After all, if comparison is fruitless and not properly practicable, this speculation as to the merits of the geniuses of nearly fifty years ago and now becomes enticing. One would like to reach some conclusion upon it, but cannot. It would be fine material for a golfers' debating society. Were I to regard myself as advocate for the moderns I should in an agreeable and inoffensive way suggest that time has done nothing to hurt the fame of young Tommy's skill. When what they call the golf boom began and the great game percolated through the mass of ignorant English, there was babble all at once about St. Andrews, and men of southern towns just discovering that the right hand on the driver should be the lower one whispered of the ancient city in a hypocritical manner of respect and awe as if it were high up above the blue instead of a day's journey up the northern lines from Euston or King's Cross. The name of the place was taken in vain, and to this day there are neophytes who lisp of "the Mecca of golf," as they say it, and its eleventh and seventeenth holes, though they have never been in Fifeshire and maybe never will. At the same time and by the same people there was established the vogue of young Tommy Morris, as one might call it. It was nearly sacrilege in the circumstances, for more people were living then than are living now who had known young Tommy, and fervently believed he was the best golfer who ever played the game. But what we may call the Morrisian traditions were established in this way, and they have laid a shoddy veneer on the really sound reputation of the young champion that it never needed. So the proposition is advanced that through ignorance and affectation and carelessness we posterity are being abundantly generous to young Tom and his father—forgetting Allan Robertson, such is the effect of championships, who was before them, and of whom it was said when he died that they might toll their bells and shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest was gone. We posterity are of another golfing world completely from that in which those early champions of St. Andrews lived and golfed. I have here in my room a driver with which old Tom played, and I see that the other day some rash fellows, unafraid of ghosts, took out from their receptacles some clubs which had belonged to him and others and played a game with them. But the handling of the old clubs and the looking on the picture of Tom which he once signed for me cannot bring the feeling of his time to ours, and I pass it on as a suggestion to our own posterity that our judgment in this matter, as it has been made, is nearly worthless.
It has been coldly stated that lies are told by golfers. That allegation may be dismissed with no consideration, but it is certain that fancy traditions of flimsy origin gather about golfing history and soon establish themselves in the most remarkable manner. I know many incidents of the past ten or fifteen years, things I myself have witnessed, the truth of which has become completely obscured by masses of imagined stuff that has gathered on them. To take a good example, more than half the golfers in the world will tell you that Lieutenant Fred Tait won a championship at Prestwick after wading into water at the Alps to play a shot from there in the final; if they will look at the records they will find that splendid Tait did not win that championship at all, and they should be told that the shot that Mr. Ball made from the wet sand in that same bunker was nearly as difficult and, in the circumstances, more trying. Again, the victory gained by Mr. Travis at Sandwich, so recently as 1904, is now already described in many different ways, but one feature common to all of them is that the American holed a putt of twenty yards on nearly every green, that his driving was childlike in its shortness, and that he was smoking himself to death at the time. Still later, the very next year, there was an Amateur Championship at Prestwick, and I remember that Mr. Robert Maxwell, after a hard struggle against young Barry—who won the championship—had to loft over a stymie on the eighteenth green to keep the match alive, and then at the nineteenth the student was left with a short putt to win that hole and the match. I saw the play in that match and saw the putt, and I believe it was one of about a couple of feet. It was certainly too much to give in the circumstances, far too much, but Mr. Maxwell, great lover of golf as he is, had even by that time begun to tire of the strenuousness and the officialdom and the graspingness of championship tournaments, and he waved his club in token of presentation of the putt to his young opponent and generously shook hands with him. The Scottish spectators did not like it at the time, because "oor Bobbie" was their best and greatest hope, and it seemed like feeding the devil with chocolates to give putts like this to English golfers. By the time that we had returned to the club-house, only three hundred yards away, it was being said that that putt was three feet long, by the morning it had gone up to three feet six, and increasing gradually it even touched the five-feet mark within the next few years. At that point there was a reaction and, from what I can gather, the putt has settled down in history at four feet. It was half as long.
So I think that golf posterities are fickle bodies, and even the best of them are not nearly so responsible and accurate in their judgments as is believed by those people who trustingly say that they will await the verdict of posterity. I remember that M. Anatole France urged that posterity was not infallible, because he himself and all human beings are posterity in regard to a long succession of works with which they are imperfectly acquainted, and he quotes the case of Macbeth whose reputation posterity has murdered, though Macbeth himself did no crime at all. Macbeth was really an excellent king. He enriched Scotland by favouring her commerce and industry. The chronicler depicts him as a pacific prince, the king of the towns, the friend of the citizens. The clans hated him because he administered justice well. He assassinated nobody. And as M. France remarks, we know what legend and genius have made of his memory. It is that way reversed with all our golfing traditions, and so we must handle them carefully. It is a principle of this game that no man can be a good golfer and a bad man, that those who are bad at heart have not the human qualities necessary for being golfers at all, cannot associate happily with the rest of the community, and so they get themselves properly out of it betimes. Hence it happens that of no golfer is there anything that is bad to be told. We have no Macbeths in this sport of ours, though it embraces some pensive Hamlets, and a number of the moderns would be golfing Romeos if their swings were finished in the old free style. But if tradition had indeed given us a foul Macbeth who improved his lie we should surely purify the remembrance of him, believing that his immediate posterity had almost certainly judged him wrong.
This case which the advocate has set up against young Tom, with all this blame cast on posterity, will seem a weak thing yet to some. If we were counsel for the boy, who made a fine and a lovable figure in his day, should we bandy with words like that, or put evidence direct and plain before the tribunal, the evidence of those who saw? There are still a few of them left, and for myself I should not have far to send to gain a willing witness. I have a good and valued friend, Mr. Charles Chambers of Edinburgh, member of a distinguished golfing family of many generations, and a fine player himself, who was in the semi-final of the first Amateur Championship. He saw young Tommy at the game, and played it with him. And Mr. Chambers, once answering my plea for some of his remembrances, said, "As a youngster at St. Andrews, I was a great friend of young Tom, the champion, and on a summer evening often accompanied him alone, when, with a club and a cleek, he played out as far as the second hole. He was, I believe, the greatest golfer the world has ever seen, those giants of the present day not excepted. His driving, which I remember so well, was of the long, low, wind-cheating style so seldom seen now, with great distance and carry. He never struck a ball anywhere except on the centre of the club, and this was reflected in the faces of his driving-clubs, which had a clear and distinct impression in the centre, the wood above and below being clean and fresh as when last filed. His putting was perhaps even more deadly, and in ordinary matches I recollect he was seldom or never asked to hole out a yard putt. In driving from the tee, his style may be described as an absolutely correct circular sweep, with great accuracy and follow-through, and this applied equally to his iron play. It was his custom to wear a broad Glengarry bonnet, which very frequently left his head on the delivery of the stroke.... Without doubt he succumbed to his private sorrows and a broken heart." That is strong testimony, and the abiding conviction is that young Morris was great indeed, but in the nature of things comparisons cannot well be made between then and now, and are better left undone.
§
I am glad that we have thus condemned posterity, for we strengthen the positions of our triumvirate and Mr. Ball at their only point of weakness, which is that their successes have been so marvellous as to be incredible to those heirs of ours who, not being of this period, will not have witnessed them. Posterity may suggest that such persons could not have lived, since none of us will hesitate to say that such posterity will not itself produce a man to win three championships. Even to win one twice is to make a proof of superiority such as in existing circumstances seems nearly impossible. Any man, as one might say, may win a championship; that would prove nothing save that he is as good a golfer as any other, or nearly so; but to win two championships is to prove that he is appreciably better than the others, that he is so much better as to balance with his skill the chances of the game—the putts he missed and the long ones that his opponents holed—that were flung against him. During a period of nearly twenty years the success of Taylor, Vardon, and Braid has been so complete, so overwhelming, so dazzling, that among them they seem almost to have solved the problem of perpetual victory. Each of these men is a genius, a great master of the game; each of them, had he lived in an age apart from the others, would alone have been enough to make a separate era in competitive golf; and it is a strange freak of fate that they should have been pitchforked into the arena at the same time. It is as if three Ormondes had been in the same Derby, or three Graces at the crease, when at their best; indeed, it is more wonderful than those things would have been. They were born within thirteen months of each other; Vardon and Braid within three months. The last-named is the eldest of the group; he was born at Earlsferry, in Fifeshire, on 6th February 1870; Harry Vardon was born in Jersey on 7th May 1870; and Taylor was born at Northam, in Devonshire, within a mile of where Mr. Ball won his eighth championship, on 19th March 1871. They are of different race; for Braid is a pure Scot, Taylor is pure English, and Vardon, while, of course, we are proud to regard him as belonging to us, is really half-French and half-English. They are of different build, different temperament, and of very different style in golf; but there they are. Among them they have won the Open Championship fifteen times, and when one of them has succeeded it has generally happened that the other two have been his most dangerous rivals. There must be a limit to the period of success as there is to human life, and for years people have murmured that these three are not like the little brook that purls down the hill, and they cannot go on for ever. And yet at the beginning of each new championship an instinct settles in the public mind that they cannot be beaten. Considering what the Open Championship is, what a fearful strain it exerts on temperament, mind, body, and muscle, how a single slip may mean failure, and then how many really magnificent golfers are in the lists, some of them old champions themselves, this is a strange state of things. I recall that when a championship was played at Muirfield in 1906 the sceptics were then loud in their prophecies that a "new man" would arise, and that the triumvirate would be cast down. And then? James Braid was first, John Henry Taylor was second, and Harry Vardon was third, though a hundred and eighty other players had done their best to beat them! Taylor, the Englishman, although the youngest of the three, was the first to score success. He and Vardon both made their initial appearances in the Open Championship at Prestwick in 1893, and on that occasion the 75 that Taylor did in his first round stood as the lowest made in the competition, although he did not win. At his second and third attempts in the championship he took first place each time, and on the second of these occasions an Englishman's victory was at last accomplished at St. Andrews, the Scottish headquarters of the game. He won there again in 1900, and is the only Englishman who has ever won the Open Championship on this hallowed piece of golfing ground. A year after the others began, James Braid entered the lists, and very quickly then did these three establish their triple supremacy. An injured hand kept Braid out of the great event in 1895, but since then each of the men has played in every championship, and among them have won fifteen times out of twenty-one. At the "coming of age" of the triumvirate in 1913, when it was twenty-one years after Taylor and Vardon started in the event, Taylor, the first to score in it, won his fifth and became "all square" with his friends. That was a remarkable occurrence. Since 1894, when Taylor won his first championship, there have only been five years when one or other of the triumvirate has not won the cup. In 1897 Mr. Hilton got it; in 1902 Sandy Herd, playing with the rubber-cored ball on its introduction, scored; in 1904 Jack White was the winner, both Braid and Taylor having a putt to tie with him on the last green; in 1907 Massy, the Frenchman, triumphed; and in 1912 the hope of Edward Ray was realised. And in each of these years one of the triumvirate was second.
§
But if each of the triumvirate is a phenomenon and collectively they are super-phenomena, in what terms then are we to describe Mr. John Ball, and how shall we account for his eight amazing championships? Mr. Harold Hilton, as all the world understands very well, is a great master of the game, a magnificent golfer who knows it through and through, and a tremendous fighting man. There has hardly been anything in all golf's history so splendid as his coming again and winning two more Amateur Championships when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly winning an Open Championship as well. But if after considering the professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs in their match-play championship, it is John Ball who is the wonder man. The luck of the game that was emphasised in the consideration of score play is surely greater in the match. At all events, the professionals themselves to a man declare that the score play makes the better test, and therefore is the fairer. If that is so, there is, inferentially, more luck to be conquered by a good man in the amateur event, and Mr. Ball has eight times beaten his fields and beaten all the luck against him. Twenty-four years after winning his first Amateur Championship at Prestwick he wins his eighth at Westward Ho! and, for all the great players that the game has yielded, no other man has gained more than half those wins, and only Hilton has done that. Surely it is a mystery very profound as to how he has won so often. And yet it is less of mystery if we accept the proposition that he who plays golf for the sake of golf and fears not to be beaten is the most dangerous of opponents. Mr. Ball's early championships were won by his own skill and his perfect temperament; undoubtedly some of the later ones, which through increasing numbers of opponents have or should have been harder to win, have been gained because he cared little whether he won or not, and because his opponents feared to lose, and feared the more as they felt their impending fate when they had the master of Hoylake laid against them. To a little extent they have beaten themselves, and Mr. Ball has done all the rest. Has there been more than one of his championships in recent times that he has keenly desired to win, that being the one he gained at St. Andrews in 1907, because he wished to be victor at the headquarters where he lost long years before, after a tie with Mr. Balfour Melville? At eight o'clock on the morning after he won his seventh at Hoylake I saw him in the garden at the back of his house giving his chickens their morning meal. It was as if nothing had happened. How many other men would have been feeding chickens so early in the morning after winning an Amateur Championship? Has he finished winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won for his seventh the only championship ever played in Devonshire, and he has won the event on all the regular amateur championship courses on which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been something of a bête noire among courses so far as he is concerned. Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the international match, and then in the championship he went down in a surprising way to a youngster of Dornoch. Shall he not add Muirfield to his list?
Despite a certain beauty of his style and the ease and elegance with which he plays the game, Mr. Ball's golf is strongly individual to himself. There are many pronounced mannerisms in it, and they are of a kind that if any one tried to copy them, he might find his game being injured rather than improved. They are the ways of the genius who cares nothing for convention. Few can drive a better ball. At the outset of his career he was a long driver. His first big match away from his native Hoylake was one against Douglas Rolland. It was a home-and-home affair in England and Scotland, and Rolland was greatly celebrated in those days for the length he gained with wooden clubs. Yet he outdrove Mr. Ball but little in that engagement. He obtains his length not to a large extent from run, as most men get it now, but by a ball that starts on a beautiful line, makes a very long carry, and leaves it at that, with a little pull to finish with. It has seemed that he has had more control over his wooden club play than almost any amateur except another of fame who was bred in the same great school. An outstanding peculiarity of his method is the way in which he grips his club, which is done not in the fingers and lightly as by other men, but by a good firm grip in the palms of his hands with the fingers facing up. He makes small use of the thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand. His stance is an open one. His play with his iron clubs again is unconventional. Even for his shortest shots he swings his clubs, meaning that he makes less of a jerky hit at the ball than others do, and he resorts less to cutting the stroke than other great men. But what a master of judging of heights and distance he is! To see him just plop the ball over a bunker in the way and then watch it run the necessary distance afterwards is to understand what marvellous properties of control can be invested in such perfect human golfing machinery. Another of his peculiarities is that he carries no niblick in his bag, and I think he never has carried one. He has certainly not had one in any of his recent championships. And among many other of his characteristics is that peculiar gait with the bent knees that, because of their climbing over the hilly links, golf seems to develop in men (Harry Vardon has it), his extreme modesty in manner, and the splendid excellence of his sportsmanship. Some one once set forward a curious theory that children born in the winter-time are likely to become better golfers than others; their temperaments are supposed to be favourably affected by the prevailing rigour of the weather conditions! It is, anyhow, a curious fact that a very large proportion of our best players were born in mid-winter months, and of them all John Ball is the greatest, and he, if you please, was born on a day so far removed from midsummer as Christmas Eve.