There were about four hundred and seventy-six reasons why Adolphus was unpopular with us; a few will suffice. In the first place, he was a cup hunter. He had an unholy passion for silver goblets and trophies with the club emblem on them, and he preferred a small silver vase—worth not to exceed three dollars, wholesale—to the respect and admiration of his fellow golfers. Heaven knows why he wanted trophies! They are never any good unless a man has friends to show them to!
In the second place, Adolphus didn't care how he won a cup, and, as Cupid used to say, the best club in his bag was the book of rules.
If you don't know it already, I must tell you that golf is the most strictly governed game in the world, and also the most ceremonious. It is as full of "thou shalt nots" as the commandments. There are rules for everything and everybody on the course, and the breaking of a rule carries a penalty with it—the loss of a stroke or the loss of a hole, as the case may be. Very few golfers play absolutely to the letter of the law; even those who know the rules incur penalties through carelessness, and in such a case it is not considered sporting to demand the pound of flesh; but there was nothing sporting about Adolphus Kitts.
He knew every obscure rule and insisted on every penalty. Question him, and he fished out the book. That book of rules stiffened his match play tremendously, besides making his opponents want to murder him. It was rather a rotten system, but Kitts hadn't a drop of sporting blood in his whole big body, and the element of sportsmanship didn't enter into his calculations at all. He claimed strokes and holes even when not in competition, and because of this he found it difficult to obtain partners or opponents.
"He's a golf lawyer, that's what he is—a technical lawyer!" said Cupid one day. "And I wouldn't even play the nineteenth hole with him—I wouldn't, on a bet!"
Come to think of it, that is about the bitterest thing you can say of a golfer.
II
Our Annual Handicap is the blue-ribbon event of the year so far as most of us are concerned. The star players turn up their noses at it a bit, but that is only because they realise that they have a mighty slim chance to carry off the cup. The high-handicap men usually eliminate the crack performers, which is the way it should be. What's the good of a handicap event if a scratch man is to win it every year?
Sixty-four members qualify and are paired off into individual matches, which are played on handicaps, the losers dropping out. The man who "comes through" in the top half of the drawing meets the survivor of the lower half in the final match for the cup, which is always a very handsome and valuable trophy, calculated to rouse all the cupidity in a cup hunter's nature.
When the pairings were posted on the bulletin board Kitts was in the upper half and Windy in the lower one. Kitts had a handicap of 8 strokes, and was really entitled to 12, but Cupid wouldn't listen to his wails of anguish. Windy was a 12 man, and nobody figured the two renegades as dangerous until the sixty-four entrants had narrowed down to eight survivors. Kitts had won his matches by close margins, but Windy had simply smothered his opponents by lopsided scores, and there they were, in the running and too close to the finals for comfort.