CHAPTER V
A FAMOUS CHAMPIONSHIP AT BROOKLINE, U.S.A., AND AN ACCOUNT OF HOW MR. FRANCIS OUIMET WON IT, WITH SOME EXPLANATION OF SEEMING MYSTERIES.
Abiding wonders of the past, perplexities of the present, the greatness of the game where it is still greatest, have been among recent thoughts; and yet one is conscious all the time that something which sure enough comes near to being the eighth wonder of it all has lately happened, and will for long enough be high in the minds of this community, something that will never cease to be discussed and will always be regarded as a matter for argument and speculation. Only because it is so very new, so utterly modern, so contrary to much of our olden faith, so inharmonious with the smooth story that we have learned and liked, has a witness hesitated to give it a forward place well won. Yet do we not know that a hundred years from now, when so much of golfing history yet unmade will have been piled on to the dusty records that we hold, this new wonder will still be a theme for club-house talk, and if by then matches are played with the people of other planets, will they not wish to know in Mars how this strange break came about? Then there shall be as many readings and explanations of the mystery of Brookline and of Ouimet as there have been of the moods of sad Prince Hamlet. So from the old traditions, the famous players, the ancient links, the scene may move to new America.
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To the Fourth of July there shall now be added the Twentieth of September. In the year of nineteen hundred and thirteen it fell upon a Saturday, and that day at Brookline, near Boston in Massachusetts, was dripping wet. Clouds had run loose for two whole days and nights before, unceasingly, and still sent their torrent down. When, dull and splashing, the morning broke, with expectation in the air, it seemed that this had been planned by fate for a day of wretchedness and misery, one that might with convenience afterwards be blotted out from memory and considered as a dies non. But good Americans will now recall no clouds, no rain, no damp, no mud when they remember the Twentieth of September. I too, though my feelings then were more of wonder and real admiration than of joy which my own patriotism could not sanction, shall be glad to remember in time to come that then I was at Brookline and was one of only two or three from Britain who saw the amazing thing that was done that day, the most remarkable victory ever achieved in any golf championship anywhere at any time. It was something to have seen; it is a distinction to have the remembrance. On that day Francis Ouimet, a boy of twenty, bred to the game on the cow pastures of Massachusetts, played Harry Vardon and Edward Ray, great champions of British golf, for the championship of the United States—and won. They three had come through the great ordeal of a full championship and tied for first place together. They played, not against blank possibility as men, knowing not the exact nature of their task, have to do in Open Championships where the test is play by score and each is against all others, having then some fears stilled by sweet hope which is ever the golfer's sustenance, but in sight of each other, together, one with another, man against man, ball against ball, seeing what was being done, knowing what had to be accomplished next. Could there ever again be such a three-ball golf? It is one of the compensations of having been so very wet at Brookline on that awful day that one knows that for the wonder and the drama of the thing it can never happen more, not ever. If such facts could be repeated, the wonder would be missing and the drama gone.
An American and two Englishmen. These championships are mainly matters for individuals after all; the "international element," of which we read so much in newspapers, is not generally so deeply felt as we try to think it is. Golf, not being a game of sides as other games are, and, if it comes to that, not generally a game in which national peculiarities exert an influence, hardly lends itself to international treatment. Players who feel internationally before a contest relapse to individualism completely when they are pitching to the green and putting to the hole. Do not tell me that in the throes of a six-feet putt that shall win or lose a day a man thinks of his trusting country and not of his tortured hopeful self. It is not possible in the combination of golf and human nature, and there is no blame to the men. But on the Twentieth of September international feeling in the game of golf did for once rise high, and became a very real thing. What of individualism had been maintained by Vardon and his companion during that week had nearly disappeared on the nineteenth, when the tie was made, and there was hardly a trace of it when the curtain went up on the fifth act of the amazing drama of Brookline, none at all when it was rolled down again. This point is now emphasised because when I write of the wonder of the thing I have to show that not only was this Brookline boy, of no championship whatever save one of Massachusetts, pitted against two of the greatest golfers of the home country of the game, but that, the international feeling being now alive and intense, he for America was opposed to those two of England, and therefore in a very full degree he was playing their better ball. The boy was playing the better ball of Vardon and Ray! He beat them! A long time has now elapsed since the dripping day when I saw him do it, and wonders have a way of softening with age, yet to me now that achievement is as wonderful as it was when new, and so it will remain. The American golfers are justified in their pride and their exultation upon the result of that event, and there is nothing whatever to be said against it. No such feat had ever been performed before, or has been since. I shall describe the circumstances which led up to this amazing triumph, and what ensued.
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Only once before had British players gone across the Atlantic to take part in the Open Championship of the United States, and that was in 1900 when Harry Vardon and J. H. Taylor did so. At that time Taylor was the Open Champion, Vardon having finished second to him in that year's tournament at St. Andrews. American golf was then comparatively a baby, and practically all the opponents of the British pair were players who had been born and bred in the home country and had gone out to America as professionals there. Good as some of them were, they were no match for their visitors, who had the competition comfortably to themselves and finished first and second, Vardon becoming champion. Much happened in the next thirteen years. Most significant was the breeding of an American champion on American soil, a "native born," in J. J. M'Dermott, who tied for first place in 1910, but then lost to Alec Smith on playing off, and tied again the next year when he won, and again in 1912. About the same time two other native players in Tom M'Namara and Michael Brady came to the surface from the raw mass of rough golfing material that was taking shape under the American sun. Both are good men, and from my knowledge of them I like their manner and their style; but M'Dermott, despite some serious faults of which he has been made aware, is undoubtedly a marvellous golfer for his age. I think he has to be considered as the most wonderful prodigy the game has so far known. At twenty years of age, when he came over to Muirfield as American champion to compete for the great Open Championship, he was even then a most accomplished golfer, high in the topmost rank. Not tall in stature but well and lithely built for a golfer, he has a full, easy, and graceful swing. It is round like most of the American swings—but not so round as it used to be—and M'Dermott is often afflicted with what is commonly known as the American hook, being a most persistent tendency to pull the ball. It is remarkable also that he has been in the habit of using wooden clubs of most abnormal length, and it has been a wonder to me how he has controlled them as well as he has done. The history of the Open Championship, marked with so many crosses for tragedies and the blighting of fair hopes, embraces few incidents more pathetic than the driving of three balls into the Archerfield woods by M'Dermott in the event of 1912 at Muirfield, and his failing to qualify in consequence. But he was only twenty then. The first expedition made by a native American to this country in quest of Open Championship honours consequently failed. In the following year we saw him again at Hoylake, and with him his brother natives, M'Namara and Brady, and some of the Scoto-Americans also. M'Dermott did the best of the three, and his play for nine holes one morning was very nearly perfect. His swing was a little more compact than before; it was beautifully timed, and his straight-up style of putting with his heels touching and his grip upon the end of the shaft was most attractive. He found the conditions on the last day too severe for him, as nearly all except Taylor, the champion, did; but he made a fine display and became the first real American player to get into the prize list of the Open Championship, which he did with a score of 315—eight more than Taylor—which made him tie for fifth place. M'Dermott undoubtedly excels in temperament.
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Here was a menace. It was felt that America was making very good in golf. And there came vaguely into the minds of British golfers the idea that a demonstration of their strength should be made in this new country, for satisfaction and for the sake of national pride. Yet, with their conservatism, our British golfing people are slow to move in matters of this kind. They are content with the game, and perhaps wisely so. But there was the feeling that something should be done. With initiative demanded, Lord Northcliffe, who had become a keen lover of the game, made a characteristic movement unobtrusively, as the result of which Harry Vardon and Edward Ray were sent across the Atlantic to test the strength of American golfers in their own Open Championship. Vardon was then five times Open Champion of the world; Ray was the holder of the title. Two other Europeans sailed the seas with the same object in their minds, one of them being Wilfrid Reid, the clever little professional attached to the Banstead Downs club near London, a man who had gained international honours constantly and has much fine golf in him, and the other Louis Tellier, the professional of the Société de Golf de Paris at La Boulie, Versailles. Four good men; two great champions; one the greatest golfer the world has known. They seemed to be enough. Their design was to win the American championship.