It may seem to the reader that it was very nice of our friend to pass this compliment on to us—especially after the exhibition of golf he himself had given. But it wasn't nice. It was the refinement of cruelty. Then and there our doom was sealed. The mid-iron was in our soul. That glorious first drive had done it. A few days later we went out with another friend and played our first game. But that is quite another story.
THAT AWFUL FIRST GAME
That Awful First Game
In a previous article we have told of picking up a friend's golf-club in a spirit of gay nonchalance and making a glorious drive—our first. How our friend artfully left us alone with his bag of tools, how we drew a club out of it, how we carelessly set a quivering little white ball on a neat little pyramid of sand, how we swung the deadly weapon with serene insouciance, and how that doomed spheroid tore a shrieking gash in the atmosphere and lit on a hillside in the next county—all that we detailed to our friends with a frankness untempered by any feeling of personal modesty. We were not modest about it. We saw no reason to be modest. On the contrary, we felt we had every reason to be proud of ourself, and we were at the time.
Naturally, we were not satisfied to let things go at that. If we had stopped then and there, if we had refused firmly and with cuss-words ever to touch a club again, we might to-day be able to go about with the pleasant conviction that we were a champion in possibility. When people talked of young Ouimet, as they still do occasionally—it is a great man who is famous for more than a few months in these bustling times—we could smile in a thoughtful way and ask casually if we had ever told them of that time when we had picked up that club and placed that ball, etc., etc.
Of course, they would probably be bored by the recital—especially after we had told it a few dozen times—but think of the satisfaction it would be to us to know that if we turned our giant intellect and steel muscles to the subject of golf, we would have Ouimet wishing that his parents had apprenticed him to a grocer or a plumber instead of making him a little caddy.
Unfortunately, we did not refrain from golf. We allowed ourself to be persuaded into going out and playing a game—starting a game, that is—and now whenever we hear the word "golf," we turn a peculiar bright salmon pink, and get a trembling all over us. That first game of ours was a thing no man who respects himself could look back on with anything but agony. Nothing but our passion for truth, even at the risk of exposing all the weakness of our nature—it is the same determination with us as with St. Augustine and Rousseau and the other great confessors—nothing but this could lead us to mention the game at all. But our favorite motto is, "The whole truth and then some." So with trembling pen we tear the veil from this crying gash on the milestones of memory—there seems to be something wrong with this metaphor. But never mind. On with the tale, let truth be unrefined!
A few days after that famous first drive we dropped into a friend's office to discuss several important matters of business—such as the weather and the market quotations in the leading blind-pigs. Our real purpose, however, was to tell him, quite incidentally, how we picked up that club and placed that ball, etc., etc., etc.
"Ah, ha, sounds like a pretty nice drive," said Bjones—let's call him that, anyway—when we had finished our modest little recital of how we had established a new record for the course. "You must come out and have a game with me at Boozedale to-morrow afternoon—hope I can give you a game all right."