II
It is an ancient game; but let no man think yet that we have realised a fair part of the curious situations that may arise on the links when the golfer hits a ball, or that we have a full appreciation of the possibilities of their complexity. Very quaint are some of the difficulties that twice a year are presented to the Rules of Golf Committee sitting at St. Andrews for the special purpose of discovering solutions thereto.
From far Manawatu once there came a plaintive cry for help. These New Zealand golfers confessed that in all the holes on their greens there is an iron box with a small flag on the top to mark the holes. In an inter-club match the caddie of one of the players before leaving the green, when replacing the box, put it into the hole, flag downwards, exposing a sharp point on the top. One of the next two players, when approaching to that hole, landed his ball on the top of the box in the hole, and it remained there. Then the arguments began, and not until a letter had sailed the seas from the Antipodes, and the Royal and Ancient Club had sent her answer back to this outpost of her empire of golf, did they subside. The man who had executed this wonderful shot had held that he could reverse the box and put it into its proper position and claim the hole. It hurt St. Andrews to think that away there in New Zealand, left to their own resources, they should give themselves up to such queer-fangled contrivances as hole flags with boxes on them. If a bit of cloth and a stick of sorts is good enough for the old course, why should Manawatu want what these Royal and Ancients sarcastically referred to as “mechanical contrivances”? The high authority begged leave to observe that the Rules of Golf did not provide for such “mechanical contrivances,” and the New Zealanders were recommended to make local rules to suit them.
You may always tell from the form of the answer when the St. Andrews lip has curled at the question that has been asked of it. Nowadays the committee can hear the mention of a hedge without a rise in its temperature; but when the secretary, in reading out the problem of the moment, has to say “mud” there is uneasiness still. The committee move in their chairs, they fidget, they scowl, somebody mutters “Tut, tut!” and they all cough to hide their agitation. “Mud” is the word you must not say. I have not seen the committee in this agitation; nobody except its own members has, for it is a very private committee; but this sudden disturbance can be imagined most clearly. Yet these inconsiderate golfers will keep on mentioning mud, and St. Andrews answers them back with as much asperity as is consistent with the preservation of its own dignity. One time in a matter of this kind they gave a snubbing to a Kentish course. The club there, in all seriousness and innocence, propounded a very pretty point. “Playing in a foursome,” they said, “A is left by his partner’s approach shot a six-inch putt for the hole; but A’s ball pitched in a small piece of wet mud left on the edge of the green (presumably from the boot of a player in front). A small piece of this mud clung to the ball, and was on the side of the ball A had to strike. A played the stroke, and the ball and the mud stuck to his putter, and the head of the putter and the ball on it were exactly above the hole.” This was surely a most delightful situation! See how pretty is the combination of this foursome pair, and how they do play each the game to suit the other, thus: “His partner then with his putter tapped the ball off A’s putter and it fell into the hole.” A charming incident! “Did A or his partner lose or halve the hole, and would A have been within his rights in shaking the ball off into the hole, or what should they have done?” Said the Committee to the secretary, “Tell these good people that the Committee have no experience of such tenacious mud, and such a contingency should be provided for by the local rules,” and then they hurriedly spoke of the weather and the wind and the state of the eighteenth green, and how the Major got a bonny 3 there the night before—anything to get this taste of Kentish mud out of their St. Andrews mouths.
A point of some curious interest was that which arose in the course of medal play on the course of the Higher Bebington Club some time ago. A player had one of those most tantalising putts a yard in length to play, and, like many a man before him, he missed it! In his aggravation at the circumstance he snatched back his ball, and, without having holed it out, he replaced it where it was before, in order to try his putt over again, to satisfy his amour propre that the holing of such a putt was not beyond his mortal capacity. This is an old way of attempting to gain some small crumb of satisfaction from a very disappointing business. At the second attempt he holed that putt, but his partner then told him that he was obliged to disqualify him from the entire competition for not having holed out when making his putt. The competitor agreed that he had done wrong, and accepted this fate; but some time later, when he had fully thought over the business, and read up the rules, he protested. Yet his committee maintained that he really should be disqualified, and after much argument the seers of the Royal and Ancient were begged to give their decision. And it was a very interesting decision. The high court held that Rule 10 of stroke competitions applied, and that, therefore, if the player replaced his ball directly behind the spot it occupied after he had missed the putt, the penalty was two strokes only, the second putt thus counting as in the competition, though it is fairly clear that the competitor never intended it for it. “But,” said the committee, “otherwise he was disqualified.” Those who discover feelings and frames of mind behind the mask of simple sentences would be moved to say, in this case, that in that last simple sentence St. Andrews was trying to cover up somewhat the absurd position to which the rules brought this case; for it was clear that the essence of the problem in relation to the law was as to whether the player replaced his ball behind the spot where it first stopped, which came simply to this—Was he short of the hole the first time, or did his ball run to either side? If he was short, then he was saved, and he is allowed to go on under penalty of two strokes; but if he over-ran the hole—which from the golf point of view was better than to be short—or if he went to either side, then he would be disqualified. That ruling has grown since then.
Pity the club committees in their constant troubles. Was ever committee so sorely beset as that which had come, by devious means, to knowledge of the faults of its members, and when honour seemed to forbid that the knowledge should be acted upon, though otherwise would an injustice be done to the sinless golfers. It was in County Sligo. A medal competition had been played, and when all was over the members of the committee—as such high officers constantly solicitous for the welfare of things will—wandered through the rooms and the corridors of the club. And it came to pass that one of them overheard a conversation that he was not supposed to overhear, between two members of the club, in which it was alleged that certain competitors had played on the putting greens before starting. The committeeman knew then that these men should be disqualified; but how was he to act? He told his colleagues, but they likewise were sore in mind as to whether they were justified in taking notice of the fact that had thus come to their knowledge. Were they bound to investigate this matter, and prove it one way or the other, or was it sufficient if they waited for someone to lay a formal objection? In their despair they appealed to St. Andrews; but this again is one of the nice points that the chief authority would rather others settled for themselves, and they said accordingly, that the committee must use their own discretion as to whether it was a case for their interference.
Upon other occasions the committee at St. Andrews has been called upon to indicate the proper course of procedure when a ball, after being played, lodged in the turned-up part of a player’s trousers. It has been somewhat naïvely asked by Kenmare whether, in a mixed foursome, when the lady missed the ball off the tee, she should “try” again, or whether her gallant partner should rid the tee of that persistent ball. It had to tell the County Down Club that a player could not carry a special flat board round with him from which to make his tee shots; and it has had to straighten out some quite frightful mix-ups in ladies’ competitions. Sometimes it happens that some casual decision of this sort serves a good purpose in bringing the portion of the golf world that has been somewhat inclined to wander, back to its duty in the observance of the strict letter of the law, as in the autumn of 1906, when on the appeal of Aldeburgh it declared how, when in long grass or anything of the kind, the player was only entitled to move so much of the obstruction as would enable him to find his ball in the first instance, and was not entitled to arrange things so that he could see it while attempting to play it. A player is not so entitled to a full view of his ball, though he will sometimes tell you that he is.
III
That which was regarded by our ancestors as a most amazing feat, namely, holing with the tee shot, has become exceeding common. One week not long ago it was done in five different parts of the country, and in three other separate weeks there were four cases reported. Why this increase, then, of doing holes in 1? The reason is simple after all. It is not that it is any easier to do the trick than it used to be. Probably it is rather harder, since it is more difficult to flop the rubber-cored ball down plump on the green at the short holes than it used to be in the days of the late lamented gutta, and a good deal harder to make it sink down into the hole as it ought to do when it gets there, instead of running around it and then away, and generally behaving badly. If it were any easier to do than it was formerly, would not the champions be doing it? But they are not. Harry Vardon has still only one hole in 1 to his credit, and while Braid gets his 2’s very often, the 1’s don’t come his way. The simple reason for the frequency is the great increase of golf. Everybody plays golf now and is always playing, and in such circumstances somebody must always be holing in 1, or very nearly. That is the simple fact, and the man who now performs this feat is no longer worthy of a paragraph all to himself in the morning newspaper. He will simply go along with half a dozen others in the weekly list.