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And the Americans are gaining in another matter—they are bringing their young boys into the game. I have been to preparatory schools where they have their own little courses and their school championships. The boys like it, the masters encourage it, and the grown-up players admire the youngsters' enthusiasm. This is the way that "prodigies" are produced. In England we do not encourage the boys to play golf. The head-masters of schools say that it is a selfish game and that it is bad for them. I wonder how much these principals have thought of the moral qualities that must exist in the good golfer who knows how to play a losing match and perhaps save it, and how long in real argument before an impartial tribunal the contention would hold that it would be better for the young boy to stand for hours in the deep field at cricket on a hot summer's day than for him to learn to play golf and learn to keep a tight hold of himself when the whole scheme of things might seem to be breaking up. Cricket and football are great games, and they are splendid things for boys, but that golf is inferior to them in what it does for character I deny, and if the comparison is pressed the golfers with me can put forward an invincible case. Anyhow the fact is there that young America is getting golf and young England is not, and that will make a difference some time some way.
CHAPTER IX
CANADIAN COURSES, AND A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT AT TORONTO, WITH MATTERS PERTAINING TO MAKING A NEW BEGINNING.
Towards the end of an afternoon in September, rounds being done, I stood with Mr. George Lyon (who is a kind of John Ball of the Dominion of Canada, having won the championship of his country seven times) on the heights where stands the club-house of the Lambton Golf and Country Club in Ontario, and we looked across the valley along which the course is traced to the woods on the opposite side where there were some fiery crimson spots to be seen as if burning amid the mass of foliage that was olive or tinting down to brown. They were the maple leaves of Canada, the emblem of the new land, of which it is prophesied that it shall be the greatest country of the earth. In early days the Canadians dabbled with the lacrosse which the Indians played, and some of the invaders, too, brought their cricket with them and taught it to others whom they found there. Then the people who are near to the borders of the United States, and are somewhat impressed with the American ways of doing things, have been cultivating an interest in baseball for its spectacular properties. Rounders revised is well enough for those who are within shouting distance of Buffalo and for places like Toronto, but I could never believe that such a game or pastime, whatever its merits—and I know that it has many—could suit such a very serious, contemplative, cold, and earnest people as the Canadians are. I regard the nature of these people, as I have had the opportunity of considering it, as more serious and intense than that of any other, and I know only one recreation beyond those that are the simplest and most essential, as of roaming in the untamed country, fishing, shooting, and hunting, that is agreeable to such a nature. They also know it; they have declared for a national game.
There is this to be said at the beginning for Canadian golf and its courses, that the general atmosphere of the game in this great country, rough and often bare and primitive as still it is, seems to be much nearer the atmosphere of golf in Britain than that of any other country different from us. One misses the sea-coast links, courses are long distances apart, fine players are comparatively few, for the men of Canada are still so busy and so earnest that they have not even time to play, but yet there is a fine chain of the game all the way from St. John's to Vancouver. There is more of the peculiarity of British sporting instinct in the Canadian than in any other person out of the British Isles; he likes what we like, and he likes it in the same way and for the same reasons. Except that the coldness, like that of the Scot, is sometimes too much exhibited in him, and that even on suitable occasions he is reluctant to demonstrate his enthusiasms, so serious he is, so deep he looks, I have found him to be a splendid opponent with an agreeable persistency, and a most desirable partner in a foursome. Here in Canada there are trestle tee-boxes, a few—but only a few—of the club-houses are built and equipped in the manner of the Americans, betokening an existing prosperity and a provision for that greater one which is felt to be as sure as the fruit and the corn of the following season; but otherwise golf seems much like what it is at home, and especially do we feel like that when we reach the old places where the game first took root out there. There is a Canadian Golf Association to rule the affairs of the game in the country with a certain subservience to home and St. Andrews as the Dominion holds to Westminster, and such a ruling authority is necessary in a new and wide country like this where so much pioneering is being done, just as it is necessary in the United States and in Australia. The chief function of such an authority is to keep the game together, hold it compact and maintain it in even uniformity with the game elsewhere. There is no blame to the Canadians because they have not associated themselves with the subtle and insoluble mysteries of the British handicapping system, but have followed the American lead in this matter and put their best champions at scratch. Otherwise they are full British still, and even if they have their doubts upon the wisdom of the edict of St. Andrews which banned centre-shafted clubs and the Schenectady putter of American origin, they have remained loyal to the law without dissenting as the Americans did. So in Canada you may not use the Schenectady. You may putt with it on one side of the Niagara Falls but not on the other side.
It is fortunate that a ball cannot be played across the Falls, or over those whirling Rapids, or some puzzling international complications might arise. The adventures are called to mind of two great scientists, the late Professor John Milne, who made such a fine study of earthquakes and could feel them in the Isle of Wight when they were taking place in Asia, and Professor Sims Woodhead, the eminent Cambridge pathologist, when they went to the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science when it was held in South Africa. They travelled to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, and there they contemplated a mighty carry of a hundred and sixty yards over roaring, foaming water. The keen golfer is always prepared, for the emergencies of the game are constant and attractive, and Mr. Milne produced driver and ball, and, with a fine nerve and eyes that were controlled most marvellously, delivered a golf ball from one side to the other for the first time since the world began. The pathologist admired the achievement and emulated it. He also carried the Falls of the Zambezi. It were better that these greedy men had left it at that and been well satisfied. However, they came to think they might go on with this majestic carry continually, and generous Fortune chided them. Crocodiles took the balls that they drove into the Zambezi.