The Perils of Golf

I

'“CRUMPETS is wholesome, Sir,” says the patient. “Crumpets is not wholesome, Sir,” says the doctor, wery fiercely. “But they’re so cheap,” says the patient, comin’ down a little, “and so wery fillin’ at the price.” “They’d be dear to you at any price; dear if you wos paid to eat ’em,” says the doctor. “Four crumpets a night,” he says, “vill do your business in six months! ” ’

Substitute golf for crumpets, and that passage from the immortal Pickwick summarizes very fairly the opposing views as to the healthy or the lethal qualities of the game.

Here by way of example are two extracts which I tore out of my newspaper on two successive days on my journeys to and from London.

On the first day the Evening Standard shouted, ‘Heart strained at golf,’ in reverberating capitals. ‘ Washington, Friday,’ it went on; ‘Mr. Edward B. McLean, the publisher of the Washington Post, is stated by his doctor to be seriously ill. The diagnosis is myocarditis (inflammation of the muscles of the heart) caused by overexertion on the golf links.’ Here was a pretty business at Washington, Friday. I had to play in a golf match — two rounds, hot weather, and formidable opponents — on the following day, and had serious thoughts of telegraphing that I could n’t come. However, I decided to brave it, and on the Saturday morning the Daily Mail heartened me up with this: ‘New Woman Golf Champion. Tribute to the game as Health Builder.’ There followed an account of the victory of Miss Enid Wilson in the final of our Ladies’ Golf Championship. I skipped hastily over the rows of fours and threes with which she had pulverized her adversary to find these remarkable words: ‘Her father, Dr. Wilson, told me that when she was born she weighed four pounds. In her early childhood he applied her to golf for the benefit of her physique. She now weighs more than thirteen stone and stands six feet high, a wonderful example of athletic girlhood.’

So I went happily on to my destination, lost, as I hope, a little of my own thirteen stone in two hard foursomes under a broiling sun, won them both, and came back feeling agreeably tired but, unless I am deceived, all the better for my day.

When I got home again I seemed to remember something that should come pat to my purpose as to the great Bobby Jones. Turning to Down the Fairway, I found that Bobby had begun life ‘with an oversize head and a spindling body and legs with staring knees’ and something the matter with his little inside that puzzled half a dozen doctors and prevented his eating ‘any real food’ till he was five years old. Then his father and mother began to play golf on the East Lake course; he naturally imitated them, and lived fat and happy ever afterwards.

So far, so good; and golf certainly seems to have benefited these two infant phenomenons, but that does not altogether dispose of that affair at Washington, Friday. Moreover, I have a friend in the United States who in his turn has a friend; and this friend collects news of all deaths on the links and makes the flesh of elderly golfers creep by publishing the most appalling statistics. There must be — and indeed I am sure there are — two sides to this question, and golf, if it can do good, can also impose a strain on both mind and body which is not good at all. I cannot write about it as ‘Specialist’ or ‘Harley Street Physician,’ a nom de plume which covers as a rule one who is not a doctor but a journalist, and lives not in Harley Street but in Brixton. I can only write as one who, having begun the game at nearly as early an age as Bobby Jones and being now something over fifty, still tries to play in pretty hard matches in pretty good company and finds it sometimes pretty hard work.

II

Let me take first those whom I know most about — the illustrious persons, not yet very old, whom I watch in championships. That they, especially the more highly strung of them, undergo a severe strain no one can doubt. A friend of mine, an experienced Scottish golfer, said the other day that too much was now talked and written about this question of strain. He admitted that with the increased competition and higher standard of play, the enormous crowds and the enormous number of columns in the papers, championships were more exacting than they used to be. Still he stuck to it that the older generation of players did not even in proportion suffer the torments that the modern ones are alleged to do, and that it was a pity that this aspect of the game should be overemphasized. Golf, he said, was intended to be ‘a contemplative game, like bowls.’

I imagine that bowls can be an agonizing game to those of a nervous temperament who play in serious competitions. However that may be, my friend was certainly right in saying that this question of the mental strain is emphasized to-day. Once upon a time those who reported golf — to be sure, they did not always know much about it — used to state that Mr. So-and-So missed a short putt ‘inexplicably’ or ‘unaccountably’ or ‘presumably owing to carelessness.’ Nowadays we — my ghoulish colleagues of the press and I — are more likely to say that the poor man was trembling like a leaf and palpably could not hold his club. Similarly, if in the old times Mr. So-and-So lost a match after being, let us say, four up with seven to play, he was alleged to have taken matters too lightheartedly. When he loses that match now, we trot out the old quotation as to ‘holes dropping away like snow off a dike’ and add that there is nothing so paralyzing as the dwindling of an apparently winning lead. Because the descriptive method has changed, I am not at all sure that there has been a change in the emotion underlying the events described. If to-day, when he is sixty, you talk to that great golfer, J. H. Taylor, about some of his past struggles, he will tell you, with much shaking of the head and jutting of the chin, that he suffered the tortures of the damned, nor can you doubt that he is telling the truth. There have always been agonized golfers as there have been comparatively phlegmatic ones, but the agonies used to be more decently covered up. I agree with my Scottish friend so far, that it is bad for the golfer that this side of his nature should be written of with such freedom; but, as one of those who have to do the writing, I submit that there is something to be said for us and that the psychology of golf is horribly interesting.

Let me go to Bobby Jones’s Down the Fairway again for an example. When in 1926 he won both the British and the American Open Championship he tells us that after his last round at Columbus, before he knew whether or not he had won, he ‘blew up completely.’ ‘Anyway,’ he adds, ‘I never sat down and cried before.’ Well, I defy anyone to say that is not interesting; it makes a very human champion of him.

Take also a little scene which I saw in this year’s Championship at Carnoustie; I have described it before, but will risk it again. In the last round Tommy Armour was going ‘great guns’ and had a score of two under fours for the first eleven holes, so that he had high hopes of catching Jurado. At the twelfth he hit a really wonderful second shot right on to the green and then missed a tiny putt for his four. That obviously shook him, and he played a bad tee shot to the short thirteenth and his ball was not on the green; he could not afford to lose another stroke and must get his three. He knew this so well that when he came to play his chip he simply could not play it. Up and down the line he looked with a quick turn of the head, backward and forward he waggled his club, until I thought that the stroke would never come and turned away my eyes in sheer distress. At last he conquered himself, played the shot, got his three, and went on his way rejoicing. I felt like one gloating over an execution, but I had seen the crucial moment of Armour’s championship.

All the famous players do not feel as acutely as these two that I have cited. It is impossible to imagine James Braid, for instance, breaking into a storm of tears. He once told me that he liked to feel ‘a little nervous’ before a championship started, and if he ever did feel more than that, assuredly no one can produce evidence to prove it. No one was ever more to be trusted in a close-run finish than that man of granite, but as a rule I fancy that the highly strung men are the greatest finishers if — and of course it is a big if — they can master themselves. To be a bundle of quivering nerves under control is to be capable of greater things than is the champion whom Sir Walter Simpson preferred, ‘the sallow, dull-eyed fellow with the quid in his cheek.’ But the imaginative golfer may well wear out the quicker, for he pays the heavier price. With use and wont the strain becomes the more endurable, but it can hardly be good for him. Last year at Hoy lake I was sitting writing in the room where Bobby Jones was waiting to hear whether MacDonald Smith’s great spurt had caught him or not. I thought then that it was almost time that he retired from the arena, and when some months afterward he announced that he was going to do so I was almost glad. The point had come when the game was scarcely worth the candle.

III

So much for the champions, and now for the ordinary mortals. That golf has done good to many of them is obvious enough. The praises of fresh air and exercise, of change of scene and occupation, need no singing, but there is the other side of the picture; there is the man who makes himself so miserable over the game that at the end of a golfing holiday he ought to begin another holiday both from golf and from work.

I venture to speak with some little experience, for I believe I have — more shame to me — made myself as unhappy over golf as most men. I can truthfully say, as did the little boy who made himself sick with smoking, ‘Yes, but I like the feeling.’ At the same time, if I had to get myself, in order to save my life, into a state of the greatest possible fitness, I would not play golf; I would do something more bovine that would not make me so often angry and desperate, even though it brought no compensating ecstasies. Some people can more skillfully divide their lives into compartments. There was a man of my acquaintance, of great ability, and one of the sanest, calmest, most sweet-tempered of mortals in every department of life save one: as soon as he began to play golf, or any other game, he suffered from the belief that of all men in the world he had been chosen by Fortune as a butt for her arrows. He was almost entirely miserable while he played, but as soon as he finished he ceased to repine until the next time, and did not chew the cud of his bad, or rather his unlucky, strokes. It may be supposed, therefore, that his golf did him good, but he was surely an exception.

Another comes to mind who had a natural genius for games, and, after playing golf a little more than a year, attained the proud handicap of scratch. The standard of handicapping was less exigent in those days, but this was an astonishing achievement. Within another year he had achieved something greater still, for he found that golf so chafed and exasperated him that he gave it up and contented himself with purely domestic archery and croquet. Once or twice afterward at long intervals he played a game of golf and came to no hurt, but he resolutely refused ever to let the dreadful game get hold of him again.

Against such a story as this there are no doubt thousands of others to be set. Great men of affairs are constantly telling the newspapers that they find in golf the perfect relaxation, because while they are at it they think only of the game. In that case, presumably golf is much better for them than the taking of a walk, because on a walk all the troubles of the world would still be running through their heads like a mill race. Presumably also they do not take their golf too solemnly, so that no ghosts of peccant elbows haunt them at night or distract them from their serious labors. They really do what so many of us pretend we do, and play the game ‘for fun.’ O fortunatos nimium!

Apart from the question of mental anguish, golf is at once a very tiring and a very untiring game. It is untiring in the sense that we walk a number of miles that we would not always face without a club in our hands, that we take in addition a good deal of exercise in the matter of hitting and yet are tolerably fresh at the end of it. It is tiring, as it seems to me, in the sense that it goes rather too slow ly. In hot weather, at any rate, we undergo a process of slow grilling which is, or at least seems, more prostrating than violent exertion at, let us say, lawn tennis.

American readers who habitually play in hot weather may not agree, but we in England are very limp golfers as soon as the sun really begins to blaze; we are apt to grow scandalously lazy on the gorgeous days, if we ever get them, of June and July and August, and postpone our rounds till the cool of the evening after tea. We have put away our ancient prejudices against coatlessness and play as lightly clad as need be, but we are still rather frightened of the sunshine. Some of us, at any rate, almost prefer mittens and frost to shirt sleeves and apoplexy.

Despite what the statisticians may say, I have only known personally one golfer who died of apoplexy. He was a fat, cheerful, hearty old fellow — an admirable subject — whom a party of us met ages ago at a tournament in Wales. To one of us he confided that he did not think much of the course, which was flat and insipid; on his course, where he had been bred, there were sand hills so towering and noble that he always took a tee ‘as high as this,’ and he indicated the generous glass of whiskey and soda at his elbow.

The rest did not believe this story; so we who had heard it indignantly undertook to make the old gentleman say it again. We duly conspired, we ordered him a handsome drink, we brought the conversation round to sand hills, and he did say it again, correct to the letter. He must have been a little surprised at the torrent of laughter, but he was radiant and jovial and suspected nothing. I never saw him again, but I remembered his name, and years afterward I read in the newspaper that on that very course of mighty hills he had fallen down dead ‘ from excitement at a golf match’ — a happy ending of which, after all, no one need be afraid.

IV

For my part, if such a fate ever overtakes me, I fancy it will not be in some terrific moment in a match, but rather after exhausting hours of practising. Practice is not only very good for our golf; it is a joy in itself, but it can be extraordinarily tiring. Let anybody try to bang balls into a net for twenty minutes and he will find his hands in blisters and his mind and body in a state of collapse. That is altogether too exhausting; moreover, it always seems to me that one should practise with no human eye to overlook one’s antics and experiments; even the presence of a caddie to retrieve the balls is for me the rose leaf that keeps the princess from her sleep. But in that case one must walk after the balls between shots and must search for them in the rough, and looking for golf balls is surely one of the most infuriating and prostrating of all human activities.

I have one friend — nearer seventy than sixty, as I suppose — who has a pious and peculiar way of spending his Sunday afternoons. He sets out on his lawn fifty ‘peg’ tees in a row and perches upon them fifty balls. Then he stations in the field beyond the railings four small boys from the village as retrievers, and sets to work at the beginning of the row of balls and goes right through them with the rapidity of a machine gun. He wastes no time in waggling, but just lashes the ball away, occasionally altering his stance and direction according as he thinks that one small boy is overworked and another is being starved. When all the balls have been hit, they are brought back by the largest boy, who acts as sergeant major, and they are teed and hit off again. Sometimes he will even go down the line a third time before the boys are recalled and brought into the house, where on four plates in the hall there are set out for them four sixpences and four slices of plum cake. I am not sure whether this is good for his golf; it appears to be good for him, but then he is a remarkable person in other walks of life. For myself I had to stop and rest, enduring his contempt as best I might, after hitting a paltry twenty-five or so.

If I had the temerity to advise the middle-aged and elderly golfer, I would suggest to him that he make a habit of playing foursomes, and by that I mean foursomes proper, with but two balls a side and alternate strokes. I know that the American golfer is possessed of so fiendish an energy that he seldom if ever plays this game. Yet I venture to think that, as he grows older, he would find it good for both soul and body and a delightful game into the bargain, which has in it more of the spirit of partnership than any other. On purely physical grounds it is obviously less tiring than the single or the four-ball match. There are but half as many shots to play, and then think of the short cuts and the saving of the legs! There are those who carry this leg-saving to a fine art and declare that they propose to drive at the odd holes or the even, according as there are fewer long walks to the teeing grounds.

Let my elderly reader by all means hit his own ball in the morning, but for the second round, after lunch or after tea, do let him try a foursome. If he will do that I will undertake not to resent his calling it a ‘Scotch foursome.’ I am sure he will enjoy it as much as did a charming old Scotsman who once wrote a manual on golf. He was a foursome player and rejoiced in his match with three ‘oldsters,’ as he called them, ‘the quotidian round enlivened with varied conversation.’ Listen to his parting benediction: ‘Thou gentle sprite! whose Empire is the dark green links, and whose votaries wield the bending club and speed the whizzing ball, art as dear to us now in the sere and yellow leaf as when first we flew to share in thy health-inspiring rites with the flush and ardor of boyhood.’

I am sure he lived to a hundred, and no gloomy statisticians could make any capital out of him.