In the final, Travis had to meet Ted Blackwell, and I never had great hopes for England as to the result of that encounter. I say this, with all respect for Ted Blackwell's great game as he developed it almost immediately afterwards; but he was not his great self then. At that time he was still putting with a thin-bladed little cleek which must have been forged about the date that Tubal Cain was in active work as a smith. Very shortly afterwards someone, who deserves to suffer lingering death at the hands of all Ted Blackwell's later opponents, induced him to take to an aluminium putter. The difference it made in his game was nearer a third than four strokes, as I reckon it. From a really bad putter he became all at once a very good putter indeed. I knew all about it, for I had been playing him and beating him comfortably in several matches at St. Andrews, in course of a little party which Lord Dudley took up there. I met him again in an international match at Hoylake only a little later, when he had exchanged the tinkling cleek for the aluminium putter, and he beat me—not by length of driving, but by length of putting.
As for this final at Sandwich, which was played in his pre-aluminium days, Travis has put it on record that he felt confident of winning from the start; and he looked like a winner all through. With the black cigar and the deliberate methods, including the practice swing before each stroke, he was perhaps rather a hard man to play against, but at the same time, and although I have said that he did not play very well when I met him, I think those critics make a great mistake who say that he was not a first-class golfer. He was, and is, a wonderful putter. I know that, not only by the wonderful week of putting that he put in over here at that time, but by what Jim Whigham and others who have played a great deal with him in America have told me. Whigham said that you were grateful, thinking that you had a lucky escape, if you were his opponent and he did not hole the ball from fifteen yards. This was at Garden City, where he knows the greens better than his drawing-room carpet. Indeed, all Travis's record disproves the statement that "he was not fit to win the championship." That he was "lucky to win" we must think. Unless a man is a head and shoulders above his field, he has to have luck if he is to live through a tournament such as our amateur championship; and Travis had no such head and shoulders advantage as this. But put him down at a hundred and eighty or any less number of yards from the hole, and there was no player, amateur or professional, better than he. Perhaps there was no amateur as good. His weakness was out of bunkers and rough ground, but that was a weakness which troubled him little because he very seldom got into these difficulties. I hardly know whether he would have won our championship if Ted Blackwell and the aluminium putter had been introduced to each other a few years earlier; but it is no use arguing about "ifs." As soon as he had won that final, the price of Schenectady putters went up a hundred per cent., and Bobby Maxwell, by way of insult, made me a present of one of them, with which I often putted till our legislation banned them.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Again I have to append the sad note, so often written, that in the interval between the telling of this tale and its publication, he, too, has been taken from the world of living men.
CHAPTER XXXV
HOW GOLF HAS GRIPPED AMERICA
The difference in the golfing condition of the America which I had last visited in the early nineties and that to which I went again in 1910, was striking, and not a little amusing. On that former visit I had given an exhibition of golf to a few indifferent spectators at the Meadowbrook Club on Long Island, on which they had reported that it "might be a good game for Sunday"—conveying thereby a studied and profane insult both to the game and to the day. On my return in 1910 I found an America even more completely in the throes of golf than any portion of our native islands. But on this visit my approach to the American courses was made in an unconventional manner that is worth a word of notice.
Lord Brassey had asked my wife and myself to come with him, on the Sunbeam, to Iceland, across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, and up the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The first golfing place at which we put in, after joining the yacht in the Cromarty Firth, was Dornoch, where is as glorious a natural links as the soul of the golfer can desire or his most industrious inquiry discover. The conformation of Iceland, chiefly mountain, or plain strewn with lava-blocks, hardly seems to lend itself kindly to golf; but on arrival, after many days, during some of them rather storm-tossed, at St. John's, Newfoundland, we found there a golf course, still a little in the rough, carved out of primeval pine forest, of undulating surface, astonishingly good considering how new it was, and promising to give really amusing and good golf of the inland type in the future. Neil Shannon, a Troon man, is the professional, and I astonished both myself and him by beating him.
The next point at which we touched golf was Tadousac, a watering-place at the mouth of the famed Saguenay River which runs into the St. Lawrence. It is the oldest fur-trading station in Canada. Here is a short course, much accidenté, at two points traversing a deep ravine which has real sand in it. There is a more elaborate and carefully kept course at Murray Bay, a little further along the north shore of the St. Lawrence.