The Soul of Golf

[Dark Saint Alaick]

The Soul of Golf

Percy Adolphus Vaile

[Dark Saint Alaick]

PREFACE


It is frequently and emphatically asserted by reviewers of golf books
that golf cannot be learned from a book. If they would add 'in a room'
they would be very near the truth--but not quite. It would be quite
possible for an intelligent man with a special faculty for games, a
good book on golf, and a properly equipped practising-room to start
his golfing career with a game equal to a single figure handicap.

As a matter of fact the most important things concerning golf may be
more easily and better learned in an arm-chair than on the links. As a
matter of good and scientific tuition the arm-chair is the place for
them. In both golf and lawn tennis countless players ruin their game
by thinking too much about how they are playing the stroke while they
are doing it. That is not the time to study first principles. Those
should have been digested in the arm-chair, where indeed, as I have
already said and now repeat with emphasis, the highest, the most
scientific, and the most important knowledge of golf must be
obtained. There is no time for it on the links, and the true golfer
has no time for the man who tries to get it there, for he is
generally a dreary bore.

Moreover, the man who tries to get it on the links is in trouble from
the outset, for in golf he is faced with a mass of false doctrine
associated with the greatest names in the history of golf, which is
calculated, an he follow it, to put him back for years, until indeed
he shall find the truth, the soul of golf.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

This book is in many ways different from any book concerning golf
which has ever been published. It assumes on the part of the reader a
certain amount of knowledge, and it essays to bring back to the truth
those who have been led astray by the false teaching of the most
eminent men associated with the game, teaching which they do not
themselves practise. At the same time it seeks to impart the great
fundamental principles, without which even the beginner must be
seriously handicapped.

It does not concern itself with showing how the golfer must play
certain strokes. That certainly may be done better on the links than
in the smoking-room; but it concerns itself deeply with those things
which every golfer who wishes really to know golf, should have stowed
away in his mind with such certainty and familiarity that he ceases
almost to regard them as knowledge, and comes to use them _by habit_.

When the golfer gets into this frame of mind, and not until then, will
he be able to understand and truly appreciate the meaning and value of
"the soul of golf."

This he will never do by following the predominant mass of false
teaching. This book is a challenge, but it is not a question of Vaile
against Vardon, Braid, Taylor, Professor Thomson, and others. The
issue is above that. It is a question of truth or untruth. Nothing
matters but the truth. It rests with the golfing world to find out for
itself which is the truth. This it can do with comfort in its
arm-chair, and afterwards it can with much enhanced comfort, almost
insensibly, weave that truth into the fabric of its game, and so
through sheer practice, born of the purest and highest theory--for
there is no other way--come to the soul of golf.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

CHAPTER I

THE SOUL OF GOLF




Nearly every one who writes about a game essays to prove that it is
similar to "the great game, the game of life." Golf has not escaped;
and numberless scribes in endeavouring to account for the fascination
of golf have used the old threadbare tale. As a matter of fact, golf
is about as unlike the game of life as any game could well be. As
played now it has come to be almost an exact science, and everybody
knows exactly what one is trying to do. This would not be mistaken for
a description of the game of life. In that game a man may be
hopelessly "off the line," buried "in the rough," or badly "bunkered,"
and nobody be the wiser. It is not so in golf. There is no double life
here. All is open, and every one knows what the player is striving
for. The least deflection from his line, and the onlooker knows he did
not mean it. It is seen instantly. In that other game it may remain
unseen for years, for ever.

Explaining the fascination of anything seems to be a thankless kind of
task, and in any case to be a work of supererogation. The fascination
should be sufficient. Explaining it seems almost like tearing a violet
to pieces to admire its structure; but many have tried, and many have
failed, and there are many who do not feel the fascination as they
should, because they do not know the soul of golf. One cannot
appreciate the beauty of golf unless one knows it thoroughly.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Curiously enough, many of our best players are extremely mechanical in
their play. They play beautiful and accurate shots, but they have no
idea how or why they produce them; and the strange thing about it is
that although golf is perhaps as mechanical a game as there is, those
who play it mechanically only get the husk of it. They miss the soul
of the game.

Golf is really one of the simplest of outdoor games, if not indeed the
simplest, and it does not require much intelligence; yet it is quite
one of the most difficult to play well, for it demands the greatest
amount of mechanical accuracy. This, on consideration, is apparent.
The ball is the smallest ball we use, the striking face of the club is
the smallest thing used in field sports for hitting a ball, and, most
important, perhaps, of all, it is farther away from the eye than any
other ball-striking implement, except, perhaps, the polo stick, in
which game we, of course, have a much larger ball and striking
surface.

In all games of skill, and in all sports where the object is
propelling anything to a given point, one always tries, almost
instinctively, to get the eye as much in a line with the ball or
missile and the objective point as possible. This is seen in throwing
a stone, aiming a catapult, a gun, or an arrow, in cueing at a
billiard ball, and in many other ways, but in golf it is
impracticable. The player must make his stroke with his eye anywhere
from four to six feet away from his little club face. One may say that
this is so in hockey, cricket, and lawn-tennis. So, in a modified
degree, it is, but the great difference is that in all these games
there is an infinitely larger margin of error than there is in golf.
At these games a player may be yards off his intended line and yet
play a fine stroke, to the applause of the onlookers; while he alone
knew that it was accident and not design.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

The charm of golf is in part that its demand is inexorable. It lays
down the one path--the straight one. It must be followed every step,
or there is trouble.

Then there is in golf the sheer beauty of the flight of the ball, and
the almost sensuous delight which comes to the man who created that
beauty, and knows how and why he did it. There is at any time beauty
in the flight of a golf ball well and plainly driven; but for grace
and the poetry of flight stands alone the wind-cheater that skims away
from one's club across the smooth green sward, almost clipping the
daisies in its flight ere it soars aloft with a swallow-like buoyancy,
and, curving gracefully, pitches dead on the green.

Many a man can play that stroke. Many a man does. Not one in fifty
knows how he puts the beauty into his stroke. Not one in fifty would
be interested if you were to start telling him the scientific reason
for that ball's beautiful flight. "The mechanics of golf" sounds hard
and unromantic, yet the man who does not understand them suffers in
his game and in his enjoyment of it. That wind-cheater was to him,
during its flight through the air, merely a golf ball; a golf ball
'twas and nothing more. To the other man it is a faithful little
friend sent out to do a certain thing in a certain way, and all the
time it is flying and running it is sending its message back to the
man who can take it--but how few can? They do not know what the soul
of golf means. So, when our golfer pulls or slices his ball badly, and
then--does the usual thing, he cannot take the message that comes back
to him. He only knows the half of golf, and he does not care about
the other, because he does not know what he is missing. He is like a
man who is fond of music but is tune-deaf. There are many such. He may
sit and drink in sweet sounds and enjoy them, but he misses the linked
sweetness and the message which comes to his more fortunate brother
who has the ear--and the knowledge.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

There is in England a curious idea that directly one acquires a
scientific knowledge of a game one must cease to have an interest in
it so full as he who merely plays it by guesswork. There can be no
greater mistake than this. If a game is worth playing well, it is
worth knowing well, and knowing it well cannot mean loving it less. It
is this peculiar idea which has put England so much in the background
of the world's athletic field of late years. We have here much of the
best brawn and bone in the world, but we must give the brain its
place. Then will England come to her own again.

England is in many ways paying now for her lack of thoroughness in
athletic sports. Time was when it was a stock gibe at John Bull's
expense that he spent most of his time making muscle and washing it.
Then it was, I am afraid, sour grapes. England had all the
championships. The joke is "off" now. The grapes are no longer sour.
The championships are well distributed throughout the world--anywhere
but in England; and we say it does not matter; that the chief end of
games is not winning them. Nor is it; but we did not talk like that
when we _were_ winning them, and the trouble is not so much that we
are losing, as the manner in which we are losing. The fact is that we
are losing because our players do not, in many sports, know the soul
of the game. The ideal is lost in the prosaic grappling for cups or
medals, in the merely vulgar idea of success. Thus it comes to pass
that many will not be content to get to the soul of a game in the
natural way, by long and loving familiarity with it.

Hordes of people are joining the ranks of the golfers, and their
constant cry is, "Teach me the swing," and after a lesson or two at
the wrong end of golf, for a beginner, they go forth and cut the
county into strips and think they are playing golf. Is it any wonder,
when our links are cumbered with such as these, that those who have
the soul of golf are in imminent daily peril of losing their own?

[Dark Saint Alaick]

One who would know the soul of golf must begin even as would one who
will know the soul of music. There is no more chance for one to gather
up the soul of golf in a hurry than there is for that same one to
understand Wagner in a week.

It is this vulgar rushing impatience to be out and doing while one is
still merely a nuisance to one's fellows, which causes so much
irritation and unpleasantness on many links; that prevents many from
starting properly, and becoming in due course quite good players; for
it is manifest that the "rusher" is starting to learn his game upside
down, as, indeed, most professionals and books teach it. There can be
no doubt that the right way to teach anything is to give the beginner
the easiest task at first. About the easiest stroke in golf is a
six-inch put. That is where one should start a learner. The drive is
the stroke in golf that offers the greatest possibility of error, so
he is always started with it. It is his own fault. "Teach me the
swing" is the insistent cry of the beginner, who does not know that he
is losing the best part of golf by turning it upside down. He will
never enjoy it so much, or play so good and confident a game as he
would were he to work his way gradually and naturally from his putter
to his mashie, to his niblick, his iron, his cleek, his brassy, and
his driver. Such a one may come to an intimate knowledge and love of
the game. The rusher may play golf, but it will be a long time before
he gets to the soul of the game.

A very good golfer in reviewing a golf book some time ago stated that
he did not care in the least what happened while the ball was in the
air, that all he cared about was getting it there. He has played golf
since he was five years old, but he has clearly missed the soul of the
game.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

It is not necessary to dilate upon the wonderful spread of golf
throughout the world. An industrious journalist some time ago marked a
map of England wherever there was a golf club. It looked as though it
had been sprinkled with black pepper. It is not hard to understand
this marvellous increase in the popularity of the great game, for golf
is undoubtedly a great game. The motor has, unquestionably, played a
great part in its development. Many of the courses, particularly in
the United Kingdom, are most beautifully situated. Many of the
club-houses are models of comfort, and some of them are castles. The
game itself is suitable for the octogenarian dodderer who merely wants
to infuse a little interest into his morning walk, or it may be turned
into a severe test of endurance for the young athlete; so no wonder it
prospers.

There is a wonderful freemasonry among golfers. This is not the least
of the many charms of the game, and to him who really knows it and
loves it as it deserves to be loved, the sign of the club is a
passport round the world.

Many a time and oft I see golfing journalists, when writing about the
game, stating that something "is obvious." It has always seemed to me
that it is impossible to say what is obvious to anyone in a game of
golf. Writing of George Duncan, the famous young professional golfer,
during the first half of the big foursome at Burhill, a great sporting
paper said that a certain mashie shot was a "crude stroke." The man
who wrote that article did not know the soul of golf. He saw the
mashie flash in the air, some turf cut away, and a ball dropping on to
the green. Just that and nothing more, and it was "obvious" to him
that it was a crude stroke.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

One who knew the soul of golf saw it and described it. It was a tricky
green, with a drop of twenty feet behind it. To have overrun it would
have been fatal. There was a stiff head-wind. The player would not
risk running up. He cut well in under the ball to get all the
back-spin he could. He pitched the ball well up against the wind,
which caught it and, on account of the spin, threw it up and up until
it soared almost over the hole, then it dropped like a shot bird about
a yard from the hole, and the back-spin gripped the turf and held the
ball within a foot of where it fell. It was obvious to one man that it
was a crude shot. It was equally obvious to another, who knew the
inner secrets of the game, that it was a brilliantly conceived and
beautifully executed stroke. One man saw nothing of the soul of the
stroke. He got the husk, and the other took the kernel.

Much has been made of the assumption that golf is the greatest
possible test of a man's temperament. This has to a great extent, I am
afraid, been exaggerated. It is one of those things in connection with
the game that has been handed down to us, and which we have been
afraid to interfere with. I cannot see why this claim should be
quietly granted. In golf a man is treated with tragic solemnity while
he is making his stroke. A caddie may not sigh, and if a cricket
chirped he would be considered a bounder. How would our golfer feel if
he had to play his drive with another fellow waving his club at him
twenty or thirty feet away, and standing ready to spoil his shot?--yet
that is what the lawn-tennis player has to put up with. There is a
good deal of exaggeration about this aspect of golf, even as there is
a good deal of nonsense about the interference of onlookers. What can
be done by one when one is accustomed to a crowd may be seen when one
of the great golfers is playing out of a great V formed by the
gallery, and, needless to say, playing from the narrow end of it. Golf
is a good test of a man's disposition without doubt, but as a game it
lacks one important feature which is characteristic of every other
field sport, I think, except golf. In these the medium of conflict is
the same ball, and the skill of the opposing side has much to do with
the chances of the other player or players. In golf each man plays his
own game with his own ball, and the only effect of his opponent's play
on his is moral, or the luck of a stymie. Many people consider this a
defect; but golf is a game unto itself, and we must take it as it is.
Certainly it is hard enough to achieve distinction in it to satisfy
the most exacting.