After this glorious hole the eighteenth seems simple enough. Two lusty, straightforward drives, with a big bunker to carry for the second; it is a hole that presents few terrors to the professional, since he always hits his wooden club shots, yet even for him there are some bunkers at the edge of the green which are not to be despised. For humbler people everything connected with the hole is very far from despicable.
Besides the greens, which are big and true and fraught with undulations difficult to gauge, there is one feature which calls for special mention, and that is the deepness of the bunkers. It is part of Mr. Fowler’s ferocity that he does not intend us to run through his bunkers, if he can by any means prevent it, while, when we are in them, he does not mean us to do more than get out with a niblick. Braid can sometimes hit prodigious distances out of them, but then he has been round the course in a score under 70—a thing that no respectable man should do.
Before quitting the heathery courses, we must take a glance at Woking, which is the oldest and still one of the best of them. Indeed, although my judgment may not be strictly an impartial one, I think it is still the pleasantest of all upon which to play, and the golf is undeniably interesting. It does lack something, however, of the bigness of Sunningdale or Walton Heath, which have been laid out on an altogether grander scale. The two-shot holes at Woking do not always require quite two shots. When the ground is at all hard a poorish drive does not do a great deal of harm, and a long one means a comfortable second shot with an iron club. Still, continuous brassey play is not everything: it is apt to grow monotonous, and whatever charge can be made against Woking, I imagine that no just critic would call it dull. The keenest golfer among my acquaintances said to me the other day that, whatever anybody might say, Sandwich and Woking were the two pleasantest places for a game of golf, and though there is no resemblance between the two courses, I think his verdict was a sound one.
Woking has certain, almost unique, distinctions--or disgraces, according to one’s point of view—among golf clubs. It has but one medal day a year, and it possesses no Bogey. Any innocent stranger visiting Woking and enquiring the bogey score for any particular hole will be greeted with a glare of such withering contempt as seriously to impair his day’s pleasure. Another curious, and I think a blessed, circumstance about Woking is that the bunkers, which are many and cunningly disposed, are the work of one benevolent autocrat. Unconscious of their doom, the members disperse for their summer holidays and when they return they find that the most revolutionary things have been done. Upon greens that were formerly flat and easy have sprouted plateaus and domes and hollows. Hillocks have risen as if by magic in the middle of the fairway; ‘floral’ hazards bloom at the side, and bunkers have been dug at that precise spot where members have for years complacently watched their ball come to rest at the end of their finest shots. Even now as I write I believe there is a gigantic project in view at a certain hole, which I would rather die than reveal. All these things happen at the instigation of a very small secret Junta, and after a little grumbling, such as is only right and proper, the members settle down and admit that the alterations are exceedingly ingenious and the course more entertaining than ever. It appears to me to be the ideal way in which to conduct a golf club, but it is an ideal that can very seldom be attained.
Looking back to the sixteenth green
Over one of the revolutionary things done at Woking controversy still rages, or rather it no longer continuously rages, but spirts every now and again into flame. This is the famous bunker at the fourth hole, of which the traveller may get a fine view as he is being whirled towards Southampton by the South-Western Railway. This hole was originally a very ordinary ‘drive and a pitch’ hole. You drove straight down a fairly broad strip of turf between heather on the left and the railway line on the right. Then you jumped over a rampart on to a nice big green and there you were. The soul of Mr. Stuart Paton, however, soared far above so lamentably unimaginative a hole, and he set to work upon it. First he removed large portions of the cross-rampart, so that it became possible to play a running instead of a pitching shot from certain positions, and then in the very centre of the fairway, at just the range of a good drive from the tee, he dug a small but formidable bunker. In shape it bore a resemblance to the Principal’s Nose, while in position it was rather like that of the bunker which lies in the middle of the course going to the ninth hole also at St. Andrews. By means of this bunker a clear-cut and distinct problem has to be faced on the tee. We must decide whether to drive safely away to the left, and so have a pitch to play, which is sometimes rather difficult, or whether to take a risk and lay down the ball between the bunker and the railway line. The danger of pushing the ball out a little too much, and so going out of bounds, is considerable, but the reward is considerable also, for an easy running up shot should give us a putt for three.