It is played with a ball, about which, though I could say much, I will say little. I will not decide whether it should have a heart of oak or a heart of gold, whether it should go through a 1·6-inch ring or a plate-glass window, whether it should sink like the German Navy or float like the British. Enough, if not too much, has been said about the standard ball.
Golf is also played with a number of striking implements more intricate in shape than those used in any other form of recreation except dentistry. Let so much be agreed.
Now, quite plainly, the essential idea underlying all games played with a ball, whether a club, stick, mallet, bat or cue be added or no, is that some interference should take place with the enemy's action, some thwarting of his purpose or intent. In Rugby football, to take a case, where no mallet is used, it is permissible to seize an opponent by the whiskers and sling him over your right shoulder, afterwards stamping a few times on his head or his stomach. This thwarts him badly. The same principle applies, though in a milder form, to the game of cricket, where you attempt to beat the adversary's bat with your ball, or, if you have the bat, to steer the ball between your adversaries, or at least to make them jolly well wish that you would.
Even with the baser and less heroic ball games, like croquet and billiards, where more than one ball is used at a time, action inimical to the interests of the opponent's ball is permitted and encouraged. Indeed in the good old days of yore, when croquet was not so strictly scientific, a shrewd sudden stroke—the ankle shot, we called it, for, after all, the fellow was probably not wearing boots—well, I daresay you remember it; and I have once succeeded in paralysing the enemy's cue arm with the red; but this needs a lot of luck as well as strength, and is not a stroke to be practised by the beginner, especially on public tables.
We come then again to golf, and see at once that, with the miserable and cowardly exception of laying the stymie, there is no stroke in this game that fulfils the proper conditions which should govern athletic contests involving the use of spherical objects with or without instruments of percussion.
And yet we read column after column about fierce encounters and desperate struggles between old antagonists, when as a matter of fact there is no struggle, no encounter at all. Against no other ball game but golf, unless perhaps it be roulette, can this accusation be laid. Ask a man what happened last Saturday. "I went out," he says, rather as if he was the British Expeditionary Force, "in 41; but I came home"—he smiles triumphantly; you see the hospital ship, the cheering crowds—"in 39." Whether he beat the other fellow or not he hardly remembers, because there was in fact no particular reason why the other fellow should have been there.
Golf matches ought to be arranged, and for my part I shall arrange them in future, as follows:—
He. Can you play on Saturday at Crump?
I. No, I'm not playing this week.
He. Next week then?
I. Yes, at Blimp.
He. I can't come to Blimp.
I. Well, let's play all the same. Your score this week at Crump against mine next week at Blimp, and we'll have five bob on it.
I'm not quite sure what his retort is, but you take my point. It is manifestly absurd to drag the psychological element into this cold-blooded mathematical pursuit. After all that England has done and come through in the last few years, is a man in baggy knickerbockers, with tufts on the ends of his garters, going to be daunted and foiled just because a man in slightly baggier knickerbockers and with slightly larger tufts on his garters has hit a small white pellet a little further than he has? Hardly, I think.
That is why, when I read long letters in the principal daily papers about the expense of this so-called game, and calculations as to whether it can be played for less than twenty-five shillings a time, I am merely amused. In my opinion, if the relatives of members of golf-clubs cannot afford to support them, these institutions should either be closed or the inmates should be provided with some better game, like basketball. That is what I feel about golf.