The Best Golf Stories Ever Told Read online

  How I came to be cured of my weakness in driving I really do not know, but the cure in this department came long before the other, in fact I was still in my teens when I got to driving a long ball nearly every time. I am not conscious that I made any difference whatever in my style or methods. I was simply going on in the same old way when suddenly I found myself driving farther and farther, and the complete conversion from short to long was effected within a week. As I have often said, it was just the same as if I went to bed a short driver one night and got up a long driver in the morning. It was then, and is still, the greatest golfing mystery that I have ever come across; but the happy result of it was that, while at one time certain rivals were getting twenty yards past me almost every time, at the end of that week I was getting that much past them, and, except for brief lapses, I have never been a very short driver since those days, the long balls not going away again in the same mysterious manner that they came, as so often happens in this tantalising game.

  When I was nineteen I left home for the first time and went to work as a joiner at St. Andrews, and as by that time I was playing a very good game, it naturally happened that I got many good matches with the best players there, which served to pull me out and to improve my own game considerably. Thus I had many fine games with Andrew Kirkaldy, and also with his brother Hugh, now dead. I found that I could hold my own in these matches in almost every department of the game except on the putting greens. Even now, when time was getting on, I had no idea of ever adopting golf as a career, and very soon after my arrival at St. Andrews there came an interruption in my game, for my employers sent me to work in different parts of the country, and during that time I had very little play, and did not get the opportunity to keep myself in any sort of form. This lasted for two or three years; but in 1891 I left St. Andrews and went to Edinburgh, and there, with the fine course on the Braid Hills available for everybody, I soon got very keen again, and joined the Edinburgh Thistle Club without delay. My best form came back to me immediately, and I won the scratch medal of the club for two years in succession, besides which I gained a few prizes in the club tournaments. Of course, all this time I was an amateur. I had a handicap of plus 2 or 3, and was generally chosen to represent the Thistle Club in the competition for the Dispatch and Glasgow Evening Times trophies. As most people who are acquainted with general golfing matters know, these are important competitions in Scotland, and arouse great interest in the Edinburgh and Glasgow districts. Both are by foursome, two pairs representing each club in the one case and one in the other. The first year that I played for the Thistle we were knocked out in the final for the Dispatch trophy, while we were beaten in the semifinal for the other by the club that eventually secured the trophy. The most important success that I achieved so far came my way in 1892, when I won the Braid Hills Tournament, open to members of the Edinburgh and Leith clubs. The competition was very keen, for there were a hundred and forty players entered. One round, by strokes, had to be played, and I started from scratch, broke the record of the course, and won the first prize. This was my top achievement as an amateur. I look back on a very pleasant time spent in Edinburgh.

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  THE STORY OF CHILDREN’S GOLF

  BERNARD DARWIN

  When I was about ten, and so a golfer of some two years’ standing, I was one day off my infantile game and the professional was asked to look at my swing. He looked and said that there was nothing much the matter except that at the top of the swing I bent my knees rather too much. No doubt he was right, and the horrid proof of it is this, that though at this present day I am subject to many superficially different diseases at golf, yet the cause of them all is the same, a tendency to too loose and florid a movement of the knees, which sends my whole body sprawling. I rid myself of it for a while, but it is always lying in wait for me. In a certain camp in Macedonia we had some men of an Egyptian Labour Corps, and attached to them an interpreter. He had one stock phrase to describe general debility. “This man,” he said, “bends at the kneels.” Well, that is my stock disease—I bend at the kneels; and though I was warned against it at ten, I shall suffer from it at eighty. I suppose I was not caught early or warned impressively enough.

  The moral is that we must look out for bad habits even in the youngest golfers. When we find them we must be very sparing in our good advice, for a boy has a facility for exaggeration. One whom I know well was waving his mashie round his head like a driver. I insinuated that this was too long a swing, and the next moment he was taking the club no further back than a putter and giving the ball nothing but a little poke or prod. If you tell him to be less like an eel, he stiffens up into a statue: if you as much as whisper “follow-through,” he spins twice round after his stroke like a hammer-thrower. Therefore, though we may have to say the same thing many times, we must not say it at too frequent intervals, and must rather understate our case. What we have to say will generally be in the nature of a restriction. A grown-up beginner may be urged to greater freedom. Not so, as a rule, a boy. He is lissom and fearless enough; his errors will nearly always tend towards a swing too long and florid: a body movement that is too free. And however loose and slashing his style we dare only check it ever so slightly, because really to cramp him would be fatal. The best of young golfers have some wild oats that they must sow. I remember once, on a tour of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society in Lancashire, that an undergraduate member of our side played against Mr. John Ball. He played a very good, sound, steady game, going very straight and taking plenty of pains, making no outrageous errors and no great shots. Mr. Ball’s verdict (he does not often give one, but it is worth hearing when he does) was that he “did not like to see a youngster too careful.” And so, let us beware lest the boy’s game becomes lifeless: let him take his wooden club and go gallantly for the impossible carry: he has plenty of time in which to learn to play short.

  Besides this pusillanimous wisdom, which children to begin with will do better without, grown-up golfers have also many tiresome habits which children will do better without both now and for all eternity. Of such are the habits of waggling or of growing fussy over the slightest sound or movement in the neighbourhood. The natural child has only the most rudimentary waggle, if any, and he swings the club with only too little thought of anyone being near him, so as to be in fact rather dangerous. Soon, however, he adopts the grown-up weaknesses, has many and ornate waggles, looks angrily out of the tail of his eye at some object moving in the distance, and peremptorily orders his own mother not to talk on the stroke. In this case, if we cannot set a good example we can at least try to counteract the effect of a bad one, and there is a good deal to be done by not too unkind laughter. The professional’s play makes an excellent object lesson. It is hard work taking a child to see a professional match: it is necessary to run like a lamp-lighter in order that the small, eager person may be squeezed into the front rank, but it is worth doing. The rapidity of the play makes a deep impression, and the child is an imitative animal. The game of pretending is one to be played conscientiously, and no one can enact the part of a champion with any degree of artistic satisfaction if he fidget and waggle overmuch.

  I always think that the watching and copying of a good model is more vital to education in iron play than in any other part of the game. A good driving style seems to come more easily and naturally to a boy “agile as a young opossum.” Driving with its dash and go is, besides, the most superficially fascinating part of the game, and he will be more inclined to take pains to acquire it. Iron play is not so attractive to the young. It does not give so much scope for the boast that clamours for recognition—“Look how far I hit that one! Look, oh do look!” There is or should be a certain restraint about it. Restraint is unnatural in the young player, and the stroke which is perhaps the crown of the golfer’s skill, the half-iron shot, is not quite a natural one and demands more control of the club than any other. It is in the iron shots that the professional and the “professionally
moulded” amateur, as he has been called, is most unmistakably recognisable. Let others strive as they will, they cannot acquire that formidable, downward thrust of the club that sends the ball and the divot flying. So let our hypothetical boy be encouraged, above everything else, to watch good iron play and to observe wherein its merits lie. He must not, it is true, try to run before he can walk. The first thing to do is to learn to hit a straight-forward shot simply and truly. But, I think, granted the good model, the sequence of his shots may largely be left to nature. The more masterful, punching iron shots will come naturally with the growing strength of hand and wrist.

  As to the form which a boy’s games should take, if a boy is keen enough to enjoy it—and he generally is—I doubt if there is anything better for him than playing by himself. He must play some matches, of course, and that if possible with a rival of his own age. This will not only break him into match-playing: it will, as the saying is, “keep him in his proper place.” There is nobody whose company is in the long run so salutary for us as a contemporary, for he stands no nonsense from us. Elders grant us little indulgences if only in the matter of losing our tempers and throwing our clubs about, which we come to expect as a right. An occasional match then, but otherwise the solitary round is excellent, for the boy will not grow slack over it as the grown-up would do. If he misses a particular shot he will try it over and over again till he gets it right. When he comes home, the account that he gives of his score will probably be inaccurate. The most honest little boys are often bad counters, but at worst this is a very lovable weakness and will disappear too soon.

  If there be a grown-up good-natured enough to sacrifice himself, it is a good plan for him and the boy to play a solitary ball between them as if in a foursome. In the summer evenings at Felixstowe my father and I used to play one ball thus for a whole round of nine holes. I don’t think we had any imaginary foe—it was before the days of Bogey—but we counted our score. I can still recall the thrill when we did the nine holes in 56, though it does not sound a very good score today. Those rounds made the culminating joy of the day, and I hope it is not even now too late to express my gratitude for them.

  This form of game will of course be excellent practice for a real foursome. A family foursome is very good fun, granted an empty course, so that there is not that paralysing sensation of people waiting behind us. So is an inter-family foursome, though in this case the feeling may run almost too high. One word of advice may be given to the elders in a family foursome, and that is that they observe, to a reasonable degree at any rate, the rigour of the game. I would not have them too relentless. For instance, I have known a foursome, in which some of the players are very young, played under the rule that “air shots do not count.” Perhaps this is immoral, but it is disheartening to the son to walk after a long tee shot of the father’s, miss the globe himself, and then stand aside for another vast paternal drive. It must seem to him that he is not getting his money’s worth. In the case of a complete miss, then, some relaxation may be allowable so long as there is a definitely understood rule on the point, and not merely an occasional concession from motives of pity. On the other hand, into whatever bunker or other horribly bad place the ball finds its way, there it should be played. It seems cruel to insist on a small creature of ten struggling with a patch of rushes that would test Braid and his heaviest niblick. There is a natural temptation to bid the young player lift into some lie rather less hopeless, both because we are sorry for him and because we want to get on a little faster. But not only is this unwise, but to the credit of the young be it said, it is unpopular. They like to play the strict game, and twelve strokes or so per hole do not strike them in the light of a tragedy nor even as a weariness of the flesh. Twelve is only two over an average of tens, and on a long course tens take some getting.

  I have written hitherto about real children, the eight- and nine- and ten-year-olds. because so many children have today the chance of beginning very young, and the younger the better. But I think most of what I have said is applicable also to older children, to the fourteens and fifteens. Certainly a boy of fourteen, generally a most hero-worshipping age at a public school, should be encouraged to observe good players as much as he can, and if he is a strong, well-grown boy, he should soon be a good player himself. We have lately seen young Bocatzou, the French boy of fourteen, playing with Abe Mitchell on his own course, and that in a competition, and finishing in one round within three strokes of the great man. Young Tommy Morris was Open Champion at seventeen; America is full of infant prodigies of fifteen and sixteen. There are heaps of Bobby Joneses in embryo. There is no reason why a boy of sixteen with good opportunities should not be a very good golfer. When I hear a boy of that age remarked on by his adoring relations as wonderful because he has a handicap of eight or nine, I feel inclined to be thoroughly crabbed and unpleasant and say he ought to have a much lower one. Of course he will still have a great deal to learn, but he ought to be able to hit the ball in a way that may be ignorant but is the despair of many of his elders. He will not know enough to know what is the matter with him when he is “off,” and generally he will have a good deal of hard thinking about the game before him if he is to make the best of himself as a golfer. Some young players play very well by instinct till they come to the almost inevitable thinking stage: then they lose confidence and never quite get over it. Others will not be bothered to think and remain instinctive players all their lives, good, but not so good as they might have been, with some weak joints in their harness. Perhaps they are the happier ones and the wiser. There is certainly such a thing as thinking too much about golf for our general well-being. But it is certain that nobody, young or old, will make the best of himself as a golfer if he does not think hard about the game and think intelligently. Whether it is worth the golfer’s while to do so is a matter of taste and temperament which only he can decide.

  PART III

  MAJOR TOURNAMENTS

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  THE STORY OF BEN HOGAN’S FIRST MAJOR CHAMPIONSHIP

  JEFF MILLER

  Ben Hogan had one final chance to cap his stellar 1946 season with his first major championship. The P.G.A. Championship would be played in late August at Oregon’s Portland Golf Club, the course Hogan had personally annexed during the 1945 Portland Open with the record-sheering 27-under-par 261. Yet Byron Nelson came into the tournament considered at least the co-favorite, despite a sore back, on the basis of being the event’s defending champion along with the fact that he’d won three of his last five starts. As Hogan and Nelson reached the quarterfinals, Nelson had little to worry about other than his sacroiliac. He eliminated Frank Rodia 8-and-7 (playing twenty-seven holes in 10-under-par), host pro Larry Lamberger (3-and-2), and his 1943 New York City tour guide, Herman Barron, (3-and-2). Hogan’s victories to reach the three 18-hole rounds began somewhat tight but became progressively easier. He downed Charles Weisner (2-and-1), Bill Heinlein (4-and-3), and Arthur Bell (5-and-4).

  In the quarterfinals that started 36-hole play, Nelson was pitted against “Porky” Oliver while Hogan’s foe was Frank Moore. Nelson owned a two-hole lead with five holes to play but couldn’t put Oliver away. The match was square going to the thirty-sixth hole, when Nelson yanked his second shot into the woods. That left him needing to convert a 25-foot putt to save par and extend the match beyond regulation; the putt didn’t fall, and the defending champion was shockingly out in the quarterfinals. There had been talk earlier in the tournament that Nelson was hampered by a bad back, but after being eliminated he denied that. “My back never bothered me at all,” Nelson said, sipping a Coke and chewing on some ice. “I lost to a man who shot better golf. Ed’s a great guy and a fine competitor.”