Putters have been made of every conceivable shape and of every possible material. Counting all variations, there are thousands of kinds of putters. They have been made with the heads bent back, forwards, and sideways. Some of them have had very thin blades, and others have had thick slabs instead of blades. They have been fashioned like knives, hammers, spades, croquet mallets, spoons, and riddles, and some even like putters; and they have been made of iron, gun-metal, steel, aluminium, nickel, silver, brass, wood, bone, and glass. I have here beside me a putter made in nickel, and consisting of a large roller, running on ball bearings! It is no good. The simplest are the best. We cannot obtain will-power by machinery or mechanical appliances. Mr. James Robb tells me that the putter he always uses is an ordinary cleek which he got when a boy. His sister won it in a penny raffle, and having no use for it herself she gave it to him, and he has putted with it ever since. Three times has he putted his way to the final of the championship, and once has he won it. Again, Mr. J. E. Laidlay conveys the information to me that when he was a boy at Loretto School he came by the first golf clubs he ever had in his life in his second or third term, these being a cleek and a brassey. That cleek-head has been his putter ever since, and it is getting so light with wear that his friends are beginning to tell him that it will soon do for him to shave with. Harry Vardon won his first championship with a putter which was not a putter at all, but a little cleek that he had picked up only the day before in Ben Sayers’ shop at North Berwick. He fancied it as a putter, and he has never putted better than on that day at Muirfield. He has never used it since, and now he has taken to the aluminium putter. And do you know that just before the famous championship at Sandwich, Mr. Travis was using a putting cleek that he, too, had got at North Berwick, and it was his intention to putt with it in the tournament? But he was not putting very well in practice at St. Andrews, and one of his compatriots then introduced to him for the first time in his life the Schenectady, which, after one successful trial, was forthwith commissioned for Sandwich. What a subject for a great historical painting to be hung up in the Temple of Golf that we shall have some day—“Emmett introducing the Schenectady to Travis, 1904.” I think it was Emmett; if it wasn’t, then it was Byers. Anyhow, golf history was changed in consequence of that introduction, for I am sure that Mr. Travis would not have won at Sandwich with his North Berwick putting cleek. It wasn’t the Schenectady that did it, but it was the player’s then confidence in the Schenectady. He had, for the time being, got that little devil of golf in chains, and putting had become a great joy.
V
Golf is a jealous sport, and often takes it ill when any of its patrons devote their attention occasionally to other diversions of the open air, and exacts from them such a penalty in failures and aggravation when they come back to their true love as is calculated to make them hesitate before committing further offences. Perhaps it is natural in a way that golf, which has so much of wild nature about it, should be least inclined to brook the rivalry of games of the namby-pamby order. Fine field sports such as shooting and fishing do not put you off your golf, in fact we have generally concluded that a few days’ fishing sandwiched in a golfing holiday rather does good to your game. Perhaps it stimulates your thinking qualities, and if you are not reflecting upon the other and the better way in which you might have played the seventeenth hole the day before, when you should be noticing the significant manœuvres of something in the water, all is well. But a game that golf cannot and will not tolerate acquaintanceship with upon any consideration, is croquet. The royal and ancient one has decided apparently that it will not recognise it in any way whatever, and that it will give a bad time to any golfer who potters about on a lawn with hoops and bells and wooden sledgehammers. And it does so. There is no more sure way of disturbing your putting than an hour or two’s croquet. This putting poison is most deadly efficacious, and its effects sometimes last for a couple of days. The man has not yet been born who can putt well after a game of croquet. Croquet is really putting, but putting with a big heavy ball after the style of a cannon ball, and it has to be putted on a woolly green of rough grass in which a golf ball would do something towards burying itself. Your accommodating eye and touch soon become accustomed to the big ball and the mallet, and you begin to putt through the hoops exceeding well, feeling then that you hold an advantage over others through usually having to manage a smaller ball under more difficult circumstances. But the awkward part of the business is that the eye and touch won’t go back again so readily to their golfing adjustment, and while they are out of it some funny things are likely to happen. At such times the golf ball looks impossibly small, and, while one is overcome with the idea that it will need remarkably delicate management, one finds it impossible to wield the putter as it should be. Here is the story of a recent happening:
A and B are keen rivals on the links—so keen that there is always great haggling when it comes to adjusting the odds for a match, B usually giving A three strokes. On the present occasion A informed B that he would be glad to play him a match on the afternoon of the following day. B wanted to know why they could not make a full day of it and play in the morning as well, but A pleaded that he had to take part in a tom-fool croquet match to which he was committed at the house where he was staying. They settled the terms of the next afternoon’s encounter at the same time, and B said that as A would be playing croquet in the morning he would be willing to give him five strokes. This was really foolish of him; but no matter. A thought something, but said nothing. The golf match was duly played on the following day, and, to the mortification of B, the croquetter putted like an angel the whole way round, won his match by 6 and 5, won the bye, and, holing a ten-yarder to wind up with, took the bye-bye as well. B was naturally in a most unhappy state of mind, and moaned that he had never before known a man to be able to putt after playing croquet, and that it was because of this that he had given A two extra strokes on that dismal day. “Croquet! croquet!” exclaimed A, “but I haven’t been playing croquet!” B stood aghast. “You haven’t!” he shrieked; “then what the dickens were you doing this morning?” “Oh,” said A, “I took the hint from what you said yesterday, and cried off the croquet match. I spent an hour instead in practising putting on the carpet, and stuffed the fire-irons underneath to make undulations!” There are one or two very good morals in this pathetic little story.
If you need to putt perfectly you should do nothing with your hands, and as little as possible with the remaining parts of your physical construction for a whole day beforehand. The fact is that everything puts you off your putting, but some things more than others, which is another reason for that old saying that putting is the devil. An old golfer has said that the ideal preparation for really fine putting is to lie in bed for twenty-four hours with your wife to feed you with a spoon. A few hours’ penmanship is certainly fatal to one’s putting, and typewriting is worse. A man may depend upon it that if he goes in for a motor-car and drives it, he will henceforth be about three or four strokes worse on the greens than he used to be, which accounts for the anxiety of so many golfers to sell their new cars. And oh, that my best golfing enemy would buy a motor-cycle! A player once told me that he could not putt in the afternoon after having found it necessary to beat his dog at lunch-time; and it has been observed to be quite a bad thing for one’s putting to use a walking-stick in one’s ordinary pedestrianism. The putting muscles and nerves are the most delicate, subtle things in the whole of animal creation, and the pity is that circumstances generally preclude their more careful preservation during the periods in one’s life when they are not needed for holing-out purposes.
VI
Now the society season is most alive. The golfing society—without a course of its own and consisting generally of men who have some other common interest, usually business or professional, apart from their love for the game—is becoming an increasingly popular institution in the south, and some people who have had to find fault with the constitution and general scheme of such bodies, have now to confess that their protests have been completely without avail, and that, for good or ill, these combinations have settled permanently with us. Considering the circumstances of the time and the great advance in the popularity of the game, they must be regarded as a natural evolution. After all, those people who regard the society as a kind of new-fangled notion and an undesirable development, need to have it pointed out to them that it is the oldest kind of golf community, and that nowhere does it flourish more than in the great Scottish centres of the game. For example, a great majority of the clubs of Edinburgh are not clubs at all, as the term is understood in the south, but merely golfing societies, made up often of men with another common interest, and the only difference between them and the southern societies is that they have a public course to play upon and are dependent upon the kind favour of nobody for the playing of the game; whereas in the south there are no public courses, and the societies have necessarily to crave the permission of clubs for the courtesy of their greens on the days when they wish to go out to play their matches and competitions.
Perhaps some day there will be public courses in the south on which the societies may play. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the societies combined are even now almost strong enough to obtain and keep up a course of their own. In these days the societies’ subscriptions are seldom more than five or ten shillings, but the majority of members would be agreeable to pay a guinea for the pleasures that they receive, and on such an increase it ought not to be a difficult matter to devise some scheme for the establishment of a society course. Alternatively, it is suggested that the societies might do something towards giving a substantial financial backing to some club or other that is in a bad way in this respect, on the condition that they had the use of that club’s course on midweek days for all genuine competitions and matches. Against this it has to be considered that one of the charms of society golf, as it is conducted in the south at the present time, is the opportunities that are given to members of visiting and playing over courses which are unfamiliar to them and which are not generally accessible, and of organising expeditions of members to these courses in the way of having a good day out together. All those who have experienced this pleasure know that it makes one of the most delightful variations from the ordinary routine of a golfer’s life.
There is no reason to suppose that clubs generally, or any club in particular, are hostile to the society idea and practice, and we have not yet heard of any case in which a club has declined permission to a society to play its match or competition on its course. So far from that being the case, the most important clubs of all, with the best courses, have shown a marked amiability in the matter. Still, from time to time there have been people who have suggested future difficulties, and even hinted at an abuse by societies in general of the good nature and courtesy of the clubs; and in view of the fact that in two years from now there will probably be ten societies for every two that are at present in existence, just as even now there are about five times the number that there was two years since, it will be as well if the clubs think the matter out and decide upon their policy, and, so far as they are able to do so, or regard it as politic, to announce it. When they do come to consider the matter, they will do well to do so on the broad basis of the common good, and to remember that an enormous factor in bringing about the increase in the popularity of golf, and in affording the great delights that golfers of the present day derive from the game, has been the principle of the community of interests which is generally agreed upon. When a man becomes a member of a “recognised golf club” in these days, he becomes ipso facto a kind of provisional member of all other golf clubs, that is to say, upon the payment of certain small fees and on a proper introduction—that of the secretary of his own club being commonly regarded as sufficient—he has some claim upon the courtesy of any other club whose green he may like to visit. The members of a club that extends these privileges to strangers obtain those of a like kind from other clubs, and thus to the individual player there is opened up the entire variety of all the golf in the country. How much would our pleasure in the game be reduced if this variety were not available, and we were compelled to play exclusively upon the courses of clubs of which we were full members!