Fifty Years of Golf Part 10

CHAPTER x.x.x

AN HISTORIC MATCH AND AN HISTORIC TYPE

w.i.l.l.y Park, always a man of some practical ingenuity, as well as a magnificent golfer, had lately invented and patented a peculiar type of putter. He had also invented, by way of an advertis.e.m.e.nt of this crooked-necked club of his, the dictum that "the man who can putt is a match for anybody."

Now Park, besides his other fine qualities, was a very gallant golfer.

It had been his way for some years, as soon as some man--be it Douglas Rolland, or any other--had come to the top of the golfing tree, so that everybody was talking about him and saying what a fine fellow he was, to challenge this fine top bird of the roost, and back his challenge with a 50 or 100 stake. There may have been a tinge of advertis.e.m.e.nt about it, for Park was a good man of business and the first of the professionals to realize what money there was in establis.h.i.+ng golf shops, but chiefly, I think, he played these matches for the pure sport of the thing.

So now, Harry Vardon, being beyond dispute, at the tree top, Park must issue a challenge to play him for a money stake, a home and home match, two rounds at North Berwick and two at Ganton. Now you have to realize that in those days Harry Vardon was so great a man, there was so much keenness to see him play, that when he went out the gallery followed him, they watched his every stroke, and they paid no more attention than if he had no existence at all to the poor wretch who chanced to be partnered with him. They would trample on this unfortunate creature's ball without the slightest remorse: he was rather lucky if he were not thrown down and trampled to death himself by the throng.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Amateur Side at Sandwich in 1894.

Standing (from left to right): A. Stuart, S. Mure Fergusson, John Ball, F.G. Tait. Sitting: H.G. Hutchinson, Charles Hutchings, A.D. Blyth, H.H.

Hilton.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Professional Side at Sandwich in 1894.

Standing (from left to right): Willie Park, A. Simpson, A. Kirkcaldy, W.

Auchterlonie. Sitting: J.H. Taylor, A. Herd, D. Rolland, W. Fernie.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Fiery"--Willie Park's Caddie.]

w.i.l.l.y Park was a shrewd Scot. He was not going to have any of this nonsense when "the man who could putt" set out to prove, for money, that he was a match for anyone, even for Harry Vardon at his best. The match opened, therefore, at its very second shot, on the note of comedy. Park had gone a little further off the tee than Harry Vardon, toward the bunker guarding Point Garry Hill. That meant that Harry Vardon had to play first, and after his play of the second shot the gallery made a start to dash in, in their accustomed manner, quite regardless of the other partner to the match. Park proceeded to teach them their lesson at the outset. He did not hurry, like a guilty thing, to play his shot, as most of the others who played with Vardon used to do: instead, he left his ball altogether, with "Fiery," his faithful caddie, standing guard over it. The people crowded forward as far as Fiery, but they were not at all likely to go beyond him, most faithful henchman, and rather truculent watch-dog, with round Scotch bonnet and streamers floating behind, the clubs loose held, out of the bag, beneath his arm--I rather think he would have called it his "oxter"--because he had for years carried clubs before bags came into use, and the fine smoothness and polish of the club handles was apt to be spoilt by dragging them in and out of the bag. I never heard nor cared what other name he had than Fiery, of which the propriety was written in flaming colours on his face. So he stood, facing and keeping back the crowd from the ball--a subject not unworthy of an historical picture and by no means to be disregarded as a point in the golfing story of the last fifty years, because he was a type, and nearly the last, of the old Scottish caddies, and because this match was among the last of those of the old style.

Park's school was really a generation behind that to which belonged the modern triumvirate.

So Park walked on, having left his ball; he walked on to the foot of Point Garry Hill; then he ascended it, with great leisure, quite regardless that the people raged together, and he looked at the flag, which he did not in the least desire to see. All he did desire was to teach the gallery their lesson, that he, Park, meant to count for something in this match, that Harry Vardon was not the only player; and when he had thus taught the lesson, which it were better that the people should learn first than last, he came back leisurely to his ball again and played it.

They took their lesson well--a Scottish crowd is not slow at the up-take and has its sense of humour. Moreover, Park was their man, being a Scot.

They liked to see him taking himself seriously, and they did not crowd on him inconveniently again.

And it was a most amusing match to watch, though just a little pathetic too. w.i.l.l.y Park was most emphatically "the man who could putt." He told me that he had been practising putting for that match to the tune of from six to eight hours a day. It sounds terribly dull work; but certainly Park was rewarded for it, for I never saw such putting, day in and day out, as he was doing about the time of that match. And in the match he putted extraordinarily. I speak only of the first portion, at North Berwick. I did not see the latter end of it at Ganton; but I think the result, if there ever could be, from the start, a moment's doubt about it, was virtually all settled on the first thirty-six holes. Park putted extraordinarily, but he still had to prove his dictum that the man who could putt was a match for anybody. Vardon as surely could not putt; but then he played all the rest of the game to a beautiful perfection, whereas poor Park could not drive. He developed, at its worst, that tendency to hook his drives which has always been a danger to him. He arrived on the greens one stroke, or even two, behind Vardon.

But then he put the putt in, whereas Vardon often neglected the simple precaution of laying it dead. So it went on, Park saving himself again and again by this marvellous putting, and at last, after he had holed one of fifteen yards right across the green, a crusty old Scot in the gallery was heard grumbling to himself in his beard: "The on'y raisonable putt I've seen the day." What he had come out expecting, an all-knowing Providence alone can say.

But the strain of those repeated saves of holes apparently lost was too severe to last. Vardon put a useful balance of holes to his credit even at North Berwick. The final half of the match was to be played on his own course of Ganton. There was only one possible conclusion to it. At the end of the North Berwick contest I suggested to Park that he would have to re-edit his dictum so that it should run "the man who can putt is a match for anybody--except Harry Vardon," and he confessed, with a melancholy grin, that he believed he would have to accept that emendation.

With the disappearance of the old Scottish caddie, of whom Fiery might very well stand for the prototype, there pa.s.sed much of the old order of golf, making way for the new. These old caddies themselves counted for very much more in the play of the game than our modern club-carriers, who are usually beasts of burden (and little beasts at that, just pa.s.sed out of their Board School standards) and nothing more. They know the names of the clubs, so as to give you what you ask for, and that is about as much as is expected of them. Sometimes they take a keen interest, and identify themselves with their master's interests; but such fidelity and keenness are rather exceptional. The ancient caddie was a grown man: he was not, perhaps, an ensample of all the virtues, and if he turned up on a Monday morning without a certain redness of the nose and possibly a blackness of the eye, indicating a rather stormy Sat.u.r.day night, of which the intervening day of rest had not wholly removed the damages, you might admire and be thankful.

But his zeal for your matches was unfailing. He made it a point of honour to do all that the law allowed him, and all that it did not allow him, so long as he was not found out, to aid and abet your inefficiency.

He expected that you should consult him about the club that you should take, about the line on which you should play and about the gradients of a putt. He was a profound student of human nature, discovered the weaknesses of your opponent and urged you by counsel and example to take advantage of them. In my early days at St. Andrews, when I was playing a match with David Lamb, I was surprised, and more than a little shocked, by the counsel that one of these sapient caddies gave me: "Let us walk oot pretty smartly after the ba', sir. Mr. Lamb canna' bear to be hurried." That was the proposal--that just because Mr. Lamb had a dislike to playing in a hurry, we should hasten on after the ball so as to induce him, by the power of suggestion, to hurry also, and so put him off his game. Needless to say, as soon as my innocence had succeeded in comprehending the inward meaning of the counsel, I repudiated it with scorn and rebuked the caddie bitterly for suggesting it; and, equally needless to say, he thought me both a thankless person and a very particular species of Sa.s.senach fool for so rejecting it. I have often thought that had Bret Harte known the old Scottish caddie he would not have needed to go to the Orient and to the Yellow Race for the type of mind that he has sketched in his _Heathen Chinee_. Nevertheless there was very much that was attractive and likeable in these henchmen of a fervid loyalty and few moral attributes besides, and their extermination, with that of other strange _ferae naturae_, is to be regretted.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

THE INTERNATIONAL MATCH

Certainly the Royal Liverpool Club has deserved well of the golfing community. It started the amateur champions.h.i.+p, and in 1891 or 1892 the idea occurred to some enterprising genius at Hoylake of the International Match. What though interest rather waned in it, and it has been abandoned now, during the years that it was played it was an interest to many, both of those who played in it and of those who merely looked on. They called me into their counsels and we roughed out some such scheme as was ultimately adopted. There was much talk as to whether it were better to score by match only, or by aggregate of holes won and lost only, or by a combination of the two. I favoured the combination, but lost, and "matches only" has always been the scoring adopted.

It is not to be denied that we of England received a very grievous shock when we learned that Jack Graham was not going to play on our side, but intended to throw in his golfing lot with Scotland, the country of his origin. Of course he had a perfect right to do so. He is a Scot,[7] I believe on both sides, but then the idea had been, in the inst.i.tution of this match, trial of the golf learnt in England against the golf of Scotland, and if Jack Graham himself was pure Scot, his golf was pure Sa.s.senach, every stroke of it learnt on that Hoylake where he lived. It is not too much to say that that decision of Jack Graham upset the balance of forces very materially, for this match was always (save for one occasion) played before the amateur champions.h.i.+p tournament, and Jack was, and is, a terrible player in the early stages of any meeting.

It is apparently his const.i.tutional misfortune that he is not able to last through a long sustained trial. Twice certainly, and I think three times, I have taken one of the bronze medals of the champions.h.i.+p while he has had the other: that is to say, that both of us have survived to the semi-final heat. But further than that, Jack has never been able to last, and has been beaten at that point by men to whom he could give three strokes comfortably in ordinary circ.u.mstances and in the earlier stages of the tournament. He has been a terrible disappointment to us all, in this way, for a more brilliant amateur golfer never played. It is his health that has knocked him out every time--a lack of robust nerves.

This going over of Jack Graham to the enemy, as we regarded it, introduced another small trouble into the International Match. It was always said (with what basis of fact I hardly know) that it would cause too much "feeling" in Hoylake if he were pitted against either Johnny Ball or Harold Hilton in this match. So the sides had to be so arranged that this terrible thing should not happen--it was all rather farcical.

As it was, I had to play Jack Graham in the first International Match, which was at Hoylake, and took a sound beating from him. That first fight was the occasion of a battle royal between Johnny Ball and Bobby Maxwell, the former only winning, though it was on his own green, by a single hole on the thirty-six. During these years Bobby was rather regarded as the champion of the Scottish amateurs, and the International Match would be notable, if for nothing else, for the Homeric contests between these two. The most fantastic of them happened in the year when exceptionally, as I have noted above, the match was played before, not after, the amateur champions.h.i.+p. It was at Muirfield, in 1903, when I got into the final, only to be beaten handsomely there by Bobby Maxwell.

We played the International Match the next day, and I had to fight Fred Mackenzie, who afterwards went as a professional to America and is now at home again and playing very good golf at St. Andrews. He did not play very good golf that day, however, though it was good enough to beat me; for I found myself not tired exactly, but utterly indifferent, after all the strain of the champions.h.i.+p, which I had had to endure up to the final round, and could not tune myself up to concert pitch at all. But on Bobby it was very clear that the strain had not told in anything like the same way. He played extraordinarily. I do not believe that Johnny Ball played badly at all, yet he was beaten, I think, by more holes than any other man ever has lost in the International Match. Whenever he did a hole in a stroke over the right number, Bobby Maxwell did it in the right number; and whenever Johnny did it in the right number, Bobby performed a miracle and did it in one less.

One of the most amusing matches I ever did play was with Gordon Simpson, a few years later, in the International when again it was at Muirfield.

On the first round I was four up at the fourteenth hole; and then I let him win all the last four holes, so that we came in to luncheon all even. Then, in the next round, he was four up at the fourteenth, and, exactly as I had done in the morning, so he, in the afternoon, let me win all the last four holes. He got a good three at the thirty-seventh--the hole was in a very "kittle" place and the green was mighty keen, so that the three was hard to get--and so won the match.

But in the course of that match I did a thing that I never have done before or since. He laid me a stimy, with his ball so near the hole that the only chance was to pitch my own ball right into the hole. By a bit of good luck I did it, but by a bit of unconscionable bad luck, the ball, after rattling about against the tin inside, came out again and stood on the lip of the hole. As the match was played, it just made the difference; but even had I won, it would not have made the difference in the whole team match. Scotland, as usual, were too good for us and had a match to spare.

I had played Gordon Simpson once, many years before, in the amateur champions.h.i.+p, when he was a student at St. Andrews' University, and the circ.u.mstances had been amusing. He was the champion of the University, and when we set forth from the first tee we were accompanied by a gallery which appeared to me as if it must include all the youth of that venerable seat of learning. They behaved wonderfully well, with a great deal of sportsmanlike consideration for my feelings, but at the same time were naturally so dead keen on their own man that they would have been something more than human, or older than undergraduates, had they been able to refrain from a little baring back of the teeth, and just the murmur of a growl, when I happened to hole a good putt.

Unfortunately things went rather badly for their hero at the start. I contrived to get a lead of some four holes on him, and hung on to them till the match was finished. Of course I did my best to win, but I never in my life won a match which gave me less satisfaction. It was so hard on the University champion, surrounded by all his best friends. However, he had his revenge, as said, at Muirfield. But as for this stimy loft, into the hole and out again, it is quite sure that there was something not just right about the tins in use in the Muirfield holes at that time, for it happened to Bernard Darwin to play precisely the same stroke with precisely the same result in the champions.h.i.+p. The fact is that if the flooring of the tin is set at a certain angle this chucking out again of a ball lofted in becomes a dynamical certainty. The makers of the tins ought to see to it that the floor is not set at this angle.

If it is set nearly horizontal the thing does not happen, and it is when set too vertically that it is almost bound to occur. But, except for this case of my own ball and that of Bernard Darwin's, I have never heard of another instance of the kind, though probably golfing history can furnish many.

The last occasion, before its death of inanition, on which the International Match was played, it was played in foursomes. I do not think that was an experiment likely to prolong its life. With all respect in the world for the foursome as a very pleasant pastime, I cannot believe in it as anything like the test of golf that a single provides. To me it is an infinitely more easy form of the game, though I am well aware there are good judges and good players who think otherwise. I can only say that for my own part it has always been easier for me to play well in a foursome than in a single. It is not, I believe, the common experience.

I am inclined to think it is a pity that the International Match is dead. There are many who would like it revived. It gave useful practice to the young players coming on, who thus had a chance, apart from the champions.h.i.+p, of showing what they could do in good company. That was its value, more than as a spectacle of the two countries set in array against each other. Scotland nearly always had the better of us. For one thing they have always seemed to lunch more wisely or more well than we of England. Perhaps their digestion is more powerful. At all events it has happened again and again that we have been leading finely at luncheon, only to be beaten decisively in the end. But if we had had Jack Graham on our side even this lack of the gastric juices would not, I think, have turned the day so often against us.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: Alas, if writing to-day, in 1919, it is in the past tense that this and some following pa.s.sages would need to be phrased. He was gallant in volunteering, joined a Scottish regiment, and met a soldier's death.]

CHAPTER x.x.xII

HOW MR. JUSTICE BUCKLEY KEPT HIS EYE ON THE HASKELL BALL

One night I was going North by one of the sleeping trains and, having business late in the afternoon in Holborn, did not return to the civilized parts of the town, but dined at the Inns of Court Hotel. There are little tables for two, and at mine was dining also a man with whom I got into conversation. He told me he came from Glasgow and was in town on a business which he dared say I should think a very curious one--a big lawsuit pending about such a small matter as a ball used in the playing of the game of golf. Did I play golf? I said, "A little." I also said that in all the history of coincidences this was just about the most singular, for that I, too, had been engaged as a witness in the very same case. It was the case that the manufacturers of the Haskell ball were bringing against the manufacturers of the Kite ball. The point was to prove the Haskell patent good for their protection in a monopoly of making rubber-cored b.a.l.l.s. The Haskell people had asked me to give evidence, because I was the first man to play with these b.a.l.l.s in England, and because I considered them, and _pace_ the law, still consider them, an absolutely new departure in golf-ball manufacture.

It would be ungrateful not to think that providence designed this meeting at the Inns of Court Hotel, for my new friend was able to tell me what the right fee was for me to charge as an expert witness. He told me that that was what I was--an expert witness. I did not know it before, although I knew, without his telling me, the ancient divisions of the species "liar," into "liar," "d----d liar," and "expert witness." I was prepared to play my part, especially when I heard, with pleased surprise, the large fees paid for witnesses of this expert and unimpeachable character.

So, in due course of time, I was summoned up to London to attend the trial. I suppose other trials are sometimes as humorous, but I could not have believed it possible that there could be such good entertainment as I found in that Court, where I sat with much enjoyment calculating, between the acts, the sum to which my expert witness fees were mounting up as I waited. The Judge, Mr. Justice Buckley, if I remember right, was not a golfer; yet the way in which he kept his eye on the ball during the three days or so of that trial was above all praise. And the ball took a deal of keeping of the eye on itself, for there were many b.a.l.l.s of different sorts brought into Court, and they were constantly running off the judge's desk, and tumbling and jumping about in the body of the Court, where learned gentlemen knocked their wigs together as they bent down to search for them. There was an old lady who said she had made b.a.l.l.s which were practically identical with these Haskells all her life--b.a.l.l.s for boys to play with. So she was commanded to go away and to come back with all her apparatus and to show in Court how the b.a.l.l.s were made. She returned, and it appeared that, after some winding of thread about a core, the next proceeding was to dip the b.a.l.l.s into a molten solution of some boiling stuff which smelt abominably. She cooked this up in Court, and the whole business was very suggestive of the making of the h.e.l.l-broth of the witches in "Macbeth," only that perhaps the Court of Law did not give a striking representation of the "blasted heath." The b.a.l.l.s were apt to escape from the old lady when they were half cooked and to go running about the Court where the barristers, retrieving them, got their fingers into the most awfully sticky state and their wigs seemed to be the appropriate places on which to rub the stickiness off.

Willie Fernie was there, enjoying himself hugely too. He, it seems, had long ago made a ball resembling the Haskell. There, too, was Commander Stewart, whom I had known in the early eighties at St. Andrews. He was the maker of the "Stewart patent" b.a.l.l.s, which had a vogue for a time, though they had not the least resemblance to the Haskell b.a.l.l.s. They were of some composition, quite solid, and with iron filings in them.

Nevertheless, Commander Stewart, as it appeared, had made a ball similar to the Haskell, though it could not have been the one known as his patent. All these were testimony to what the lawyers call "previous user."

Then an old gentleman was called who said that he had played at ball as a boy with another old gentleman whose name he gave, with a ball similar in all its essentials to the Haskell golf ball. The other old gentleman was called then, and he was asked whether his memory corroborated this, and whether it was in essentials the same ball. To which he answered, to the delight of the Court, that it was not the same ball at all. "What then," asked the Counsel, in a profoundly shocked voice, "do you mean to say that you think your old friend is a liar?" "No," he replied quite readily, "I don't think so, I know it." I looked out to see these two old friends going out of Court, to discover whether they were quite as good friends as they had been before, but I could not see them.

I do not remember much about my own testimony. I think what I said was true, but I am nearly sure that it was quite unimportant. The present Lord Moulton, I remember, examined, or cross-examined me, but he did not turn me inside out very badly, and I believe I left the Court "without a stain on my character," according to the stereotyped phrase. At all events the conclusion of the whole matter was that we lost our case very handsomely. The Judge, considering the evidence of the old lady, of Commander Stewart, of Willie Fernie and so on, said that he thought there were sufficient witnesses to "previous user," and no doubt "Messrs. Hutchison, Maine and Co."--I think this was the name of the firm opposing us--fought a good fight in the best interests of the golfer, for it would have been a bad job for us all if there had been a monopoly in the hands of one firm of the manufacture of the rubber-cored b.a.l.l.s. They put the prices up against us fairly high as it was, without that. Had there been a monopoly of manufacture we might now be paying five s.h.i.+llings each perhaps, instead of half-a-crown, for the b.a.l.l.s--a very solemn thought. They carried this case to the Court of Appeal, but that Court only confirmed the finding of the Court below, and thereto added this further comment, that whether there were "previous users" or no, they did not think that the invention in itself had sufficient novelty for the patent to be good. So that "put the lid on," to use homely phrase.