The Balance of Power in Golf

THE American golfing authorities have lately decided to adopt a rather larger and lighter ball. The Fritish authorities, having for some time coquetted with the idea of this new ball, have decided to give up their dangerous flirtation and cleave in virtuous orthodoxy to their present love. It is possible that America may retrace her steps or that Britain may come late and penitent to the change. It is likewise possible that each may stick to its own resolution, believing itself right and the other country wrong. That is likely enough; in spite of Mr. H. G. Wells, who wants us all to forget our nationalities, countries have a habit of believing themselves to be right. It is perhaps the more likely because, in this case, each country may be for once justified in its belief. The lighter and larger ball may turn out to be well suited to American courses, which are comparatively little afflicted by winds, while our British seaside winds might blow it so tempestuously to and fro as to make the golfer’s life too hard to bear.

I am personally a little sorry that our authorities have not shown more enterprise in this matter, but I do not feel strongly about it and am not going to discuss all the pros and cons. I only want to mention one of the arguments, which is apposite to the title I have chosen for this paper. That one is that the new ball will do something to restore the lost balance in golf. This argument was very well stated by my friend, Mr. W. C. Fownes, when he was President of U. S. G. A. I cannot give his actual words, but I hope I can give something of their effect. In any sport or game there is an ideal balance which should be maintained between the two parties. In sport it is, as a rule, between the hunter and the hunted. If the fox always gets away it is poor fun for the hounds and so for their followers. It is equally poor fun if the fox never has a chance. Pickwickian students will recall Mr. Winkle’s plan for improving his shooting by means of a stuffed partridge on the top of a post to be shot at from gradually increasing distances. They will also recall Sam Weller’s comment: ‘ I know a gen’l’man, Sir,’ he said, ‘as did that, and begun at two yards; but he never tried it on agin; for he blowed the bird right clean away at the first fire, and nobody ever seed a feather on him arterwards.’ This anecdote earned a rebuke from Mr. Pickwick, but Mr. Weller was in fact stating very well the case for the maintenance of a balance.

I

In most games the balance is one to be maintained between attack and defense. The defense must not be an impregnable stone wall, neither must the attack be a devouring flame.

I have read in an American magazine, and read with great interest though with inevitable ignorance, that the laws of American football have several times lately been changed because either attack or defense was too palpably having the best of it. It is the same here in England with cricket. Given dry weather and a hard wicket, the batsman has dominated the proceedings, He has not always made runs quickly, for which the unscientific onlooker, who likes fun for his money, might forgive him; but he has stuck and stuck, defying the bowler and gaining now and then a painful inch or two, so that one unfinished match, unfinished even in three days, has followed another. This year an experiment has been tried, as far as first-class cricket is concerned, in the form of a slightly enlarged wicket and an alteration in the law making it more difficult for the batsman to defend his wicket with his legs. So far the result seems satisfactory and, despite dry weather and hard wickets, many more matches have been finished. The balance has been redressed to some extent in the bowler’s favor. It would be impertinent for me to talk about baseball, which I have only watched once or twice with an excited but uneducated eye. So I will only diffidently add, by way of illustration, that to the English spectator, accustomed to a leisurely long-drawn-out innings, the balance seems too much in the pitcher’s favor.

Golf differs from these other games in this, that the balance has to be maintained, not between the two opponents, but between man and Nature. It is only incidentally that man plays against his fellow man. He plays primarily against Nature, who provides the course and its hazards and the wind that blows across it. In her provision of the course she gets constantly more and more assistance from her ally the architect; he reënforces her and makes her more formidable. Man takes as his helpers the club maker and the ball maker, and the ball maker has been so efficient an ally that, in many people’s opinion, Nature has been getting the worst of the struggle, whereby it has become a duller one. The balance, these reformers allege, wants readjusting. It cannot be any further readjusted by the lengthening of courses or the multiplication of bunkers, lest the game become a weariness of the flesh, and therefore, they say, it must be done by means of the new ball.

One great difficulty in all these questions, whatever the game, is to decide for what particular class of player to legislate. The professional billiard player has to be restricted in all sorts of ways lest he go on scoring from sunrise to sundown. The amateur of average incompetence strikes the stars with uplifted head if ever he makes half-adozen scoring strokes in succession. In first-class cricket, as I said, the bowler has terribly uphill work; in village matches wickets fall before his attack like corn before the sickle. And so in golf, what particular class of golfer are we considering when we say that the game has become dull through the disturbance of the balance?

Let me give an egotistical little example, which other golfers can easily translate into terms of their own experience and their own courses. Where I play at home there is a hole which I personally take leave to consider the worst hole in the world. It is supposed to be of just such a length as to give the really long driver, the unquestioned ‘tiger,’ the advantage that is his due. The green is on a plateau, built out in something the shape of a gun platform from the side of a hill. The ground short of the green is on a considerable slope and at the foot of that slope, as also below the green, are cavernous bunkers. I am not tigerish enough to reach that green with my tee shot. My truly hit ball flatters for a moment, only to deceive; it never quite reaches the green — it trails away down the slope into a bunker. Even if it does not actually reach the bunker, I am left with a hideously difficult pitch to play up on to the gun platform.

I suppose that to Mr. Bobby Jones the hole might make an appeal. His ball would carry so far that the slope would have no effect on it; he would be on the green every time and get his three, and, for all I know, he would deem that hole one not merely of majestic and imposing appearance, but also one to reward real merit. The hole seems harmless and even perhaps rather amusing to those golfers whose driving is perceptibly less tigerish even than mine. They do not drive far enough to run down that slope into the bunkers, nor to get a difficult approach: they have a simple straightforward mashie shot; get their fours and think it all very capital. The Green Committee have made by way of experiment a forward tee to this hole. From it I can reach the green, and I am bound to say that, when I see my ball soar away over the treacherous slope to end in triumph on the plateau, the hole seems to have a certain quality that — well, in short, it is not such a bad hole after all.

But what about those still humbler ones who have been getting their fours so happily? Now their lot becomes as mine was from the back tee and they all think it the worst and unfairest of holes. Of course, a really good hole should be a good hole for everybody. I only mention this bad one in order to point my question. For which particular class of player is the balance to be adjusted? It is so dreadfully natural that we should all answer it from our own point of view. The poor never can really sympathize with the rich in finding an investment at once safe and remunerative.

II

When the balance is maintained with an ideal nicety, golf is a very great game. I never saw a finer illustration than Hagen’s last two rounds at Muirfield this summer when he won our Open Championship for the fourth time. Muirfield is a long difficult course; its greens were fast and, now and again, slippery to the verge of trickiness. The wind was blowing hard. I have read some accounts of that day’s golf, one or two from American pens, describing the wind as a hurricane, the conditions as appalling and cyclonic and I know not what. I have not those writers’ command of language and I allowed myself the freedom of saying that they talked nonsense. The wind was a very strong wind, but it was not a tempest, nor a hurricane nor a tornado. The fight between the man and the game was a glorious one.

Hagen, at his very best as he was, assuredly could not make Muirfield look easy, but neither could Muirfield make Hagen appear to be struggling. If, as one waited for him to play, one put one’s self in his place and imagined one’s self confronted with his particular shot, one did realize that, for ordinary mortals, golf on that course and in that wind was too severe an ordeal; but for Hagen the balance was perfect. He had to bring forth all his powers, but nothing impossible was demanded of them. He had two 75’s — just the right score, it seems to me, from the point of view of that ideal balance, not too high and not too low. It was a very fine score, the best of the day, but it was only one stroke better than Johnny Farrell’s 75 and 76; it was not, to draw on the most lurid vocabulary I can muster, either ‘uncanny’ or ‘superhuman.’ It represented one of the best of golfers tested by conditions worthy of his strength and his skill. But I freely admit that for most other people, even very good players, the test was a little too fierce, and for the ordinary rank and file of golfers it would have been altogether too much.

Let me give another example, one in which the balance was all too much in the player’s favor. Mr. Bobby Jones won our Open Championship at St. Andrews in 1927 with a score — which would beforehand have been deemed incredible even for him — of 285. If Bobby had been asked whether he found the golf easy he would no doubt have mopped his brow and indignantly denied the accusation. Golf can never be easy, in one sense, in a Championship; there is the unending strain — the whole pack of pursuers, like so many ravening wolves, chasing the leader and ready to profit if he stumbles. The golf, however, was easy in this other sense that few of the holes demanded, of such a golfer as Bobby Jones, the putting forth of any supreme effort or the exhibition of all the golf that was in him. He had, of course, to make a continuous effort, but the individual shots he was called on to play were easy shots for him — a tee shot with a good margin of room and no wind to deflect the ball, a pitching shot played with some lofted club on to a comparatively slow green. There was nothing in the conditions to sift the wheat from the chaff. All that the greatest golfer in the world could do was to continue to play ordinary, simple shots just about as well as they could be played, hoping that now and again he would play one so exceptionally well as to gain a clear stroke, hoping also that now and again his competitors would make a mistake and play the easy shot badly.

Had there been a proper seaside wind and had the ground been reasonably keen instead of damp and slow with a kind of sullen slowness, we should have seen a very different contest. Bobby would very likely have done just as low a score, perhaps even a lower one, but how much more enthralling would have been the doing and the watching of it. We should have seen him using that wind so that it became his slave while it was humbler folks’ master. We should have seen him not continually playing one high pitching shot with monotonous accuracy, but having to use the ground as well as the air, and playing strokes of varying elevation, sometimes a pitch-and-run, sometimes a purely running shot in order beautifully to circumvent the banks and braes which make the great fascination of St. Andrews. We should also have seen him take his wooden club through the green more often, instead of only twice in each round at the two long holes, and there is no golfer with soul so dead that he does not thrill at the sight of a full brassy shot. As it was, we saw the best of all golfers play the best possible golf suited to the conditions, but it was not, and could not be, golf in its fullness. The champion was too good for the game, which was not worthy of him.

It would, however, have been at least reasonably worthy of us, my reader, if I may do myself the honor of playing you on level terms. We should have found the holes tolerably long and our natural weaknesses would have introduced all the element of variety that we needed. We might have perceived, as in a glass darkly, that we were not being very highly tested, that we ought to be doing a good score even if we were not. We might have murmured that all this talk about the extraordinary interest in the approach shots at St. Andrews had been exaggerated. Still nobody watching us would have said that the game was obviously too easy for us. For whom is that blessed balance to be adjusted?

III

The weather is bound to upset the balance on occasion. That cannot be helped. Indeed it is one of the charms of the game, and we would not have it otherwise. Leaving the weather on one side, the golf architects are nowadays doing their best to put it right. Once, in more primitive times, they used to blockade the tee with ramparts stretched across the course and generally make life a burden for the poor wretch whose loftiest ambition is not to top the ball in front of his nose. Now they hold, rightly, that the duffer’s incompetence brings its own sufficient punishment with it and that those ramparts which make him miserable are of positive assistance to the big driver, since they help him to judge his distances. They set themselves to punish the slightly erratic shot of the strong player. They bunker the left-hand side of the fairway at long range from the tee, because the virile hook is the fault of the strong man; the anæmic slice can be left to look after itself. They do not rob the long hitter of his advantage, but they insist that he must be accurate as well as long. As far as in them lies, they play the part of that admirable thief, Robin Hood, who, so we are taught, took from the rich to give to the poor. Their intentions are excellent, their ingenuity great, and they do accomplish something, but the duffer is not always capable of taking advantage of their kindness. He will insist on getting into the bunkers that are meant only for his betters, and he gets into them with his second, or even his third, shot, whereas the great man gets into them in his first. This is, alas, the world of the big folks and nothing can alter that. Perhaps it is even unreasonable of us to expect that the game should be made as easy for us as it is for Mr. Bobby Jones. At any rate it never will be.

This question of maintaining the balance in golf arises also in another form. There must be, one supposes, an ideal proportion between the long game and the short. Whether better or worse, it is surely a little different to-day from what it once was. To-day it is not in the least inconceivable that a round of golf should be played in which half the strokes are putts. A fine golfer may lake his thirty-six putts, which is usually regarded as at least decently steady putting, and get round in 72. This is a very different state of things from that in the days of the old feather ball. Let us take an example from the oldest golf club in the world, Blackheath. Up till 1840 the Blackheath Course consisted of five holes and each of the five was over four hundred yards in length. In 1818 a certain Mr. Laing, a medal winner, made a bet, recorded in the Club annals, that he would ‘drive a ball five hundred feet, he having the chance of ten strokes to accomplish it.’ We know, then, that a good drive under favorable conditions — for no doubt Mr. Laing picked his wind and his ground — was between 160 and 170 yards. Those five holes were therefore all of them long holes. How long they were we can judge still better by the medal winners’ scores. Three rounds of the course were a medal round and the winning score was always well over 100, often round about 120, sometimes higher. When for the first time twenty-one holes were played in place of fifteen, the winner took 176 and one persistent gentleman returned 203. Doubtless the greens were much rougher than they are now and more putts were needed, but a medal winner, whose total score was 120, assuredly cannot have taken sixty putts on fifteen greens! Let us assume the greens were bad and he a bad putter. Let us give him forty putts, and even so he took eighty shots, twice as many, to reach the greens. The balance between the long and the short game was utterly different from that of today; those of us who are constitutionally bad putters think it was better.

It may be said that this is such antediluvian history as to be negligible. Perhaps it is rather old, but in much more modern times the long and the short game bore a rather different proportion to one another from that of to-day. Those of us who played with gutties can well remember the time when 84 or 85 was no bad score and an Open Championship could be won with a score well over 160 for two rounds. Though the greens were not so good as they are now, they were fairly good. Granted that the average number of putts taken was rather higher than at present, the number of shots spent in reaching the green was decidedly higher. There were such things as genuine three-shot holes, and the brassy was anything but atrophied.

IV

This question has lately been discussed over here, because a correspondent in the Times raised the old question of a larger golf hole, and one of his arguments in its favor was that it would restore the balance between the long and the short game. The subject is one resembling that of the giant gooseberry, which has often been the prop and stay of editors; it always produces a crop of letters. One of the most interesting and authoritative letters came from a highly distinguished Scottish lawyer, Lord Dunedin. He would not have it that the balance used to be different. Here is what he said of the larger hole’s advocate: —

‘He begins by exaggerating the old state of things when he says that the holes with the old balls took three or four to reach. Taking St. Andrews as the links where there has been the least change in the position of the holes, it was always possible to reach the longest hole in three. . . . It is true that in the old days it took, on an average, more strokes to reach the hole than it does now. But then he assumes the putting conditions were the same. They were not; they were absolutely different, owing to the roughness of the green. ... I have no hesitation in saying that twenty yards from the hole was the equivalent of forty yards now . . . so that just as in the long game it took on the average more strokes to reach home than it does now, so on the putting green it took more strokes on the average to get down. In other words the balance between the long game and the putting was precisely as it is at present.’

Lord Dunedin’s opinion is worthy of the highest respect, and he has been a member of the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers for sixty-one years. I cannot cope with so long an experience and I am sure that much of what he says is true; it is very easy to exaggerate the difficulties of the old gutty game and the powers of the modern ball. Even so, however, I do think that he puts his case too high and that putting has assumed a distinctly greater proportionate importance.

To say this is not necessarily to believe in the gospel of the larger hole. I believe that, were the hole increased, the good putter would remain good and the bad putter bad. The only thing that would change would be the length of what is vaguely called a short putt. To-day the ball is — often erroneously — deemed to be dead at two feet or so from the hole. With a larger hole it might be deemed dead at four or five or six feet, but the great body of bad putters would continue to miss putts at that paltry distance; they would continue to attribute their failures to bad luck or bad greens, and would call gods and men to witness that this wretched, niggling business of putting played too large a part in the game. That, at least, is my own conviction, but it may be quite wrong and other people who hold diametrically opposite convictions may be quite right.

The curious thing is that, at intervals, people with missions crusade wildly in words on behalf of the larger hole, but nobody — save, I believe, at one enterprising club in the State of Maine — has ever taken the simple step of trying one. Some day it will be done and then we may have a little practical knowledge to go upon. Personally I am not anxious for the trial of any tricks. Once we start tinkering with the fundamental institutions of the game, goodness knows where we shall stop. Golf may not be perfect, but it is a very good game as it is, and experimenting with it may do much more harm than good.

I quoted Sam Weller before; let me end with some words of wisdom of his father’s: ‘Vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. I rayther think it is n’t.’