When a man has risen from his bed in the morning, thoroughly roused himself, and noticed that it is a fine day, he is at his best for golfing. After that all things put him off. Some authorities are very adverse to the cold bath, and others have even said that one’s breakfast ought not to be regarded as an absolutely loyal friend. But it is the journey to the links—with all its delays, irritations, inconveniences, and joltings—that does the most damage. Frequently this journey is a mixture of cabs, omnibuses, and trains. At one point or another you have very likely to run for either the omnibus or the train, and this is certain to do something towards putting you off. It may be only a little, but it is this trifle added to other similar trifles that make up a total sufficient to bring disaster to your driving and putting. If you do not need to run anywhere, you have to wait, and this irritates and does harm. Then the great vibration of the cab and the omnibus most seriously affect the nervous system.
The golfer may not be conscious of it, but the effect is there. How true this is may be judged by taking the extreme case of the motor-bicycle. A year or two ago large numbers of golfers who could not afford motor-cars went in for the cheaper kind of machine, but to a man they found them quite fatal to golf, and particularly to their putting, the vibration having reduced their nerves to such a state that delicacy of touch on the putting green was next to impossible. Ordinary bicycles are nearly as bad. In many respects motor-cars have great advantages, and have become very popular with golfers, but they are far from being the ideal form of locomotion. Here, again, there is vibration, and if you have anything in the nature of a fright on the road you may generally reckon that your game for the day is damaged to the extent of a number of strokes that varies with the individual. Having all these things and many more in mind, the superiority of the aeroplane, from the golfer’s point of view, becomes evident. It will take you from your door to the first tee, and, as there are no roads to jolt upon, one conceives that in the perfect aeroplane there will be no vibration, and, barring the effects of his breakfast, the golfer will be transported to the links in as nearly as possible the ideal state in which he rose from his bed.
XIII
Some footpaths count for very much in the playing of a hole, and at times call for and produce fine shots that would never be made if there were no path there. So sometimes they are good to the game; but generally they are merely an aggravation. You could hardly call a path or a road famous, but if you were asked which were the most notable you would probably call to mind first of all the path that goes across the first and eighteenth holes at St. Andrews, which is distinguished from others because of the devil-may-care spirit in which the general public defy injury and death by the way they saunter along it when such men as Edward Blackwell are standing on the first tee, and it is also a path among paths, because it has led to the cultivation of the most magnificent voice ever heard on any golf course. The man who has not heard Starter Greig fire his blast of warning through the hole in his box down the fairway—with a clap, and a bang against the horizon, for all the world like a discharge from a small brass gun—is still ignorant of one of the minor wonders of the golf world, and has a very inadequate perception of the possibilities of calling “Fore!” Likewise, one would say that of all roads—as superior to mere paths—that which skirts the seventeenth green on the same old course is the most remembered by the majority of good golfers—remembered sadly. How many golfers have had their brightest hopes dashed by that road when within sight of home and victory it would be a sorry task to count, but there lingers in my mind a dreadful scene when J. H. Taylor’s ball went there in the course of the 1905 championship meeting, from a not by any means unworthy shot, and of his trying, time after time, to get it back to the green, until when he had done so his nerves were tingling as would have been those of any man.
The paths and roads of Blackheath are altogether probably responsible for the making of a bigger and more enduring piece of golfing history than any others. Other footways may have despoiled great players of deserved honours, but thus their effects are chiefly destructive, and it cannot be claimed for them that they have made anything for the game. But the Blackheath paths and roads have been constructive in their effect upon the game, for they made the brassey. There is a fair consensus of opinion that this most necessary of modern clubs was first introduced on this course as a consequence of these paths and roads that had to be played from, and also partly on account of the gritty nature of the turf. In those days of the use of the brassey, when a Blackheath golfer appeared on a Scottish course, the caddies knew his headquarters at once. “He comes frae Blackheath,” they would say with some deprecation. “There’s naething but gravel pits and stones at Blackheath.”
XIV
However humble its merits may be, it is well that a man should be faithful always to his mother course, respectful of her, and that he should not speak and very tardily admit to himself the blemishes of her features. For it is always for him to remember that she, and she alone, gave the game to him that has yielded him so much happiness, and he owes to her a debt that he can never repay, save in constancy and gratitude. Therefore it is to be reckoned as a good thing in a golfer that, wherever the necessities and vicissitudes of life may take him to live, and for whatever other courses he may in mature years find a fondness and become attached to by membership, he should, if he can do it, always remain an associate of his first club, and should from time to time display some public attachment to its course, even though it be at some inconvenience to himself. It is a little act of filial homage that should not be neglected.
At such times he will be kind to her and will not chide her for her weaknesses. He will humour her good-naturedly. The sixteenth may be a better hole on another course, but do not say so now. Think how rich did that sixteenth here seem in those far-off days when the teething to the clubs was first being done. What terrors had its bunkers! What a big, lusty, and not to say a brutal one, did it seem then; but now to the time-worn golfer, if the truth must be whispered for once to himself, that old sixteenth seems something of a milksop, and can be played in ten different ways with a half-hearted drive and something of a mashie or iron. How happy we were despite the constant troubles in those olden days, when we were always with our mother links, and knew no others! The old men of golf came and told us of the great courses that they had encountered in their travels—such wonderful holes, such amazing bunkers, such marvellous putting greens! These travellers’ tales were pleasant to listen to, and they fired the imagination; but after all we returned with some content to our mother links.
And then, what golfer does not remember the day, particularly if he was then no longer a child in years, when he went away for the first time from that course and paid a visit to one of those celebrated of which so much is written in the books and on which so many fine matches and championships are played? This is always an epoch, and a stirring one in every golfing life. There are many wild emotions in the man when for the first time he takes his club to play a shot on this foreign course of so much renown. If he is an intelligent man, and an impartial one, he sees the merit and the glory, and he admits it without reservation. He feels that now he has gone out into the great world, and that there are more wonders in it than even his utmost fancy had suspected. He is like the Queen of Sheba who went to see the magnificence of Solomon, confessing then that it was a true report that she had heard in her own land, though she believed not until her eyes had seen, when she knew that the half had not been told her. Out alone on this wonderful course the feeling of loneliness and helplessness will come upon this immature player. Truly the half had not been told to him, and in mortal agony in some “Hell” or other, or in a Devil’s Kitchen or a Punchbowl, or it may be in the sandy wastes of a Sahara or in a crevasse on the heights of the Alps or the Himalayas—how, then, will he be reminded of the tender indulgences of his mother links, of her constant kindness, and of the way in which she humoured his youthful caprice and smiled patiently upon him when he was fretful! Perhaps she was too indulgent, and the maternal laxness did something towards the spoiling of the child for the manhood that was to follow. But no matter, let the golfer always be kind and well disposed to his mother links.