The Best Golf Stories Ever Told Read online

  It has been said, in referring to this question, that no trace of a hole, the characteristic feature of the Scottish game, is to be found in any Dutch or Flemish picture. This would have been a useful argument with which to support, if not to settle, the case for the Scottish origin of the game, but unfortunately it is no longer available. In a beautifully illuminated Book of Hours, in the British Museum, executed at Bruges about 1510, there is a representation of four golfers, one of whom is putting at an unmistakable hole. Exception may be taken to the player’s costume, his manner of kneeling on the ground, and his grip of the club, but there is no doubt about the hole.

  I do not think, however, that the presence of the hole in this early Flemish picture weakens, to any great extent, the case for the Scottish origin of the game. It only proves, what is not surprising, that the hole was also known in the Low Countries. But Dutch and Flemish golfers are depicted playing at many other marks, such as pegs, stones, and church and pot-house doors. This shows, at any rate, that in the Low Countries the hole was not de rigueur, as it always has been in Scotland, and that the game of the Hollander was a bastard one, without the purity and simplicity which have always characterised its practice in Scotland. There, the mark has always been the hole, the true hole, and nothing but the hole.

  Although it may be impossible, from the facts at our disposal, to arrive at any positive finding, I submit that the balance of probability, and even of evidence, is in favour of the Scottish origin of golf. The game has been practised in Scotland, in all its essential particulars, for many centuries, and that with an ardour and persistency unknown elsewhere. If the Dutch or Flemings played any game akin to ours, it seems more reasonable to suppose, in view of their widely different practice and their feebler enthusiasm, that their game was only a clumsy copy of what they saw at Leith and Musselburgh.

  Be these things as they may, golf in these islands has certainly come to stay, and the surprising thing is that, with the firm hold it has so long had in Scotland, it should have taken so long to become popular in England, and that its popularity there should have been so sudden and widespread. Fifty years ago there was but one golf club in England; today there are nearly 1,000, while everywhere, all over the world, where Scotchmen and Englishmen are to be found, golf clubs are springing up and the game is being enthusiastically prosecuted.

  Although everybody must admit the fascination of the thing, it is a somewhat curious matter, when one comes to consider it, this hitting of a ball with a bat or club. So universal and clamorous an instinct must have its base somewhere very far down in human nature, for it has manifested itself in all climes, except, perhaps, in the torrid zone, and in all ages, while advancing civilisation seems only to develop and confirm the more primitive, but still inevitable, tendency. What subtle and potent agency working within us is it that hurries us in our thousands to the cricket-ground, regardless of the claims of business and society—not to perform in our own proper persons—but only that we may sit and watch a man hit, with a piece of wood, a round ball hurtled at him by another?

  What madness in their blood is it, that causes obese and elderly gentlemen, who ought to be thinking of their latter end, to array themselves in knickerbockers and gaiters, and to take early suburban trains to inland parks, that they may strike with a club, round trees, and over ditches, a sphere of gutta-percha, and babble of their prowess in the family circle? Surely so strange a manifestation, so overwhelming and imperious in the claims it makes on its victims, must be a recrudescence of some primeval habit of the race, the precise nature and purpose of which it is now impossible to divine.

  But apart from this mysterious and metaphysical aspect of the fascination of golf, the reasons for its widespread popularity are not far to seek. With the gradual centralisation of our population, and the ever-increasing strain and struggle of city life, physical recreation, both for its own sake and for the rest and healing it brings to the overworked mental energies, has become a necessity of existence. Cricket, tennis, football, and cycling all do their share in meeting this demand, but none of these can compare with golf as a healthful recreation for all ages and conditions of people. For it is not only the overworked city man who has found in golf the health-giving recreation he so much needed. In our country there is a large and increasing leisured class, men who have retired from the active pursuit of their professions, while still in possession of their physical energies. For these men, bilious and bored with the inaction and monotony of town life, broken only by the afternoon rubber at the club, or the yearly shooting or fishing holiday, golf has come as a boon and a blessing indeed.

  The healthy surroundings of the game are doubtless another element that go far to make its popularity. Cricket and football are too often played in confined spaces, sometimes in the centre of large towns, surrounded by smoke and bad air. For golf, an open park or common of considerable size is necessary, and of course its original and proper home is the breezy “links” by the seashore.

  As a physical training, golf is surpassed by no other form of exercise. No other game develops and strengthens, so evenly and roundly, all the muscles of the body. Here there is no dangerous straining of muscle or organ such as occurs in rowing, running, or football. The nature of the exercise is continuous, and calls into active play all the chief muscles of the body, but without violent strain, and, in consequence, the heart is strengthened in a gradual manner, and the circulation improved, to the manifest advantage of all the other organs.

  These characteristics which golf possesses make it the game par excellence for all men whose physique, whether from constitutional weakness or from the weight of advancing years, has become impaired, and who are consequently debarred from the more violent forms of exercise. Many a cricketer and football player, whose heart or lungs have gone wrong, has found in the pursuit of golf not only improvement and cure for his body, but equal scope for the satisfaction of his sporting instincts. Many a man past fifty, who has imagined that all outdoor games were henceforward beyond his capacity, has in golf renewed his youth, finding himself under the spell of the game, half cheated of his years and his anxieties. It is quite common to hear such a man declare that golf has added ten years to his life.

  The presence of elderly men enjoying themselves on the golf links, however, has led to golf being frequently described as “an old man’s game”; and this remark is not intended to convey, what indeed would be cheerfully admitted, that it is capable of being played and enjoyed by our uncles and fathers, but the implication is that it is not a game which any young man should take up, to the neglect of, say, cricket or football, unless he wishes to be set down as a muff. This view of the matter, it need hardly be said, is seldom expressed by those who have ever tried to play the game themselves, and it will probably surprise the irresponsible outsider to learn that no golfer has ever attained first-class form who began golf late in life, or, so far as I am aware, after he was out of the twenties; that, conversely, all the best players who have ever lived or are now alive, have played from their childhood, or at any rate from their teens. As a general rule, experience and history confirm the view that a golfer plays his best game between the ages of twenty and thirty, and usually when he is nearer twenty than thirty. At that age he possesses, in the highest degree, the activity, suppleness, and strength which are essential to a powerful, long game, and a long-sustained call upon his physical energies. At that age, too, he has more confidence in himself, his attitude of mind is simpler, less analytical, than at a later stage, when worldly cares and worries have done their work upon his nervous system.

  It is quite true, on the other hand, that, against the decay of his more purely physical forces, the golfer often gains valuable compensation in the judgment and steadiness which come to him from experience and the formation of character. In consequence, many golfers, who have played, and played well, all their lives, only reach their best form comparatively late in life—though this, of course, can only occur before any marked physi
cal deterioration has set in. Mr. Balfour-Melville, who won the Amateur Championship in 1895, is perhaps the most eminent example of this class.

  But while golf confers these physical advantages on its votaries, its importance and usefulness as a training for the mind and character cannot be overestimated. In the course of a game of golf, all the strength and weakness of a man’s nature come to the surface, and lie bare to the gaze of the most superficial observer. In the ordinary pursuits and intercourse of life, men comport themselves in a more or less conventional manner, so that their strong and weak points are often hidden, even from themselves. On the golf green, under the storm and stress of a tight match, these masks are flung aside, and we see our own and our neighbours’ real natures in all their nakedness. Here, as in the greater issues of life, it is the “still, strong man” that endures. Pluck, steadiness, patience, and self-restraint are the qualities that win the day. The sanguine and excitable temperament, though often found in combination with extreme brilliancy, nearly always cracks under the strain of bad luck, or if the struggle be much prolonged. The game thus provides a bloodless arena, where the highest attributes of human character—the qualities of courage, patience and self-restraint—may be studied and cultivated, and where a man may learn his true relation to his environment, and how to comport himself before his fellows.

  But there is yet one more aspect of golf which endears it to its votaries, and that is its social aspect. Like its sister game of curling, it is a great leveller, and, on the golf green, social distinctions are ignored, and all men are equal, or separated only by the breadth of their handicaps. No matter how rich, or influential, or talented a man may be, he is judged on the links by his golfing capacity and his good-fellowship, and by nothing else. Here the simple confound the wise, and out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the great ones of the earth extract golfing wisdom. The game thus performs a great and patriotic service, in bringing all classes of the community together on a common basis, where they learn to know and respect each other, finding out, as they inevitably do on the golf green, what a deal of human nature there is about everybody. The golfing snob we of course encounter, but he is a rara avis on the golf links and, from his position of splendid isolation, is incapable of doing much to disturb the prevailing harmony of the proceedings.

  Now that the ladies have taken up the game in real earnest, and are proving themselves such redoubtable performers, there seems nothing to be added to the completeness of the social side of golf.

  Talleyrand has said that he who does not learn to play whist lays up for himself a miserable old age. With equal force the remark may be applied to golf. To enjoy golf, a man may begin at any age. It may be that to become a first-class player a golfer must begin early, and have, besides, a natural aptitude for the game; but be the period of his probation long or short, or his ultimate proficiency what it may, he will never regret the happy days he has spent in pleasant places, and he will be thankful that he has embraced a game which, as time goes on, will not cast him off scornfully, unmindful of his youthful devotion, but which will accompany him gladly, making his failing steps easy and pleasant, down the vale of years.

  pocketwiley

  THE STORY BEHIND THE BIRTH OF THE RIVALRY BETWEEN JACK NICKLAUS AND ARNOLD PALMER

  BY MATTHEW SILVERMAN

  There have been great rivalries in professional golf: the amateur Bobby Jones against the pro Walter Hagen in the 1920s—with Gene Sarazen battling both as well; Ben Hogan fought fellow Texan Byron Nelson on the course, and when Lord Byron retired at the top of his game in 1946, Sam Snead became Hogan’s top competitor; and in recent years there has been a lot of heat generated by the public and the media about Phil Mickelson against Tiger Woods. But no rivalry has meant as much to golf or its devotees as Arnold Palmer versus Jack Nicklaus.

  Their rivalry helped fuel a golf explosion in the United States in the 1960s—and the duo’s desire to play in the British Isles helped renew their countrymen’s attitudes regarding the Open Championship. (Snead, who won the 1946 British Open and then did not play in the event for 15 years, dismissed the travel and paltry purses: “Any time you leave the U.S.A., you’re just camping out.”) The Nicklaus-Palmer rivalry changed the way people followed golf, and the way it was covered on television And their styles could not have been any different.

  First came Palmer, the swashbuckling everyman with a loopy swing that would make a pro blush, bringing the masses to the game. Arnie constantly hit into trouble, hit out of trouble, and won and won and won. Nicklaus was more polished, growing up playing at a country club and developing a game that never had him out of place on any golf course against anybody, even as a 17-year-old amateur at the U.S. Open. By the time Nicklaus turned pro in 1961, Jack and Arnie already had a rivalry going. The star-studded, heart-stopping 1960 U.S. Open is where it began.

  When he stepped to the first tee for the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills Country Club, outside Denver, Palmer had been a pro for six years. He had played golf at Wake Forest, dropped out of college, joined the Coast Guard, and after winning the 1954 U.S. Amateur, reluctantly decided to try his hand at playing professionally. Money was a lot harder to come by on the golf circuit in the 1950s, but Palmer proved he’d made the right decision by winning 18 tournaments in his first five years as a professional, including the 1958 and 1960 Masters. He would have won three straight at Augusta had it not been for meltdown on the last seven holes in 1959. Palmer hit two balls in the water at 12 and missed short putts on the last two holes to allow journeyman Art Wall to pass him with a stunning 66. Though gifted and popular, Palmer was not infallible. And he had plenty of competition.

  Ben Hogan was a four-time Open winner and a legend. The gruff Texan’s idyllic swing could still dissect any given course at age 47, but his putting tormented him. Lucky to have survived a 1949 head-on collision with a bus, Hogan collected six of his nine major triumphs after the accident. He won all four majors at least once, a career Grand Slam achieved only by Gene Sarazen before him—and only Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, and Tiger Woods managed the feat afterward.

  Player, who would win nine majors, 24 PGA tournaments, and 166 professional wins around the world, was considered part of golf ’s “Big Three” in the 1960s and 1970s along with Palmer and Nicklaus. The South African was 24 in 1960—and he was the defending British Open champion.

  Nicklaus was still in college in 1960, but he already had plenty of game. He had overcome a mild case of polio at 13 in 1953, the same year he broke 70 for the first time. The 66 he shot at age 15 was the record at his home course, Scotio Country Club in suburban Columbus, Ohio. He won five straight state junior titles and qualified for the U.S Open for the first time at 17. While at Ohio State he won the 1959 U.S. Amateur by sinking a birdie on the final hole and later that year helped America win the Walker Cup. Pudgy with a blonde crew cut, “Fat Jack” had visions of winning the U.S. Open as an amateur, as his idol Bobby Jones had. Nicklaus planned on becoming a pharmacist, like his father.

  The 1960 U.S. Open was Nicklaus’s fourth Open, he’d twice missed the cut and tied for 41st in 1959. He shot an even-par 71 in the first round in Denver, a tie for 12th with Ken Venturi and five others. The top amateur behind first-round leader Mike Souchak’s 68 wasn’t even Nicklaus, it was Don Cherry. No, not the hockey icon of Canadian TV, but the Texas-born singer who crooned out top 10 hits and wrote the jingle for “Mr. Clean.” Two pros missing from the first day leader board at Cherry Hills were Palmer, with a 72, and Hogan, whose 75 put him in danger of missing a U.S. Open cut for the first time since 1938.

  Hogan got on track with a sizzling 67 on Friday, tying for 11th place with Nicklaus, Player, and Julius Boros. Souchak’s lead, in the meantime, grew to three strokes after carding a 67. Palmer shot a 71 and was tied for 15th place with six others. As author Julian I. Grauber relates in his marvelous account of the 1960 U.S. Open, Golf ’s Greatest Championship, Palmer “was barely mentioned in second-round newspaper accounts. In a fe
w articles, writers declared matter-of-factly that the pre-tournament favorite was out of the running.”

  All was to be decided on Saturday. The U.S. Open still finished with a 36-hole final day, which would be the rule until finally switching to a four-day tournament in 1965. Not only did this make it harder to televise (NBC provided trimmeddown, taped-delay coverage of certain holes), but the drama was also somewhat stifled by the pairing order (11 groups went out for the final round after third-round leader Mike Souchak). So in the nation’s biggest golf weekend, coverage was hours behind “real time,” and players were still coming in from the morning round while others were teeing off for the decisive afternoon round. Oh, but there would be drama in the afternoon.

  Palmer’s morning 72 left him seven shots behind Souchak and tied for 14th place with eight others. No one had ever come back from more than five strokes to win in the 56 U.S. Opens held since 1898—and since World War II, the biggest comeback had been from three strokes ( Jack Fleck, ironically trailing by four after 54 holes in 1960, had made up three strokes in the last round in the 1955 Open to catch Ben Hogan, beating the Hawk the next day in an 18-hole playoff ).

  Palmer made a comment to a couple of writers in the locker room as he changed shirts and ate a hamburger, “Wonder what a 65 would bring this afternoon?” Palmer got only grins and a dismissive comment from Pittsburgh Press reporter Bob Drum, who had long followed the hometown hero from Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

  Still angry on the first tee, Palmer got off a booming drive in the thin Colorado air that bounced on the green 355 yards away and started a legendary birdie flurry that turned the leaderboard upside down. Palmer birdied six of the first seven holes, hitting the turn with a score of 30 to tie the lowest nine ever in a U.S. Open (by James B. McHale in 1947). But the guy in the lead wasn’t Palmer, or even Souchak—Nicklaus was in front with nine holes left.