# Out-door Games: Cricket and Golf/Chapter 8

A FAMOUS CADDY of Bruntsfield Links.
CHAPTER VIII
Characteristics
I have elsewhere remarked, that golf is a bad game for schools. It is a game for individuals, but not for a side. No golfer ever became first rate who did not begin the game early. The boy, however, should learn not at school, but in the holidays. He can learn how to swing and get a true and good style, and having got this it will do him no harm to put the game aside for a time; and in the meanwhile play the games suitable for youths, where self is kept under, and the interests of the side and comradeship prevail—rowing, football, and cricket.
Golfers of the old school scorn the idea that golf is a game for middle age and old age. If the question is sifted to the bottom, it may ​readily be said that inasmuch as golf can be played by men and women to really an advanced age, it is a game for age as opposed to youth. Rowing, football, hockey, and polo are really for the period of life that ends at thirty. Cricket in moderation may go on to forty, but golf may be played in foursomes, and one round a day style by men as long as they can walk. The drives become shorter and the handicap gets longer; but as the famous old St. Andrews player, Tom Morris, and the late Mr. Whyte Melville show, you can play to eighty years of age if lumbago and rheumatism, and active disease, which of course prevents everything, does not interfere. Golf is a very great game on account of its elasticity. The youth may play it in such a way that it becomes a test of physical endurance that only youth can supply; but the old and comparatively feeble can also play it, and play it well, with intense enjoyment, because the game adapts itself to practically every physical condition. I know no other outdoor game of which this can be said. There are men who play country cricket after fifty years of age, but they are very few in number, ​and to field out all day in hot weather at that age is weariness and a burden. Here is one of the reasons why golf has been taken to in England with a vigour and force that certainly is the most astonishing feature in the history of games that I have any experience of at all.
I have said that nobody can become a really first-rate golfer who has not begun the game early in life. I believe this to be absolutely true; but it is equally true that a very respectable skill can be acquired by men whose eye and muscles are attuned to games, if they have never handled a club till thirty years old. Mr. Charles Hutchings of Hoylake, I believe, began when he was well over thirty years of age, and he became good enough to win a St. Andrews medal, but this is a very exceptional case, and I dare believe that Mr. Hutchings himself would admit that he could not be put quite in the same class with Messrs. Ball, Laidlay, Tait, and Hutchinson. Football cannot be played at all after thirty: I know of no one instance where anybody ever took to cricket at that time of life, and I am absolutely certain that ​if any enthusiast were to try, the result would be failure and abandonment.
One reason why a moderate and more than fair skill is possible to the golfer who begins late is that quickness and agility of eye are not indispensable qualities for the game any more than are rapidity and suppleness of limb. The golfer is never obliged to run or jump, and he has not to stoop to an inordinate extent. In one sense it is a game of repose: to hit a ball ninety or a hundred times in two hours may be said to be a somewhat leisurely performance. Some of the strokes are given with scarcely an effort, such as all putts and little quarter shots. An analysis of the game will prove that a fair player will only have to put forth his full strength on an average about thirty-six times during a round, or twice per hole, a first-rate player less. Vardon and Mr. Tait, I suppose, only find a minority of holes where it is necessary to do more than a full shot, and then a three-quarter or half shot, and some holes they can drive off the tee with a half-swing. An inferior player wastes a ​superhuman amount of muscle with singularly little result of distance, though often the ball goes a long way, but off the line. The worse, however, a player is, the greater is the effort; he is often in bunkers and the niblick has generally to be wielded with all the force at his command; playing a hole of over 300 yards and foozling one or more strokes cost the bad player far more exertion than Vardon has to expend at the same holes. But every player, good, bad, and indifferent, will find that the hitting of the ball is what gives the fatigue and makes the exercise. You will find the difference at once if you walk round and follow a match, when the distance covered is exactly the same as that traversed by the players; the players will be more or less fatigued, the spectator not at all.
Another charm of golf to the beginner of thirty years of age "which leads him to pursue the game with the ardour of youth" is in the fact he can progress and improve. This would be impossible in cricket, for even slight progress would be out of the question. At golf, however, I believe it to be quite possible to improve your game till you get to fifty, whilst from fifty ​to sixty you may not go back even if you do not go forward. From sixty onwards you can find refuge in foursomes as long as you can walk and lumbago and rheumatism are absent. Nobody will really get enthusiastic about any game or pursuit where the element of progress is impossible. The sportsman whose shooting deteriorates gradually but surely, will transfer his licence to his son; the cricketer who cannot raise ten runs, and whose function is watching his own side from the tent and his opponent under a hot sun and fielding out, will give up the game and become a spectator. But improvement at golf is quite within the reach of many, because agility and quickness are not requisite, but rather the reverse. This element of progress is a highly important feature, and largely accounts for the popularity of the game.
As years go on, a man's golf undergoes changes. A player's stance has to be altered gradually when his rapidly-changing figure makes a view of his feet not always easy. When younger he prided himself on the length of his drive, but golf provides compensation for the very material abbreviation that inevitably comes ​to the drive of the middle-aged. Experience is a great thing in all games, but in none more than in golf. The older player frequently finds that it is possible to improve with the irons and putter if he deteriorates with the driver and brassey. Nothing appears to me to be more true than that to win a match the short game must be good. I have watched several great matches and read about them also, and in nine cases out of ten the man who putts well is the man who wins. I do not say that this is always the case. Vardon, for instance, who must be the first player the world has ever seen, seems to me to be no better than several others in putting and lifting shots, but he wins his matches by his steady long drive, and by the still more tremendous length of his second shot through the green, and the consequence is that Vardon is always playing the like on the putting-green. But the histories of matches are very much the same. A was short in his approach putt, and took three to hole out; B on the contrary laid a long putt dead and won the hole. It seems to me that the compensation an older player gets from his younger rival is in the fact that the older man plays with greater steadiness ​on the putting-green, and this superiority takes away all the advantage that is gained by greater length in the drives. The golfer who, when on the green, is always down in two strokes except when he is down in one, is the player who wins matches.
The game of golf should be played in a sportsmanlike and in a gentlemanly manner. One drawback to the game is that, on the whole, more than any other game, it seems to attract a great many who fail to come up to the ideal in either of these respects. Some of the rules seem to be drawn as if this was recognised to be the fact. Two men, both gentlemen, play a friendly game, and it would not occur to either of them to pay any attention to some of these absurd rules. Others play and angry discussions arise as to moving a bit of grass that may be growing, and therefore cannot be moved; or one man claims the hole because his opponent has pressed down the turf with his knuckles. In a high wind the ball moves before the player has touched it with his club, but after he has addressed it, this counts a stroke against the unfortunate player. These are instances of what I ​call absurd and pettifogging low-attorney sort of rules. It would be far better that the rule about brushing the green lightly with the hand on the line of the putt were abolished altogether. If there are players who take a mean advantage and flatten down a lump when they should only be brushing away loose bits of dust or stones, such players had better be provided for if such a thing can be brought about without hardship to the sportsmanlike golfers. The benefit to the putter of brushing away dust or small stones is, in my opinion, infinitesimal. Greens are kept in good order by the greenkeeper, so let every player take his chance of the green, and make it unlawful to brush away dust or remove what is not growing, and the swindler will be defeated.
The whole question of rules in games is interesting. Some rules there must always be, but if a game is to be played in a right spirit the fewer there are the better. At golf there are so many rules which seem to be both pedantic and absurd that in a friendly game they are quietly ignored. Nobody of proper feeling will claim a hole because his opponent's caddie has sheltered the ball from the wind with his body, or because ​the ball has been moved by the wind after the player has put himself in a certain attitude, though he has no more touched it than he has the moon. Golf, indeed, has come to be so much hedged round by rules that these defeat their own object, and by respectable people are ignored. It always appears to me that rules of any game should be such that it is to the advantage of the game that they should be enforced always and by everybody. Whist, for instance, has a code of rules that seem to be so reasonable that they are all of them enforced, and nobody who insists on the letter of the law at whist is thought the worse of, or guilty of sharp practice; and this is the case also at football. But at golf such is not the case, and the man who exacts extreme penalties is a gentleman who is generally to be found searching in vain for an opponent.
At cricket you may play against any eleven, and you may enjoy your game. But golf is a painful game when played against an opponent of a certain type. The sulky player who is moody and never smiles, the fierce-tempered man who makes you miserable while he curses his caddie who has not the right of reply, the man ​who seems to be caring for nothing except for his own welfare and is barely civil to you, and, lastly, the man with a total absence of humour. I am quite aware of the fact that in Scotland it is generally the practice not to talk or utter a sound during any part of the game. I can only say on this point that a game is a game, and if a reasonable amount of cheerful conversation can be indulged in without injury to the play so much the better.
When everything has been said, however, the fact remains that golf is a splendid game, and has, moreover, a charm impossible to describe or exaggerate. Why this is, what it consists of, is not easy to say. In the first place there is the glorious sensation of making a true hit. This is not only true of the drive. There is a right or wrong way of hitting a yard putt. The right way is bliss, the wrong purgatory. Of course the pleasure of the long drive or second shot through the green gives as fine an emotion as is possible for any sinner to receive on this earth, but there is satisfaction to be got out of every true hit of whatever length.
Then there is the charm of scenery, though I ​admit that to many the game is so engrossing that if eighteen holes could be found in the desert of Sahara as good as at North Berwick, some would as soon play on one as the other. Lastly, there is the indescribable charm of uncertainty. If a foxhunter knew for a certainty that a fox would always be found in the same place, take the same line, and be killed in the same spot, hunting would lose nearly all its charm. You cannot in golf ever be quite certain how the ball will lie except on the tee and putting-green. You experience during your walk of 150 yards to the ball alternate feelings of hope and fear, hope that the ball is lying on a smooth place and easy to hit, fear that it is in a cup or has a lump behind it. There is also the uncertainty that has a twinge of agony about it, and that is the question how you are going to hit it; even the best players foozle sometimes. Without uncertainty there is no really first-class game where a ball is concerned; and to the charm of a fine hit, picturesque scenery, and uncertainty, the charm of companionship has still to be added. Nobody can wonder that golf has added to the gaiety of nations.