Then, too, there is always a rich reward at Hoylake for the man who can play his approaches really straight and with a firm, sure touch. There are some courses where the greens are always helping us and the ball is always running to the hole. We may play a most indifferent iron shot on to the outskirts of the green, and behold! a kindly slope has intervened on our behalf, and the ball finishes within comfortable putting range. Hoylake is emphatically not one of those easy and enervating places; there the greens are always fighting against the player, and he must hold his shot straight on the pin from start to finish. If he does not, the chances are that the ball will take a vindictive leap, and his next shot will still come under the category of approaching. There is none of your smug smoothness and trimness about Hoylake; it is rather hard and bare and bumpy, and needs a man to conquer it. The game, as I have said, is not made easy for us, and this is true—a little too true, alas!—of the putting greens. Sometimes they are good enough, though hardly ever easy; but very often, unless I have been exceptionally unfortunate in my experience, they are rather rough and lumpy, and make the holing of short putts a very anxious business. Time was when the greens were the particular pride of the course, and Mr. Hutchinson wrote in the Badminton Library that “The links of Hoylake are associated, in the mind of every golfer who has played upon them, with the most perfect putting greens in all the world.” Since that eulogy was written the building of houses and the consequent drainage operations are said to have drained some subtle and beautiful quality out of the greens, and they may now be said to form the weakness rather than the strength of the course. Even now, however, they are not so rough as they often look, and the man who has a delicate and withal a fearless touch of his putter will still be rewarded at Hoylake.
One more good quality of the holes at Hoylake deserves a word of mention; it has been called by Mr. Low their ‘indestructibleness.’ By this most useful, if inelegant, word, he means that they are good whether played with or against the wind, and that is very high praise, particularly as there are few courses on which a change of wind more completely alters the character of each individual hole. Blessed indeed is the hole which can keep its good character whichever way the wind is blowing.
The first hole is so good and difficult that it seems almost a pity that we are compelled to play it before we have got thoroughly into our stride. Whatever the wind, it is our duty to begin with a long, straight drive between the club-house railings on the left and a sandy ditch and cop on the right. At about the distance of a good drive from the tee the cop turns at a right angle to the right, and we must follow the cop, skirting it as near as we dare. The wind cannot be either with or against us for both our first and second shots, and we shall have a fine opportunity of showing our skill in the use of it. If it be blowing strongly against us on the tee we shall hardly get home in two, and our second must needs be played over the corner of the cop and the out-of-bounds region that lies within it. If it blow behind us we shall be well clear of the cop with our drive, and may hope to be home with a low, running second with an iron club, but it must be a parlous straight one. Altogether there are few finer holes to be found anywhere, and it would always find a place in my eclectic eighteen holes.
Passing over the second—good hole though it be—we come to an unpleasantly narrow one—the third or ‘Long’ hole. If the wind is blowing freshly behind us we may aspire to reach the green in two very long and very straight shots, but as a rule we shall require two drives and a pitch. Along the left-hand side runs a sandy ditch beneath a turf wall with absolutely precipitous sides, and woe betide the man whose ball lies tucked up hard under the face of that wall; he will be lucky if he can get it out backwards, forwards, or at all. I saw Mr. John Ball extricate himself from this predicament by an extraordinary stroke, or so it seemed to me. He stood on the top of the wall, far out of reach of the ball, then leaped down into the ditch, hitting as he jumped, and out came the ball most gallantly; it needs something more than local knowledge to play such a shot as this.
The fourth is a short hole—the ‘Cop’ by name, so called from yet another bank that guards it. Then follow two good two-shot holes, of which the sixth, or ‘Briars,’ has the distinction of having been halved in nine in the final of an amateur championship. The tee-shot must be struck straight and true over the angle of hedge, while anything in the nature of an attempt to sneak round by the right entails a prickly death among the whins. Safely over the hedge, we have yet two sandy trenches to carry, and the green is guarded by rushes and pot-bunkers, so that if nine be an excessive total, four is a comparatively small one. Next comes one of the finest short holes in the world, ‘The Dowie,’ which is not only very good, but really unique. There is a narrow triangular green, guarded on the right by some straggling rushes and on the left by an out-of-bounds field and a cop; there is likewise a pot-bunker in front. To hit quite straight at this hole is the feat of a hero, for let the ball be ever so slightly pulled, and we shall infallibly be left playing our second shot from the tee. Nearly everybody slices at the Dowie out of pure fright, and is left with a tricky little running up shot on to the green. The perfect shot starts out of the right, just to show that it has no intention of going out of bounds, and then swings round with a delicious hook, struggles through the little rushy hollow, and so home on the green; it is a shot to dream of, but alas! seldom to play.
The twelfth tee
