. So I tried that ball and found it wanting—it would not fly at all. But what I did not realize at the time was the reason why it did not fly; or, if I did realize, as one could not fail to do, that the nicks were not emphatic enough, I had not a suspicion of the merit of its interior qualities. I had not appreciated that it was an amazingly good ball if only this slight matter of its exterior marking had been attended to. I had taken no more thought or notice of it.
Armed with these new weapons I prepared to go out to Biarritz, where the annual foursome match against Pau was just impending. My partner was to be Evy Martin Smith, and as soon as I arrived I told him that we must use these new balls for the match. He strongly objected, being a firm Conservative, tried the balls, with every intention of disliking them, and disliked them accordingly. The fact is that I was, at this moment, just the last man in the world to appear on any scene as an advocate of a new ball. Only a year or two before I had taken an unfortunate interest in a patent substance called "Maponite," of which, in addition to a thousand and one other things for which gutta-percha and indiarubber are used, golf balls were to be made. And wherein exactly was the weak point about the stuff as a material for golf balls I never knew, for the trial balls that they made for us were excellent—I remember that I won an open tournament at Brancaster with them—but as soon as ever they began to turn them out in numbers they were useful for one end only—for the good of the club-makers—for they were hard stony things which broke up the wooden clubs as if one had used the clubs as stone hammers.
So I was not a good apostle of a new ball—rather discredited in fact—but I did induce Evy Smith to play with the ball finally, under deep protest, and we justified its use by winning. Meanwhile the balls were beginning to filter from America into England. It was difficult indeed to get people to appreciate their merits: the balls were not numerous, and were still hard to obtain. At Johnny Low's request I sent him one for trial. He was writing at that time in the Athletic News. He wrote a most amusing article about the ball—said that he had tried a stroke or two with it in his room, and had found it so resilient that it went bounding about the room like a fives ball in a squash court and finally disappeared up the chimney and was never seen again.
In fine, he gave the ball his banning, "not because it was an expensive ball"—it is to be remembered that it was rather a shock to be asked to pay two and sixpence for a golf ball, whereas before we had paid a shilling as the normal price—"but because it was a bad ball," meaning a ball "singularly ill-adapted for the purpose" of golf. So difficult is it for even a clever man and wise in the royal and ancient wisdom, as Johnny Low undoubtedly is, to keep an unprejudiced judgment about any new thing.
Expensive as the ball was in the beginning, it was soon found that it was far more economical than the solid "gutty"; both because it lasted in playable condition far longer and also because it did not knock about the wooden club to anything like the same extent. But within a very short while there came such a demand for those balls, so greatly in excess of the supply, that there was a time when as much as a guinea apiece was paid for them, and numbers changed hands at ten shillings. That was round and about the time of the championships, both open and amateur being held that year at Hoylake, and both these championships were won with the Haskell balls.
I am calling these balls Haskells, because that is the name by which they were known and spoken of, after their American inventor, at this time. The reluctance of players to use them, and the gradual overcoming of that reluctance, had many comic incidents associated with it.
The amateur championship that year was full of wonders. It was won by Charles Hutchings, he being then a grandfather and fifty-two years of age. He knocked me out, among other better men, beating me at the last hole. And then he beat that brilliant and greatly to be regretted young golfer, Johnny Bramston. In the final he had to play Fry, and established a very big lead on him in the first round. He had about six holes in hand with only nine to play, and then Fry began to do conjuring tricks, holing putts from the edge of the green, and so on. In the event Charles Hutchings just won by a single hole after one of the most remarkable final matches in the whole story of that championship. And it is to be noted that these two finalists, who proved themselves better able than most others to adapt themselves to the new touch of these livelier balls—for nearly all the competitors used the Haskells—were extremely good billiard players. Fry had won the amateur championship of billiards more than once, and Hutchings was quite capable of such atrocities as a three-figure break. I think the sensitive fingers of these billiard players helped them to get the touch of these livelier balls which were so "kittle" for the approach and putting.
After the amateur came the open, in which I did not take a hand, but I heard a great deal of the preliminary discussions about it. Of course, if the amateurs were difficult to convince about the merits of the new balls, the professionals, who had their vested interest in the old, and did not know how these were to be affected by the coming of the new, were harder still to convince. However, the balls were too good to be denied. Andrew Kirkaldy, a shrewd man, and one, besides, who had no interest in the sale of balls, solid or rubber cored, was one of the first and most enthusiastic converts. "The puggy," he declared, "is a great ba'." He called it "puggy," which is Scottish for monkey, because it jumped about so. "Ye canna' tak' eighty strokes to the roun' wi' a puggy—the puggy will na' gae roun' in eighty strokes." However, on the morrow of making that brave statement, he contrived, even with the "puggy," to take several strokes more than eighty to go round the Hoylake course for the championship. Alec Herd was one of the most uncompromising opponents of the new ball until the very day of the championship. He had declared that he hoped everybody else would play with the Haskell, but that for his own part he meant to stick to his old friend. And then, on the day of the play, behold Herd, who had said these things, teeing up a Haskell himself on the first tee, and continuing play with it until he had won the championship! It was a bit of luck for him, hitting on the truth about the merits of the ball just at the right moment. I do not think he would ever have won the championship save for the Haskell ball. At the same time it is only fair to him to say this, that he was—at least I think so—quite unlucky not to win the championship two years previously. It was the year that Taylor won at St. Andrews, and at that date, and for some little while before the championship, Herd had certainly been playing the best golf of anybody. Then the weather changed, just on the eve of the championship. There came abundance of rain, which put the greens into just the condition that Taylor liked. He won that championship, and Herd, I think, was a little unfortunate not to win. But fortune restored the balance of her favours by giving him this win at Hoylake with the new ball long after we had ceased to think him a likely champion. Thus once again, "justice has been done." Therewith the Haskell ball made its reputation and came to stay. There was a talk of ruling it out, by the Rules of Golf Committee, but Hall Blyth, then chairman, agreed with me and others that it had won its way too far into popularity to be made illegal, and the idea of legislating it out was dropped.