The Happy Golfer Part 5

Ouimet 5 4 4 4 5 4 4 3 5--38 Vardon 5 4 4 4 5 3 4 4 5--38 Ray 5 4 5 4 5 4 3 3 5--38

SECOND HALF

Ouimet 3 4 4 4 5 4 3 3 4--34--72 Vardon 4 4 5 3 5 4 3 5 6--39--77 Ray 4 4 5 4 5 6 4 5 3--40--78

Mr. Ouimet's score exactly equalled that of the better ball of Vardon and Ray.

I shall say no more about what happened immediately afterwards than that the American crowd gave a hearty demonstration of the fact that they were very pleased indeed. A considerable sum of money was raised by a collection for Mr. Ouimet's little caddie, Eddie Lowry, who was a wonder of a mite and inspired the new champion throughout the week with all sorts of advice. He would tell him in the mornings to take time over his putts as it was then only ten o'clock and he had until six at night to play; would remind him again at a suitable moment that America was expecting great things from him, and, above all, whispered gently to him on handing him his club for each shot that he must be careful to keep his eye on the ball! It is declared, moreover, that at the beginning of the tie round he a.s.sured his master that a 72 would that time be forthcoming. Little Eddie Lowry had his share of glory.

And now what about it all? How is it to be explained? Vardon and Ray generously and properly admitted they were beaten fairly and squarely on their merits. They could not say otherwise. I believe that Vardon came to the conclusion at the end of his American tour that he played worse golf at that champions.h.i.+p than anywhere else, but on that final day on which everything depended he did not play so badly as he may have thought, and his putting was better than usual. I would not like to guarantee either Englishman to do much better in the same conditions at any time. On the other hand, Mr. Ouimet was blessed with no special luck, except that negative kind of luck that kept his ball out of trouble always, and made two putts invariably sufficient. His driving was as long as Vardon's, and he was the straightest of all, while he missed some putts by half-inches. He played a bold game too, and the only semblance of timidity was in occasionally being a trifle short with long putts, while Vardon and Ray, desperate, but in proper principle, were giving the hole every chance and often running past it. Mr. Ouimet seemed to general his own game so thoroughly well. Talking to me afterwards, he explained completely his policy at every shot in the match, and showed himself to be a thinker of the finest strain. He was all for running approaches instead of pitched ones that day, because he feared the ball embedding itself in the soft turf, and also felt that when running it would be more likely to shed dirt that it picked up and leave him a clean putt. Everything was considered and well decided, and in his argument one could find no flaw. And he insisted that he just played his own game and never watched the other b.a.l.l.s. "Looking back on it all," said he, "I think it was just this way, that Vardon and Ray rather expected me to crack, not having the experience for things like this as they had, and when the time went on and I did not crack but went along with them, I think it had an unfavourable effect on them. That is the way I reason it out, because when you expect a man to crack and he doesn't, you lose a little of your sureness yourself. I began to feel that the champions.h.i.+p was coming to me when we were about the fourteenth hole, for Ray then seemed to be going, and he was swinging rather wildly at the ball." I think that Mr. Ouimet's explanation was tolerably near the truth. Some of the secret history of this champions.h.i.+p may never be written, but I know that Harry Vardon realised when it was too late that he had been paying insufficient attention to what Mr. Ouimet was doing, and what the possibilities were in that direction. At the beginning he felt that the real contest lay between him and Ray, never dreaming that Mr. Ouimet could hold out against them. Therefore he concentrated on Ray, as it were, and when he had Ray beaten he realised too late that there was some one else. It may have made no difference, but a thousand times have we had demonstrated to us the capacity of our champions for playing "a little bit extra" when it is really needed. Anyhow it was Vardon's own mistake, if it was one, and he is very sorry for it.

A consideration of great importance is the way in which this victory was confirmed, as it were, by the other events of the week. It does not generally happen that the men who distinguish themselves in preliminary qualifying compet.i.tions go through winners of champions.h.i.+ps afterwards.

Men can rarely play their best for six rounds in succession, and, the law of averages being at work all the time, they would rather perform indifferently in the first test, so long as they qualify, than beat all the others. I do not recall a case where the champion would have been champion if all six rounds had been counted in, instead of the four of the compet.i.tion proper. But this time at Brookline we had seven rounds played, and the astonis.h.i.+ng fact is that, if all seven rounds were counted in, Mr. Ouimet would still be at the top with a score of 528 against Ray's 530 and Vardon's 532. I think that this is a point which has not been much realised, and it is one of importance in dealing with the idea that a fluke victory was achieved. You can hardly have a fluke victory in four stroke rounds; much less can you have one in seven. Now I would suggest that if Vardon and Ray had dropped behind in the scoring, and had occupied other places than they did in the final aggregates, there might have been some good support for the fluke theory. Their defeat by several people would have needed far more explanation, because it would have been clear that, for some reason, they were beaten by golfers inferior to themselves. Conditions and climate would have become considerations of greater importance. But merely the fact that these men finished second and third in such a big field indicates that there was little fluke anywhere, for this was a marvellous vindication of form in compet.i.tion, in a game where form is so much affected by fortune. And, finally, the fact that Mr. Ouimet beat these men in the play-off when he had them both there in sight, playing stroke against stroke with him, and not an invisible field without any definite menace as in the previous play, was quite enough to stamp him as the most thoroughly deserving champion of that week. British golfing pride will force the suggestion to many minds that such a thing, proper as it was on this occasion, could never happen again; that if the champions.h.i.+p were replayed in the same conditions Mr. Ouimet would be beaten. But of how many champions could it be said that if they had to play the event over again a week or a month later, the luck of the game being what it is, they would repeat their triumph? Reflecting once more that this was but a boy of twenty, and the real greatness of our players being what it is, I am more amazed than ever at what has happened. It was an American victory and America takes the credit, but, again, the United States are by no means full of Ouimets. I look upon him as a first-cla.s.s prodigy, such as the game has never known before, produced in the country where such a golfing prodigy was most likely to make his appearance. He accomplished what had never been done before, and what I feel sure will never be done again, and because it was such an historic happening, and there were so few from England there to see it as I did, I have told the tale in full. n.o.body believes that Mr. Ouimet is as great as Harry Vardon and Edward Ray. He could not be. But also I do not think that any one else could do what he did at Brookline on that occasion. I found, a long time after the occurrence, that many wise American golfers, reflecting dispa.s.sionately if still proudly upon it, gave a certain satisfaction to their reason by suggesting as a final explanation that a miracle had happened. That is a good way out of our difficulties, and for my own part I accept it, for it is the only explanation that will stand all tests. A miracle happened at Brookline on that Twentieth of September.

CHAPTER VI

THE BEGINNINGS OF GOLF IN THE UNITED STATES, AND EXPERIENCES IN TRAVELLING THERE, WITH AN EXAMPLE OF AMERICAN CLUB MANAGEMENT.

There is little done to solve the mysteries of golf's beginning by pressing into the farthest recesses of American golfing history. Only by such little twinklings in the darkness of the almost prehistoric period of the game do we begin more to suspect that, being such a natural and simple thing, an almost inevitable kind of pastime despite its man-made intricacies and laws, and all its heartenings and maddenings, it came up of itself in different places, when man had reached full intelligence and the desire to play properly other games than such as bowls. Those Indian braves who wandered and hunted and fought over that magnificent land when in its virgin state must have tried to knock something like a ball, or a stone, in the direction of a particular mark, and that would be a game for them. I remember hearing that several years ago a visitor to one of the reservations found several of the red men playing golf of a kind, with real clubs and b.a.l.l.s. "Purple Cloud" was the champion of the braves. Then in the autumn of 1903 another white wanderer looked in upon the Indians in the reservation at Montana and reported that he had witnessed a very spirited game. Golf, said he, is much better suited to the Indian of to-day than his old game of lacrosse. He noticed very few subtleties in the game. When the champion, "Spotted Horse," drove off, there was a long stretch of clear prairie, with only here and there a shrub, so that the game resolved itself into a chase of the ball for a couple of miles and a return, the one who did it in the fewest strokes being the winner. He saw some really capital drives, several well over three hundred yards, he thought. The only thing that was very new and characteristic about these red men's golf, so far as he could see, was that the spectators "made a most infernal row all the time that the play was in progress." When a brave took his stance for a tee shot, it was looked upon as the signal for a perfect bedlam of yells and howling, which should have disconcerted the player but did not do so. And with my own eyes have I seen the modern Indians playing for the American champions.h.i.+p, and it might be claimed that though laws be made at St.

Andrews, and interpretations thereof in the council chamber of the white men at New York, this after all, in essentials, is a game that is native of the soil. Yet the history of such a game down the Indian line must be hazy as the history of the braves themselves, and we must leave it now with this ample recognition.

But though in names and other matters there is a Scottish flavour in some of the records of the earliest American golf, and when it became a real and growing thing it was obviously imported, one is sometimes inclined to think that the Simpsonian theory of the spontaneous generation of golf, or what approximated in essentials to golf, must have applied to America as to other countries. A stick, a ball, a mark, and there is the principle of golf fully indicated.

In a primitive way also it was played in America in the seventeenth century, and, as in the homeland, some of the earliest references to it that remain take the form of warnings of the punishments accruing to players who departed from such severe restrictions as were imposed. It was not proclaimed what advantages would be yielded men who played, as is done to-day, but what grievous penalties they should suffer if they played it when and where they should not, and alas! the times and places that were forbidden appeared to be many in proportion to those when the game might be enjoyed by those who liked it. Then as now, and in America as in happy England, those who were not of golf were against it, and bitterly. There were jealousies then as ever since. There were those often-quoted Laws and Ordinances of the New Netherlands of 1659 in which, because of a complaint by the burghers of Fort Orange and the village of Berwyck about the damage done to their windows and the danger to which they were exposed of being wounded by persons who played golf along the streets, the golfers were threatened of consequences to come.

Then clearly the game was played in South Carolina in 1788, for at that time an advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared in a local newspaper thus: "Anniversary of the South Carolina Golf Club will be held at Williams's Coffee House on Thursday, 29th instant, when members are requested to attend at 2 o'clock precisely, that the business of the Club may be transacted before dinner." Here there is a clear indication of the close connection maintained between the playing of the game and the social ceremonies about the dinner-table that were held by the golfers on the same day in the way that was practised by the early golfers of the Scottish centres and of Blackheath. For many years afterwards these meetings of the South Carolina Golf Club were held at the club-house on what was known as "Harton's Green," which is now in the heart of Charleston. Perhaps this was the first golf club-house in America, and if that were so it shared the fate of pioneer establishments in many other places where towns have widened and gathered in the outlying lands. There is also preserved in the archives the form of invitation that was sent to Miss Eliza Johnston to attend the ball of the Savannah Golf Club at the Exchange hall in that city in December 1811. And then American golf seems to have lapsed and slept like Van Winkle in the Catskills until the time of the great regeneration came near the end of last century. One does not come now to make a history of American golf, but only to indicate that new and republican America also has something in the way of golf traditions.

The real beginning of American golf was made, as you may know, out at Yonkers up the Hudson, and Mr. John Reid, the elder, is rightly regarded as the father of American golf. Such recognition being of long standing and his claims being incontestable, he was again publicly and officially proclaimed as such at the silver jubilee celebration that was held in New York on November 19, 1913. That was twenty-five years from the time when the game was really set going in the States. One night I sat over a log fire in a club-house in Ma.s.sachusetts and heard the story of the foundation by his father from the lips of Mr. John Reid, the younger, secretary of the United States Golf a.s.sociation. He told me how his father and Robert Lockhart, who went to the same school in Scotland, came to America together; how Lockhart who, as a buyer of goods, had to pay periodical visits to his homeland, talked of the strange game that was played there; how Mr. Reid became interested and asked for clubs and b.a.l.l.s to be brought across the water; how he tried the swings and strokes in a field by their house at Yonkers, the son "fielding" for the father; how the captain of a steamer was persuaded to bring another set of clubs over with him, and how irons were thereafter cast in America. Then he told me how other people, few but keen, were attracted to this new pastime that the Reids were trying, and how the first little club was formed here at Yonkers in November 1888, and called the St.

Andrews Golf Club. They were as the golfing fathers. I learned how the members came to be known as the Apple Tree Gang because of the tree near to the first hole on which they hung their coats; how six holes were laid out at the beginning on Mr. Reid's land, his house being used as a club-house; how he gave a medal which was the first prize ever put up for compet.i.tion in America--and it was for an annual thirty-six holes stroke compet.i.tion--and how it was won for eleven years, three in succession, by Mr. George Sands. Those were days of consequence. From that little beginning the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, after many changes and enlargements, has risen to a place of importance and honour in American golf.

These little histories and traditions of American golf do become attractive as one probes more deeply into them. It was in Ma.s.sachusetts that the most remarkable thing that has ever taken place in the history of the game on the other side of the Atlantic, or anywhere perhaps--meaning, of course, the Ouimet triumph--happened lately, and I have been much attracted to the story of the beginning of golf in that part of the American world, and not less so when I see that the start was made such a very little while before the birth of the boy who won that great champions.h.i.+p at Brookline. American golf and Ouimet have grown up together. One finds that in the summer of 1892 a young lady from Pau went on a visit to Mr. Arthur Hunnewell, at Wellesley, Ma.s.s., and took with her a set of golf clubs and b.a.l.l.s. They had been playing the game for a long time past at Pau, but it was only just being started in other parts of France. After Yonkers it had been reproduced at s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k and one or two other places, but so far Ma.s.sachusetts had not known it. The girl showed Mr. Hunnewell how the clubs were used, and some relatives of his, owning adjacent estates and being fond of outdoor pastimes, watched and were won quickly to the game. On the first of June Mr. Hunnewell wrote down in his diary, "F. B. arrived to-day from Europe"; and on the fifteenth of September, "We are getting quite excited about golf." A fortnight later he wrote that "J. B. is here and plays golf all day." I calculate it as a coincidence worth remark that twenty-one years afterwards, to the month and to the week, Mr. Ouimet won the great champions.h.i.+p.

Many of Mr. Hunnewell's friends were invited to come and attempt the game at his place, which they did accordingly and fell in love with it.

He had fas.h.i.+oned a course of seven holes of moderate length over undulating lawns and some park-land. The actual holes consisted of five-inch flower-pots sunk in the turf, and the hazards were avenues, clumps of trees, beds of rhododendrons, an aviary, a greenhouse, and an occasional drawing-room window, as it is facetiously remarked by Mr.

Lawrence Curtis, who became the first secretary of the golf committee of the Country Club, and to whose account of these happenings I am indebted for my notes upon them. Mr. Curtis, seeing the fascination that the game exercised upon all who became acquainted with it, wrote a letter to the executive council of the Country Club informing them of it, suggesting that it was a pastime that might very well be brought within the scope of the club, and that the cost of an experimental course need not exceed some fifty dollars. The suggestion was backed by several members and the council agreed, the course being laid out in the spring of the following year. The home hole was placed on a lawn in front of the club-house which was soon discovered to be a very dangerous place for it, so that it had to be removed. Almost immediately the game became a strong attraction at the Country Club, new members came along in droves because of it, and it has flourished ever since. The example of this powerful club was followed at the Ess.e.x County Club at Manchester, then just being begun. Mr. Herbert Leeds, now so closely and honourably a.s.sociated with Myopia, won the Country Club's champions.h.i.+p in 1893 with a score for eighteen holes of 109, Mr. Curtis being next with 110; and that summer a Country Club side won a team tournament that was played at Tuxedo against the St. Andrews and Tuxedo Clubs. And afterwards all went very well indeed.

And while I write in this way of the grand pioneering work that was done in those days when champions of the present time were being born and trained, I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Mr. Edward Blackwell, in which he told me of his going out to California in 1886 and staying there for six years. His people had bought some land in those western parts, and he and his two brothers went out there to convert it from barley to a vineyard. Mr. Blackwell is a very great golfer to-day, but considering the gutty ball and circ.u.mstances in general, he was, relatively to his contemporaries, as great then. Only about a week before he sailed for California a match was arranged between him and Jack Simpson, who had gained the Open Champions.h.i.+p the previous year, and Mr. Blackwell won that match at the last of the thirty-six holes that were played. Out in California there was plenty of hard work to do on the land and good sport with the gun, but, of course, there was no golf. Mr. Blackwell's thoughts frequently turned towards it, and he missed it very much. He considered the possibilities and found that they were practically non-existent, for the country round about was too hopelessly rough for laying out any sort of holes. So he never saw a golf club and never hit a ball during those six years, but for all that he won the King William IV. medal at the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club immediately on his return. Then he went back to California and did not see club or ball for another five years. Some of us could almost wish he had made some sort of course out there in California and become the first golfer of that far west, for he would have been so good to have been a pioneer, and golf has flourished there exceedingly since then. California sends men to champions.h.i.+ps. It would have given a special piquancy to that fateful amateur champions.h.i.+p final at Sandwich in 1904 when Mr. Blackwell was his country's last hope against America's Mr. Walter Travis, and as it happened he was not quite equal to the occasion, for the American captured four holes at the start with his amazing putting, and he won by as many at the end.

That was a great day for American golf, a kind of consummation it was, and I shall never forget the queer sensation that filled the atmosphere on the St. George's course, nor the dumb feeling, not exactly of dismay but of incomprehension, there was at the end. As to the first of these sensations I believe that nearly everybody felt--without knowing why exactly, for comparatively few had noticed his play until he got to the fourth or fifth rounds and was appreciated as dangerous--that the American player was nearly sure to win, that nothing could stop him from winning. It was a conviction. Certainly Mr. Travis's wonderful putting had created a very deep impression, but if he had been a British player I think the feeling would have arisen that putting like that, which had been continued for the best part of a week, would be sure to give out before the end. Take the case, for instance, of Mr. Aylmer in the champions.h.i.+p of 1910 at Hoylake. He had been putting in the most amazing manner all the time, and holing them from everywhere, but n.o.body had any confidence in his ability to beat Mr. John Ball in the final, and he collapsed utterly. Of course, Mr. Aylmer then had not the tremendous fighting power and pertinacity of Mr. Travis in match play, qualities of their kind which I have only seen equalled by a successor of his in the American champions.h.i.+p roll, Mr. Jerome Travers, and to beat Mr. Ball at Hoylake is a different matter from beating Mr. Blackwell at Sandwich.

But then they were saying that Mr. Aylmer could not go much farther even when he was only at about the third round, and as for Mr. Ball at Hoylake there was a considerable feeling among golfers about that time that the old champion could not go on defying the law of averages any longer, and that there could be no more champions.h.i.+ps for him. I confess that I rather shared this view, held in a superst.i.tious sort of way, but now that Mr. John has clapped another champions.h.i.+p on to that Hoylake affair, we have given him up. There is no reason why he should not win another eight! However, when the Scot and the American teed up that fateful morning there was a disposition to be sorry for Mr. Blackwell, and a kind of hope that the end might be painless. In the circ.u.mstances Mr. Blackwell's performance in losing nothing more after losing four of the first five holes was as good as it could be. He kept the pump working splendidly.

The truth is that he was by no means so gloomy as his friends about his prospects, as he told me afterwards. He said he thought he had a good chance of winning, and did not believe he would get beaten. He wished, however, that the tees had been farther back so that his long driving would have given him a better advantage. Two things about his opponent impressed him very much, one, of course, being his astonis.h.i.+ng putting and the other his silence. But then, of course, one does not work one's way into a final of a champions.h.i.+p for conversational purposes, or for debating the merits of the sixth sub-section of one of the rules of golf. When the deed was done completely Mr. Blackwell joined the converts who departed from the old prejudice and raided Tom Vardon's shop for Schenectady putters, with which they practised, and marvelled as the sun was setting on the first day that any but a British player had won a British golf champions.h.i.+p. With that victory the first era in modern American golf, not counting the prehistoric times of golf in Charleston and the Indians' games, came to an end. America had made good. Now she became a power.

The second era lasted nine years and was one in which she gradually came to be taken more seriously. She suffered a set-back of sorts when Mr.

Harold Hilton won the American Amateur Champions.h.i.+p at Apawamis in 1911, but there were some circ.u.mstances attending that victory at the thirty-seventh hole which were rather galling to the Americans, and they behaved well in saying so little about them. Mr. Hilton ran away with the match in the final, as it appeared, and Mr. Fred Herreshoff in the afternoon was offered about the most forlorn hope that golfer ever had to lighten his way for him. He brightened it up and made it thoroughly serviceable, and was distinctly unlucky in being beaten at the extra tie hole when Mr. Hilton's bad second shot cannoned off the famous rock to the right and went kindly to the putting green instead of getting into a hopeless place. It has been said that even if Mr. Hilton's shot was lucky, Mr. Herreshoff played the hole so badly that he hardly deserved to win it even if he was hardly treated by losing. But it is forgotten that it was match play, and that what one man does affects the other's game, and Mr. Herreshoff told me once, long after, that the American crowd, which is supposed erroneously to be many shots to the advantage of an American playing against an Englishman, on that occasion misled and upset him. It cheered for Mr. Hilton at the wrong time and for the wrong thing, and led to Mr. Herreshoff making a hash of a most fateful stroke. This era of American golf came to an end with the amazing victory by Mr. Ouimet at Brookline.

The present state of things is very remarkable, and I have found the study of it very interesting during two long golfing expeditions through the United States, when I have visited many of the chief American clubs, met and made friends with men who are at the head of American golf and the most distinguished players, and in every way gained a good practical knowledge of the amazing progress of the game in this country. The Englishman who visits America and is not a golfer suffers a loss that he must regret always afterwards. To strangers in general the Americans in their own country are kindly and hospitable. That touch of carelessness and arrogance which is sometimes noticed in the wandering American when he is "doing Europe" is not in evidence among good Americans when they are at home, always provided that the Englishman has the good sense and manners--which one regrets to say is not always the case--to remember that when in the house of his host it is not good taste to praise his own for its superiority in divers ways. Pay the American now and then, and with proper delicacy, that little compliment that is so very well deserved about the magnificence of his achievement in making a country like that in such a short s.p.a.ce of time, and about the excellence of many of his established systems. It is a compliment that can and should be paid with the most absolute sincerity. The American has the right to be proud of his own country, and we should be proud of the American, for that his blood is much the same as ours--trite observations, no doubt, but commonly disregarded. Then with all his fancy hustle and his tarnation smartness, the American is at bottom rather a sentimental man (perhaps it is because he has to be so very businesslike most times that he is liable to a sharp reaction at any good chance) and he is touched with signs of genuine good feeling towards him and an appreciation of what he has done. Thereupon in a softened voice he will tell of his weaknesses, and of his appreciation of the greatness of mother England, and he will play the host in a more thorough and warm-hearted way than any other man on earth will or can. The ordinary non-golfing visitor may find out many of these things, and have his own good time in his simple way, but even in the freest countries there are often social omissions, accidents, and disasters when there is not good common ground for meeting and friends in waiting, and it is very possible to go to America and fail in the way of holiday. The man who visits as a golfer, enters at once into joys of existence and the most friendly companions.h.i.+p. I have visited clubs in many parts of the country, and have made good and abiding friends among countless golfers, and it is but a poor expression of my feelings to say that I am very appreciative and deeply grateful.

If, therefore, for anything whatever I should criticise the golf of the country I hope that American golfers will believe that in my comments there is no trace of adverse prejudice.

It is difficult to estimate how many players of this game there are in the country at the present time, and whatever figures were fixed upon would soon be made inaccurate through the rapid increase that is going on all the time--more rapid by far than is the case in Britain. I have seen it estimated that there are six or seven hundred clubs in the States at the present time, with a total members.h.i.+p of about a hundred and fifty thousand. The Americans say that they will double their golfing population in the next five years.

It is impossible for a person who has not crossed the Atlantic to imagine the United States as the country and people really are. I found it easier to imagine Italy and Spain and oriental Morocco before ever I went to those places, than I did to conceive a picture of the country and the life of our own blood relations in this new America. All the fraternising with Americans in London and elsewhere, our reading of their newspapers and their books, printed in the words of our own language, pictures and photographs of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, of the sky-sc.r.a.pers in the background and the Fifth Avenue that glitters on a summer's day, all the pictures of Boston and Was.h.i.+ngton, or of the boulevards and business activities of Chicago, will not help any one to preconceive those places exactly. The atmosphere and the life and the ways of the people are a little beyond the imagination of the untravelled western man. In the same way I do not think that British golfers who have not been to the United States can understand the American's present-day att.i.tude towards the game; certainly those who have not been to America should not judge upon it as they are often inclined to do. It is good, sound, and in its every aspect it is exceedingly interesting.

Wandering through the country I have visited many clubs and courses. If we would have much golf in America we must move quickly as the Americans do, and think as little of travelling all night as they think, for it would be too much waste of time to make the long journeys that have to be made by precious daylight. As a rule the golfer at home protests against being asked to play anything like his best game after a night in a railway train. I remember Mr. H. E. Taylor, who is not possessed of the strongest const.i.tution in the world, told me that he had set off from Charing Cross one morning in the winter, arrived at Cannes in the south of France at breakfast time on the next morning, cleaned himself and put on his golfing shoes, and then gone along to the golf course out at La Napoule to win a scratch gold medal. Again I recall that Mr.

Hilton once travelled all night from Hoylake to Muirfield and broke the record of the course there on arrival, playing two more rounds the same day. However, men like these are exceptions to most rules.

But a golfer may cure himself of more of his weaknesses and susceptibilities than he may think he can--all that are imaginary and not really of the temperament. A man who hates wind and avoids it would learn to play well and bravely in it if he had always to take his golf on an exposed part of the eastern coast. The ability or otherwise to play in wind is largely a matter of temperament. So it is with the journeys. I had either to golf, and golf for me tolerably well, in the intervals of scampering from one part of the country to the other, or I had to spoil the whole expedition. I managed it somehow.

Arriving in New York for the first time early on a Sunday morning, I fixed myself up at my appointed quarters, rang up a golfer on the telephone, and then, according to arrangement, proceeded to track a man down at his club on the Fifth Avenue with the object of playing in the afternoon. I walked into Fifth Avenue from a cross street, and my first glimpse of it is one that will not soon be forgotten. It was a glorious morning, the sun s.h.i.+ning hot and white, and New York, for the only time in its hustling week, was comparatively quiet. There was no traffic and few people just then in the Fifth Avenue, quite one of the most majestic and wonderful thoroughfares in the world despite its plain simplicity.

But it was not the whiteness, not the glittering cleanliness, not the real splendour of this Fifth Avenue with all its newness, that struck the first impression on my mind. Upon the moment that this wandering British player of the most meditative of games emerged from somewhere round about West 36th or 37th, into the big avenue, there whizzed along it, right in front, a motor funeral which was doing a fine fifty miles an hour clip along the smooth and open thoroughfare. There was just the hea.r.s.e with gla.s.s panels, the coffin plainly exhibited inside, and the chauffeur on the seat, with another man beside him who might have been a mourner. Holding life a little more cheaply in America than we do, they grieve a little less for those who lose it, which is not to say that they are heartless or unsympathetic, but more practical. This funeral, done with petrol instead of horses, was positively going north at the rate of fifty miles an hour. It was moving just as fast as I saw any car ever go in the United States, and I could not help reflecting that the spirit of the good American, viewing the last journey of its separated corpus, must feel a certain satisfaction that it was hustlingly done and that no time was wasted. _Finis coronat opus!_ Inspired, I played on two different courses in New York on the same afternoon.

English people hear much about railroad travelling being far better in the United States than it is in our own country. It is--and it is not.

The comfort and conveniences of the cars in the daytime are much in advance of anything we have. The men's smoking cars, the observation cars, the parlour cars, are delightful and enable us thoroughly to enjoy the journeys. Although they standardise so many things in America, they cease their standardisations when considerations of personal comfort and peculiarities have to be considered. It never occurred to me until I travelled my first thousand miles in America that it is a hards.h.i.+p that, no matter what our girth may be, nor the length of our bodies and legs, we must all of us at home, though we pay for our first-cla.s.s accommodation, sit in standardised seats which are all the same and attached to each other. In the American railroad car running on a long-distance journey there are seats of different sorts, some are high and some are low, and they are detached. This makes much difference. In the dining-cars the tables and chairs are all loose, and one does not have to squeeze into them with the feeling that one is being locked into one's place as we do in England. And the dining arrangements on the American cars are far superior to what they are elsewhere. But if the American system gains by day the British system makes up for much of the lost comfort at night, and that is when the American, golfer and non-golfer, does most of his long-distance travelling. The Pullman day cars are converted into sleepers by the dark-skinned attendants (uncommonly good railroad car servants these n.i.g.g.e.rs make), and by an almost magical transformation the lounging car is made into a sleeper with about two dozen berths, a dozen on each side, half uppers and half lowers, and an alley down the middle. The chief difference between the upper berths and the lower is that the uppers have to be reached by a short stepladder and are not convenient to fat, gouty, or unathletic persons, while those who wake early and like to look upon the prairie, or what once was that, have a window at the bottom as the people in the top have not. The berths are covered in with thick green curtains which b.u.t.ton together. We may leave our boots outside for the attendant to brush in the morning, but our other clothes and traps must go along to bed with us, and be stowed away at the bottom of the berth, or in the little netting that hangs alongside. And here I must timidly state in evidence that there are not separate cars for the s.e.xes; in America all go together, and the ladies and the men occupy the same cars. The ladies generally go off to bed earlier than the men. Whether they do or not, we all climb into our respective berths, fasten up the curtains, and undress in the very limited s.p.a.ce at our disposal, a process which seems to me must be the same as that by which acrobatic performers wriggle themselves out of chains and ropes with which their limbs and bodies have been tied up fast. After a time we become expert. What is most difficult to become accustomed to is the horrible jolting, and the painfully sudden stopping of the trains in the middle of the night.

Their permanent ways are not laid so finely as the magnificent lines along our coasts from London to Scotland. Their rails are not fixed in chairs laid on the sleepers, but are pinned down straight on to the wood. This makes much difference. The cars shake exceedingly. Then the drivers at night have to be wary and stop quickly at times, and no doubt they do right not to reduce their speed gradually for the sake of the men and women who are asleep behind them, but instead to stop with a suddenness that could only be improved upon by a collision. However, I say again, that we find ourselves accustomed to it all in time.

I shall not forget my first experience of a thousand-mile golfing journey from the New York Central Station to Chicago. A few golfers were in a party going westward for the champions.h.i.+p at Wheaton in Illinois, and we discussed the game from the time of starting in the late afternoon until we had pa.s.sed Albany, about ten, when we moved into our sleeping quarters. My bag of clubs had to go to bed with me, and they lay alongside all the night; there was no room for them underneath. I had to sleep with one hand on the bag to prevent them from attacking me or going overboard into the avenue, so much did that wretched train rattle and shake as it hurtled its way through the darkness, with the big bell in the front of the engine jangling mournfully all the time.

And what a wild, sad note it is that is struck by the bells on these American engines, suggestive of the loneliness of the open country through which they speed, now and then making a big noise with a sort of foghorn. I am much attached to my clubs, and they are the chosen favourites of a vast number that go with their master everywhere, and are carefully watched and tended, but the intimacy that was sprung upon us then was too much, and I invented another arrangement for the next travelling night. James Braid, very wise man indeed, tells me that long, deep nights of placid slumber are the best things in the world for the golfer who would keep steady his hands and nerves and clear his eyes so that he may play the best game of which he is capable. But no British golfer could sleep at the beginning of his American experiences in such circ.u.mstances. I was just falling into some sort of a doze in the small hours of the morning when the train pulled up sharply at a station which I discovered to be Schenectady, where the famous putter that disturbed the peace of two nations was born. Next, one realised that we were within a mile or two of the Niagara Falls, and so on with jolting and banging and sudden stopping all the night. By and by daylight came and then we had a long day of travelling through the heart of America to Chicago.

Some may suggest that all this about railroad travelling in the country where there is more of it than any other has little to do with golf, but it has all to do with it, for the thorough golfer in America, whether a citizen or British, must needs spend a large part of his time in the train, and if he would have the maximum amount of golf, much sleeping must be done behind the green curtains in the darkened cars. The travelling done by the American golfer, therefore, is a surprising thing, but a few months of it is a fine and valuable experience for the British golfer afterwards. No longer, since I have been across the Atlantic, do I consider it a far way from London to the links of Dornoch. St. Andrews and North Berwick have come pleasingly near to me.

All the world has shrunk, and I feel I have my foot on every course--or soon may have.

Though it be a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and these are the two great golfing centres of the east and west, it is a fact, as I know well, that the golfers in the two places visit each other for a weekend's golf almost as frequently and with as little fuss as would be the case with golfers in London who go down to Sandwich. They take the "Twentieth Century Limited" from New York on Friday afternoon, and on Sat.u.r.day morning they are at Chicago. They flash out on a local train to Onwentsia, Midlothian, Glen View, Wheaton, Exmoor, or one of those places, play all day, start play again at eight o'clock on Sunday, finish their couple of rounds early in the afternoon, catch the fast train back to New York, and are at their office on Monday morning as if they had spent the week-end pottering about the garden. I am not concerned with the question as to whether they are prolonging their lives by these acts; nor are they concerned. In the meantime they appear to be in the best of health, and are certainly in the highest of spirits.

With this talk of journeys we seem in fancy to be in Chicago now, so let us consider the leading club of the busy district in the heart of America. The course of the Chicago club is at Wheaton, some twenty-five miles out on the North Western line, and this is the foremost club of the Central States, and west in the sense of being west of the east, for all golfing America is divided into two parts, the east and the west, Chicago being the capital of and held chiefly to represent the west, which holds some close rivalry with the east, where New York is headquarters. The west out California way is just the far and other west, and is in another world. The Chicago club is exclusive and dignified. The most solid men in the city support it, and they see that everything is good. It is not an ancient inst.i.tution, but it has some of the characteristics of solidity and strength of age and sound experience. Chicago is not an old city, but, as the proud citizens like to tell you, about a hundred years ago there was no Chicago at all, but just a few wigwams of Indians and some huts and things round about a creek. Since then the place has been once burnt down, and yet it is now the fourth largest city of the world, while in its tenseness of commercial industry it is the foremost of all. If all the ages past in Chicago only amount to a hundred years, then one-fifth of all time as known to Chicago history, which represents the life of the Chicago Golf Club, is comparatively long indeed.

In 1892 a small golf club was started for the first time round about Lake Forest, but the promoters had only about sixteen acres of ground.

In the following year, when the World's Fair was held, a number of foreign visitors were in Chicago and asked for golf, as travellers will do, though the great golf boom had not yet then set in. Mr. Charles B.

Macdonald came in with the movement, ground was searched for, and the Chicago Golf Club was organised at Belmont, some twenty-two miles out of the city. When the Fair was over in the following spring, only about twenty members were left to the club, and the outlook did not seem splendid. But once begun, in either place or man, golf is a very hard thing to kill. The twenty die-hards asked their friends to come and see the place and try the game. They did so, and those men of Chicago knew at once that they had discovered the real thing. A hundred and thirty members were quickly obtained. The inevitable result followed. They wanted more and better golf, and they wanted it to belong to them and not to be on leased ground, so in 1894 the club met and authorised the purchase of two hundred acres at Wheaton, twenty-four miles out from the city, a fine course was laid out, a splendid club-house was built, and a really great club was established. Here and now we may gain a very fair idea of the difference in cost to the player between American golf and British. No better club could be selected for the purpose of exemplification than this one. It so happened that a few days before I arrived there, its club-house was burnt down, with all its contents and appurtenances, and from the wreck only a single one of the club-books of rules and regulations was rescued. I took possession of it while I made some notes upon the terrace of the only part of the building that was saved.

The first paragraph in the book, being Section 1 of Article 1 of the bye-laws, states that "this club is incorporated under the laws of Illinois as Chicago Golf Club, and its corporate seal is a circular disc bearing the words, 'Chicago Golf Club,' the figure of a golf player, and the motto, 'Far and Sure.'" To become a member of the club the applicant must be over eighteen years of age; he must have not more than one adverse vote cast against him by the governing body; and he must pay an entrance fee of not less than a hundred dollars or 20. The resident (or full) members.h.i.+p of the club is limited to 225, and the annual subscription is 75 dollars or 15, half of which is payable at the beginning of the year and half at midsummer. Now this subscription is much higher than that of any golf club in Great Britain, and the fact is only partly attributable to the circ.u.mstance that everything in America is more expensive than it is in England. The higher subscription is necessitated because the members.h.i.+p is kept down so low as 225, and that is done in order that there may be no overcrowding of the course. In England such a club, being situated within thirty miles of a great city and having the best course round about, would probably admit at least five or six hundred members, with the result that on the fine and busy week-end days the course would be hopelessly blocked and there would be no pleasure for anybody. This is certainly so in the case of two or three of the most popular clubs in the outer London golfing area, and one may come to a speedy decision that in this matter the American way is by far the better. Ladies who are over sixteen years of age and the immediate relatives of a member are permitted to have the privileges of the course, subject to the rules of the Green Committee, on payment of ten dollars a year. There is another cla.s.s, "summer members," who are not to exceed fifteen in number, and who pay 150 dollars for one summer season's play. There is practically no play in the winter, the climatic conditions being too severe. The other rules as to members.h.i.+p are much the same as those which obtain in the case of British golf clubs.