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  And here let me say that this constant playing on a course where heather and sand, bents and wind abounded was the best possible education for the young golfer with any grit or gift for the game. The trying conditions might have discouraged some, but never did us. We loved the buffetings of the wind and the high adventure of the difficulties, and these things gave a fibre to our game which easier conditions would never have given. Wind was almost the normal condition at Silloth, and one’s game had to be adapted accordingly. Experience teaches the best and most permanent lessons, and even in the earlier and more irresponsible days Silloth was teaching me lessons which have left their mark on my game. Constant battling with the wind gradually evolved in me a means of reducing its resistance, and much familiarity with difficult “lies” on or off the course bred in me, if not exactly a contempt for them, at any rate no great fear of them.

  We never allowed either wind or weather to curtail a round once started. We persevered until our balls were at the bottom of the last hole, determined to see the thing through. I am sure this was good for us and developed in us the spirit of fighting to a finish when it came to important match play.

  No sooner had I joined the Carlisle and Silloth Club than I began to keep a record of every round or match played. To this day I have kept up that practice.

  Had circumstances allowed, we would have played golf every day and all day; but education and its claims forbade this. There is no doubt that education does interfere with a child’s golf! I am not sure that it is not a greater nuisance in that way than work in later life!

  Everyone knows the story of the ardent golfer who told a friend that golf was interfering with business, and that he would have to give it up. “What! ’’ exclaimed his friend, “give up golf ?” “No,” replied the other, “business.” That was my feeling about golf and education.

  As a matter of fact we had little to grumble at. After being started off in our education at home, we went to school in Carlisle for many years. This necessitated an hour’s train journey morning and afternoon; but as we got back to Silloth by three o’clock on most days, we had time for a round of golf nearly every day during the summer months. The guard of the train, Mr. Selkirk, an official well known to visitors and golfers, often speaks of the responsibility he felt in looking after the four of us. I think it says a great deal for our sense of duty that we never once missed the train. To have done so would, probably, have meant a day’s golf! The temptation was great, and it would have been such a simple matter to succumb to it. A little lagging or imaginary trouble with a boot-lace was all that was necessary. But I must not take all the credit to ourselves for our regular attendance at school. Our friend, the guard, was largely responsible for it. Many were the times he stood at the end of the platform, whistle and flag in hand, beckoning to one, two, three, or even four small figures trailing stationwards. That particular train had not a good reputation for punctuality. It was a very different story coming back; there was only eagerness to get to the station as soon as possible.

  Arrived at Silloth, we invariably made for the Club-house and, throwing our school-bags into the locker and our school worries with them, set off from the first tee full of hope that we should play the game of our life.

  Not long after it’s publication, I became the proud possessor of a copy of Braid’s book, Advanced Golf. How I used to devour this in the train to and from school. Alas! my zeal for the study of Braid outran my discretion. One day, under cover of the lid of my desk, I was secretly feeding on Braid when my mental diet should have been of a more edifying (!) kind. Detection was followed by confiscation, and Advanced Golf spent several unhappy and profitless days in the mistress’s desk.

  Our keenness for golf was not at all understood by the schoolmistresses. On returning to school after the summer holidays, we were, on one occasion, told to write an essay on how we had spent them. We, of course, had spent ours on the links; but the innocent colloquial golfing expression, “Spent my holidays on the links,” was taken as a gross exaggeration by the mistress and underlined as such.

  One of the questions in a geography examination paper was: “What do you know about the denudation of the earth’s surface ?” Having no idea what “denudation” meant, I had, perforce, to give this question a miss. But when later I learnt the meaning of denudation, and its geological significance, I felt I had let slip the chance of a lifetime, for my own practical experience of denudation on the Silloth links fitted me to write feelingly on the subject.

  I had my favourite subjects at school and worked hard enough at these, which, perhaps fittingly, were mathematics, science, drawing, and physical geography, especially those parts of the last named dealing with the composition of the earth’s surface and with climatic conditions. Political geography made no appeal to me. It might have been otherwise had I known that the game I loved would one day take me to many different parts of the world. Though school prizes never fell to my share, I had the satisfaction of always being in a class where I was younger than the average age.

  At home we were always encouraged in outdoor games, our mother maintaining that it was far better for our health to forget lessons entirely on leaving school each day. Nor did she believe in too much home-work. For these beliefs we blessed her! Hockey, cricket, and tennis were included in the school curriculum, but, though keen on these, I would willingly have given them all up for golf.

  The energy of a child, viewed through adult eyes, is an amazing thing. Many times, in those early days, did I play three rounds of the Silloth course in one day. Remembering the number of shots and the amount of energy I used to expend per round, I wonder I was not often exhausted. And yet I do not recollect ever feeling even tired. But the bracing air of Silloth must share the credit for this. Limpness is a feeling I, personally, have never experienced at Silloth, though I have played on courses where I hardly had the energy to drag one foot after the other.

  In another respect, too, I was very fortunate in having Silloth for my native course. A large-minded and generous Committee allowed children the full privileges of the links. What a blessing this was has often been forcibly brought to my mind when hearing of boys and girls unable to play over their local courses, and unable, therefore, to make an early start at the game.

  As I knocked a guttie ball round the Silloth links by the means I found most comfortable, I had no prophetic vision that golf would be the cause of my travelling thousands of miles, playing before thousands of spectators, making multitudes of friends, experiencing countless thrills and excitements, and achieving success in the great big golfing world. I understood as a child, I thought as a child, I played as a child.

  Soon after joining the Club, I was taking part in Club matches and competitions. A Leitch usually headed the latter, while in the former the Leitch family furnished the majority of the team. An amusing incident of one of these matches is worth retelling. The Silloth team, largely Leitch in flavour, journeyed to Moffat to play the local Club. After mutual greetings, the Moffat captain, seeing two small children with the team, remarked to the Silloth captain, “Oh, you needn’t have brought caddies with you, we have plenty here.” Her embarrassment on learning that the “caddies” were members of the team was only second to her amazement when later the little sisters returned to the Clubhouse, bringing with them the scalps of their adult opponents.

  During all this time we were quite unconscious of the fact that we played any better than other ordinary mortals in the outside world. And it was not until Mr. Eustace White, the wellknown writer on women’s sport, paid a chance visit to Silloth in 1907, that we were led to believe we were anything more than beginners.

  The great names in ladies’ golf were known to us, and we read with keen interest of the doings of Rhona Adair, Lottie Dod and the Hezlets. But they were just names to us, golfing goddesses, too far above us to make us either envious or ambitious. A story I was told about Rhona Adair impressed me. She was playing on a course laid out over rocky ground. Before us
ing a spoon for which she had great affection, she would pull a hatpin from her hat and test the ground with it, in case a hidden rock should damage her pet club.

  When not playing myself, I loved nothing so much as “carrying” for my brother, especially when he was taking part in a Club match or competition. He used very few clubs: brassie, driving iron, jigger, mashie and putter. He would never have these cleaned and became known as the boy with the “bronze set of clubs.” Though he was not exceptionally long, his short game was the most marvellous thing imaginable. I have yet to see its equal. He never had a handicap worse than scratch, and on winning with ease the first competition he took part in as a full member, he was made plus 2, a handicap he retained till his early death in 1907, at the age of twenty-two.

  We all learned our golf with the old guttie ball, and I am glad of it. That old solid ball had to be hit in the proper manner before it would go. There was no running bunkers with it, and a “top” meant an ugly gash that made one realize the fault must not be repeated. One great advantage it had over the rubbercored ball was that it could be re-made. Often on hitting one hard on the head, I found consolation in the fact that it was a 27½ and that Renouf, who was the professional at the time, would give me a re-made for it, together with sixpence. I never remember experiencing the drudgery stage, through which most players have to pass. All being self-taught, our styles were quite different. Of the sisters, Edith, the eldest, was always looked up to by the others, as she was, undoubtedly, the most capable performer. My allotted place was No. 3. The wind and the guttie ball together had an influence on our style, and produced in us our powerful and rather manlike swings.

  Since success has come my way, two or three professionals claim to have taught me my golf. But surely no professional would allow a pupil to adopt, to the extent to which I do, the palm grip, flat swing, and bent knee at the top of the swing. Such an unorthodox combination should be condemned and disowned by the professional teacher!

  There is a famous hole at Silloth called the “Duffer’s Bunker.” A very wide and deep sand pit has to be carried from the tee. This used to be the dread of lady (and many men) players, especially in a medal round, as it came near the end (formerly the 16th, now the 17th). To this day I can remember the exquisite thrill of pleasure at my first successful “crack” over this trouble.

  The improvement in my play came gradually, and I was encouraged by friends interested in my efforts to keep on improving my “best round.” The day I broke 100 by one stroke was a red-letter day. Slowly and surely I improved this, until at the age of seventeen (the year of my first championship), my average match-play round was between 80 and 84 from the men’s tees, bogey at that time being about 78.

  In the summer of 1907 Mrs. Archbold Smith, a moving spirit in Yorkshire golf, paid a golfing visit to Silloth. She tried hard to make us believe that we played better than most of the competitors in the ladies’ open championship. But we did not share this flattering opinion of our own play, and would certainly have gasped had anyone predicted that one of us would come within measurable distance of winning the open championship in less than a year.

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  THE STORY BEHIND MY FIRST “BIG” MATCH, AND OTHER LESSONS FROM MY YOUTH: AN EXCERPT FROM GOLF FACTS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

  FRANCIS OUIMET

  It was as a school-boy golfer that I first had that feeling of satisfaction which comes in winning a tournament, and it was as a school-boy golfer that I learned a few things which perhaps may be useful to some boys who are pupils in school now and who are interested in golf. It was in 1908 that I took part for the first time in an interscholastic tournament, at the Wollaston Golf Club, and I may as well say, right here, that I did not win the title; the fact is that I barely qualified, my 85 being only one stroke better than the worst score in the championship qualifying division. The best score was 74, which I must say was extraordinarily good for such a course as that on which the event was played. It is a fine score there today for any golfer, even in the ranks of the men. In my first round of match play, fortune favored me, only to make me the victim of its caprices in the second round, when I was defeated two up and one to play by the eventual winner of the championship title, Carl Anderson. It was inability to run down putts of about three feet in length which cost me that match, and, to my sorrow, I have passed through that same experience more than once since leaving school. But what I recollect distinctly about that match, aside from my troubles on the putting-greens, was that I felt nervous from the start, for it was my first “big” match. I mention this because it has its own little lesson, which is that the chances of winning are less when the thought of winning is so much on the mind as to affect the nerves.

  In 1909 I won the championship of the Greater Boston Interscholastic Golf Association, the tournament being played at the Commonwealth Country Club, Newton, Massachusetts. Only one match was at all close, that one going to the sixteenth green. The final, at thirty-six holes, I won by ten up and nine to play. In that tournament I learned a lesson invaluable, which was to avoid trying to play every shot equally well with my opponent. In other words, there were boys in that tournament who were vastly my superiors in long hitting. Frequently they were reaching the green in two shots where I required three, or else they were getting there with a drive and a mashie shot where I required two long shots. But, fortunately, I was of a tempera ment at that time which enabled me to go along my own way, never trying to hit the ball beyond my natural strength in order to go as far as my opponent, and making up for lack of distance by accuracy of direction and better putting. My advice to any boy is to play his own game, irrespective of what his opponent does. This does not mean, of course, that a boy should lose his ambition to improve his game, or that he should be content with moderate distance when he might be able to do better. But the time for striving to do better is not when ambition is aroused merely through the desire to win some one match or to outhit some opponent. The average boy or man who strives in some one match to hit the ball harder than he does normally generally finds that, instead of getting greater distance, he is only spoiling his natural game. Then, the harder he tries, the worse he gets. Greater distance on the drive, as well as accuracy in all departments of the game, comes through practice and natural development, rather than through the extra efforts of some one round.

  In that tournament at the Commonwealth Country Club, which gave me the first championship title which I ever held in golf, there were a number of players who subsequently have achieved successes in athletic lines, several of them having become prominent for their skill in golf. Among these was Heinrich Schmidt, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who in the spring of 1913, made such a great showing in the British amateur championship. Even at that time, “Heinie,” as we called him, was a more than ordinarily good golfer, and he was looked upon as one of the possible winners of the championship. It was one of his Worcester team-mates, Arthur Knight, who put him out of the running, in a match that went two extra holes. “Heinie’s” twin brother, Karl, who looked so much like him that it was difficult to tell the two apart, also was in the tournament, and among others were the late Dana Wingate, afterwards captain of the Harvard varsity baseball nine; Forrester Ainsworth, halfback on the Yale football eleven in 1913; and Fletcher Gill, who later played on the Williams College golf team.

  The following year, 1910, I was honored with election to the presidency of the Greater Boston Interscholastic Golf Association, which did not, however, help me to retain the championship title, for that year the winner was Arthur Knight, of Worcester.

  This interesting tournament was played on the links of the Woodland Golf Club at Auburndale, Massachusetts, and in the qualifying round I was medalist, with a score of 77. Singularly enough, I had that same score in winning my match of the first round, and also had a 77 in the second round; but on that occasion it was not good enough to win; for Francis Mahan, one of my team-mates from Brookline High School, was around with a brillia
nt 73, whereby he won by three up and two to play. It was beautiful golf for a boy (for a man, either, as far as that goes), and the loss of the title, under such circumstances, left nothing for me to regret. It always has struck me that for any one who truly loves the game of golf, there is even a pleasure in being defeated when you have played first-class golf yourself, and have been beaten only because your opponent has played even better. It certainly was so in that case, and I was sorry that Mahan could not keep up the gait in his other matches. He was beaten by the eventual winner of the tournament, Arthur Knight, in the semi-final round, Knight winning the thirty-six-hole final by two up and one to play from R. W. Gleason, later a member of the Williams College team.

  From my own experiences in school-boy golf, I should be an enthusiastic supporter of any movement tending to make the game a greater factor in the athletic life of school-boys or, for that matter, in the colleges. I do think, however, that it should come under more direct supervision of older heads, and that boys should be taught not only how to play the game, but that they should have impressed upon them the fact that it is a game that demands absolute honesty.