Next morning, with sunlight and breeze, we went along to the course, so near that a ball could have been driven to it from the lawn of Breezy Bank, where the master has been known to practise mashie shots by moonlight, and I was joined in foursome with Mr. Walter Fairbanks of Denver, Colorado, against B. and his son Theodore. What then happened is of no consequence; the tale may be told in Colorado but not in England. But the course—it is splendid, and reflects an infinity of credit upon Mr. James L. Taylor, the first in command, who has for the most part designed it, has constantly improved it, and has made it what it is. All the holes have abundant character. They are up and down, straight and crooked, interesting always, with a good fairway that gives fine lies to the ball, and putting-greens of the smoothest sort. We drove first down a hill with a slanting hazard that made awful menace to a slice, then up again and away out to the far parts, with some very pretty short holes. The gem of the collection of eighteen is the seventh, which has been called, and with some fitness, the King of American Holes. A great, fine, lusty piece of golf it is, 537 yards from the tee to the green, and every shot has to be a thoughtful, strong, and well-directed shot, with no girl's golf in it anywhere. It is a down drive from the high-placed tee, and the land below heaves over in a curious twisted way that demands very exact placing of the ball. Then there is a strong and straight second to be played over a high ridge in front into which big bunkers have been cut. Afterwards there is plain country to a well-protected green. It is a great hole, a romantic one, and is well remembered. Some of the drive-and-iron holes that follow are splendid things, and this course was very well chosen for the Amateur Championship Meeting in 1914. When we were leaving it at the end of that day, the sun had just gone down behind big Equinox Hill, but presently and by surprise he sent a last good-bye. Round the mountain side a golden bar of light was cast, and it spread along the olive-coloured hill across the shadowed valley like a clean-cut shining stripe or a monotinted rainbow. These were the glorious Green Mountains of Vermont! We tarried until the sun went right away, and took with it that parting beam, and, sighing, we passed along.
§
I have left to the last of these few remembrances, what is in many respects the greatest of American courses—the National Golf Links at the far end of Long Island. In recent times it has probably been more discussed than any other course on earth. A while since a number of very wealthy, ambitious, and determined golfers put their heads and their money together, and decided on the establishment of something as near perfection as they could reach. In pursuit of this idea they have so far, as I am informed, spent about two hundred thousand dollars, and are in the act of spending many more thousands. They have their reward in a magnificent creation, as great in result as in idea, or nearly. All the people in the golf world have heard by this time of this National Links, and have no doubt wondered upon it, and the extent to which the extraordinary scheme that was developed a few years ago has been realised. It has been referred to as "the amazing experiment," and "the millionaires' dream," and so forth. Undoubtedly in its conception it was the grandest golfing scheme ever attempted. It came about in this way. America, with all its golf and money and enthusiasm, was without any course which might be compared with our first-class seaside links, the chief reason for her deficiency being that nowhere on either of her seaboards could be discovered a piece of land which was of the real British golfing kind. But at last a tract was found nearly at the end of Long Island, about ninety miles from New York, which was believed to be nearly the right thing. It was taken possession of by a golfing syndicate, and they determined there to do their very best. The question of expense was not to be considered in the matter. A member of the syndicate, Mr. Charles B. Macdonald, an old St. Andrews man, and one of wide golfing knowledge and experience, went abroad to study, photograph, and make plans of the best holes in Great Britain and on the continent. The whole world of golf was laid under tribute to assist in the creation of this wonder course. After exhaustive consideration a course was decided upon which was to embrace, in a certain reasonable measure, features of such eminent holes as the third, eleventh, and seventeenth at St. Andrews, the Cardinal and the Alps at Prestwick, the fifth and ninth at Brancaster, the Sahara at Sandwich, the Redan at North Berwick, and some others. The scheme was modified somewhat as the work progressed, but in due course the National Golf Links, a string of pearls as it was intended to be, was opened. Many different reports have been circulated as to the quality of the course, and the extent to which the object has been achieved. It has been described both as a failure and as a magnificent success.
I preferred to go there alone and see things for myself without explanations and influences. A certain penalty had, however, to be paid for this enterprise. I shall not soon forget my journey to the Shinnecock Hills out at the end of the Island, nor the journey back again. It was on a glorious Sunday morning in October that I went to the Pennsylvania station and took train there for Shinnecock, which was a three-hours' journey along the line. In getting out at Shinnecock I was nearest to the course, but there were no cars waiting there, and the tramp that had to be made across country for two or three miles was one that might have suited an Indian brave better than it suited me, although I have an instinct and a desire always to find things and ways out for myself rather than be told and led. It was nearly noon; the sun was high, and it was burning fiercely. The so-called path was something of a delusion. It was more of a trail through a virgin bush country with a tendency to swamp here and there, and occasionallv one was led to a cul-de-sac. I could see the National Golf Links a little way ahead all the time. There was a big water cistern standing out against the sky-line, and there were some smoothly laid out holes, but grapes were never more tantalising to any fox than those holes are to the wanderer who tries to get there from Shinnecock along a route over which a crow might fly, and who determines that he will discover the elusive secrets of the National Links, however dearly the expedition may cost him. However, the enterprise succeeded, and the journey back from the course to the Southampton station was also accomplished despite the prevailing difficulties, and, with the sense of something having been attempted and done, we rode home on the Pennsylvania, and were back in New York by the same night—about the hardest day's golf business I have ever done.
A certain disappointment is inevitably threatened when one visits a course of this kind about which one has heard so much beforehand. An ideal is established in the mind which cannot possibly be realised, and it is the fault of nobody. We do not know exactly what it is that we hope to see, but it is something beyond the power of man and Nature to achieve. But the National is a great course, a very great course. It is charmingly situated, most excellently appointed, and bears evidence of the most thorough and intelligent treatment by its constructors. Any preliminary disappointment there may have been soon wears away as the real excellence of the course and its difficulties are appreciated. Had we heard nothing of this copying, and did we not make comparisons between new and old in the mind, through which that which is new does not often survive, we should glory in the National at the first inspection of it. And the fact is, that the comparisons we suggest ought never to be made, though I, for one, was not aware of that till afterwards. Absolute copying was never intended; only the governing features of the British holes, the points that gave the character and quality to them, were imitated so far as could be done. That has been done very well, and some of the holes are very fine things. Those the design of which is based on such gems as the sixth at Brancaster and the eleventh at St. Andrews are very well recognisable. I should like to write much more about this course; it is a strong temptation. If I thought less of it and did not realise its greatness as I do, I should yield to the desire, and yielding, might rashly criticise as well as praise. But there is an imperative restraint. Upon a moderate course, or even a very good one, you may sometimes, if sufficiently self-confident, judge in one day's experience. But there are courses which, not because they grow upon you as we say, but because they command a higher respect at once than is given to others, which do not permit of such presumption. I saw the National on one day only, though I hope to see it many times again, and to gain courage for comment upon it. Now, with cap in hand, I can only signify my respect and full appreciation that here is something that is by no means of an ordinary kind, the accomplishment of a magnificent enterprise, and no doubt the achievement of a great ideal. But I shall say, at any rate, that a links more gloriously situated than this one in Peconic Bay, with pretty creeks running into the land here and there, and hill views at the back, could hardly be imagined. The view as I beheld it from different parts on that peaceful sunny Sunday afternoon is one that I never shall forget. It is the ideal situation for a national course.
§
To Mr. Macdonald thus belongs the credit for the initiation of what we may call the higher golf in America. In the last few years this movement has made strides as long and rapid in the United States as it has done in England, and above all other countries in the world America, which is so much dependent on her inland golf, having scarcely any other, is the country for this movement to be carried to its ultimate legitimate point. The day for very plain and purely and obviously artificial construction of inland golf courses is gone, the original inland system in all its stupidity and its surrender to difficulties has become archaic. It has come to be realised in this business that man may associate himself with Nature in a magnificent enterprise, and only now is it understood that this golf course construction is, or may be, a really splendid art. Landscape gardening is a fine thing in the way of modelling in earth and with the assistance of trees and plants and flowers and the natural forces, while engineering across rivers and mountains is grander perhaps; but in each of these the man takes his piece of the world from Nature and shovels it and smashes it, and then, according to his own fancy and to suit his own needs, he arranges it all over again. But in the making of a golf course, while we have indeed to see that certain requirements of our own are well suited, knowing how particular and hyper-critical we have become, yet we wish to keep to plain bold Nature too, and we want our best work to be thoroughly in harmony with her originals. I believe that if we could express it properly to ourselves, we wish now to make our golf courses look as if they were fashioned at the tail-end of things on the evening of the sixth day of the creation of the world—just when thoughts had to be turning to the rest and happinesses of the seventh. And so the great architect now takes a hundred acres or more of plain rough land and forest, hills and dales among it, and with magnificent imagination shapes it to his fancy. The work he now does will endure in part, if not in whole, for ages hence, and so it is deeply responsible. It is a splendid art; I do not hesitate to say it is a noble art.
Mr. Colt, with his great thoughts and his splendid skill, has done fine work in several parts of the United States. The new courses of the Mayfield Country Club, and of the Country Club of Detroit, are splendid things. But Mr. Macdonald's creations—for more of them now follow upon the original at Southampton—are destined to be leading influences in the new American golf course construction. I have had some interesting talk with him upon these matters, and am glad to find that he is artist and creator enough to have the full strength of his own original opinions in this matter, especially as in some ways his ideals differ from those commonly accepted in Britain. I have been so much interested in his views, and I think that these views are destined to have such an enormous influence upon American golf in the future, that I have asked him for some brief statement of them, an enunciation of his creed as an architect of courses, and he has kindly made it to me in writing, as follows:—
"To begin with, I think the tendency to-day is to overdo matters somewhat, making courses too long, too difficult, and with too much sameness in the construction of two-shot holes. To my mind a course over 6400 yards becomes tiresome. I would not have more than eight two-shot holes, and in constructing them I should not follow the ideas or fancies of any one golf architect, but should endeavour to take the best from each. While it is the fashion now to decry the construction of a hole involving the principles of the Alps or seventeenth at Prestwick, I favour two blind holes of that character—one constructed similar to the Alps, and another of the punch-bowl variety of hole some fifty yards longer than the Alps. It is interesting now to read the 'best hole' discussion that took place in 1901. The leading golfers of that time were almost unanimous in pronouncing the Alps at Prestwick the best two-shot hole in the world. The eleventh at St. Andrews and the Redan at North Berwick were almost unanimously picked as the best one-shot holes.
"To my mind there should be four one-shot holes, namely, 130, 160, 190, and 220 yards. These holes should be so constructed that a player can see from the tee where the flag enters the hole. The shorter the hole the smaller should be the green, and the more closely should it be bunkered. The most difficult hole in golf to construct interestingly is a three-shot hole, of which I would place two in the eighteen, one 520 yards and the other 540. The putting greens at these holes should be spacious.