The history of every man’s golf is covered with metaphorical gravestones as the result of all the short putts he has missed. Every season the whole course, and the result of almost every event of importance, would be changed if one or other of the parties did not miss some of these apparently unmissable putts. One need go no farther back than last year’s Amateur Championship meeting. I saw Mr. John Graham miss a two-feet putt in his match with Mr. Robb on the fourteenth green. This was the all-important match of the whole tournament, and in the light of what happened afterwards it was made to appear that the missing of this putt cost Mr. Graham the best chance he ever had in his hard and deserving golfing lifetime of winning the blue ribbon of the game. Mr. Robb himself fancied that Mr. Robert Andrew would be the ultimate winner of the championship that time at Hoylake, but on the eighteenth green in one of his rounds Mr. Andrew missed a putt of less than a foot for the match, and then had to go on to the nineteenth hole, where he was a well-beaten man. And in the final tie of all, if Mr. Lingen had never missed a short putt, who knows but what he would have been the champion of the year after all?
Therefore we may take it as established that the very greatest players cannot do the very shortest putts with anything approaching to certainty, when it is of the very greatest importance that they should do so. They are no better at this game than quite moderate players, and the chances of their holing such putts decrease according to the importance of the occasion—that is to say, the more necessary it is to hole the putt in order to promote one’s success in the encounter in progress, the less likely is one to do so. This is one of the fundamental principles of the thing. Anybody can hole a putt of four or five feet when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no particular credit in doing it. It is when it does matter that you cannot do it. The hole is 4¼ in. wide, and the ball is about 1½ in. in diameter. You may use anything from an umbrella to a lawn-roller in order to putt that little ball into that huge pit, and yet at that distance of three or four feet you cannot do it—that is, as often as you ought to do. Training and practice are no use. Do not beginners always do these putts well? That is because they do not know how difficult they are. They will by and by, and then they will begin to miss them! At home I have a little baby girl, and sometimes she gets one of my putters out of the corner, and begs for the loan of a ball. Make a sort of hole on the carpet, or even go out on to the lawn and play at a real hole in the real way, and that little thing will hole the putts of a yard and two yards every time! She never bothers about any particular stance or anything of that kind, and takes no count of the blades of grass or where she ought to be looking at the much-talked-of “moment of impact.” She just putts, and down goes the ball every time! It is wonderful, one of the most wonderful things in sport that I have ever seen! Here she does that, and we others who know so much about these things, cannot do them—at least, not with the same certainty.
Here is another point. It may need only an exceedingly delicate stroke to putt a ball properly, yet if you take the clumsiest, horniest-handed labouring man—say a road-mender or a railway navvy, who had never either seen or heard of golf before—he would never miss those three to five feet putts. Again it is because he does not know how really difficult they are. It is said that a mighty hunter of great renown, a man who had bagged all the big game of India in great variety, once declared in an agony, “I have encountered all the manifold perils of the jungle, I have tracked the huge elephant to his retreat, and I have stood eye to eye with the man-eating tiger.” All of which was quite true—he had. Then he added, “And never once have I trembled until I came to a short putt.”
I have thought the matter out, and I suggest the reason. It is one of the prettiest points in psychology that one will encounter in the whole of a long lifetime of the most careful thought and study. You don’t really want any mind at all for putting purposes. The whole thing is too simple, and instead of a mind and brains being any use for the purpose in hand, they are a positive disadvantage, and are continually getting in the way.
III
Consciousness is often fatal in putting, and it is the conscience making a coward of the man that makes him miss his putt. To hole a three-feet putt over a flat piece of green is really one of the easiest things in the world; there can be no doubt about it. But while there is one ridiculously easy way of doing the putt, there are about a dozen more or less difficult ways of missing it, and these dozen are uppermost in the mind of the golfer when he comes to his effort. Thus the missing of the short putt represents the greatest triumph of matter over mind that is to be found in the whole range of sport, or, so far as I know, in any other pursuit in life. But why should a man be given to these morbid thoughts of the ways of missing, and why should he not be of hopeful, courageous disposition, and attack the hole boldly and with confidence, instead of remembering these dozen ways of missing? That is what non-golfers ask.
It is an easy question to set; but there is another factor in the situation that has to be mentioned. There is the sense of responsibility, and this sense of responsibility is probably greater in a man when he is making a putt of from three to five feet than it is in the case of any other man at any time in any other sport, because he will never, never have the chance again that he has got this time. If he putts and misses, the deed is irrevocable, the stroke and the hole or the half have been lost, and nothing that can happen afterwards can remove the loss. If a man makes a bad drive, or if his approach play is weak, he can atone for these faults by being unusually clever with the subsequent stroke in the play to the hole, and he thinks he will. But the short putt is the very last stroke in that play, and if it is missed there is no possible atonement to be made. Thus there is something of the awful, of the eternal, of the infinite about the putt; the man is awe-stricken; he knows it is easy, but he is conscious of those dozen ways of missing. So he misses. I have put the question to a number of the best-known players of the day as to what were their precise thoughts—if any—when they came to making the final putt of a great match, which in many cases gave them a championship. Their answer almost universally was that their thought was, “What a fool I shall look if I miss this putt!” Thus they knew that they ought not to miss it, but they were burning with consciousness of the fact that they were terribly liable to do so. So matter triumphs over mind.
IV
Can anything in a mechanical sort of way be done to overcome this awful difficulty? I fear not, though one or two new putters are invented every week, and some of them are acclaimed as being the philosopher’s stone for which we have been looking. The golf world began to buzz as if its mainspring had got loose when Mr. Travis won the championship at Sandwich with that Schenectady putter—the most epoch-making putter of all. But where is it now? Very few people use it.