For one reason, if not for more, a Liberal Government is popular with golfers of true feeling—because it gives Mr.Arthur Balfour, the ex-Prime Minister, more to the links than when he is burdened with the care of Ministerial office. In the days of the sweet idleness of Opposition we find him at play on a golf links here and on another one there; now opening a new course and delighting the assembled players with a little speech, which is rich in the spirit of the game; and at some other time enjoying a foursome with some old political friend, or with J.H. Taylor or James Braid as his partner. As Mr.Balfour is the better, as he will tell you, for being a golfer, so is golf the happier for his intimate association with it; and some people who do not know and cannot understand, not being of golf, think we make over-much of a statesman’s interest in our pastime, as if the great of the land were not bound closely up with other sports. Good and earnest-minded golfers feel that they are kin to this player, because he is himself a pattern of the man imbued with the best sense of the honour and glory of the game. He is loyal to it, he has the sentiment of it, and he has seen through to the inner recesses of its charm. Thus he is not ashamed, as no good golfer ever is, of abandoning himself entirely to its delights, of setting all his emotions and his thoughts free to race and frolic in the joy of the links, and of allowing the high dignity of the great statesman to sink away into the simple naturalness of the earnest golfer. So we like this late Prime Minister not because of his political rank, but because he loves his game and does his best by it, and is at all times an example to the acolytes who come forward in nervous ignorance of the great meaning of golf.

Then it is less interesting to consider what style of player Mr.Balfour is, than what kind of man he shows himself to be amid the trials and the triumphs of the links, where, it is indisputably held, a man’s entire human nature, despite all efforts at repression, is forced up to the surface for all to see. Here, then, we see the real Mr.Balfour as he is never seen on the Front Bench at Westminster. There are no mashie shots to foozle, and no drives to top into the bunker in the House of Commons, to make a man feel that life is yet a feeble, disappointing thing. To the Parliamentarian, the nearest thing in pleasure to laying a long approach shot “dead” against the hole is a successful speech, or the engineering of a majority on a division which is something above par, and these are dull things in comparison. Mr.Balfour, then, as we have studied him many times at this testing game, is a man of many and quickly changing emotions, of a temperament somewhat highly strung and nervous, and capable of enormous enthusiasms and alternative depressions. There is nothing that is phlegmatic about this Ministerial golfer. There is something of the schoolboy left in him. One day I saw him driving from the tee and getting a beauty, so that his ball was cleanly flicked for the best part of two hundred yards in a straight line to the hole. It is not in human nature to wait for tardy praise in such ecstatic moments, and he, his face aglow with pleasure, turned about to his opponent, exclaiming, “I do push them away, don’t I?”

On the other hand, there are times when he is sadly mindful of failure, and he is much too serious a golfer ever to forget the most evil things he has done. One time we saw him playing in a foursome—his favourite form of golf—with Mr.Eric Hambro as his partner, and after foozling his approach in a deplorable manner, he called out wearily to his partner, “Do you know, Hambro, I once did that kind of thing for a whole fortnight!” It must have been the blackest fortnight in the right honourable gentleman’s career. He is something of a philosopher on the links, and when he makes a bad stroke he sometimes explains how it came about to those who are near him, or to the course and the sky, if he is momentarily isolated. This, indeed, is one of the very few respects in which the Prime Minister falls from what we may regard as the standard of the ideal golfer. He is inclined to reach too hastily at a conclusion, and some say to speak too much. Some masters have held that the perfect golfer plays in absolute silence, and Mr.Balfour is not an absolutely silent golfer, though in his case he is none the less earnest. It has been stated that never on the links does he make use of any other ejaculation than “Dear me!” but this statement, besides being untrue, is absurd, and is not complimentary to him as a golfer. Let him miss a shot or do anything which he ought not to have done, and the human man comes out above the statesman, though, of course, nobody has ever heard Mr.Balfour commit himself to any unbecoming remark. But in the production of effect from the minor expletives he is most skilful. “Botheration!” is the commonest of his ejaculations, and as he says it whilst witnessing the descent of his little white ball into a yawning bunker, one, as an old golfer, sometimes realises that the most satisfactory results in this respect are not always produced from the use of the strongest materials. “Oh, this is indeed shocking!” is another favourite form of expression, which, as he says it, speaks a volume upon the agony of the mind.

For the rest he is just a good, determined golfer, who is a first-class sportsman, never giving any quarter on the links, and never expecting any. You never see Mr.Balfour pick up his ball whilst there is still the remotest chance left of his dividing the hole with his opponent, and he would reject with scorn, like every other true golfer, the suggestion that he takes his golf for the sake of the exercise only. It is because he is thus keen that other and better players find it a constant pleasure to match themselves against him, or to become his partner in a foursome. They know then that they are out for golf.

“Big” Crawford, his old-time favourite caddie, who keeps a ginger-beer tent alongside the eighth green at North Berwick, flies the Scottish standard from the top of it when Mr.Balfour is on his most beloved course. A Russian grand duke, who did not know the truth, once naÏvely suggested to Crawford that the flag was flying as a compliment to him, the Russian. “Na, na, sir,” said Crawford, “begging your pardon and with great respect, but it’s for one greater than you.”

“Who is looking after Mr.Balfour?” they whispered one time at St.Andrews, when the right hon. gentleman was playing himself into the captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Club, and was then Chief Secretary for Ireland, and regularly attended by plain-clothes detectives in case of accident. “I am looking after Mr.Balfour!” Crawford said when he overheard. “I’m enough.” And he would have been.

II

It should not be set against a golfer for foolishness or faddism that he gives pet names to some of his favourite clubs that have served him well through many hard campaigns, and between him and which there has grown up a very close degree of intimacy, for some of the greatest players have given this rank of name to their trusted clubs. “My driver,” even “My best driver” or “My old driver,” is a cold term to apply to that fine head and shaft that you think have no equals on the links—at least for you. All drivers may be called drivers; shall we have no other name for the champion that has roamed with us and played with us over courses all the way from Dornoch to Westward Ho!? Call him “Bill” if you like, and “Bill” is a very good name; or if your fancy leans that way, and she is slender and whippy, you may call her “Bess.” But better keep to human names. There is a man who calls his baffy “Jumbo,” and it does not seem a nice name. I have a golfing friend who has a driver that he calls “Ephraim,” and it is one of the most wonderful drivers ever seen, with such a long shaft that it needs a giant to wield it, but its owner is something of a giant too. When I hear him ask for Ephraim I know that mighty schemes are afoot, and, straining my eyes to the far distant green, I wonder that even old Ephraim should ever be called upon to make such efforts. But Ephraim has a way with him that makes for success. He is not to be used often, and then when he is he does his job well. That is Ephraim. And do not many of us know the famous golfer who has a dear wooden putter who goes by the name of Fanny? Fanny has done fine duty in championships ere this, and her master knows her every whim and mood. She is a delicate creature is Fanny, and she is not so young as she used to be, and Mr.John, her master, never takes her out in these days when it is wet.

III

Many golfers carry in their minds a fairly clear picture of a club that they regard as their ideal. They have some notion as to its looks, the shape of the head, and the length and the thickness of the shaft. Particularly do they know what that club feels like in their hands as they grip it to make the shot for which it, and it alone, is perfectly adapted. They have never seen such a club, and they fear sometimes that they never will. Some old favourite of theirs has some of the points that are possessed by this ideal, but it has not got them in the same ripe perfection, and it has obvious faults which at times have cost their master dearly. There is no reproachful word to say against that old favourite. It is a good club, and it has done a fine service on the links, and as for its imperfections, are they not what its maker gave to it, trifling imperfections, too, which we are generously disposed to overlook when considering that fine record of service. But it is not the ideal club; it does not feel like that club that we sometimes handle in our imagination, and then enjoy a glorious sense of power as with no other.

It is a pleasant thing to treasure in the mind such a club as this; but let it stop at that. If one grand delusion in which there is nothing harmful, and which on the whole but makes for good, as most ideals do, is not to be destroyed, never set out to reduce that club, now made of but filmy thought, to cold iron or clumsy wood. It will not be the same, be the fancy ever so exact. The first efforts will bring forth results that will be far poorer in quality than those made by old favourites of whom we have spoken, and it will be as if the favourites have jealousy and resent these new-born interlopers, so that they will for the time being cease to give their best work to the man who is so plainly discontented, and who, being so, is lacking in confidence. And the faults that are in those first models that come thus from the mind only increase and aggravate the more as attempts are made to repair them. It is a Will-o’-the-wisp, indeed, is this ideal club, be it driver or brassey or cleek or iron, and it may lure the golfer to a shocking fate. Let us cling to the old favourites and be kind and generous to them. It has been said, and it is no doubt true, that the perfect wife has never yet been born, and some men may reflect upon the advantages of life if they had a perfect wife such as one whom they have painted in their fancy. But in their honesty they will turn their thoughts away from such conceits, and let them dwell upon the manifold excellences of the wives they have, who have hearts that beat, and who, kind and patient and generous, have those human weaknesses which would be faults in the ideal, but which only seem to give to the being the greater human completeness and even perfection. Thus, with this tolerant affection and appreciation, must we look upon our favourite clubs, and leave the ideal to lie unmaterialised and worthless in the mind, a pretty thing to think about, but impossible.

Once there was a man who made a grand effort to materialise the ideal that he had cherished through many seasons. It was a brassey. Some twenty brasseys had he had made, but none of them was quite the thing that he craved. There was something wanting, and thus his shots had not the sting that they ought to have, or that he thought they should possess. But, so often disappointed, he let alone his search for the ideal for a while, and made good friends with one of the real. But he could not forget the ideal brassey, and it grew more and more definite in his imagination. He would look at it there with a smile on his face as he would be going home in the train, and he would handle it and make with it that long carry against the wind that no club of wood and brass in his hands had ever made. Then he took the professional clubmaker into his confidence, and in odd moments after rounds, in the shop they would sometimes talk of this great club, but neither would venture to suggest that it should be made, though they spoke of it as if it were made. They would pick a new one from the stand, and the idealist would say, “Now, Solomon”—he always called it Solomon—“has a shade more hook than that, and there is a little sharper angle to his nose.” The worthy clubmaker entered fully into the spirit of the fancy, and seriously, and he would answer, “Ay, sor, but Sawlaman wasna made by my apprentice!” Another day the golfer would recount the story of his play at a fateful hole, and of the narrow margin by which a fine long shot failed to clear the hazard. It was a moving theme, and after a moment of silence the maker of clubs would say in summary, “Ay, ay, sir; it was a pity ye no had Sawlaman in yer bag!” Yes, it was Solomon that was wanted, just Solomon.

Then one day the player fell to temptation again, and, stirred as of yore by his foolish hopes, he resolved that he would pluck Solomon from the stronghold of his fancy. It was a desperate thing to do, a mad and a reckless thing, a defiance of the spirit world of golf. He told the clubmaker of his resolve, and begged that he would give his closest attention to the details of the commission and his personal care to the execution thereof. The clubmaker, a good human man, was afraid. Awe-stricken, he said, “Ye’ll no have ma try to make Sawlaman—a real Sawlaman, sir. I couldna do it! I couldna do it! I canna make a Sawlaman!” But the player had steeled himself to his resolve; and so for days and days old Sandy laboured in his shop, and head after head was shaped and rejected, and stick after stick was shaved and thrown away. It was a weary task. Then the golfer went away for a stay at another links, and a month later he returned, and on passing Sandy’s shop he was beckoned in. “Yes, yes, Sandy! Got him? Got him?” In Sandy’s face there was written a look that was half of disappointment and half of pride. He whispered, “Not Sawlaman, sir, not Sawlaman; he’ll never be seen on the links this life. But I’ve got David, and here he is!” And David, with a black varnished head, most beautifully shaped, a fine greeny hickory shaft scared on, and a feel and a balance when handled, and a lie to the ball that spoke well for power and clean hitting. The golfer fondled the club for a while, for he was pleased with it, but he could see, despite his pleasure, that it was no Solomon and that the great ideal had not been realised, and he knew now that it never could be realised; for while he was conscious that this club was wanting in some of the points that made Solomon so great, his imagination failed him to discover them. It was a grand club, but it killed a great hope; and there was something of sadness in the manner of taking it over. “Never mind, Sandy,” said he. “It was a fine try, a very fine try; and I’ll tell you what we will do. We shall never see Solomon, the real Solomon; but let us have something to remind us of him, and then we will never talk of him, the real one, again. We will call this one, not David, but Solomon. He shall be the Solomon,” and so he is to this day, and in his name he marks the renunciation of that great ideal. And some very fine things he has done, for he is a most worthy club.

IV

The 1st of September is a fine date for the golfer, for it seems to mark for him the beginning of the period of play which is the best of the whole year. The summer heats are cooling, the tints of Nature are turning to beautiful golds and browns and crimsons, and with a little rain the turf begins to yield more to the foot and the club, and play is pleasanter than it was in the dog days. We would have no sorrows to mar the pleasure of such a day; but the golfer need only be braced to skill and worthiness by the reminder that this date has a little black edge round it in his calendar, for on that day there died one who was certainly one of the greatest golfers who ever lived. That was Allan Robertson.

It will always be a difficult matter to compare the golfers of a living generation with those of a dead one, or to estimate the relative quality of the golfers of two different generations, both of them of the long distant past. We have no standards that are carried on from decade to decade and century to century, and while men do not change, their implements do, and the courses on which they play, while, what with the alterations in implements and courses, the methods are much changed, so that it is quite the same game no longer. Therefore it is impossible and futile to make any comparison between the man we have to-day and whom we like to think is the greatest golfer who ever handled a club, and some of the great heroes of the past. That is a question that can never be settled. What we do know, and we can think it for our modern satisfaction, is that there are of necessity many more fine players in these days than ever there were before, and there are dozens for every one that there was in the days of Allan Robertson and young Tom Morris. Therefore it must be much harder to assert supremacy in these days than formerly, and all the greater is the feat of doing it not once, but many times. If some of the old golfers triumphed as often, or nearly, we can say for the men who live in our time, that, in the numerical weight of their conquest at all events, theirs are by far the greater achievements, and they must have that credit.

As in all other matters, it happens that estimates of the merits of things of the past are necessarily indefinite; they vary from time to time. One generation will have it this old-time celebrity was the greatest in his line; while the sons of that generation make hero-worship of another master, and say that he was the best. So it is in golf. One time there will be a feeling that young Tom was incomparably the best of the golfers of the early period of the game. Then by and by a little of this enthusiasm will fade, and it will be agreed that there was no one better than Allan Robertson. Sometimes a wave of feeling will roll over these discussions in favour of good old Tom, and of late years poor Bob Ferguson has been having justice done to the magnificent skill that he displayed when he was in his prime. Now, taking a mental vote from all the authorities one can remember to have spoken or written on these weighty matters, it seems to result in Allan and young Tom coming out at the top. Bob Ferguson is too near our time for his merits to be properly appraised. Our grandchildren may better be able to give his due to the man who won three championships in succession, and tied for a fourth.

But there can be no doubt that Allan was a really great player in every way. Like Bob Ferguson, and like Harry Vardon in our own day, the beauty of his achievement lay largely in the concealment of his effort, and this is the perfection of style. It has been handed down to us as indisputable, that the easiness of his style was its most remarkable feature, and that he never, never seemed to hit hard at the ball. His swing was a long but a gentle one, and his clubs were light. He was the first man to cultivate in its perfection that fine cleek play from long range up to the hole that in our day has been accomplished with such magnificent effect by Vardon. The 79 that he did at St.Andrews in 1858—he was then just turned forty-three years of age, having been born in the year of Waterloo—was then and for a long time later regarded as a most superlative achievement. That time he was out in 40 and home in 39, winding up with a 4 and a 3. That great things could be and were done in those days, even reckoning their merit on the most exacting modern standard, may be realised from the circumstance that, taking the best scores at each hole in all Allan’s rounds on the old course, which he kept, and making up a composite round from them, that round works out to the strange total of 56,—out in 27 and home in 29. In this strong essence of Robertsonian golf the ingredients, in the order of the eighteen, are, 33 3 3 4 4 3 13 to the turn, and 32 3 4 4 3 3 43 on the way back.

Allan was a great golfer, and a fine exemplar in every respect, for he was a great-hearted player who never knew when he was beaten, was always cheery and with a smile, and he possessed the very perfection of a golfing temperament, as most, though not all, great players do. That was why everybody found it such a delight to play with him, and why he and old Tom, who had also a fine temperament, were as a foursome pair just as strong and invincible as men could be imagined to be. That lionlike finish of theirs to their historic match with the Dunns deserves all the celebrity it has achieved, and will for ever hold, not so much because it was an exciting thing and a great match, but because it was a triumph of the golf temperament over another that was not quite so good. Allan had the spirit of the game within him; he had the true soul of a golfer, and his most casual utterances constantly indicated how he saw right through to the back side of the game. “It’s aye fechtin’ against ye” was a common observation of his, and there is only too much truth in that simple remark, that the game is hardly ever with you, that it is fighting against you the whole way round. He had no greater admirer than his famous pupil. An “awfu’ good player” was Allan to Tom. “Puir Allan!” soliloquised Tom once, when his old master was no more. “The cunningest bit body o’ a player, I dae think, that iver haun’led cleek an’ putter. An’ a kindly body, tae, as it weel does fit me to say, an’ wi’ a wealth o’ slee pawky fun aboot him.”

“They may toll the bells and shut up their shops at St.Andrews, for their greatest is gone,” somebody said when he died. He had golfed all his life from the time when he first knew that he was alive. His father and grandfather were golfers, and the first things that he played with as a child were golf clubs that were made for him.

V

Surely we must account old Tom Morris as one of the wonders of the sporting world, as he is indubitably in that relation to the world of golf. How many times have we heard that the light of that long and happy life was flickering towards its extinction, but the rumour has no sooner been spread than Tom comes forward in some activity to give it full denial. Long may he continue to do so; every time that we hear he is sick upon his bed may a telegram come to us from St.Andrews to say that again he is sitting in the chair outside his shop, watching the couples as they come forward in their turn to hole out on that beloved eighteenth putting green, which, with the clubhouse of the Royal and Ancient beyond it, has during recent times comprised almost the entire circle of his daily vision. Each time I go to St.Andrews I find him still cheery, and indeed it seems to me a little cheerier than the last time that I saw him taking the sun in his chair. There is the cheery respectful greeting and the felicitous remark that it is “a gran’ day for a roond,” and in the next moment he turns his head to mutter a grumble towards those “boys,” who are idling away a few spare minutes outside Forgan’s shop, and are giving evidence of the freshness of the life that is in them, to which Tom, a stickler for decorum in all connected with golf, however humbly or indirectly, demurs. Like most others who are running up the score of their life’s round towards the ninety mark, he is prone to tell you that times have much changed, and that the boys were more sedate in the days when he was one of them. That is as it may be. But despite all the antics of the boys, and the little irritations that they give to old Tom, he remains a cheery Tom to the last, just as he has always been. His life throughout has been imbued with an optimism which has always been the most attractive feature of his character. Every good golfer is an optimist. I deny that it is possible to be a good golfer in the best sense and not be an out-and-out optimist.

Another fine thing about Tom, and one that has always endeared him to the golfing world, is the fact that there has never been anything in the least niggardly in the gratitude which he extends towards the game with which his life has been bound up. Suggest to Tom that there is anything better in life than golf, and you have done the first thing towards raising up a barrier of reserve between him and you. Listen to how he spoke of the game of his heart on a New Year’s Day twenty-one years back from now, when even then he was by way of becoming an old man. “An’ it hadna been for gowff,” he said to the patron who greeted him in the customary form for the first day of the year, “I’m no sure that at this day, sir, I wad hae been a leevin’ man. I’ve had ma troubles an’ ma trials, like the lave; an’ whiles I thocht they wad hae clean wauved me, sae that to ‘lay me doun an’ dee’—as the song says—lookit about a’ that was left in life for puir Tam. It was like as if ma vera sowle was a’thegither gane oot o’ me. But there’s naething like a ticht gude gowing mautch to soop yer brain clear o’ that kin’ o’ thing; and wi’ the help o’ ma God an’ o’ gowff, I’ve aye gotten warsled through somehow or ither. The tae thing ta’en wi’ the tither, I haena had an ill time o’t. I dinna mind that iver I had an unpleasant word frae ony o’ the many gentlemen I’ve played wi’. I’ve aye tried—as ma business was, sir—to mak’ masel’ pleesant to them; an’ they’ve aye been awfu’ pleesant to me. An’ noo, sir, to end a long and maybe a silly crack—bein’ maistly about masel’—ye’ll just come wi’ me, an’ ye’ll hae a glass o’ gude brandy, and I’ll have ma pint o’ black strap, an’ we’ll drink a gude New Year to ane anither, an’ the like to a’ gude gowffers.”

Sportsman, in the best sense, Tom has always been, and he was a worthy predecessor of the men who are to-day at the head of the ranks of the professional golfers. That is a pretty story that is told of Captain Broughton’s challenge to Tom to hole a putt for £50. As everybody knows, Tom was once famous as the man who missed the very shortest putts, to whom there was duly delivered, when he was at Prestwick, a letter which was addressed only to the “Misser of Short Putts, Prestwick.” On the occasion under notice Tom was playing to the High Hole on the old course at St.Andrews, and had got into sore trouble, so that he was playing two or three more when Captain Broughton happened to pass by and became a witness of what was happening. Tom, be it noted, always belonged to golfers of that fine and sportmanlike persistency, who would never give up a hole while there was a single spark of hope remaining alight. “Oh, pick up your ball, Tom, it’s no use!” said the Captain half chidingly. “Na, na,” answered Tom, “I might hole it!” “If you do I’ll give you £50,” retorted the Captain, and it seemed a very safe retort too. “Done!” responded Tom, and thereupon made one more stroke with his iron club, and lo! the ball hopped on to the green, and glided on and on towards the hole, hesitated as it came nearer to it, curled round towards it, crept nearer and nearer until it was on the lip—and down! He had holed! Then said the triumphant Tom, “That will make a nice little nest-egg for me to put in the bank,” and the Captain looked very serious and went his way. A few days later the Captain came along with the £50, and with a smile and a compliment offered it to Tom as the fruits of his achievement; but Tom declined absolutely to take a penny of it. “I thank ye, Captain, and I’m grateful to ye all the same; but I canna tak’ the money, because, ye see, ye wisna really meaning it, and it wisna a real wager.” And to that he stuck.

VI

There are alarms and excursions in the ball business daily, and the player takes a devoted interest in them all. The trade is striving with might and main to put ten yards on to the drive of little Tomkins, and poor old grandfather, who began his golf at sixty, may think as he goes off to sleep at night that perhaps by the morning there will be a new ball on the market which will enable him to get his handicap down to 20. The good inventors are doing all that they can for him. They are trying everything and each thing in all possible different ways. The other day a great professional was taking stock of his shop, and he found that he had twenty-seven different varieties of rubber-cored balls in hand. And many golfers feel that they must try them all and each new one as it comes out. The evolution of the golf ball is one of the most wonderful things of its kind. All of us who have played golf for more than five years can plume ourselves on the fact that we lived in golf in the earlier era of the gutta; it is strange to think that possibly half of the present golfing population cannot say that, so quickly has the game been coming on of late. But not one golfer in five thousand of those living now played in the days of the feather-stuffed ball, which was the pioneer. It had the game to itself up to 1848, which was the year that the gutta came in. St.Andrews was the great centre of manufacture of the “featheries,” and in the shop of Allan Robertson alone there were some three thousand a year made. Of course three thousand rubber-cores would be nothing in these days, but making a ball was a big job then, and they were expensive, costing about four shillings each. And a single topped shot with an iron finished them absolutely! The ballmakers bought the little leather cases ready made from the St.Andrews saddlers, a small hole being left to stuff the feathers in. The feathers were boiled, and it took a large hatful to stuff a ball tight with them. Mr.Campbell of Saddell is believed to have taken the first gutta balls to St.Andrews, and when he did so there was consternation everywhere. They thought the trade in the featheries would be ruined, and that anyone could make the new balls. So an attempt was made to boycott them, and it is even said that Allan Robertson bought up all the lost balls that were found in the whins and destroyed them by fire! Tom Morris was working in his shop then, and they quarrelled so violently the first day when Tom used a gutta that they parted for ever. Tom himself tells the story in this way: “I can remember the circumstances well. Allan could not reconcile himself at first to the new ball at all, just in the same way as Mr.John Low and many other golfers could not take to the Haskell when it first appeared. But the gutta became the fashion very quickly, as the rubber-cored ball has done, so what could we do? One day, and it is one that will always be clearly stamped on my memory, I had been out playing golf with a Mr.Campbell of Saddell, and I had the misfortune to lose all my supply of balls, which were, you can well understand, very much easier lost in those days, as the fairway of the course was ever so much narrower then than it is now, and had thick, bushy whins close in at the side. But never mind that. I had, as I said, run short of balls, and Mr.Campbell kindly gave me a gutta one to try. I took to it at once, and as we were playing in, it so happened that we met Allan Robertson coming out, and someone told him that I was playing a very good game with one of the new gutta balls, and I could see fine, from the expression of his face, that he did not like it at all, and when we met afterwards in his shop, we had some high words about the matter, and there and then we parted company, I leaving his employment. There are two big bushes out there in Allan’s old garden. Well, one of them was planted by him and the other by me, just about that same time, so they cannot be young bushes now.” But by 1850 the guttas were in general use and nobody was much the worse.

It is odd to reflect that golfers were very near the rubber core several times during the fifty-four years that the gutta held office. As we were told in the big law case, an old lady made balls that were wound with rubber thread to make them bounce more; but, nearer to our rubber-core, there were two golfers who at different times and places are said to have made what was to all intents and purposes just the same ball in principle that we use to-day, but not so thoroughly made and perfected. One of these golfers used to make them and give them to his friends. But there was no advertising and not so much enterprise in the way of companies with big capital in those days, and these inventors let their chance go by. What a chance! There were millions, and millions again, in their idea.

None the less the Americans deserve the credit for being the men who gave us the rubber-cored ball as we know it. But for their belief in it, and their enterprise, there would have been no rubber-cores to-day, and perhaps far fewer golfers. Let me tell the real story of how they came by their idea and their determination. In the early summer of 1898, Mr.Coburn Haskell was the guest of Mr.Wirk, one of the magnates of the American rubber industry, at his house in Cleveland, Ohio, and both being golfers, they golfed all day and talked golf during dinner and afterwards. It was these dinner conversations that brought about the Haskell ball, revolutionised the game, and made an industry which is the most thriving of all connected with sport. Both gentlemen agreed that they wanted a better ball than the gutta, something that would go farther. At last, after many sittings, one of them observed that something might be done by winding rubber under tension. Winding it without such tension would result in the ball being too soft. This idea was elaborated during the next night or two, and then Mr.Wirk hurried away to his factory, obtained some rubber strands, and he and Mr.Haskell spent nearly a day in winding, by their own hands and in secret, the first ball of the new era. They covered it with gutta-percha and gave it to a professional to try, without informing him of the nature of what he was trying. They watched anxiously for the result, and with the very first shot that the man had with it he carried a bunker that had never been carried before, beating the best drive that had ever been made on that course by many yards. Then the two makers smiled happily at each other. They knew that they were “on a good thing.” It took more than two years to invent a machine to do the winding, and some time longer to perfect the process. Then the Haskell killed the gutta in a season. Before that Britain supplied America with all her balls. Afterwards she sent none; but the makers of the Haskell bought 30,000 dozen that had been sent over, for the sake of the gutta-percha of which they were made, and at the bare price of that material.

In the first five months of 1903 the American people shipped 40,000 dozen of their balls to this country. So were the tables turned. Now they ship very few indeed, as we make our balls ourselves. Instead, they are threatening American golfers as to what will happen if they catch them playing on American courses with British balls. Of the little ball that was thought out over the dinner table in Ohio on those hot summer evenings there are now half a million used in a week in the busy season on British courses, and some fifteen millions, at a cost of about a million pounds, in the course of the season!

But yet not one man in a thousand who looks upon his beautiful white rubber core when it is new knows what and how much is inside it. In one ball there are 192yards of thread, the whole of which is stretched to eight times its original length, so that, as it is in the ball, there are 1536yards of it—nearly a mile. This thread has to be wound round something. It has commonly been wound round a tiny piece of wood; now, in the case of some balls, it is being wound round little bags of gelatine and things like that. Some people are under the delusion that in the case of such balls the whole centre is gelatine, and that there is no rubber.

VII

The man who has the courage to enter upon a medal round or a match with a keen opponent and play with a cheap, or cheaper, ball, is a rarity, and an admirable one. Faith goes for a long way in these matters. Give a man the most expensive ball on the market to play with, and he feels that he has got something which will do justice to his capabilities, and occasionally let him off with light penalties for some of his errors. Let him have a cheap ball and he is uneasy, with the idea that nothing is likely to go right for him. When he has faith in his ball—his expensive ball—he plays accordingly, that is to say, he plays with confidence, and the probabilities are, of course, that in such case he will play better than he would otherwise do, especially if he makes a good start. If he has not so much faith in his ball—because it is cheap—he will not play so well, because he will play without confidence. This is really a truism which is emphasised over and over again on the links every day. As this player cannot test his balls accurately and show for a certainty which one is better than others, he has naturally faith in the more expensive, because it ought to be better, whether it is or not. So one comes quite logically to the conclusion that the most expensive balls are the best. Now suppose that the makers of any of our leading brands of florin balls were at this stage to reduce the price of their specialities to a shilling each. What would be the attitude of these golfers to that ball? They would say to themselves, or suspect, that these makers were taking something out of the quality of their wares, and if they suspected that, they would almost certainly find innumerable happenings in their next match, which in their opinion would give the utmost possible support to their theory. Every drive that fell short of the proper standard would be put down to the makers of the ball; this really very funny golfer would shake his head and say that it was a great pity, and so forth, but that he would have to give up this shilling ball, of which at two shillings he was so very fond. And he would do it. But all the time there may not be a particle of difference between the old two-shilling ball and the new shilling one.

Once again one is tempted to the fancy that there is a good future for a reasonably good ball to be sold at five shillings. It would not be a popular ball, because there is a large proportion of players to whom this one would at last be too expensive; but all who could afford to play with it by making some little sacrifice, such as by cycling to the links instead of going by train, by carrying their own clubs two or three times a week instead of employing a caddie, or, simpler still, by reducing the weekly or monthly allowance for domestic purposes to the lady of the household because of the hard times, would certainly do so. And as the rich golfers would play with it also, it would have a good sale, and if it cost no more to make than the florin balls it would be very profitable to the manufacturers. All the ordinary golfers would play well with it. They would feel that they had the very best, that at last they could do themselves justice. They would have confidence. Queer world this of golf!

VIII

“The course is black with parsons,” was said one fine Monday at the outset of his game by a man who had been kept waiting for a most unconscionable time while a minor canon and a plain vicar had been worrying away in bunkers on opposite sides of the first short hole. In this observation there was some evident exaggeration, but it is being borne in upon us every day how more and more popular is this diversion becoming with the cloth, as indeed it should and might be expected to be, since golf makes its greatest appeal to those of the most thoughtful and philosophical temperaments, such as clergymen should possess. Excellent is this association, and it is a poor and threadbare humour that is constantly fancying the cleric in such exasperation with his game that ordinary modes of expression are insufficient for him. Having heard of the worthy divine who was horribly bunkered and in a heel-mark at the Redan at North Berwick, to whom the most excellent of caddies, “big” Crawford observed, “Noo, gin an aith wad relieve ye, dinna mind me”; and of the other one who was reported as repeating the Athanasian Creed at the bottom of “Hell”—the bunker of that name on the St.Andrews course—one would wish to go no farther with such stories. The celebrated Bishop Potter of New York was playing golf on the course at Saranac, and he made a mighty attempted drive that topped the ball, and another one that tore up the turf, and yet a third that almost missed the ball, and each time he uttered a soothing “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh!” But the caddie was himself a golfer of a very stern and human school, and in his great annoyance he exclaimed, “Man alive! sh-sh-sh-sh won’t send that ball where you want it to go to!” The Rev.Silvester Horne, who is one of the keenest of the clerical golfers, and has been known to captain a side of parsons occasionally, once drew up a system of conduct to be observed by brother clergymen when playing the game, and a very excellent system it was, with severe adjurations against the doing of many things such as are common with the ordinary golfer, and certain small licences permitted to make the path a trifle less difficult than it might otherwise be.

There was a worthy rector who was given to golf, and was somewhat sensitive upon the subject of the large scores that were made by his foozling. He had a pretty way; he did not count his score himself, though who knows what subconscious ideas he may or may not have formed as to its dimensions? But be that as it may, he would say to his caddie as at last he flopped the ball on to the green at the short hole, “Now, my boy, how many have I played this time?” The caddie, being official counter to the rector, would say at once, “Six, sir!” Then the reverend gentleman would stop suddenly in his march forwards, and would turn upon this miserable little boy with a severe and awful frown, and would say, or almost shriek, “Six! six! six! Whatever are you saying, my boy? Have you been watching the game? Do you really mean six?” The caddie was utterly cowed. “N—n—no, sir,” he would stammer, “I’m very sorry; I m—m—mean five!” “Ha! That is better,” his reverence smiled. “Yes, no doubt it is five; five, certainly. Let it be five. But”—and this very seriously—“my boy, it is of the greatest importance to count the strokes correctly at this game, and let this be a warning to you. Take great care with the counting.” And yet it was six.

But, tell us, why is it that the clergyman, with all his magnificent opportunities, is so seldom anything like a good player, so often has a handicap deep down in the teens? You may see him on the links six days a week, and yet he goes on from year to year no nearer to the degree of scratch, still driving his short and very wayward ball with that nervous, fearful stance of his, that slow, hesitating swing. I can almost tell the clergyman on the tee, however he may be disguised, he is such a doubter. Yet, with his opportunities, the Church ought to be by way of finding a candidate for the championship. Can it be that the philosophical temperament in excess kills keenness and makes a man content in his own little kingdom of foozling and shortness—

There can be no other explanation. But it is to be set down perhaps to the clergyman’s credit that he is so often unorthodox in his methods. On the links he is the broadest-minded man alive, and he is tolerant of all things. Why, if ever in London one wants to be reminded of just the way in which the Barry swing is done, one might seek out none other than the Bishop of London, for if ever a man performs that fall-back, bent-kneed swipe it is Dr.Ingram, as photographs will prove. If this is to be, then an archbishop might play no stymies, and how then shall a curate become a champion?

IX

We have not that form and ceremony in the management of our golf clubs that our ancestors had, nor is there so much idea and sentiment employed. Golf in these days seems often to be regarded too much as a work-a-day affair, so that at few places besides St.Andrews is there any real preservation of the old feeling. Else, the true spirit dominating, why should there not still be chaplains to all the old-established golf clubs? How much the chaplain counted for in the great golfing days of old may be gathered from the minute of the Honourable Company which they made when settling an appointment to the office. The club then had its home at Leith, the date being 1764, and it was entered in the book—“The Captain and Council, taking into their serious consideration the deplorable situation of the Company in wanting a godly and pious Chaplain, they did intreat the Reverend Doctor John Dun, Chaplain to the Right Honourable the Earl of Galloway, to accept the office of being Chaplain to the Golfers; which desire the said Doctor, out of his great regard to the Glory of God and the good of the Souls of the said Company, was Religiously pleased to comply with. Therefore the Company and Council Did and Do hereby nominate, present, and appoint the said Rev.Doctor John Dun to be their Chaplain accordingly. The said Reverend Doctor did accept of the Chaplaincy, and in token thereof said Grace after dinner.” Whether the general company of golfers is at present in as “deplorable situation” as the Honourable Company was at this time, is a nice point which need not be inquired into.

X

In a day when the young school of golfers is making such a determined advance it is often difficult to make distinctions of merit and to determine who are the most promising and who will most probably become the really great golfers of the future. We are a little too much inclined to get into the way of saying that this man is likely to be an amateur champion of the future, and that that player is almost a certainty for the high honours of the game. When people talk in this irresponsible fashion they forget several things—that competition now is many times keener than it was in the days when the Balls and the Taits and the Hiltons first became champions, and when it was quite safe to prophesy beforehand that they would be, and that in the future it will be keener still; that there is more luck than ever in the game and in the selection of champions, and that if the honour is to be denied to such a fine player as Mr.John Graham, who has forgotten more about the game than some of the younger school know, nobody should say that others are likely to be champions; and that because a man does some fine golf for a week or two it does not follow that he is a fine golfer.

The game no doubt is easier now than it used to be, and it is more difficult for fine distinctions in merit between players to be reproduced in the balance of holes; but still in the long run knowledge and skill will tell, and those men of the younger school who are deeply thoughtful and scientific golfers will in the end separate themselves from those of their rivals whose methods are more of the slapdash order. With all the advance of the young school, and its scores of men with high plus handicaps, each of whom is declared to be good enough to win the championship if it finds him on his day, one would seriously hesitate to suggest that there are more than five or six young players at the present time who show any promise at all of becoming as good golfers as Ball and Hilton and Laidlay have been. The remainder may be only the veriest trifle their inferiors, and the difference may be so small that it may constantly be not indicated in the results of competitions, or it may even show a balance to the credit of the players whom we are regarding as the inferior ones. But in the long run the minority, who know more about the game, will triumph, and will be separated from the general ruck. With all the talk that there has been about the levelling up of the players as the result of the rubber-cored ball, depend upon it that in twenty years from now we shall still have a high table in golf, at which will sit the acknowledged masters of the game, just as some of those whose names we have mentioned have sat at this table for the past decade or two.

XI

Perhaps it would be as well for the golf of some of us if now and again a time of quiet and inactive thought were enforced. It is certain that many men feel much the better in their game for having been deprived of play for a time, greatly irritated as they have been. The fact is that he who is a faithful golfer often plays it mentally when real shots on the links are denied to him. It turns out that this mental golf is of a very thorough order; never is the player so analytical and severely critical of his methods as then, and never does he grope more patiently or more intelligently for the hidden light that is the source of success. It is simple fact that men have discovered grave faults in their play in this way, such as they never suspected during the whole season that they had been committing them in real play on the links. And in the same way others have come upon great secrets of fine details of method, making for the improvement of their game, which they would never have encountered at golf on a course.

The chief, if not the only reason, and one that is quite good enough to be convincing, for this somewhat peculiar state of affairs is, that this is essentially practice and experimental golf, in which the player is constantly wondering and trying something new; while the golf that he plays with clubs and balls on the green grass is far too often exclusively match-play or score-play golf, and that is regarded at the time as too responsible a thing to permit of any experiment. The old ways may be bad ways, and no doubt many of them are; but we must stand by them on occasions of this kind, we say to ourselves, when the wise precept of an old player-friend flashes across our mind, the opponent being one up with three to go, and a very vindictive fellow. It is evident, then, that we do too much of this match and score play, and that the consequence is that we are never given time and the opportunity for thought and practice and the working out of experiments and ideas that might prove of the utmost moment. Our game runs along a little old-constructed channel, and it gets clogged with fault. When we go out to golf for the day, no other possibility presents itself to our minds than that of the two rounds, one before luncheon, and the other one after, with living opponent or opponents, and always upon such occasions we must trust to the old ways to pull us through. How much would it make for future improvement if one of the rounds, or a long afternoon, were devoted to simple lonely practice with one club, or at most two, in which new ideas might be tried, theories considered, and different and perhaps more effective ways to salvation worked out. Spend an hour thus in close communion with one’s cleek or iron, and what an intimacy is established that never would have been otherwise! There used to be suspicion, distrustfulness, fear, and neglect—and what may follow upon such relations save utter failure?—but now there is friendship, and an appreciation of capabilities and qualities that bodes ill for the arrogance of the opponent who has seen so many failures with this cleek or iron, that he has come to think that when it is unbagged it is time for him to be adding one more hole to his score. The man who never does any of this practice golf never gives himself a chance of learning how to play more than one stroke with one club, and when there is only one stroke to a club it is not generally a very good or very reliable stroke, as can easily be shown.

Thinking thus, we perceive the value of influenza and the minor illnesses, and come to realise the truth of the remark by one earnest golfer, that the thing that of all others had most improved his game of golf was a severe attack of typhoid fever, which all but summarily terminated his career. When this man told us that he emerged from that disquieting experience a new and better golfer, and one more thorough, the observation seemed cryptic to the point of absurdity, and it was not taken very seriously. But it is certainly true that a very earnest golfer will think long and hard upon all points of his game during a dull period of enforced rest and idleness such as comes at sickness, and then all the sins of omission and commission loom up in his troubled mind, and he corrects the faults that he knows now, as probably he would not admit before, went to the undoing of his game. The entire position is revised; in the early days of convalescence we send downstairs to the study for some favourite volumes, and we look up Vardon, Braid, or Taylor on a subtle point of which we have been making mental examination. The thoughtful studies of Mr.John Low are a stimulant at such times. Such introspection is a fine thing and most fruitful, and little wonder after all that the player does indeed return to health a wiser and a more complete golfer, who will now go farther in skill upon the links than ever he would have done in the old, narrow, careless days.

What follows is a story that bears somewhat upon the moral that we have been thinking over. There was a man who was in want of a shot that would come between the driving iron and the wood, and he could not find one. Of the cleek he had no good word to say; he could not play it. Of driving mashies he had several, and some of them were well enough at times, and at others they were like the cleek, so that what with his driving mashies and his cleeks, this man was in constant jeopardy when there was a shot of a hundred and sixty or seventy yards to play, and so he was unhappy in his game. It happened that one of his driving mashies was one that had been gifted to him upon a day by a great player, who said, “I pick this from all that I have seen; may I never play more if it is not a perfect club!” The man tried it, and it seemed to him that the head wanted more ballast, and after a little while he allowed the club to be gathered to his fine collection of idle relics, saying to himself consolingly, “What suits one man does not suit another.” Thus it came to pass that the perfect club that a champion player declared he would love to play a long-short hole with to save the life of himself or his dearest friend, lay for months and years in a dark cupboard.

In the even cycle of this golfer’s life the time of torment came round once again, and, as it had seemed before, it was more desperate than it had ever been. There appeared to be no remedy. All the tricks had been tried, and all the clubs generally put into commission had been experimented with, and there was no good result. And then a strange thing happened. Things were at about their worst, when, as sometimes was the case, this poor tormented golfer awoke in his bed very early one morning in summer. The sun had not long broken the darkness; it was about three o’clock. Being a man who went to bed betimes and who was early refreshed, he did this time, as on others, lie in long thought upon the events of life and his own affairs, the perfect stillness of the time conducing to effective contemplation. And, as was inevitable, the chain of reflection brought him round to the prevailing worry of the game, and for half an hour or so he considered this grave problem from every conceivable point of view, and subjected each iron instrument that was concerned with it to the severest cross-examination, from which none emerged with an unspotted reputation. It is not always in the human golfer to attach entire blame to flesh and blood, and wholly exonerate inanimate iron. Pride must have its place, even in the times of adversity. This man was self-assured that one reason for his failure—not the whole reason, perhaps; but still one reason—was that all his searchings and purchasings had yet left him without the club that he really needed, that one which was resting somewhere in a shop or in another man’s bag, that was the affinity of his game, the thing that was meant for him and which one day might come his way. He had a vague instinct of what the feel of that club would be like, of the shape of its head, its balance, and the length of the shaft. When he encountered it he would know it at once for the long-sought-for club.

Then, as by a gift of the gods, an idea flashed through his mind and caused him to start up, thoroughly roused from the dreamy state of lethargy. That club! That old despised club that had come to him from the champion with such a glowing recommendation, wasted entirely! That was the club that was wanted; it must have been one of the most irresponsible and illogical moments of his golfing lifetime when it was rejected. Did it not conform to that ideal that was vaguely felt in the mind? As he handled it in imagination now, did it not seem quite perfect, that above all other clubs its true motto was “Far and sure.” When a golfer makes discoveries of this kind about his old clubs, that, poor things, cannot speak for themselves and tell him what he is doing wrong, he is man enough to own his previous mistakes, and this player owned them. He was all contrition, repentance, humility. He wished to abase himself before the champion club and promote it to the captaincy of his bag. Therefore when there is no sound to be heard save the chirruping of the birds and the creaking of stairs, see this inspired golfer leave his room, clad in a dressing-gown, at half-past three in the morning, and go forward to the ransacking of a rubbish cupboard in search for the wanted club. And there it was found at last, a little rusty, the marks of privation from golf and of severe neglect written plainly upon its face, but sure enough that same grand club that had lived in the remembrance until at last it was appreciated. Yes, it was just as it had been imagined to be. It was the perfect club; it would do what all others had failed to do. Happy club in which there is placed such belief and confidence, for the less likely is it ever to disappoint! In his mood of repentance the man gets a little emery and brightens up the blade until the first shafts of the morning sunlight glint upon it. Being a handy man with a tool or two, he takes out the tack at the end of the grip and unwinds it, laying it back again in some way to suit the fancy of the time. And then the grip is waxed, and the club is ready, and it is laid to a ball on the hearth-rug, and how that ball could be hit, with a fine, low, skimming flight that would yield much length, and the stroke, having been something of a push, would dump the ball at the end of it just down beside the flag! It is no use. Let it be four o’clock or twelve, why should the conventions keep us off the links when these exalted moods are upon us? The golfer hurries through a bath, puts his clothes about him, and with the whole world of golf save this one unit still asleep, even unto the most watchful greenkeeper, he hurries down to the course with a few balls and just this one club, this one fine club. And there the truth of it all is realised. It is the club that was wanted, and the shots that come from it are just as perfect as shots by this man will ever be. The balls are fired off up to the first green one by one, and it is found then that such are the virtues of this club of exquisite balance that it is a splendid thing to putt with!

It is a glorious morning. The pearly sky seems to speak well of weather prospects for the day when it opens out, and there is not wind enough to curl a wavelet on the sea, which simply makes a little soothing creamy lapping on the pebbles. How grand is the fine expanse of the course in this morning freshness, and is there not something of rugged beauty in that huge sandy projection which marks the short hole far out? This indeed is the time of day for the golfer to be abroad. Happy man who is in this mood, having found that which was lost. The golfing life is not the same. A little thought and much confidence, and see to what they will carry you! Make the most of them, you happy fellow, for they may not last—they may not last!