The two great features of golf at Rye are the uniformly fiendish behaviour of the wind and the fascinating variety of the stances. The wind presumably blows no harder than it does anywhere else, but the holes are so contrived that the prevailing wind, which comes off the sea, is always blowing across us. With a typical Rye wind blowing, it may be said that there is but one hole where it blows straight in our teeth, and one—and that a short one—where it is straight behind us. At the other sixteen holes the enemy persists in making a flanking attack upon us, and we never have a perfectly straightforward shot to play. For the few who are artists in using the wind, Rye is a paradise; for the majority who are not, it is a place of trial and disillusionment.
Disillusioned too will be they who imagine that they know all that there is to be known about wooden clubs, because they have attained to some certainty in hitting a ball that lies teed on a smooth, level plain. At Rye they must be prepared to hit brassey shots—and long, straight brassey shots, too—with one foot on a hummock and the other in a pit. If they cannot do it, they must be content to take five far more often than they like.
For these two reasons it is a fine course on which to give strokes, and an ideal battle-ground for golfing giants, from a spectator’s point of view, since it is scarcely possible, even with the most perfect golf, to avoid two or three shots in the course of a round which shall be difficult enough and unusual enough to be intensely interesting.
The subtlety of the short holes is the thing that will probably impress the advanced student, while the more elementary will retain vivid recollections of the knotted horrors of the Sea hole and the utter hopelessness of the eighteenth bunker. Certainly that eighteenth bunker—we never ought to get in it—is a pit of desolation; its sides are so steep and so smooth that wherever the ball may pitch down it will roll to the bottom, ultimately to repose in a footmark. To the man who has a good medal score in prospect, it looms vast and uncarryable—a thing against which it is useless to struggle. So appalling is it that at one time some tender-hearted people thought that it was refined cruelty to keep such a horror till the last; so they shuffled the course round and turned the eighteenth hole into the ninth, in order that, if a man was fated to ruin his score, he should be put more quickly out of his agony. This was rightly considered, however, to be mistaken kindness, and the big bunker is still kept as a crowning joy or misery. The three short holes are certainly things of beauty and of the three the best and the most paralyzing is the eighth.
To see Mr. de Montmorency play this hole against a wind with a hateful little club which he calls his ‘push-cleek’ is to see iron play at its highest; to attempt to play it ourselves is to realize how far we fall short of that standard and to what a state of impotency and terror it is possible to be reduced by the surrounding scenery. The appearance of the hole is so frightening that the ball is as good as missed before we address it. The distance on a still day can be compassed with a nice, firm shot with the iron, but the green looks so small and the sides of the plateau on which it stands so steep and unpleasant; the angle at which we approach it is so awkward and the wind blows so persistently on our backs that something is almost sure to go, and does go, wrong.
The fourteenth is another good and difficult short hole, built in pious imitation of the eleventh at St. Andrews, as is also the fourth hole at Worplesdon, and the imitation is carried so far that it is not uncommon, after the tee-shots have been struck, to hear the agonized cry go up to Heaven, “I’m in the Eden!” This is, unfortunately, the one hole where the wind does not do its best for Rye, since it blows for days together straight behind the player and makes the stopping of the ball upon the green too much a matter of luck.
There are so many other good holes that it seems invidious to distinguish between them. There is the first, with its narrow, curly tee-shot between a stream and a road and its little square box of a green protected on every side; there are the fifth and sixth, good holes both, and one cannot leave out the third, commonly called the ‘Dog-leg.’ Then, coming home, what could be better than the eleventh, with its uncompromisingly small green, guarded night and day by a deep bunker and most magnetic cabbage-garden; or the sixteenth, with its long hog-back? Surely there can nowhere be anything appreciably better than the golf to be had at this truly divine spot.
‘Paradise’