Curiously enough I have had rather the better of the exchanges, in the so-called "big" matches, amateur championship matches, and the like, that I have played with Johnny Ball. He would sometimes miss a short putt—in fact, I always rated him as good for a couple of missed short putts in the round—and that just gave one a chance to come in. But as to "friendly" matches—though I am sorry to say I have had but few with him—I think he has beaten me every one. It is true they were always on his native Hoylake. With Johnny Laidlay, on the other hand, of whom I never had the same consciousness of being in the hands of a stronger man as I had with the English Johnny, I have had the worse of it in the "big" matches. I beat him, I remember, in an international match, but he beat me at least twice in the amateur championship, and I have not a win from him to my score in that encounter. Yet in the "friendly" matches—and we have played a great many, for I have very often been the guest of his kind hospitality, both at North Berwick and elsewhere—I do not think that I have come off at all the worse.
But Johnny Ball, at his best, and especially at Hoylake, was a terror. For one thing he was so very long. Generally driving with a hook, the ball carried very far and then set to work to run till it made you tired watching it. And then he had that wonderful long approach with his brassey, banging the ball right up to the hole, with a concave trajectory—you know what I mean—the ball starting low and rising towards the end of its flight, then dropping nearly perpendicularly, and with no run. It is a shot that I have seen played in any perfection only by three players, and all young ones—Johnny Ball, Hugh Kirkaldy and Jamie Allan. Only the first is still alive, and he does not, probably cannot, play the stroke now. I believe it is a stroke that was easier with the gutta-percha balls than with the modern rubber-hearted things. At all events no one plays the stroke now. Perhaps that foolishly named "push-stroke" of Vardon's comes most near to it, and now and again Taylor gives us something of the sort: but this is with iron clubs, not with wood. In the old days Bob Ferguson had the stroke, with his irons, played up to the plateaux greens at North Berwick with great accuracy; but he did not achieve it so well with the wood.
Then Johnny could drive that gutta-percha ball most ferociously with his cleek. I remember Colonel Hegan Kennard saying to him, as he and I were playing a match, "I wish you could teach me to drive as far with my driver as you can with your cleek."
Johnny had just driven a huge cleek shot to the end hole. And Kennard was a very fair scratch player of the day. Johnny was full of resource too. When you had him, as you thought, in a tight place, he would bring off some tour de force, with a great hook or slice, and lose very little. He delighted, too, in an evil and windy day: the harder it blew the better he could play and the more he enjoyed controlling his ball through the storm.
The short game was where he gave you your chances. If you could live with him at all through the green and up to the hole you need not despair of stealing a shot or two back from him, now and then, on, and from just off, the putting green.
And that was the very last point at which you might think to have any advantage over that other, the Scottish Johnny. He never could quite trust his wooden clubs. The occasional hook or slice was apt to put in a sudden appearance, after he had been playing perfectly straight for a number of holes. On the putting green he improved very much after I had known him for a year or two. But always, from first to last in a golfing career which has been crammed full of glorious achievement, once he came within ironing reach of the green there was no man, till Taylor came, that was his equal. That is my humble opinion. Bob Ferguson, who was really his teacher, on that fine old nine-hole course at Musselburgh, may have been even better at the full iron bangs up to the hole: he had the concave flight and the straight drop which are worth anything in the approach; but Johnny Laidlay was better than his master at the little chip shots. He learned them, no doubt, at North Berwick, where you are undone, if you cannot play them, and where the other man is undone if you can. And, then, Johnny Laidlay was a very fine finisher in a tight match. How many times I have known him do that last hole at North Berwick in three—a hole hardly to be reached from the tee and guarded by a very tricky valley—when the match depended on it I should be sorry to say. I always thought his stance, as he addressed his ball all "off the left leg," an ungraceful one, and am inclined to think it the cause of the occasional uncertainty of his driving, but his manipulation, by which I mean his hand and finger work, of his iron clubs was beautifully delicate. I do not think he had given much thought to the way in which the different strokes were played—the slice and the pull and the rest of them—but there was not, so far as I know, a stroke or a subtlety with the iron clubs that he was not master of. His clubs were all curiously thin in the grip, and one of his great theories was that the club should be held as lightly as possible. There is not a doubt that most men can put more cut on the ball with a lightly than with a tightly held club, but further than that, there is not any very general recognition, so far as I know, of a virtue in the light grip.
After I lost the amateur championship at Prestwick in 1888, these two Johnnies, the English and the Scottish, held it between them, winning two apiece for four years, so that it was not until Mr. Peter Anderson won, in the seventh year of its institution, that we let it go out of the hands of one of the three. Neither Johnny Laidlay nor I were fated to win again, but as for the other Johnny, there seems to be no saying when he will be done with it. To be sure he has a few years' advantage.