The Spirit of the Links

by Henry Leach

Then one day the player fell to temptation again, and, stirred as of yore by his foolish hopes, he resolved that he would pluck Solomon from the stronghold of his fancy. It was a desperate thing to do, a mad and a reckless thing, a defiance of the spirit world of golf. He told the clubmaker of his resolve, and begged that he would give his closest attention to the details of the commission and his personal care to the execution thereof. The clubmaker, [a] good human man, was afraid. Awe-stricken, he said, “Ye’ll no have ma try to make Sawlaman—a real Sawlaman, sir. I couldna do it! I couldna do it! I canna make a Sawlaman!” But the player had steeled himself to his resolve; and so for days and days old Sandy laboured in his shop, and head after head was shaped and rejected, and stick after stick was shaved and thrown away. It was a weary task. Then the golfer went away for a stay at another links, and a month later he returned, and on passing Sandy’s shop he was beckoned in. “Yes, yes, Sandy! Got him? Got him?” In Sandy’s face there was written a look that was half of disappointment and half of pride. He whispered, “Not Sawlaman, sir, not Sawlaman; he’ll never be seen on the links this life. But I’ve got David, and here he is!” And David, with a black varnished head, most beautifully shaped, a fine greeny hickory shaft scared on, and a feel and a balance when handled, and a lie to the ball that spoke well for power and clean hitting. The golfer fondled the club for a while, for he was pleased with it, but he could see, despite his pleasure, that it was no Solomon and that the great ideal had not been realised, and he knew now that it never could be realised; for while he was conscious that this club was wanting in some of the points that made Solomon so great, his imagination failed him to discover them. It was a grand club, but it killed a great hope; and there was something of sadness in the manner of taking it over. “Never mind, Sandy,” said he. “It was a fine try, a very fine try; and I’ll tell you what we will do. We shall never see Solomon, the real Solomon; but let us have something to remind us of him, and then we will never talk of him, the real one, again. We will call this one, not David, but Solomon. He shall be the Solomon,” and so he is to this day, and in his name he marks the renunciation of that great ideal. And some very fine things he has done, for he is a most worthy club.

IV

The 1st of September is a fine date for the golfer, for it seems to mark for him the beginning of the period of play which is the best of the whole year. The summer heats are cooling, the tints of Nature are turning to beautiful golds and browns and crimsons, and with a little rain the turf begins to yield more to the foot and the club, and play is pleasanter than it was in the dog days. We would have no sorrows to mar the pleasure of such a day; but the golfer need only be braced to skill and worthiness by the reminder that this date has a little black edge round it in his calendar, for on that day there died one who was certainly one of the greatest golfers who ever lived. That was Allan Robertson.

It will always be a difficult matter to compare the golfers of a living generation with those of a dead one, or to estimate the relative quality of the golfers of two different generations, both of them of the long distant past. We have no standards that are carried on from decade to decade and century to century, and while men do not change, their implements do, and the courses on which they play, while, what with the alterations in implements and courses, the methods are much changed, so that it is quite the same game no longer. Therefore it is impossible and futile to make any comparison between the man we have to-day and whom we like to think is the greatest golfer who ever handled a club, and some of the great heroes of the past. That is a question that can never be settled. What we do know, and we can think it for our modern satisfaction, is that there are of necessity many more fine players in these days than ever there were before, and there are dozens for every one that there was in the days of Allan Robertson and young Tom Morris. Therefore it must be much harder to assert supremacy in these days than formerly, and all the greater is the feat of doing it not once, but many times. If some of the old golfers triumphed as often, or nearly, we can say for the men who live in our time, that, in the numerical weight of their conquest at all events, theirs are by far the greater achievements, and they must have that credit.

As in all other matters, it happens that estimates of the merits of things of the past are necessarily indefinite; they vary from time to time. One generation will have it this old-time celebrity was the greatest in his line; while the sons of that generation make hero-worship of another master, and say that he was the best. So it is in golf. One time there will be a feeling that young Tom was incomparably the best of the golfers of the early period of the game. Then by and by a little of this enthusiasm will fade, and it will be agreed that there was no one better than Allan Robertson. Sometimes a wave of feeling will roll over these discussions in favour of good old Tom, and of late years poor Bob Ferguson has been having justice done to the magnificent skill that he displayed when he was in his prime. Now, taking a mental vote from all the authorities one can remember to have spoken or written on these weighty matters, it seems to result in Allan and young Tom coming out at the top. Bob Ferguson is too near our time for his merits to be properly appraised. Our grandchildren may better be able to give his due to the man who won three championships in succession, and tied for a fourth.

But there can be no doubt that Allan was a really great player in every way. Like Bob Ferguson, and like Harry Vardon in our own day, the beauty of his achievement lay largely in the concealment of his effort, and this is the perfection of style. It has been handed down to us as indisputable, that the easiness of his style was its most remarkable feature, and that he never, never seemed to hit hard at the ball. His swing was a long but a gentle one, and his clubs were light. He was the first man to cultivate in its perfection that fine cleek play from long range up to the hole that in our day has been accomplished with such magnificent effect by Vardon. The 79 that he did at St. Andrews in 1858—he was then just turned forty-three years of age, having been born in the year of Waterloo—was then and for a long time later regarded as a most superlative achievement. That time he was out in 40 and home in 39, winding up with a 4 and a 3. That great things could be and were done in those days, even reckoning their merit on the most exacting modern standard, may be realised from the circumstance that, taking the best scores at each hole in all Allan’s rounds on the old course, which he kept, and making up a composite round from them, that round works out to the strange total of 56,—out in 27 and home in 29. In this strong essence of Robertsonian golf the ingredients, in the order of the eighteen, are, 3 3 3 3 4 4 3 1 3 to the turn, and 3 2 3 4 4 3 3 4 3 on the way back.

Allan was a great golfer, and a fine exemplar in every respect, for he was a great-hearted player who never knew when he was beaten, was always cheery and with a smile, and he possessed the very perfection of a golfing temperament, as most, though not all, great players do. That was why everybody found it such a delight to play with him, and why he and old Tom, who had also a fine temperament, were as a foursome pair just as strong and invincible as men could be imagined to be. That lionlike finish of theirs to their historic match with the Dunns deserves all the celebrity it has achieved, and will for ever hold, not so much because it was an exciting thing and a great match, but because it was a triumph of the golf temperament over another that was not quite so good. Allan had the spirit of the game within him; he had the true soul of a golfer, and his most casual utterances constantly indicated how he saw right through to the back side of the game. “It’s aye fechtin’ against ye” was a common observation of his, and there is only too much truth in that simple remark, that the game is hardly ever with you, that it is fighting against you the whole way round. He had no greater admirer than his famous pupil. An “awfu’ good player” was Allan to Tom. “Puir Allan!” soliloquised Tom once, when his old master was no more. “The cunningest bit body o’ a player, I dae think, that iver haun’led cleek an’ putter. An’ a kindly body, tae, as it weel does fit me to say, an’ wi’ a wealth o’ slee pawky fun aboot him.”

“They may toll the bells and shut up their shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest is gone,” somebody said when he died. He had golfed all his life from the time when he first knew that he was alive. His father and grandfather were golfers, and the first things that he played with as a child were golf clubs that were made for him.

V

Surely we must account old Tom Morris as one of the wonders of the sporting world, as he is indubitably in that relation to the world of golf. How many times have we heard that the light of that long and happy life was flickering towards its extinction, but the rumour has no sooner been spread than Tom comes forward in some activity to give it full denial. Long may he continue to do so; every time that we hear he is sick upon his bed may a telegram come to us from St. Andrews to say that again he is sitting in the chair outside his shop, watching the couples as they come forward in their turn to hole out on that beloved eighteenth putting green, which, with the clubhouse of the Royal and Ancient beyond it, has during recent times comprised almost the entire circle of his daily vision. Each time I go to St. Andrews I find him still cheery, and indeed it seems to me a little cheerier than the last time that I saw him taking the sun in his chair. There is the cheery respectful greeting and the felicitous remark that it is “a gran’ day for a roond,” and in the next moment he turns his head to mutter a grumble towards those “boys,” who are idling away a few spare minutes outside Forgan’s shop, and are giving evidence of the freshness of the life that is in them, to which Tom, a stickler for decorum in all connected with golf, however humbly or indirectly, demurs. Like most others who are running up the score of their life’s round towards the ninety mark, he is prone to tell you that times have much changed, and that the boys were more sedate in the days when he was one of them. That is as it may be. But despite all the antics of the boys, and the little irritations that they give to old Tom, he remains a cheery Tom to the last, just as he has always been. His life throughout has been imbued with an optimism which has always been the most attractive feature of his character. Every good golfer is an optimist. I deny that it is possible to be a good golfer in the best sense and not be an out-and-out optimist.