In the twentieth century I was no longer regarding myself with great seriousness as a likely champion, and it is very certain that I should not have troubled to go to Muirfield for the amateur championship of 1903 had it not been for a kindly invitation from David Kinloch to stay with him for it at his place Gilmerton, about nine miles from the course. I was salmon fishing on the Wye at the time, and the river was in good order, so it was a wrench.

I remember that there was staying also at Gilmerton on that occasion poor Harold Finch-Hatton, most humorous of good companions. We used to drive the nine miles in a high dog-cart, the horse generally taking fright at the railway crossing at Drem each morning; so the excitement of the day began long before we came to the links.

I only arrived the day before the fight began, and I remember my first tee-shot in that championship as if it were yesterday. I was playing Mr. Frank Booth, affectionately known as "Father Booth" to men of Sandwich. The spectators were drawn up in a line parallel with the line of play to the first hole, and I hit my tee-shot on the extreme tip of the toe of the club, so that it went out to cover point and right away to the right of the spectators altogether. I had to play back over their heads, up to the hole.

After that promising start I played quite steadily and beat Booth comfortably. Then I went along uneventfully till I met A.M. Ross. A.M. Ross was already something of a veteran, but he gave me some extremely tough work. The match had its element of humour. We had not, at that time, the rule that all putts should be holed out, and very early in the match he did not give a putt which I thought to be stony dead. Therefore at the next hole, where he had a putt still more stony, I did not give that to him. He repaid me again by making me perform a still more ridiculous task of holing out; and so I him again, until at the end of that match we were scrupulously, but without a smile or a word said on either side, holing out putts of two inches with the solemnity of a religious rite. But it was all with quite good temper on both sides: I think both of us were too old stagers to take offence. In the last eight I beat Dick, playing very steadily, and then I met Angus Macdonald. I had never played him before. He was, no doubt, an immensely strong man. He was so strong and big that he seemed unable to swing round his body, as it were. He was the shortest driver for a player of his ability I ever met; but he was also the longest putter. Time and again, when I thought I had the hole, having arrived on the green a stroke before him, he upset calculations by holing a gigantic putt. He smoked all the time, a long meerschaum pipe, and had all the air of a man playing the game for pleasure—which is not at all a common aspect for a man to wear when he is playing a championship heat. And after he had been holing these prodigious putts time after time, and I had been following them up by holing humble little things of a yard and a half or so, he fairly petrified me with astonishment by remarking, in a tone of almost pained surprise, "You're putting very well!" I looked at him to see whether he was chaffing, but his face did not show the twinkle of a smile, and I had to assume that it was simple honest comment, and that he was accustomed, that he expected, to hole these gigantic putts, but that he did not expect his opponent to hole the little ones after him. Perhaps that explains how, being so short a driver, he was yet so good a golfer. But eventually I defeated him, and thus came into the final.

In the other semi-final tie a terrific battle had been raging between Bobby Maxwell and Herman de Zoete. Of course I did not see it, being very fully occupied with Macdonald, but I heard all about it, and what I heard was that Herman de Zoete was driving tremendous balls, very seldom on the course, and following up these huge erratic efforts by wonderful recoveries and putting, so that, as they said, if he had beaten Bobby, who was playing a sound steady game down the middle of the course, it would have been a crying iniquity. But it was an iniquity that was as nearly as possible perpetrated: he had Bobby, as a matter of fact, stone cold. This was at the nineteenth hole, which they had to go out to play, having halved the round; and at that hole I believe that Bobby's first shot was in the neighbourhood of the wall and the second still some little way from the hole. Herman's first was short of the green, but not very short. It looked as if he had but to do that hole in four to win the match, and it did not look as if he could fail to do it in four. But then, as he told me afterwards, for the first time in the whole match nerves got hold of him, and having hold of him they seem to have taken their hold very hard. He was unable, he said, to see the ball with any distinctness. It looked all in fog; and, playing at it through this obscuring atmosphere, he sent it about a foot. The end of the hole was that Bobby, by holing a very missable putt, did get a four, and Herman took five and lost the hole. The tale, as told me, was peculiarly painful to listen to, for though Bobby Maxwell is a very pleasant fellow to play with, still, for the final round of a championship, especially over Muirfield, I would rather have had to play Herman de Zoete.

However, there it was. And then an unfortunate thing, for me, happened. On the next day we found the wind exactly opposite in its direction to what it had been all the week before. Of course that did not make any difference to Bobby, to whom every grass-blade on Muirfield was a personal friend and every distance known to a foot, no matter in what trend or force of wind. But to me, who had been painfully learning the distances all these days, the right about face of the wind put a very changed aspect on the business. Not that I believe for a moment that the ultimate result was affected by it. I have no delusion that in the year 1903, or possibly in any other, I could make a match with Bobby over Muirfield. Elsewhere it might be another story. As it was, I did make a very good match with him for fourteen holes, for at that point we were all even. But then I made the fatal error of letting him win the last four holes of that round. I hardly know how it happened, for I do not remember that I played these holes extraordinarily badly, but I do know that I did not have nearly as good an appetite, when we went in for luncheon, as I should have had if the break had come at the end of fourteen, instead of eighteen, holes. To start out, as I had to, afterwards, to give Bobby four holes up, was rather a large order, and I found it a good deal too large for me to fill.

I did not play badly. I had a vision of bringing him down to quite a reasonable number of holes up, and making a close match of it, at one point on the way out, but there—it was the hole before the windmill—he made a great recovery out of the rough and won the hole which I had looked forward to winning. I took three on the green and he only took one. That was the final touch. He played the rest of the round, as far as we had to take it, far better than I did—drove much farther, for one thing, which is always useful—and finally hammered me out by the tune of seven and six to play. He deserved to win by quite that margin; but I still cannot help rather regretting that attack of nerves which seized Herman de Zoete so unfortunately at the approach to the nineteenth hole the day before. One thing, however, that championship taught me, that if I was to live with some of these younger golfers and harder hitters I must do something to add yards to my driving. And the way I tried was by adding, as soon as I went South, inches—to the number of six—to my wooden clubs, both driver and brassey. And it had its effect. The extra length was useful at all angles of the wind, but especially against the wind, and for some years these long clubs did me very good service. Of course, the longer the club the lighter you must have the head. That has to be understood, for otherwise you get a weaver's beam that is quite unlike the club of the balance that is familiar to your hand. But if you reduce the head-weight judiciously you can lengthen the shaft unbelievably without making accurate hitting any harder. And with the longer shaft it seems, according to my experience, that you get a longer ball.