Having thus mentioned Mr. Travis, one can hardly refrain from quoting some of his instruction in this matter as he once conveyed it to me. "I believe," said he, "that putting should always be done with one hand—with one hand actively at work, that is. The left should be used only for the purpose of swinging the club backwards preparatory to making the stroke. When it has done that its work is ended and the right hand should then be sole master of the situation, the left being merely kept in attachment to it for steadying purposes. When only one hand is thus employed the gain in accuracy is very great. Two hands at work on a short putt or a long one tend to distraction. When the stroke is being made the grip of the right hand should be firm, but not tight, and after the impact the club-head should be allowed to pass clean through with an easy following stroke. The follow-through should indeed be as long as it is possible to make it comfortably, and, with this object in view, at the moment of touching the ball the grip of the fingers of the left hand should be considerably relaxed, so that the right hand may go on doing its work without interruption. Never hit or jerk the ball as so many players do. There is nothing that pays so well as the easy follow-through stroke."
Yet we find that there is less than ever of that easy follow-through being done in these days, and putting may be no better for the fact, almost certainly is not. These are days when old maxims are being abandoned and new systems are being proclaimed season by season. Jack White, a splendid putter and a magnificent heretic, lately declared that it is time to get rid of what has been regarded as the most inviolable of maxims, "Never up, never in," asserting that the determination to be past the hole in putting, if not in it, leads with these lively balls we now play with to far too many of them running out of holing distance on the other side. His counsel, therefore, is that the ball should be coaxed gently up to the hole with as much drag applied to it as can be. Then for years past it has been recommended that one of the best ways of managing the putting with these speedy balls is to have much loft on the putter, and so in that way do something to create the drag; but lately a change of opinion began to be made, and I am finding some of the best players using putters that are perfectly straight in the face, believing that by their agency they can putt more delicately and with a surer judgment of strength.
It is a little bewildering. Arnaud Massy, the French player who once won the Open Championship, and who is better at the putts of from six to ten or twelve feet than any man I know, says that he has come to believe that Nature has planted deep down in us a sixth sense, and it is that of putting. In the development of that sense lies the way to success. But after all such meditations as this, I go back to the remembrance of that wonderful little child who could never miss, and then from it all there emerges the only real secret of success in putting. The child has a quality which we elders do not enjoy, and never shall have it for any length of time. He knows not the hardness of the world. Having innocence and faith he looks trustingly upon it, and the old world and its four and a quarter inch hole is a little ashamed, perhaps. The child has Confidence.
CHAPTER IV
OLD CHAMPIONS AND NEW, AND SOME DIFFERENCES IN ACHIEVEMENT, WITH A SUGGESTION THAT GOLF IS A CRUEL GAME.
If men who play games are not proud of their champions, of what then shall they be proud? If we advance the proposition—which is done here and now—that no other game or sport that was ever conceived and played has produced such remarkable strength and mastery in its champions as golf has done, the cynics will find that with the resources of the world and history at their disposal this position of ours can be well maintained, even though we have less than sixty years of championships for our support. And let it be said also at the beginning that we of golf declare to win, not with the Morrises or Parks, as might be supposed—good men they were too—but with the moderns, and especially with our Harry Vardon, our Taylor, our Braid, and the amateurs, John Ball, Harold Hilton, and the Frederick Guthrie Tait of immortal and beloved memory. I have long since grown accustomed to the mysterious and the inexplicable in golf, and pass them by on their fresh occurrences in these days as like the commonplace, something for which indeed there may be some explanation and a simple one, but one which the gods, with their humour and their teasing, are hiding from us. We who in this game have fed so long on wonders are now disposed to overlook phenomena. We tire of sensations and the extraordinary, and would revert to a smooth placidity of plain occurrence. It is in such mood that we often contemplate the records of the past, and then we dismiss them quickly with the comfortable judgment that the Morrises were themselves, and, being fixed on a permanent pinnacle, must not be disturbed. They have become a creed. One might imagine little plaster figures of old Tom, his left hand in his trousers pocket, thumb outside, and young Tom in Glengarry bonnet all complete, to have been placed in some over-zealous golfers' homes along with representations of Homer, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Gladstone, and Cecil Rhodes, and no questions are to be asked about them. It may be right to place them there, those early champions of the game, but when sometimes steeled to sacrilege and careless of all risk, I set myself to analyse the conditions and circumstances in which they gained their immortal glory, I can give reasons, ordinary worldly reasons, why they gained it; and can thereupon pass them as satisfying every reasonable requirement of human champions of the first degree. But with the others it is not at all like that. Golf being the game it is, the repeated successes of those three great players we call the "triumvirate," Taylor, Vardon, and Braid, at a time when competition is so enormously severe, and when—this point being of towering importance—the luck of the game, always considerable, is, through a variety of circumstances, greater than ever, appear to me, having seen most of them accomplished, and now looking upon the plain printed records of indisputable fact, to have still some elements of impossibility. One has a fear that three or four hundred years from now the golfers of the period may not believe that these things did happen; they may decide that we of this imaginative and progressive age, a little fearful perhaps of greater wonders that might be accomplished in the future, had prepared a little trick for posterity and had set forth false records of what we had done, so absurd that their falsity was self-evident, and so we were to be pitied for our simplicity. In our humble way, and by stating the records of achievement in the coldest way, admitting moreover that even to us of the time they appear incredible, we do our best to gain favour and acceptance with our descendants. Fifteen Open Championships to the triumvirate, and eight Amateur Championships to Mr. John Ball himself. It is indeed impossible; but it is one of those things in golf that are to be described in the terms that Ben Sayers (who might have been given a championship by the fates for services rendered and skill displayed before the era to which he chiefly belonged was closed, as men are made lords when governments give up) applied to the victory over him by Fred Tait on his own course at North Berwick once by something like seven and six—"It's no possible, but it's a fact!" All of us know one man—perhaps more than one, but we do know one for certain—who nearly all the time that Mr. Ball has been winning those championships might have been winning them himself, has been almost good enough to do so. But he has won nothing, and after all it may not be a matter of much surprise if we consider the enormous odds against victory in a championship because of the luck of the game, the fact that it is not like running or rowing, billiards or chess, where strength and stamina, knowledge and skill, work out almost exactly every time, but a game in which skill has this element of luck blended so largely with it. But Mr. Ball, Amateur Champion eight times over, and the triumvirate as well!—when "the truth stands out as gross as black from white," with my eyes I can scarcely see it. These persons have forbidden the caprice of chance that was set to worry them, they have overthrown the laws of averages, they have annihilated the weaknesses of flesh and blood, and they have laughed at fortune and at fate which, defeated, have joined up with them. Then clearly they, with the collection of champions in general for their garnishment, are to be regarded as the sixth wonder of the game.
It is now too late—as it always was too late—to make any fair comparison between the great players of our own time and those who were members in the early years of the Open Championship. There is not so much argument now as to whether Harry Vardon is better than young Tom Morris was, though such argument was common only ten or a dozen years ago. How may you compare these men? Young Tommy won four championships in succession, but there was only a handful of competitors each time, and the opposition was feeble almost to nothing in comparison with what it became a very few years later. Vardon, Taylor, and Braid have each won the championship five times, and many of these victories were gained against their own fellow-champions and the strongest opposition conceivable. Yet though such as Vardon produce what are in a sense more astonishing results in the way of scores, we are reminded that they have far smoother courses to play upon and much improved clubs and balls. Also they have better rivals to sharpen their game. From this one might argue that it would be strange indeed if they were not better than young Tommy was, that it is quite inevitable they should be. But our modern champions have done more than fulfil the obligations laid upon them. They have established an amazing supremacy at a period when golfers are reckoned in the hundreds of thousands; young Tom was champion when there were the hundreds without the thousands. His championship, at all events, did not mean so much. The championships gained by our triumvirate are proof beyond all possibility of doubt or question that these men are the most exalted geniuses, that they have such a clear superiority over all other golfers of their time as is, seeing the circumstances of the case and knowing the waywardness of golf, almost incredible. The success of the younger Morris proved, as some will hold, only that he was quite the best golfer of a few eligible to compete for the championship.