Fifty Years of Golf

by Horace G. Hutchinson

I have not said very much, or not as much as the subject deserves, about Johnny Ball as a golfer; have not attempted any appreciation of his game. He would not, as I have indicated already before, do himself any kind of justice at the beginning of his career, when he was off his native Hoylake heath, and this failure was a source of bitter disappointment to his friends at home. They began to be afraid whether he ever would make that mark which they knew his golfing talents ought to put within his achievement. They need not have feared.

So now that I have brought the course of this faithful history to the point at which he and the Scottish Johnny—Laidlay—came together in the final of the amateur championship, it seems as if both of them had at length "arrived." They have set their names on the scroll of Fame and will grave them constantly deeper as the years go. The one, to be sure, was destined to perform many more deeds of glory than the other, and the English Johnny to win a big balance of their matches, but they were in constant competition with one another, and for four successive years at this time one or other of them was amateur champion. It was not indeed until after that great tournament had been going for six years that another name than theirs and my own was inscribed on the championship cup.

John Ball.
As a Yeoman (S. African War).

From "Golf and Golfers" (Longmans, Green & Co.)
J.E. Laidlay.
Characteristic throw forward of the body at the finish of approach stroke.

I may have suffered—probably I have—under many illusions with regard to my ability to play golf, but I never so deluded myself as to suppose I was as good a player as Johnny Ball. I believe I am right in thinking that Johnny Laidlay has just the same opinion of him, in comparison with himself. He, too, I believe, would put Johnny Ball on a pedestal by himself, and leave him there, as the best match-player that we ever have had among the amateurs. I say match-player with deliberation, for of all amateurs by far the best score-player that we have seen is, in my judgment (and I cannot believe that anyone is likely to think differently), Johnny Ball's younger schoolfellow at Hoylake, Harold Hilton. But of course his is rather a younger story, and so, too, is that of Jack Graham, another Hoylake prodigy, of Freddy Tait, of Bobby Maxwell and others. Still, I make no exception of any of those later ones when I claim that Johnny Ball is the best amateur that has ever been seen, for a match. It did not need that he should win the open championship and the amateur championship eight times, in order to prove this. I knew it well, even before he ever won either championship once.

It has always amused me, as it has amused Johnny Laidlay too (we have compared notes about it), to hear people in some of these latter years saying, as Johnny Ball won championship after championship, that "he is as good as he ever was." But the one who has always been most of all amused by these statements is Johnny Ball himself. Perhaps the most humorous thing about it is that they are invariably statements made by those who never saw Johnny Ball at all when he really was at his best. Those who did see him then know better than to make them.

I know that I never started out to play a match with Johnny Ball without the full consciousness that if we both played our game I was bound to be beaten, or, rather, that it could only be by an accident if I should win. It is a feeling I have never had, when I was playing tolerably well, with any other amateur, except when playing Bobby Maxwell over Muirfield. But then I cannot pretend that I was playing at all as strongly as I once might have played when I had to encounter that great man. Still I do not suppose I could ever have held him at Muirfield. He was not quite as terrible elsewhere.