The sixth green and seventh tee
We must get back to Gullane, however, where at the far end of the village, on the road to North Berwick, is a course of greater fame than any of those I have mentioned—Muirfield, the home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh golfers, and one of the select band of championship courses. Muirfield has had rather a chequered career in regard to public estimation, and has been at different times very violently abused, partly because the Honourable Company, in leaving Musselburgh, took the championship with them away from its ancient home: partly on account of the intrinsic merits or demerits of the links. The Open Championship was for the first time played at Muirfield in 1892, and it is possible that the course was hardly good enough or long enough for a championship course. Certainly the score with which the championship was won was phenomenally low for those days of gutty balls. It was altogether a memorable championship, for several reasons; it marked the beginning of the decline of Musselburgh, it was played for the first time over 72 instead of 36 holes, and it was won by an amateur, Mr. Hilton. That change from one to two days’ play may be said to have robbed another great amateur of the honour of being open champion, for at the end of the first day Mr. Horace Hutchinson had a handsome lead. On the second day, alas! an unfortunate encounter with that fatal wood at the very first hole was the beginning of a series of disasters. There is always something bitterly hard about being the first to suffer through a reform, however excellent it may be in the abstract, and I have always felt dreadfully sorry for Mr. Hutchinson.
However, one amateur’s loss was another’s gain, and Mr. Hilton, after being eight strokes behind on the first day, came away with a wonderful game on the second, nearly doing the first hole in one, holing two pitches, and racing so fast round the course as nearly to be the death of an ancient partner. It is interesting to read in Mr. Hilton’s reminiscences that it was only two days before the event that he decided to enter for this momentous championship, and that his course of training consisted of three rounds in one day immediately following a night journey. Here is a fine chance for a confusion of thought between cause and effect.
Muirfield has been a good deal altered since then, and, if it will never be among the most prepossessing of courses, it is now both sound and interesting, while, given any appreciable amount of wind, it is thoroughly difficult. It is curious that it has but little outward attractions. There is a fine view of the sea and a delightful sea wood, with the trees all bent and twisted by the wind; then, too, it is a solitary and peaceful spot, and a great haunt of the curlews, whom one may see hovering over a championship crowd and crying eerily amid a religious silence. All this is charming, but there is a fatal stone wall that runs round the course, giving the impression of an inland park, and it is, I believe, this purely sentimental objection that has brought Muirfield so many detractors. Not that there are not or have not been other objections of a more practical kind. The course has twice had to be lengthened, and there was, moreover, a time when the ground near the edges of the greens was very spongy and uncertain in character. The greens are rather small—this is entirely a virtue—and, consequently, there are many little chips and running shots to be played; these, when the greens were hard and the surrounding country was soft, were apt to travel upon the wings of chance, and there were many lamentations. Now, however, the ground has hardened considerably, and at the last Amateur Championship there were no complaints on this score, although the greens themselves were difficult and, indeed, almost tricky.