M. E. W. Sherwood

As an addition to one's power of entertaining one's self, "golf affords a wide field of observation for the philosopher and the student of human nature. To play it aright requires nerve, endurance, and self-control, qualities which are essential to success in all great vocations; on the other hand, golf is peculiarly trying to the temper, although it must be said that when the golfer forgets himself his outbursts are usually directed against inanimate objects, or showered upon his own head." How it may take possession of one is well described in this little poem from the "St. James Gazette:"—

"Would you like to see a city given over,

Soul and body, to a tyrannizing game?

If you would, there's little need to be a rover,

For St. Andrews is that abject city's name.

"It is surely quite superfluous to mention,

To a person who has been here half an hour,

That Golf is what engrosses the attention

Of the people, with an all-absorbing power.

"Rich and poor alike are smitten with the fever;

'Tis their business and religion both to play;

And a man is scarcely deemed a true believer

Unless he goes at least a round a day.

"The city boasts an old and learned college,

Where you'd think the leading industry was Greek;

Even there the favoured instruments of knowledge

Are a driver, and a putter, and a cleek.

"All the natives and the residents are patrons

Of this royal, ancient, irritating game;

All the old men, all the young men, maids and matrons,

With this passion burn in hard and gem-like flame.

"In the morning, as the light grows strong and stronger,

You may see the players going out in shoals;

And when night forbids their playing any longer,

They will tell you how they did the different holes.

"Golf, golf, golf, and golf again, is all the story!

Till despair my overburdened spirit sinks;

Till I wish that every golfer was in glory,

And I pray the sea may overflow the links.

"Still a slender, struggling ray of consolation

Comes to cheer me, very feeble though it be;

There are two who still escape infatuation,

One's my bosom friend McFoozle, t'other's me.

"As I write the words McFoozle enters blushing,

With a brassy and an iron in his hand;

And this blow, so unexpected and so crushing,

Is more than I am able to withstand.

"So now it but remains for me to die, sir.

Stay! There is another course I may pursue.

And perhaps, upon the whole, it would be wiser,

I will yield to fate and be a golfer, too!"

"The game of golf," says Andrew Lang, its gifted poet and its historian, "has been described as putting little balls into holes difficult to find, with instruments which are sadly inadequate and illy adapted to the purpose." Its learned home is St. Andrews, in Scotland, although its advocates give it several classic starting-points. Learned antiquarians seem to think that the name comes from a Celtic word, meaning club. It is certainly an ancient game, and some variation of it was known on the Continent under various names.

The game requires room. A golf-course of nine holes should be at least a mile and a half long, and a hundred and twenty feet wide. It is usual to so lay out the course that the player ends where he began. All sorts of obstructions are left, or made artificially,—running water, railway embankments, bushes, ditches, etc.

The game is played with a gutta-percha ball, about an inch and a quarter in diameter, and a variety of clubs, with wooden or iron heads, whose individual use depends on the position in which the ball lies. It is usual for each player to be followed by a boy, who carries his clubs and watches his ball, marking it down as it falls. Games are either singles,—that is, when two persons play against one another, each having a ball,—or fours, when there are two on each side, partners playing alternately on one ball.

The start is made near the club house at a place called the tee. Down the course, anywhere from two hundred and fifty to five hundred yards distant, is a level space, fifty feet square, called a putting-green, and in its centre is a hole about four and a half inches in diameter and of the same depth. This is the first hole, and the contestant who puts his ball into it in the fewest number of strokes wins the hole. As the score is kept by strokes, the ball that is behind is played first. In this way the players are always together.

For his first shot from the tee, the player uses a club called the driver. It has a wooden head and a long, springy, hickory handle. With this an expert will drive a ball for two hundred yards. It is needless to say that the beginner is not so successful. After the first shot a cleek is used; or if the ball is in a bad hole, a mashie; if it is necessary to loft it, an iron, and so on,—the particular club depending, as we have said, on the position in which the ball lies.

The first hole won, the contestants start from a teeing-ground close by it, and fight for the second hole, and so on around the course,—the one who has won the most holes being the winner.

"A fine day, a good match, and a clear green" is the paradise of the golfer, but it still can be played all the year and even, by the use of a red ball, when snow is on the ground. In Scotland and athletic England it is a game for players of all ages, though in nearly all clubs children are not allowed. It can be played by both sexes.

A beginner's inclination is to grasp a golf club as he would a cricket bat, more firmly with the right hand than with the left, or at times equally firm with both hands. Now in golf, in making a full drive, the club when brought back must be held firmly with the left hand and more loosely with the right, because when the club is raised above the shoulder, and brought round the back of the neck, the grasp of one hand or the other must relax, and the hand to give way must be the right hand and not the left. The force of the club must be brought squarely against the ball.

The keeping of one's balance is another difficulty. In preparing to strike, the player bends forward a little. In drawing back his club he raises, or should raise, his left heel from the ground, and at the end of the upward swing stands poised on his right foot and the toe or ball of the left foot. At this point there is danger of his losing his balance, and as he brings the club down, falling either forward or backward, and consequently either heeling or toeing the ball, instead of hitting it with the middle of the face. Accuracy of hitting depends greatly on keeping a firm and steady hold of the ground with the toe of the left foot, and not bending the left knee too much.

To "keep your eye on the ball" sounds an injunction easy to be obeyed, but it is not always so. In making any considerable stroke, the player's body makes or should make a quarter turn, and the difficulty is to keep the head steady and the eye fixed upon the ball while doing this.

Like all other games, golf has its technical terms; the "teeing-ground," "putting," the "high-lofting stroke," the "approach shot," "hammer-hurling," "topping," "slicing," "hooking," "skidding," and "foozling" mean little to the uninitiated, but everything to the golfer.

Let us copy verbatim the following description of the Links of St. Andrews, the Elysium of the braw Scots:

"The Links occupy a crook-necked stretch of land bordered on the east by the sea and on the left by the railway and by the wide estuary of the Eden. The course, out and in, is some two miles and a half in length, allowing for the pursuit of balls not driven quite straight. Few pieces of land have given so much inexpensive pleasure for centuries. The first hole is to some extent carpeted by grass rather longer and rougher than the rest of the links. On the left lie some new houses and a big hotel; they can only be 'hazards' on the outward tack to a very wild driver indeed."

These "hazards" mean, dear reader, that if you and I are stopping at that big hotel, we may have our eyes put out by a passing ball; small grief would that be to a golfer!

"On the right it is just possible to 'heel' the ball over heaps of rubbish into the sea sand. The natural and orthodox hazards are few. Everybody should clear the road from the tee; if he does not the ruts are tenacious. The second shot should either cross or fall short of the celebrated Swilcan Burn. This tributary of ocean is extremely shallow, and meanders through stone embankments, hither and thither, between the tee and the hole. The number of balls that run into it, or jump in from the opposite bank, or off the old stone footbridge is enormous! People 'funk' the burn, top their iron shots, and are engulfed. Once you cross it, the hole whether to right or left is easily approached.

"The second hole, when the course is on the left, is guarded near the tee by the 'Scholar's Bunker,' a sand face which swallows a topped ball. On the right of the course are whins, much scantier now than of old; on the left you may get into long grass, and thence into a very sandy road under a wall, a nasty lie. The hole is sentinelled by two bunkers and many an approach lights in one or the other. The putting-green is nubbly and difficult.

"Driving to the third hole, on the left you may alight in the railway, or a straight hit may tumble into one of three little bunkers, in a knoll styled 'the Principal's Nose.' There are more bunkers lying in wait close to the putting-green.

"The driver to the fourth hole has to 'carry' some low hills and mounds; then comes a bunker that yawns almost across the course, with a small outpost named Sutherlands, which Englishmen profanely desired to fill up. This is impious.

"The long bunker has a buttress, a disagreeable round knoll; from this to the hole is open country if you keep to the right, but it is whinny. On the left, bunkers and broken ground stretch, and there is a convenient sepulchre of hope here, and another beyond the hole.

"As you drive to the fifth hole you may have to clear 'hell,' but 'hell' is not what it was. The first shot should carry you to the broken spurs of a table land, the Elysian fields, in which there yawn the Beardies, deep, narrow, greedy bunkers. Beyond the table land there is a gorge, and beyond it again a beautiful stretch of land and the putting-green. To the right is plenty of deep bent grass and gorse. This is a long hole and full of difficulties, the left side near the hole being guarded by irregular and dangerous bunkers.

"The sixth or heathery hole has lost most of its heather, but is a teaser. A heeled ball from the tee drops into the worst whins of the course in a chaos of steep, difficult hills. A straight ball topped falls into 'Walkinshaw's Grave,' or if very badly topped into a little spiteful pitfall; it is the usual receptacle of a well-hit second ball on its return journey. Escaping 'Walkinshaw's Grave' you have a stretch of very rugged and broken country, bunkers on the left, bent grass on the right, before you reach the sixth hole.

"The next, the high hole, is often shifted. It is usually placed between a network of bunkers with rough grass immediately beyond it. The first shot should open the hole and let you see the uncomfortable district into which you have to play. You may approach from the left, running the ball up a narrow causeway between the bunkers, but it is usually attempted from the front. Grief, in any case, is almost unavoidable."

It is evident the Scotch pleasure in "contradeectin'" is emphasized in golf.

One gets a wholesome sense of invigorating sea air, healthy exercise, and that delightful smell of the short, fresh grass. One sees "the beauty of the wild aerial landscape, the delicate tints of sand, and low, far-off hills, the distant crest of Lochnager, the gleaming estuary, and the black cluster of ruined towers above the bay, which make the charm of St. Andrews Links."

Golf has come to our country, and is becoming a passion. There is a club at Yonkers and one at Cedarhurst, but that on the Shinnecock Hills, on Long Island, will probably be the great headquarters of golf in the United States, as this club owns eighty acres beautifully adapted to the uses of the game, and has a large club-house, designed by Stanford White.

So we may expect an American historian to write an account of this fine vigorous game, in some future Badminton Library of sports and pastimes; and we shall have our own dear "fifth hole, which offers every possible facility to the erratic driver for coming to grief," if we can be as "contradeectin'" as a Scot. You never hear one word about victory; this golf literature is all written in the minor key,—but it is a gay thing to look at.

The regular golf uniform is a red jacket, which adds much to the gayety of a green, and has its obvious advantages.

"Ladies' links should be laid out on the model, though on a smaller scale, of the long round, containing some short putting-holes, some larger holes admitting of a drive or two of seventy or eighty yards, and a few suitable hazards. We venture to suggest seventy or eighty yards as the average limit of a drive, advisedly not because we doubt a lady's power to make a longer drive, but because that cannot be well done without raising the club above the shoulder. Now we do not presume to dictate, but we must observe that the posture and gestures requisite for a full swing are not particularly graceful when the player is clad in female dress.

"Most ladies put well, and all the better because they play boldly for the hole, without considering too much the lay of the ground; and there is no reason why they should not practise and excel in wrist shots with a lofting-iron or cleek. Their right to play, or rather the expediency of their playing, the long round is much more doubtful. If they choose to play at times when the male golfers are feeding or resting, no one can object; but at other times, must we say it? they are in the way, just because gallantry forbids to treat them exactly as men. The tender mercies of the golfer are cruel. He cannot afford to be merciful, because, if he forbears to drive into the party in front he is promptly driven into from behind. It is a hard lot to follow a party of ladies with a powerful driver behind you, if you are troubled with a spark of chivalry or shyness.

"As to the ladies playing the long round with men as their partners, it may be sufficient to say, in the words of a promising young player who found it hard to decide between flirtation and playing the game, 'It is mighty pleasant, but it is not business.'"

To learn this difficult game requires months of practice, and great nerve and talent for it. I shall not attempt to define what is meant by "dormy," "divot," "foozle," "gobble," "grip," or "gully." "Mashy, a straight-faced niblich," is one of these definitions.

Horace G. Hutchinson's book on golf is a most entertaining work,—if for no other reason than that its humour, the pleasant out-of-door atmosphere, the true enthusiasm for the game, and the illustrations, which are very well drawn, all make it an addition to one's knowledge of athletic sports.

That golf has taken its place amongst the arts of entertaining, we have no better proof than the very nice description of it in Norris's novel of "Marcia." This clever writer introduces a scene where "Lady Evelyn backs the winner" in the following sprightly manner:—

"Not many years ago all golfers who dwelt south of the Tweed were compelled, when speaking of their favourite relaxation, to take up an apologetic tone; they had to explain with humility, and with the chilling certainty of being disbelieved, that an immense amount of experience, dexterity, and self-command are requisite in order to make sure of hitting a little ball across five hundred yards of broken ground, and depositing it in a small hole in four or five strokes; but now that golf links have been established all over England there is no longer any need to make excuses for one of the finest games that human ingenuity or the accident of circumstances have ever called into existence. The theory of the game is simplicity itself,—you have only to put your ball into a hole in one or less strokes than your opponent; but the practice is full of difficulty, and what is better still, full of endless variety, so that you may go on playing golf from the age of eight to that of eighty, and yet never grow tired of it. Indeed, the circumstance that gray-haired enthusiasts are to be seen enjoying themselves thoroughly, and losing their tempers ludicrously, wherever 'the royal and ancient sport' has taken root, has caused certain ignorant persons to describe golf contemptuously as the old gentleman's game. Such criticisms, however, come only from those who have not attempted to acquire the game."

We advise all incipient golfers to read "Marcia," and to see how well golf and love-making can go together.

Golf has its poetic and humoristic literature; and as we began with its poetic side we may end with its broadest, latest joke:—

Two well-known professional golfers were playing a match. We will call them Sandy and Jock. On one side of the golf course was a railway, over which Jock drove his ball, landing it in some long grass. They both hunted for a long while for the missing ball. Sandy wanted Jock to give in and say that the ball was lost; but Jock would not consent, as a lost ball meant a lost hole. They continued to look round, and Jock slyly dropped another ball, and then came back and cried, "I've found the ba', Sandy."

"Ye're a leear," said Sandy, "for here it's in ma pooch."

We commend also "Famous Golf Links," by Hutchinson as clear and agreeable reading.