Coming home the course suffers a little, as I said, from being too flat, and, so as with many of these park courses, it is rather hard to pick out any one hole from among its fellows. Good sound golf will be repaid, and so will the golf that is unsound and bad, but neither the rewards nor the punishments are of a thrilling or heroic order. There is one hole, however, that calls for special mention, the sixteenth, where two really fine shots are needed to reach the green, and the only thing to be said against the hole is that it would be better still if it were number seventeen instead; not that the present seventeenth is bad, but that the sixteenth is so eminently well adapted to occupy that critical and important position. Gaudin has been round the course in 65, but the intending visitor will be disappointed if he imagines that he himself will necessarily do a particularly low score on that account. In these days of expanded courses—against which one begins to see some signs of a revolt—Trafford Park is not vastly long, but it calls for good, honest golf for all that.
CHAPTER VII.
YORKSHIRE AND THE MIDLANDS.
With an open mind and a golfing friend I started in the month of March on a short pilgrimage to the courses of Yorkshire and the Midlands. Two rounds a day on a new course, to be followed by some hours of travelling, constitute a strenuous life for the ordinary golfer, although no doubt it is mere child’s play to the great ‘showmen’ of golf, as Mr. Croome has christened them. On my remarking on this point to my companion that we now knew what it must feel like to be Braid or Taylor, he replied that personally he did not feel in the very least like them, and that he did not think my play was any justification for my doing so either.
The carry at the eighteenth tee
In spite of this slight unpleasantness, we had a most agreeable pilgrimage, which was begun by taking a train to Scarborough, in order to play at Ganton. Ganton sprang into fame as being the home course of Harry Vardon. It was there that he played the second half of his great match with Willy Park, and having gained a small but serviceable lead at North Berwick, played one of his most overpowering games on his own course, and never gave his adversary even the faintest of chances. Some of the glamour of Harry Vardon still hangs round Ganton, although he has left it now for some years, and has a worthy successor in Edward Ray, the hitter of mighty drives and smoker of many pipes. The course has been a good deal altered since Vardon’s days, for with the advent of the Haskell, it suffered the common lot and became rather too short. Now it has been stretched and rearranged and pretty severely bunkered; most noteworthy of all, the hole of which the visitor to Ganton formerly carried away the most vivid impression, has been altered out of recognition. This is the present twelfth hole, where in old days the tee-shot consisted of a mashie pitch, played mountains high into the air in order to clear the tops of a row of tall trees. Now the trees have been ruthlessly cut down, and we have a one-shot hole, demanding not a mashie but a brassey shot, very good and very orthodox. No doubt the old hole was a bad one, and the new one is good; nevertheless there must have been some bitter regrets over the felling of the trees. Unless we are utterly consumed with a fire of reforming zeal, we can well afford to drop a tear over the disappearance of these holes—once the pride and joy of their creators, now destroyed or altered beyond recognition. The once-famous short holes are meeting with the same fate all over the country. The ‘Maiden,’ long since shorn of much of its glory, is undergoing yet another metamorphosis, and it is even rumoured that some day it will be a blind hole no longer. The ‘Sandy Parlour’ has even been threatened, and indeed it may be laid down that if the golfers of a dozen years ago praised a hole as being ‘sporting,’ that hole will be the first marked down for the reformer’s attack. It is all very splendid no doubt, but it is also just a little bit sad.