Golf Meditation: Mystery of Golf

The Mystery of

GOLF

A brief Account of the Game: its Origin; Antiquity; & Rampancy; its Uniqueness; its Curiousness; & it Difficulty; its anatomical, philosophical, and moral properties; together with diverse Concepts on other Matters to it pertaining[1]

Arnold Haultain

Proem

Three things there are as unfathomable as they are fascinating to the masculine mind: metaphysics; golf; and the feminine heart. The Germans, I believe, pretend to have solved some of the riddles of the first, and the French to have unraveled some of the intricacies of the last; will some one tell us wherein lies the extraordinary fascination of golf?

I have just come home from my Club. We played till we could not see the flag; the caddies were sent ahead to find the balls by the thud of their fall; and a low large moon threw whispering shadows on the dew-wet grass or ere we trod the home-green. At dinner the talk was of golf; and for three mortal hours after dinner the talk was – of golf. Yet the talkers were neither idiots, fools nor monomaniacs. On the contrary, many of them were grave men of the world. At all events the most monomaniacal of the lot was a prosperous man of affairs, worth I do not know how many thousands, which thousands he had made by the same mental faculties by which this evening he was trying to probe or to elucidate the profundities and complexities of this so called “game.” Will some one tell us wherein lies its mystery?

Chapter I

The Layman’s Ignorance

I am a recent convert to golf. But it is the recent convert who most closely scrutinizes his creed – as certainly it is the recent convert who most zealously avows it. The old hand is more concerned about how he plays than about why he plays; the duffer is puzzled at the extraordinary fascination which his new-found pass-time exercises over him. He came to scoff; he remains to play; he inwardly wonders how it was that he was so long a heretic; and, if he is a proselyte given to Higher Criticism, he seeks reasons for the hope that is in him.

Well, I know a man, whether in the flesh or out of the flesh I cannot tell, I know such a one who some years ago joined a golf club, but did not play. The reasons for so extraordinary a proceeding were simple. The members (of course) were jolly good follows; the comfort was assured; the links – the landscape, he called it – were beautiful. But he did not play. What fun was to be derived from knocking an insignificant-looking little white ball about the open country he did not see. Much less did he see why several hundred pounds a year should be expended in rolling and cutting and watering certain patches of this country, while in others artfully-contrived obstacles should be equally expensively constructed and maintained. Least of all could be understand (he was young then, and given to more violent games) how grown-up men could go to the trouble of traveling far, and of putting on flannels, hob-nailed boots, and red coats, for the simple and apparently effortless purpose of hitting a ball as seldom s possible with no one in the world to oppose his strength or his skill to their hitting; and it seemed to him not a little childish to erect an elaborate club-house, with dressing-rooms, dining-rooms, smoking-rooms, shower-baths, lockers, verandas, and what not, for so simple a recreation, and one requiring so little exertion. Surely marbles would be infinitely more diverting than that. If it were football, now, or even tennis – and he once had the temerity to endure to suggest that a small portion of the links might be set apart for a court – the turf about the home-hole was very tempting. The dead silence with which this innocent proposition was received gave him pause. (He sees now that an onlooker might as well have requested from a whist party the loan of a few cards out of the pack to play card-tricks withal.)

Yet it is neither incomprehensible nor irrational, this misconception on the part of the layman of the royal and ancient game of golf. To the uninitiated, what is there in golf to be seen? A ball driven of a club; that is all. There is no exhibition of skill opposed to skill or of strength contending with strength; there is apparently no prowess no strategy, no tactics – no pitting of muscle and brain against muscle and brain. At least, so it seems to the layman. When the layman has caught the infection, he thinks – and knows –better.

But, as a matter of fact, contempt could be pored upon any game by anyone unacquainted with that game. We know with what apathetic contempt Subadar Chiniah or Jemadar Mohamed Khan looks on while Tommy Atkins swelters as he bowls or bats or fields under a broiling Indian sun, or Tommy’s subalterns kick up the maiden’s dust with their polo-ponies’ huff. And what could be more senseless to a being wholly ignorant of cards than the sight of four grey-headed men gravely seating themselves before dinner to arrange in certain artificial combinations certain uncouth pictures of kings and queens and knaves and certain spots of red and black? Not until such a being recognizes the infinite combinations of chance and skill possible in that queen of sedentary games does not comprehend the fascination of whist. And so it is with golf. All that is requisite in golf, so it seems to the onlooker, is to hit; and than a “hit” nothing, surely, can be simpler or easier – so simple and easy that to have dozen sticks to hit with, and to hire a boy to carry them, is not so much a sign of pitiable insanity as of willful stupidity. The puerility of the proceeding is enough to make the spectator irate. Especially as, owing to the silence and the seriousness with which the golfer plays, and his reticence as to the secret of the game – for none knows better than the golfer than the game renders up its secret only to the golfer, if even to him – this quiet, red-coated individual is surrounded with a sort of halo of superiority, a halo not made by himself. No wonder the onlooker’s anger is aroused. That expertness in puerility of this sort should of itself exalt a man, make him possessed of that which obviously, yet unintentionally, raises him above the intelligent yet indignant onlooker – there is something in this past finding out. Nor does he find it out till he himself is converted. Golf is like faith: it is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen; and not until it is personally experienced does the unbelieving change from the imprecatory to the precatory attitude.

However, the erstwhile aforesaid non-playing member of the golf club in question, the suppleness of his epiphyses, it may be, becoming (perhaps not quite imperceptibly) unequal to the activity and agility demanded of them by more ardent games, purchased, first one club, then another; then a sheaf, and betook himself to the task of finding out a posteriori, by the experimental method, what there was in the confounded game that brought the players there by scores to play. – And to talk of their play. For it should be added that the talk at that club puzzled him as much as the play. It was not enough that keen King’s Counsel, grave judges, erudite men of letters, statesmen, and shrewd men of business should play as if the end of life were to hole a ball; but they talked as if the way a ball should be hold were the only knowledge worth possessing. Well, he played; or, to be more precise, he attempted to play, and, fortunately for him, he persevered in the attempt. Then indeed did the scales fall from his eyes. He discovered that there was more in golf than met the eye – much more.

Chapter II
The Origin of Games

How great a similarity there is in all outdoor human games! Probably ninety percent of human outdoor games consist in the propulsion of a spherical or spheroidal object towards a certain spot. In cricket, rounders, football, baseball, polo, basketball, croquet, marbles, tennis, racquets, quoits, billiards, bagatelle, fives, polo, curling, lacrosse, hockey, ping-pong, golf, either one party assails with a ball, a sphere, a spheroid, or a disc a position defended by another, or both parties assail with a similar object the selfsame position, victory lying with the party reaching it first. It would be interesting to dive into the primeval origin of games and to discuss whether the first distinct differentiation of the man from the ape consisted not in the ability to throw a stone and wield a bough, to attack with a sphere and defend with a stick, the pithecanthropoid prototypes of batting and bowling. The first ape that tried to possess himself of a fruit he could not reach, or to repel a foe he could not grapple, by throwing a stone or using a branch, was in all probability the progenitor of the human race. It may, indeed, be that man’s erect posture was gradually evolved by this attempt to throw and wield (which could not be done on all fours), and that the ape became the true “face-up-turning” animal when he succeeded in hurling and hitting. In the case of this suppositious ape, the throwing and hitting were actions primarily prompted by hunger or love, by the desire to obtain food or by the desire to obtain a mate (or to keep off a rival) the two primal instincts of life. In so far they were highly utilitarian.

With all due deference to Schiller and to Herbert Spencer, with their theory of the “play instinct” as at the bottom of all art, I contend that all our amusements, alike all our art, derive ultimately from the most serious, most utilitarian instincts. In the world of like, mere play, quâ play, is as non-existent as, in the world of nature, is mere beauty, quâ beauty. Beauty is but the perfection of useful matter. The most lovely landscape is but hills and dales and trees. The most wonderful human body is but bone and muscle and fascia and nerve. There is nothing in nature, and there is nothing in the anatomical frame, put there for beauty’s sake alone. All is for use; nothing for ornament. And as art is but the reproduction, the representation, of the perfection of useful nature, so sport is but a reproduction, the representation of the perfection of useful occupation. Event the gambols of kittens and puppies are the hereditary and instinctive reproduction of contests with teeth or claws. In this sense only, in piping times of peace, when man was not afraid of his fellow-man, can man be said to have “played” with his fellow-man – contended with him in amicable and imitative combat. – They are near akin, are art and sport; the one being the intellectual and emotional, the other the muscular and nervous, representation of the primal and highly utilitarian instincts of hunger and love exerting themselves, in the form of hunting and mating and fighting, in a world of animal and vegetable life.

All masculine games are contests. Whether there are any such things as feminine games proper is doubtful. When girls play games they play with their brothers, or they play their brothers’ games. And even when they play among themselves, their games prove the evolutionary law, and show themselves to be refinements on primeval feminine occupations; they play at “doll’s-house,” at “school, “ at “mistress and maid”; they pay visits to one another, they dress up in their elders’ clothes, they make muddies, they erect diminutive domiciles, they nurse unheeding dolls. Of these the derivation is obvious.

One other species of games there is, but as into it little or no element of sport enters, it needs not to be classified here. To gamble is perhaps as primeval an instinct as to fight. Here Karl Groos, indeed, regards gambling as a sort of fight against fate. In almost all games, too, an element of chance inheres – inheres, and thus perhaps enhances the interest of the game. But it is a question whether a game of mere and sheer chance deserves the name. Rouge et noir is hardly a “game”; a sport it certainly is not.

You can detect national character in games. Golf is preeminently the game of the Scot: slow, sure, quiet, deliberate, canny even – each man playing for himself. There is no defensive play, no attacking an enemy’s position, no subordination of oneself to the team, no captain to be obeyed, no relative positions of players. Compare with it cricket, the game typical of the Anglo-Saxon of more southern proclivities. Here you have more excitement, greater rapidity of action. There is no serious and contemplative addressing of yourself to the ball; no terrible anxiety over your stance; no forty-two rules for your slog. Golf, on the other hand, is self-reliant, silent, sturdy. It leans less on its fellows. It loves best to overcome obstacles alone. If the golfer take a caddie, it but proves him a member of a clan: his caddie is his fellow-clansman. Of the two, perhaps cricket is for youth the superior game. It requires as keen an eye, as accurate an adjustment of hand and eye, as great muscular power in the stroke, and it is more rapid. It must be played, too, as much as golf, “with the heid.” In cricket you have an ally or allies, both in batting and fielding; it is communistic, political. The nation that evolved cricket evolved the British constitution.

Note, too, an you will, the nomenclature proper to golf. Where your blunt and careless Southron cricketer “slogs” or “blocks” or is “stumped,” your Northern golfing precisian religiously takes his “stance,” “addresses” himself to the ball, and “approaches” the hole; - a phraseology that smacks of the Assembly of Divines. There is something Puritanically and Sinaitically threatening in the thought of “approaching” a hole; as if, puir aperture, it were not to be come at but after due preparation thereunto, and were altogether fenced off from the ignorant, the scandalous, and the profane. And so indeed it is: the hole is an ominous and portentous ordinance, and often mightily inconveniently placed; and the duffer who thinks to enter therein without much searching of heart, without diligent use of all means suitable and answerable unto so high and serious a task, if he doth not thereby render himself liable to admonishment by his elders, is nevertheless, in the matter of the “approach,” still in the infancy of golf!

Chapter III

Rampancy of Sport

There is rampant in the world at the present moment a sort of sporting mania, an international sporting mania; excellent in its way, but very difficult to analyze or account for. Manias of one kind or another are not unknown to history. Such, for example, was the mania for Crusades in the Middle Ages. It had a highly rational basis, namely the defense of Christendom against Islam and the wresting of the Holy Land from its desecrating possessors. But to such lengths did this mania go that in 1212 an army of children once actually set out, with banners and paraphernalia, to conquer some vague, invisible foe; with the result that hundreds died before they had gone any distance, and hundreds were sold into slavery. Such, too, was the Hippodrome mania in the fourth century at Byzantium, when feeling ran so high that society was divided into hostile sections, and money, and even blood, was recklessly spent in contests between the faction of the Green and the faction of the Blue. And such was the tulip mania of Holland in 1637, when, so keen was the rivalry for bulbs, that a whole nation was absorbed in the strife and many a family ruined itself by speculation in rare of mythical roots.

Well, to-day the western world seems to be laboring under something of the same sort. Year by year athletics occupy a larger share of the attention, not only of the students, but of the teachers, at our schools and colleges, and year by year the sums spent in intercollegiate and international contests increase. To win a comparatively valueless cup of means of a comparatively unserviceable craft, a single individual spends some millions of sesterces, and two nations look on intent on the race and applaud. Teams without number, of all kinds, cross and re-cross the Atlantic and pacific; money is poured out like water on racehorses, motor-cars, dirigible balloons, and what-not. – Like the Crusades, there is for all this a highly rational basis, that most laudable one of amicable rivalry in brain or muscle; but, like the Crusades, it is a question whether it is not here and there just a little overdone.

Chapter IV
Prowess in Sport

And yet, why is it, let us ask ourselves, that mankind consents to hold prowess in sport in such high esteem? From the days of the Olympian and Isthmian games to the latest broken record, always athletic excellence has elicited spontaneous admiration. To the champion, to him who excels in any kind of game, - the batsman, the oarsman, the boxer, - we look up with a certain sort of awe, an instinctive and mysterious sort of worship. The feeling is deep-seated and universal; it must have its roots far down in the primitive foundations of human history and human nature.

Well, if my theory that all sport is but amicable combat is correct, prowess in games is proof and symbol of prowess in that inevitable sempiternal combat of man with man and of man with nature without which neither would mankind as a whole have evolved, nor would special races of men have emerged and dominated the world. Men seem instinctively to understand that to excel in strength or agility means much more than possession of mere strength or agility; that it means staying-power, will, determination, courage – a host of, not only muscular, but mental and even moral qualities. It was with quite serious, though perhaps shapeless, motives, that the Greeks erected statutes their Olympian victors; motives identical probably with those that led to the deification of Herakles and Thor and all the strong men of mythology.

What may be the particular weapon wielded by the champion matters little, whether bat or ball, boxing-glove, driver, or oar. The weapon is but the medium of his strength and skill, the vehicle of his thought and knowledge. The weapon is to the sportsman what the brush is to the artist or the pen to the poet. It is that by which he shows to the world what manner of man he is. What manner of man he is! That, surely, after all, is the question of questions. It is at the bottom of all religions, which fight among themselves in their theories as to what man’s true nature is and how it shall be improved; it is at the bottom of all philosophies, which make desperate and futile efforts to define man and to specify his place in the cosmos; in a way it is at the bottom of all art, since art tries to depict man, or if it depicts Nature, depicts man’s conception of her; and it is at the very bottom of sport, than which only the mortal and immemorial conflict of man with man and of mankind with Nature, of which sport is but the symbol and analogue, is a better exponent of the true and secret character of man his real and inner self.

Chapter V

The Clue to the Mystery

This modern rampancy of sport does not explain the fascination of golf. No; but it may help to explain its existence. Golf is some hundreds of years old; but only in the last two or three decades has it obtained its extraordinary footing. The interesting question is, why is it that, amongst the thousand-and-one games to-day played by men, women, and children in Europe and America, why is it that golf commands so large a share of attention, of serious and thoughtful attention? The literature of golf is now immense, and, much of it, good. Eminent men have devoted to it serious study; mathematicians try to solve its problems; prime ministers play it; multimillionaires resort to it; and grown men the world over jeopardize for it name and fame and fortune. Not even bridge quite so absorbs its votaries. Cricketers, foot-ballers, tennis-players do not so utterly abandon homes and offices for the crease, the field or the lawn. Only the golfer risks everything so he may excel in putting little balls into little holes. – What is the clue to the mystery.

The clue is a compound one. To begin with, it is threefold: physiological; psychological; social. – In the first place, no other game has so simple an object or one requiring, apparently, so simple an exertion of muscular effort. To knock a ball into a hole – that seems the acme of ease. It is a purely physiological matter of moving your muscles so, he expends more time and money and thought and temper than he cares, at the year’s end, to compute. Without doubt the ball must be impelled by muscular movement: how to co-ordinate that muscular movement – that is the physiological factor in the fascination of golf.

In second place, when the novice begins to give some serious consideration to the game, he discovers that there is such a thing as style in golf, and that a good style results in good golf. He begins to think there must be some recondite knack in the game, a knack that has to be learned by the head and taught by the head to the muscles. Accordingly he takes lessons, learns rules, reads books, laboriously thinks out every stroke, and by degrees comes to the conclusion that mind or brain has as much to do with the game as have hand and eye. – It is here that the psychological factor comes in.

In the third place, having progressed a bit, having learned with a certain degree of skill to manipulate his several clubs; having learned also, and being able with more or less precision to put into practice, certain carefully conned rules as to how he shall stand and how he shall swing, the beginner – for he is still a beginner – discovers that he has not yet learned everything. He discovers that the character of his opponent and the quality of his opponent’s play exercise a most extraordinary influence over him. Does he go out with a greater duffer than himself, unconsciously he finds himself growing over-confident or careless. Does he go out with a redoubtable player, one whose name on the Club Handicap stands at Scratch, he cannot allay a certain exaltation or trepidation highly noxious to his game. And it is in vain that he attempts to reason these away. Not only so, but even after months of practice, when the exaltation or trepidation is under control, often it will happen that an opponent’s idiosyncrasies will so thoroughly upset him that he will vow never to play with that idiosyncratic again. This we may call the social or moral element. It affects the feelings or the emotions; it affects the mind through these feelings or emotions; and, through the mind, it affects the muscles.

Now, I take it that there is no other game in which these three fundamental factors – the physiological, the psychological, and the social or moral – are so extraordinarily combined or so constantly called into play. Some sports, such as football, polo, rowing, call chiefly for muscular activity, judgment, and nerve; others, such as chess, draughts backgammon, call upon the intellect only. In no other game that I know of is, first, the whole anatomical frame brought into such strenuous yet delicate action at every stroke; or, second, does the mind play so important a part in governing the actions of the muscles; or, third, do the character and temperament of your opponent so powerfully affect you as they do in golf. To play well, these three factors in the game must be most accurately adjusted, and their accurate adjustment is as difficult as it is fascinating.

Chapter VI

Golf and Life

All true games, I have said, are contest. But in golf the contest is not with your fellow-man. The foe in golf is not your opponent, but great Nature herself, and the game is to see who will over-reach her better, you or your opponent. In almost all other games you pit yourself against a mortal foe; in golf it is yourself against the world: no human being stays your progress as you drive your ball over the face of the globe. It is very like life in this, is golf. Life is not an internecine strife. We are all here fighting, not against each other for our lives, but against Nature for our livelihoods. In golf we can see a symbol of the history and fate of human kind: careering over the face of this open earth, governed by rigid rule, surrounded with hazards, bound to subdue nature or ere we can survive, punished for the minutest divergence from the narrow course and end of it all . . . And the end of it all?. . . To reach an exiguous grave with a few mistakes as may be – some with a few mistakes as may be – some with high and brilliant flight, others with slow and lowly crawl.

Chapter VII

Uniqueness of Golf

To descend, however, from this highly abstract plane, why is it, let us ask, that golf to so many of us seems to-day a game unique?

Well, amongst other things, it is unique because it is so difficult. Curiously enough, its chief difficulty arises form its chief simplicity. In golf you hit a stationary ball. At first blush that sounds the acme of ease. It is not; though it takes even a zealot some days to plumb the depths of that paradox. At first blush it would seem that a cricket ball – flying toward you, its trajectory foreshortened, it velocity variable, its pitch problematical, its break uncertain – would be of all balls the hardest to hit, and the next hardest, seemingly, would be the racquet or the tennis ball. All three come fast, and you never know exactly whence they are coming or whither they are going. The difficulties in cricket, racquets, and tennis seem immense.

Yet they are not as great as the difficulties in golf. If they were, we should surely ere this have been, in this analytical era, inundated with theoretic lucubrations as to how these should be played, as assuredly we have been in the matter of golf. Besides, no cricketer suffers agonies in debating with himself of the correctness of his stance, or of the character of his swing; or addresses himself with painful pause to the bowling; or waggles his implement with serious, not to say solemn, insistence; or devoutly locks up a pet bat against the day of some extra-important match; or requires from all spectators of his play the most awesome and reverential silence. What is there in the game of golf which so differentiates it from all others that in it these trifling minutiae become magnified to matters of great moment? I take it it is because in golf the mind plays a highly curious and important part. In cricket, tennis racquets, polo, the entire absence of such maxims as “Keep you eye on the ball,: “Be up,” “Slow back,” “Follow through,” “Don’t go to sleep, “ and the rest of them – all addressed to the mind – shows that in these the mind requires no external or adventitious stimulus. Who would dream of taking his eye off an approaching ball in cricket” – who could do it? Who could possibly go to sleep in the midst of a rally in tennis? Evidently in these games the movement of the ball is sufficient stimulus in itself – it is the stimulus. Now, in golf there is no such stimulus, and the mind has to be goaded into attention and action by laborious and incessant iteration of mental formulae dinned into the memory and repeated over and over again. (I know a man who repeats to him self six rules every time he takes his driver in hand and addresses the ball.) This is curious, but it is true; and perhaps the following train of reasoning will substantiate the assertion. No game can be played without accurate and delicate adjustment of hand and eye; this adjustment is primarily the function, through the nerves, of the mind; it cannot be achieved unless the mind is instantly and constantly stimulated to action; in all rapid games the movement of the ball supplies this stimulus, for it excites the perceptive faculties, and, through them, the conceptive, by which the orders for the next stroke are issued; in golf there is little or no excitation of the perceptive faculties; accordingly the conceptive faculties have to be concentrated and roused to action by artful and adventitious means, by precepts learned by rote and forcibly applied at every stroke. That is the psychology of golf. In all quick games, so strong and so rapid are the stimuli that the resulting movements might almost be called reflect or automatic. Volleying at the net in tennis might certainly be so called: there is no time to think; the very sight of the approaching ball throws the right arm into position to receive and strike it. To the expert tennis-player the movement is doubtless reflex and automatic, as automatic as the closing o the eyelid on the approach of a fly – though both, probably, are the result of constant response to stimulus. Now, in golf there is never any reflex action possible. Every stroke must be played by the mind - gravely, quietly, deliberately. And this is why there is a psychology of golf but there is no psychology of cricket or racquets or tennis or polo. If for this theory it is necessary to show that strong stimulation of the perceptive faculties tends to strong stimulation of the conceptive, one might point to the effect of music upon the mind and body. How easy it is to dance when the rhythmic valse strikes upon the ear! What waves of thought and emotion are set agoing at sound of martial airs!

Chapter VIII

The Difficulty Subjective

As a matter of fact, most of the difficulties in golf are mental, not physical; are subjective, not objective; are the created phantasms of the mind, not the veritable realities of the course. Bad lies, on good links are the exception, not the rule; and bunkers are avowedly where they are in order to catch the unworthy and the unwary. That wood to the right is no real obstacle to your drive; why then are you so fearful of a slice? Were you blindfold and could not see it, it would be as if it were not and the so-called “difficulty” would banish. And yet the number of balls that do go into that wood – or are pulled off to the left to avoid it – is astonishing. – The mere test of strength or of skill is one of the most subordinate of the elements of golf; much more important is the test of what goes by the name of “nerve,” that quiet self confidence which no ghostly phantasms can shake, in howsoever questionable shape they come. So many golfers forget this. “If I had not done this, that, or the other stupid thing,” they say “my score would have been so-and-so.” My dear sir, it is just those stupid things that make the game. Eliminate the liability of the frail and peccant human mind to do stupid things, and you might as well play pitch and toss. It is this very frailty and peccability to the human mind that golf calls in question, and it is this that differentiates golf from all other games, because in golf this frailty is shown in its utter nudity, not hidden away under cover of agility or excitement or concerted action, as it is in cricket or football or tennis or polo or what-not. The simplicity of the thing to be done strips the soul of all cloak of excuse for not doing it. You may place your ball how or where you like, you may hit it with any sort of implement you like; all you have to do is to hit it into a hole. Could simpler conditions be devised? Could an easier task be essayed? And yet, such as the extraordinary constitution of the human golfing soul, that it not only fails to achieve it, but invents for itself multiform and manifold ifs and ans for not achieving it: ifs and ans the nature and number of which must assuredly move the laughter of the gods. . . . I have often thought that golf was the invention of the de – well, let us say, of the deities of Olympus, an invention contrived for a twofold purpose: first to afford them subject-matter for merriment; and second to prove to vaunting man how trivial a creature he is. – In my mind’s eye I can see brawny Zeus, with stout Hera at his side (she must be inclining to embonpoint by this time), lying beside his nectar and watching puny men chasing pigmy balls over this paltry planet. What inextinguishable laughter must ring through the Sacred Mount at sight of grave statesmen and puissant potentates, mighty satraps and great pro-consuls, Right Reverends and Right Honorables, striving strenuously to put little pieces of India-rubber into little holes in the ground, and “damnin’ aufu’” when they don’t!

Chapter IX

Analysis of Mental Factors

However, probably neither the youthful caddie nor the elderly professional is much given to any very minute analysis of the mental factors incident to golf. It is only he who takes up golf when well past his ‘teens who finds that the motor centers have carefully to be taught and trained by the ideational centers; and probably not until the motor centers have learned to act largely by themselves does such golfer improve in his game. Probably, the more automatically one plays, the better one plays – which means that (unless one is a born athlete, or a muscular genius) one ought to commence golf very young indeed. (Zealous golfers had better enter their babies’ names on the waiting lists of limited clubs.) For I take it that if the mind is strenuously occupied in trying to remember this, that, or the other particular rule for the stroke, some other rules are apt to be forgotten. That is to say, if the ideational or conceptual centers of the brain are too much occupied, some motor centers go disregarded. In the caddie and the professional probably at the moment of the stroke there is no ideation or conception going on whatsoever, the whole attention of the mind being in some incomprehensible way concentrated on the motor centers alone. All beginners – of a maturer age – find it impossible to remember – and obey – at every stroke all the rules they learn. – ‘What on earth,” said one fair golfer to another once, “do you wear that ring on your thumb for?” - “To remind me of a certain rule.” - “Good gracious!” said the other, “I should have to wear rings on my fingers and bells on my toes to remind me of all the rules I forget!”

I asked an admirable professional once, a man whose skill in tuition equaled his skill with the clubs, who thought out each stroke and excelled in the etiology and diagnosis of the faults of his pupils, - I asked this professional to try to tell me precisely what it was that passed through his mind in that important but minute interval of time which elapsed between the raising of his club for the back-swing and its impact with the ball. He promised to do his best to find out, and his answer was as significant as it was practical. “I canna find oot, Sorr,” he said some days afterwards; “I dinna think I think aboot anything at a’. I juist luke at me ba’. Ef I do not luke at me ba’, the stroke disna coom aff.” Of an amateur to whom I put the same query, the reply was to the effect that if his mental attitude was at all reducible to verbal phraseology, it would probably take the form of the prayer of that Publican, who did not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

In one respect the professional and the caddie have an immense advantage over the amateur in golf: they are handling golf-clubs all day long; if they are not swinging them, they are making or mending them; they do nothing that tends to develop any set of muscles other than those brought into play in the game. And this is no unimportant point. The amateur rides or rows or shoots or yachts or fishes. Now, it may be a preposterous thing to assert, a thing that may arouse the derision of all but enthusiasts of the game, but it is highly probable that any form of exercise which brings into play and develops muscles not used in golf, or not used in the way that golf uses them, is injurious, not beneficial, to the golfer. If neither a violinist nor a pianist would dream of developing the muscles of his forearm and wrist by, say, hoeing or digging, neither should a golfer. I once knew a man who for a whole snowy winter did not touch a club, but daily visited a gymnasium and went through a variety of exercises for the express purpose of developing his muscles for his summer’s golf – his ambition was long driving. What was the consequence? He confessed to me that summer he was completely off his game! Another man I knew whose sole form of exercise that winter was walking and swinging golf clubs. This man’s game improved vastly. The explanation probably lies in the fact that the nerve-currents by which the muscles are contracted are very prone to run in the tracks to which they are habituated; and if for several weeks or months they are made to travel in paths quite different from those in which they just run – and swiftly and accurately run – in the drive and the approach and the put, when they are ordered to take the new direction they fail to first to find it. No stoker or coal-heaver could suddenly become a card engraver; and if a card engraver took to stoking or coal-heaving, he would probably turn out very unsaleable visiting-cards when first he returned to his vocation. Everybody has noticed how persistently the cricketing stroke sticks to the cricketer who drops cricket for golf in maturer years. – This anatomical frame of ours is a wonderful machine; we little know what slaves we are to it. – The curious thing about golf is that adepts in all sorts of other and alien forms of sport think that there is no reason under heaven why they should not compel their anatomical frames to comply with the demands made upon them by the links. They excel, so they argue, in cricket or tennis racquets, why not in this ridiculously easy task of putting a ball into a hole? And when they fail, they become exasperated – and spend pounds in lessons – and pounds in implements of curious make – goose-necked putters, Schenectady putters, socket-headed drivers, aluminum cleeks – of these the name is Legion! There is not a game known to sportsmen in which failure so exasperates. Nay, it is not a game, if by “game” we mean a mere pass-time. Or, if it is, it is a method of passing the time than which few serious vocations so absorb the faculties, mental, moral, and, physical; or (shall we say?) so develop them. At least it is a game in which earnestness, the moral attribute of character which seems now-a-days sometimes in serious danger of disparagement, in which earnestness ranks so high that, we may safely say, without it success is impossible. – I once heard of a lady champion who, in solitude, wept in sheer nervous tension over her victory. All honor to her tears!

Chapter X

Causes of Good and Bad Play

However, after all this abstruse metaphysical and anatomical disquisition, shall we essay to discover practically what it is at bottom makes a man play well and what it is makes a man play ill; and what it is makes a man one day play well, and the next day ill? – Ah! He who could answer such queries would tear the veil from Maya. Some men there be, of course, who will never play golf. Either they have a poor “eye”; or their muscular sense it but imperfectly developed; or their keenness in sport is nil; or they are too much taken up with the things of this world’ or they are men wrapped up in the contemplation of so-called higher things. University professors I have known who, when they aught to have had their eye upon the ball, had their eye upon the clouds, and their minds farther off still. Other men I have known to whom a round of golf was so casual and frivolous a pass-time that they would seek to retrieve the tedium of the game (and perhaps entertain you!) by the narration between strokes of interminable and pointless anecdotes. Never by such men will the Royal and Ancient Game be properly played. By such men golf may be given up at once and for ever. For maugre all appearances to the contrary, golf is one of the most serious of sports. As well try to study metaphysics indifferently, or to attack the feminine heart indiscreetly, as try to play golf listlessly. One cannot serve golf and Mammon. Golf is the most jealous of mistresses. Are you worried and distrait; are you in debt and expecting a dun; are stocks unsteady and your margin small; is a note falling due; or has a more than ordinarily delicate feminine entanglement gone somewhat awry? Go not near the links. Take a country walk, or go for a ride; drop into the Club and ask numerous friends to assuage their thirst; -- do anything rather than attempt the simple task of putting a little ball into a little hole. For to put the little ball into the little hole – or rather into those eighteen little holes – requires – requires what? Alas! So many things, so many unthought-of-things. It requires, in the first place, a mind absolutely unperturbed, imperturbable. You may play chess or bridge or polo or poker on the even of bankruptcy; I defy you to play golf on the even of a curtain lecture. It takes a strong character to play strong golf. Golf is as accurate an ethical criterion of a man as is the Decalogue. Perhaps this is why your rigid and Puritanical Scots Presbyterian plays so admirably. An eminent Scots philosopher once told me that the eminence of Scottish philosophy (note the Scottish appraisal of things Scottish, an you will) was due to the fact that Scots philosophers were brought up on the Shorter Catechism. I venture to think he might have extended his axiom to the St. Andrews game. – But, not to beat about the bush, this much is certain: golf is a game in which attitude of mind counts for incomparably more than mightiness of muscle. Given an equality of strength and skill, the victory of golf will be to him who is captain of his soul. Give me a clear eye, a healthy liver, a strong will, a collected mind, and a conscience void of offence both toward God and toward men, and I will back the pigmy against the giant. Golf is a test, not so much of the muscle, or even of the brain and nerves of a man, as it is a test of his inmost veriest self; of his soul and spirit; of his whole character and disposition; of his temperament; of his habit of mind; of the entire content of his mental and moral nature as handed down to him by unnumbered multitudes of ancestors. Does his pedigree date back to Romantic heroes – Frankish horsemen or Provencal Knights? Let him see to it that he curbs his impulsive Southern ardor. Does he trace his descent to the Vikings of the North, strenuous sea-kings that roamed afar and devastated foreign shores? Let him see to it that he applies himself to tasks more close at hand, that he wins him nearer victories. Is he a stolid Goth, bull-necked and big of loin? Let him see to it that the more agile-witted Kelt does not wrest victory from him by a deftness more delicate.

Chapter XI

Golf – a Contest with Self

But all this, again, is vague, theoretic, abstruse. What you, my confidential reader, seek, I know, is some simple, intelligible, practicable rule by which to determine how you, when you telegraph to an opponent and propose a match, shall be able to play transcendently well. What is it, precisely, that will enable you to go around under eight to-day? – Confidential reader, did ever you hear tell of the elixir of life? did ever you hear tell of the universal solvent? of the philosopher’s stone? of the Sphinx her riddle? or of Fortunatus his cap? Mayhap you have. But mayhap you do not know that the secret of success in golf is more recondite, far more recondite, than is any one of these. These be bagatelles compared with that. A greater fortune awaits him who will discover and divulge the mystery of golf than that which awaits him who will square the circle, explain the potentialities of radium, or solve the problem of the perpetuity of motion. – For, mark you, it is not against the fellow-man his human opponent that the golfer really wars. Nor is it even against Bogey that he pits his skill. The contest is with himself. There is no reason known amongst men why any golfer should ever get into a bunker. He knows, or he thinks he knows, exactly how every stroke in the round should be played. He may carry as many clubs as he likes, clubs of the most flagitious and flamboyant make. Most potent, grave, and reverend signors will stand stock-still and dumb the while he drives; and no thing on this terraqueous globe be permitted to impede his play. A sanguine flag gratuitously points out for him the hole; overtly printed on the sand-box or the score-card is the distance; his blameless ball (over the making of which countless rival manufacturers have expended an ingenuity extreme) lies meekly at his feet – could Nature, or art, or the Invention of Man farther go to expedite his way? It is Nature, it is Bogey, that are handicapped, not he; -- and perchance it is the cognizance of the enormity of the responsibility thus laid upon him that appals the timorous golfer. The conditions are simple in the extreme: to knock a ball into a hole; and damp sand, and mown fields, and rolled greens, and caddie, and professional, and flag – to say nothing of cobbler’s-wax, and rosin, and chalk, and hob-nails, and a red coat – contribute to aid him in coping with his foe. – Against whom do you contend if not against yourself?

Ah! But the conditions are the same for your opponent also. There’s the rub. He too, therefore, wages a warfare against self. Accordingly golf resolves itself into this: -- It is not a wrestle with Bogey; it is not a struggle with your mortal foe; it is a physiological, psychological, and moral fight with yourself; it is a test of mastery over self; and the ultimate and irreducible element of the game is to determine which of the players is the more worthy combatant. You try to prove to your opponent that you are a better man than he; and your opponent tries to prove to you that he is a better man than you; and the ordeal is decided by competition with a mutual and ideal foe, a foe merciless and implacable, a foe impeccable and impartial, and that will by no means clear the guilty. Golf is the refined modern equivalent of the ancient barbarous Ordeal. To support our claims to superiority to-day, we do not walk blind-fold and bare-foot over nine red-hot plough-shares, we invite our opponent to beat us in putting a ball into eighteen holes; and we look to Pan – in the shape of bunkers and hazards – to Defend the Right; -- and Pan is as inexorable as the plough-shares.

Chapter XII

Golf – a Test of Character

Golf seems to bring the man, the very inmost man, into contact with the man, the very inmost man. In football and hockey you come into intimate – and often forcible enough – contact with the outer man; chess is a clash of intellects; but in golf character is laid bare to character. This is why so many friendships – and some enmities – are formed on the links. In spite of the ceremony with which the game is played: the elaborate etiquette, the punctilious adhesion to the honour, the enforced silence during the address, the rigid observance of rules, few if any games so strip a man of the conventional and the artificial. In a single round you can sum up a man, can say whether he be truthful, courageous, honest, upright, generous, sincere, slow to anger – or the reverse. – Of these arcane of golf the uninitiated onlooker knows nothing. Yet if ever that onlooker is initiated into these Eleusinian mysteries, he changes his mind and sees in the links a school for the disciplinary exercise of a cynical or stoical self-command rivaling that of the Cynosarges or the Porch.

Not only is golf an excellent test of character, it is also an excellent medicament for character. If we only know it, there is a whole Materia Medica between sand-box and flag. The volatile can find, if he will, a sedative; the phlegmatic, an alternative; the neurasthenic, a tonic. And it is a test of character in more ways than one: the cheat simply could not play golf: in the last resort, no one would play with him. It is also a test of tact. Many a man has to learn how to lend a deaf ear politely to a loquacious friend, or to curb his own tongue when playing with a taciturn one; and probably there is no one but has had on some occasion or other to keep his own temper sweet while the atmosphere about him was mephitic with a surly silence or rent by vituperative abuse.

Chapter XIII

Serious Nature of the Game

The two best schools for mind and manners, says the sage, are the Court and the Camp. He might have added a third. He who would attain self-knowledge should frequent the links. If one seriously essays the task, one will “find oneself” in golf. Few things better reveal a man to himself than zealous and persistent efforts to decrease his handicap. That profound and ancient maxim γνŵθι σεαυτόν ("know thyself"), a maxim so ancient and profound that Juvenal averred it had descended from heaven (Sat. xi, 27), might be inscribed on the portal of every Golf Club. Even it might be said that Tennyson’s trinity of excellences, self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control, are nowhere so worthily sought, or so efficacious when found, as on the links. – To the Greeks this will be foolishness; to golfers a platitudinous truism.

For golf must be played “conscientiously” – so an eminent King’s Counsel once remarked to me. He was right. The duffer imagines that at the very most it only requires a good “hand and eye” and some sort of knack. A good eye and a very large amount of skill it certainly does need; but he who thinks that these are the Alpha and Omega of golf will be apt to remain a duffer long. Between this Alpha and this Omega is a whole alphabet. Golf requires the most concentrated mental attention. It requires also just as concentrated a moral attention. The moral factors in the game are as important as the physical. He who succumbs to temptation will have to succumb to defeat. Satis imperat, says an old adage, qui sibi est imperiosus; he rules enough who rules himself. This should be the motto of every golfer. “If one man conquer in a battle a thousand times a thousand men,” says the Dhammapada with oriental extravagance, “and if another conquer himself, he is the greatest of conquerors,” a test which is brought home to one in every round. “Greater,” said Solomon, “is he that ruleth himself than he that taketh a city.” In golf the ruler of himself will take many a hole. – And in truth the golfer knows this, and many and curious sometimes are the means he adopts to attain this end. Every reader will recall this idiosyncrasies of his friends, even if he cannot recall his own: how one will regale himself on stout and steak, and another lunch off chicken and tea; how Robinson will order a tankard of ale, and Anderson a tumbler of Scotch; how Bibulus will challenge Asceticus to take another helping of pie, and Asceticus respond by challenging Bibulous to wash it down with liqueur; how Fumosus will smoke cigars or cigarettes the whole round through, and Abstemius resolutely leave his pipe in his locker; how Medicus will seek by diet or drugs to eliminate this or that unheard-of-acid from his frame, and Hereticus live high to accomplish the same purpose. – The cellar and the pantry of a Golf Club, an they would, could divulge many a tale. And all, what for? To “bring under,” as Saint Paul saith, this pervicacious body of ours, or to brace this puny soul of ours to the conflict so that we shall not “beat the air,” as saith Saint Paul again.

Chapter XIV

Analysis of the Drive

The thousand and one things that we should not do in golf are evidence of the difficulties of the game. In no other game must immense strength go hand in hand with extreme delicacy. If a fraction of a square inch of wood or steel does not come in contact with a fraction of a cubic inch of gutta-percha exactly so and not otherwise, you are landed in a bunker, or you fly off to one side, or you over-run the hole. And in every stroke in golf this nicety of accuracy is necessary. If in the Drive the whole weight and strength of the body, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, are not transferred from body to ball through the minute and momentary contact of club with ball absolutely surely, yet swiftly – you top, or you pull, or you sclaff, or you slice, or you swear (let us hope episcopally: which, being interpreted, according to the anecdote, signifieth silently). So with the Put. Not even an expert dare be careless of his stance or his stroke even for the shortest of Puts. And as to that Mashie shot, where you loft high over an abominable bunker and fall dead with a back spin and a cut to the right on a keen and declivitious green – is there any stroke in any game quite so delightfully difficult as that?

Not only is the stroke of golf an extremely difficult one, it is also an extremely complicated one, more especially the Drive, in which its principles are accentuated. It is in fact a subtle combination of a swing and a hit; the “hit” portion being deftly incorporated into the “swing” portion just as the head of the club reaches the ball, yet without disturbing the regular rhythm of the motion. The whole body must turn on the pivot of the head of the right thigh-bone working in the cotyloidal cavity of the os innominatum or nameless bone, the head, right knee, and right foot remaining fixed, with the eyes riveted on the ball. In the upward swing, the vertebral column rotates upon the head of the right femur, the right knee being fixed; but as the club-head nears the ball, the fulcrum is rapidly changed from the right to the left hip, the spine now rotating on the left thigh-bone, the left knee being fixed; and the velocity is accelerated by the arms and wrists, in order to add the force of the muscles to the weight of the body, thus gaining the greatest impetus possible. Not every professional instructor has succeeded in putting before his pupil this anatomical exposition of the correct stroke in golf. “Juist swoop her awa’, maister,” says one instructor. “Hit ut, mon,” says another. Both are right, but such apparently discordant admonitions puzzle the neophyte. The professional also never wearies of telling you to “follow through” – the phrase has become almost a bye-word and a hissing on the links. But the “follow through” is merely evidence of three things: that you have poised the body properly; that you have swung correctly; and that you have “hit” at the moment of impact without destroying the rhythm; though probably the endeavor to “follow through” is an aid towards the correct accomplishment of these three things. The complexity of this movement is, I take it, one of the chief difficulties in golf, and the one hardest to be surmounted by the unyouthful novice. No stroke in any other game is quite like it; so that proficiency in other games is neither a criterion of, nor a preparation for, proficiency in golf.

One comfortable thing there is about golf; it does not need any excessive training. You need not reduce your weight, as you must for steeple-chasing; you need not be desperately careful about your wind, as you must be if you are entering for a half-mile or the mile. The heavy-weight and the light-weight are evenly matched on the links. Indeed as illustrious exponent of the game has said in print that it is as well as the golfer should pursue his ordinary mode of living, that he should make no extraordinary variation from his regular regimen. If he is accustomed to his pipe and his glass, well and good. So far so good. But there is this to be said. Golf above all things needs the steadiest of nerves, the clearest eye, and the most imperturbable of brains. If you are given to burning the midnight oil over books – or bridge, the odds will be against you on the links. Perhaps, as a matter of fact, golf is more exacting than a steeple-chase or the half-mile: it tries endurance; it tries the judgment; it tries the temper. No kind of sport sooner finds out a man’s weak point than does golf. Two or three months will put you in trim for polo; golf demands the training of a lifetime. In golf this human machine of ours is put to the severest test; and if it has been overworked or abused, it is more than likely to break down between the teeing-around and the green.

Chapter XV

Analysis of Difficulties

Yet not a little has been said, in a semi-sarcastic way, by devotees of other games than golf, about the comparative ease with which – as the sayers aver – a stationary ball can be, or should be, struck, as compared with one in motion. These detractors forget the nicety of the stroke that is required. A tennis-player has a whole court into which to play; a cricketer a whole field; the golfer has to put his ball into a hole of the size of a jam-pot, a quarter of a mile away. Indeed, the difficulties of golf are innumerable and incalculable. Take, for example, that simple rule, “Keep your eyes on the ball.” It is unheard of in tennis; it is needless in cricket; in golf it is iterated and reiterated times without number – and infringed as often as repeated. Yet not everybody, I think, knows the reasons of the tendency to infringe it. One of them is this: As anatomists know, the crystalline lens in the eye automatically accommodates itself, by means of the ciliary muscle, to the focus of the object looked at. Now, many players get into the habit of looking intently at the flag, then suddenly reverting their gaze to their ball and striking before the lens had adapted itself to the new and nearer focus, with the result that they see the ball indistinctly and hit inaccurately. It is not that one does not look at one’s ball; it is that one does not take time to look properly. To prove my theory, let anyone gaze steadfastly at a distant object and then quickly direct the eye to one close at one’s foot. To learn that it requires time for the outlines of the latter to grow definite and distinct will be a lesson he will find invaluable on the links.

But indeed upon this all-important and fundamental rule, “Keep your eye on the ball,” there might be written, by him who had ability for the task, a whole Baconian essay, for in this rule is comprised all the law and the prophets. In itself this injunction seems simplicity itself; to the practical carrying out thereof there are obstacles insuperable. I have touched on the difficulties incident to the focusing of the crystalline lens; yet these, compared with obstacles less obvious, are nearly negligible – at least to youth. To youth the focusing of the crystalline lens is happily not only automatic, but instantaneous; ‘tis age has to be patient and circumspect – in golf as in all things else: youth cuts the Gordian knot; age, poor age, saws through it. – But I digress. One of the chief impediments to a rigid observance of this the chief of rules lies in the fact that almost always the unpracticed golfer has an incontinent desire to see whither his ball is going before even he has hit it. The desire may be natural, but, without the shadow of a doubt, to indulge it is fatal. James Braid in his “How to Play Golf” has found for this desire an ingenious explanation. “The fact seems to be,” he says, “that the mind, and the optic nerve through it, works rather more quickly than the arms and the body.” It may be so. This mind of man is a highly culpable entity, and the optic nerve should have more sense than to yield to its demands. Men have I known, not a few, who resort to adventitious aids by which to thwart its nefarious designs. Only last week a golfer of repute, in the smoking-room of my club, frankly avowed that he took a caddie, not so much for the purpose of carrying his clubs, as because, when he had a caddie, he was less apt to take his eye off his ball. – How peccant, how very peccant, human nature is! The mind of man, so it seems, even when most intent on the most important business in hand, is so undisciplinable, so incorrigible, so ungovernable by the owner of that mind himself, that that owner has perforce artificially to avoid a temptation which he feels he cannot resist.

Again, curious enough, if you impress upon yourself too anxiously this maxim calling upon you to look at your ball, you will find yourself deprived of the power to look at it at all, as a man who tries to count his own pulse unconsciously perturbs it. Your eye wanders back and forth; you look at the top of the abiding sphere; you look at its back; often you look at your club instead of at your ball. As a matter of fact, instead of looking, you are thinking; and to think, when you ought to play, is the madness of mania.

“What then,” so do I imagine an irascible reader to ejaculate, “what then the use of all this learned descant on the Mystery of Golf, and all these numerous attempts by tutors and writers to elucidate for me the intricacies and complexities of this abominable game, if I may not on the links think upon and carry out their lucubrations?” – I prithee give us grace. Theorize not when you are playing in a match. Theorize in your study, experiment when you practice; but if you do not wish to go forth to certain defeat – and of a surety to the taking of your eye off your ball, cease you from theorizing in a match. For, to think out a stroke implies diffidence in that stroke; and than diffidence there is not a more fatal foe to golf.

However, to sum up; until a man has learned to keep his eye on his ball, he will not play golf. He may be an excellent fellow; he may be the most jovial of companions, the sagest of counselors, and the truest of friends; but unless he can keep his eye on his ball, never will he be a golfer.

Indeed, sometimes I am inclined to think that for a man invariably to be able to keep this one commandment, he must be good; that perhaps only the man who could keep the ten commandments could keep this one. For, mark you, it requires so many virtues, certainly that greatest of Tennyson his trinity, self-control. Not every good man will be a good golfer; but I challenge any one to dispute the fact that every really good golfer will at heart be a good man. Golf, in short, is not so much a game as it is a creed and a religion. Only the man who has not learned how thoroughly under control he must keep his mind, his body, and his morals, will dispute that assertion.—

I have said that art and sport are near akin. Are not art and sport and religion very nearly akin?

Besides, not every one knows the full significance of that simple very “to look” in this simple but cardinal injunction you must “look” with the most concentrated and absorbed attention. A casual or half-hearted look is suicidal. And you must look with the mind’s eye as well as with the sensory one—and the one must be as keen, as clear, and as alert as the other.

Chapter XVI

The Action of the Nerves

The difficulties of golf are immense. For think for a moment: there is scarcely a muscle in the body that is not called into play; and every muscle is controlled by a nerve. In fact, every muscle is a bundle of fibres of spindles, and every fibre or spindle is controlled by a branch of a nerve, cannot contract save in response to a stimulus conveyed to it by a branch of a nerve. Unless an order is sent from the brain and distributed to each and every part of the machinery which moves the trunk and limbs, not a movement can be made. And to ensure harmonious and coordinate movement, those orders must be very carefully, not only timed, but apportioned. Indeed, it would seem that duplicate orders, that two sets of stimuli, have to be dispatched. There is, first, that which governs the “muscular sense,” or, as some physiologists prefer to call it, the kinaesthesis, the sense that determines how tightly to hold the club and that poises the body for the swing. It is the sense, speaking generally, which ensures the proper relative rigidity or flexibility of opposing flexor and extensor muscles. It is chiefly concerned in judging distance, and is especially noticeable in the short Approach. In the second place, there is the hit or swing. This is the office of the motor centers, and is brought about by a strong contraction of muscles, a contraction that should be rapidly yet perfectly evenly increased. Both sets of stimuli must be intimately and intricately combined throughout the whole course of the swing: the wrists must ease off at the top and tauten at the end; the left knee must be loose at the beginning and firm at the finish; and the change from one to the other must be as deftly and gently, yet swiftly wrought, as a crescendo passage from pianissimo to fortissimo on a fiddle.

Chapter XVII

Anatomical Analysis

Is it possible, from this physiological point of view, to determine what is the fundamental difference between a good player and a bad? Can we say what it is makes a great golfer? At first sight one is inclined to answer, as well try to find out what makes a great general, a great poet, or a great artist. Genius plays as large a part on the links as it does in life; and “genius,” the dictionary says, “implies the possession of high and peculiar natural gifts which enable their possessor to reach his ends by a sort of intuitive power.” However, leaving the genius out of view as beyond the reach of ordinary explanation, what is it that enables one man always to go round under eighty and another never? Well, for one thing, I suspect Imitation plays a large part in golf—as indeed it does in all life. Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace and Professor Poulton have pointed out its importance in biology, and Professor Yrjo Hirn its importance in art. Mimicry it is, probably—whatever in its ultimate analysis mimicry may be—which is at the bottom of all education; that by which we learn to talk no less than to golf. The youthful caddie probably picks up the game by sheer unconscious imitation, and his motor centers being highly docile, the correct golfing swing comes to him with ease—as a child learns to talk simply by hearing its parents. The man who takes up golf at thirty or forty, when the motor centers are by no means docile, and the nerve currents have been for years accustomed to flow in very different channels,--cricket channels and tennis channels,--the elderly beginner has to learn golf as a man learns a new language, by accidence and prosody. If he can imitate his professional, well and good, but he will in all probability have also to apply himself assiduously to the grammar of the game. But to imitate requires the enervation of nerve centers in the brain—all unconscious, or rather all sub-conscious, as no doubt that enervation is.

To begin at the bottom then, if the physiologists are not all wrong, to excel in golf requires first of all a good brain. There is a part of the brain called the corpora strata. “The corpora strata,” say the neurologists, “are great motor ganglia in some way concerned with the execution of voluntary, emotional, and ideo-motor movements.”* “The Corpus Striatum,” says Broadbent, “…translates volitions into actions, or puts in execution the commands of the intellect; that is, its selects, so to speak, the motor nerve nuclei in the medulla and cord appropriate for the performance of the desired action, and sends down the impulses which set them in motion.”† Nor is that all. In co-operation with the corpora strata is the cerebellum, which “co-ordinates movements…or combines the general movements…ordered by volition” (Ib.).—That is to say, if you want to move your arms and legs together so, you must call upon the striate bodies and the little brain to convey the orders; and if the so is a highly complicated and delicate series of movements, they must be good striate bodies and a good little brain to be equal to it; and to these undoubtedly we must add a good medulla and a good spinal cord to boot.

Secondly, given a first-class corpus striatum and a cerebellum equally good, these two parts of the brain, together with the cord and all the nerve-cells and fibers by which they operate, must be educated, by constant practice, to perform smoothly, quickly, and forcibly the complex motions necessary for the peculiar stroke of golf. This, I take it, is done by what Professor Loeb calls the “associative memory.” The associative memory is a very important affair indeed. Loeb goes so far as to make it synonymous with the will, with self-consciousness, with the Ego! Yet its office and function are simple, namely to ensure the almost automatic sequence of such movements as have previously been deliberated and hesitatingly combined. The golf stroke is a highly complex one, and one necessitating the enervation of innumerable cerebral-spinal centers. Not only hand and eye, but arm, wrist, shoulders, back, loins, and legs must be stimulated to action. No wonder that the associative memory has to be most carefully cultivated in golf. To be able, without thinking about it, to take your stance, do your waggle, swing back, pause, come forward, hit hard, and follow through well over the left shoulder, always self-confidently—ah! This requires a first-class brain, a first-class spinal cord, and first-class muscles.

What the anatomists say is this, that, if the proper orders are issued from the cortex, and gathered up and distributed by the corpora strata and the cerebellum, are then transferred through the crus cerebri, the pons varolii, and the anterior pyramid of the medulla oblongata, down the lateral columns of the spinal cord into the anterior cornua of grey matters in the cervical, the dorsal, and the lumbar region, they will then “traverse the motor nerves at the right of about a hundred and eleven feet a second and speedily excite definite groups of muscles in definite ways with the effect of producing the desired movements” (Bastian).

“Definite ways” and “desired movements” speedily excited”! Gramercy! Are not these THE desiderata in golf? But Bastian and Broadbent, I shall be told, are a bit out of date. Let me then quote Sherrington, a pre-eminent neurologist of the day.—Sherrington has tried to find out what it is that determines the final and definite movement of a set of muscles when more than one stimulus exists. His experiments were made on a dog. Would they had been made on a golfer, for if any one thing is patent to the indifferent golfer it is that he has to attend to a terrible lot of stimuli; and to what particular stimulus his muscles will respond he would give a great deal to know. (What duffer can tell beforehand whether he is going to slice or to pull, to baff or to top?) Sherrington, after a series of careful investigations argues thus: “The motor paths at any moment accord in a united pattern for harmonious synergy, cooperating for one effect…. The struggle between dissimilar arcs for mastery over their final common path takes place in the synaptic field at origin of the final neurons. . . . The issue of that conflict—namely, the determination of which competing arc shall for the time being reign over the final common path—is largely conditioned by three factors. One of these is the relative intensity of the stimulation. . . . A second main determinant. . . . Is the functional species of those reflexes. . . .A third main factor deciding the conflict between the competing reflexes is ‘fatigue.’ . . . The animal mechanism is thus given solidarity by this principle which for each effector organ allows and regulates interchange of the arcs playing upon it, a principle which I would briefly term that of ‘the interaction of reflexes about their common path.’”* That is to say, muscles are moved by orders issued by the neuron or nerve center governing those muscles; when this neuron receives conflicting orders from headquarters, it transmits only one, and this one is determined by (a) its strength; (b) its character; or (c) its freshness. Accordingly, the task for the golfer is by no means an easy one, for he has to move several sets of muscles, and he has to see to it that the orders issued to their respective neurons are strong, are of a particular character, and are fresh. If he does not know what sort of an order to issue: if, for instance, he forgets for the fractional part of a second, any one of the numerous injunctions imperative for a proper stroke—the firm grip, the eye on the ball, the head steady, the right foot fixed, the rhythmic back-swing, the twirl of the wrists, the accelerated velocity, the hit at the impact, the glorious follow-through, to say nothing of the preliminary stance, waggle, judging of distance, and correct angle of feet, elbows, body, and what-not—well, all I can say is that woe betides him. “The multiplicity of the conflict,” says Sherrington, “seems extreme.” We can positively assure him that it is.

I am afraid, however, that unless these learned anatomists and neurologists can also tell us some remedy for improperly issued and incorrectly communicated orders, I am afraid their lucubrations will be of no very great practical value to the golfer who is off his game. It would be a comfort to find out what portion of the anatomical apparatus really was at fault. It would be a comfort to be able to fix the blame, say, on the infundibulum of the pituitary body or the value of Vieussens. Which the offending center is, I am afraid we shall not know till some foozling golfer submits to trepanning.—Perhaps not even then; for if, as I believe is the case, no alienist has yet been able to discover a cerebral lesion in the lunatic, it is not likely that the surgeon will find one in the foozler.

And yet it is always some unknown but sinning center that the erring golfer blames. The bad workman used to complain of his tools; but, with numberless tools to choose from, and with absolute power of choice, the bad golfer is perforce driven to complain of some part of himself.—Never himself apparently.—The Old Adam dies hard. It is always one’s digestion, or one’s liver, or one’s suprarenal capsules that are at fault.—Which is a curious ethico-psychological fact.—At all events it is a tremendous compliment to the fascination of golf that it is to these technical adumbrations of the anatomist that we are driven in order to explain or to excuse the vagaries of our game. One does not get “off” one’s football in this way, or one’s chess or one’s poker or one’s bridge; and if one did, one would hardly go to neurology or to histological pathology for the cause.

Chapter XVIII

Mind and Matter

And yet, what, after all, do these innumerable excuses that the poor golfer invents for himself after a bad round mean? Whom or what is he blaming? Is he not made up of cerebral and cerebellar centers; of cranial and spinal nerves; of neurons and synaptic fields; of extensor and flexor muscles? Are they not he? Which is the blamer and which is the blamed? Is there some inscrutable and immaterial psychic center, inerrant and supreme, that sits enthroned aloft, and sways and rules these lesser centers? Shall we find in golf proof of the existence of a Soul?

Of a soul! If the physical mysteries of golf are so recondite, what of the psychic? These, I fear, be beyond us. How analyze the complexities of the human golfing soul? How tread the labyrinthine mazes of temperament and of character? How unravel the mesh-work of feelings and emotions, hopes and desires and fears, exultations and disappointments, heated angers, heavy despondencies; the wrath so hard to allay or ere the sun goes down; the vain imaginings, the ridiculous puffings-up of our little souls, of our silly little souls, over a hole halved in three or a circumvented stymie? Or how explain the disturbances these bring about in the higher layers, and the resulting delinquencies of the motor muscles? — In golf we see in its profoundest aspect that profound problem of the relation of mind to matter. Nowhere in the sum-total of the activities of life is this puzzle presented to us in acuter shape than on the links. Is there an idea and immaterial self in the golfer which knows precisely what it wants to do; and a bodily and fleshly one that will not or cannot carry out its behests? Is there an immaterial mind, superior to, but linked with, a material brain; or does the brain, in its subtlest interstices, shade off into an immaterial mind—a thing unimaginable by man? Does matter think? Are beef and mutton and cabbage and potatoes transmuted into mind?—

We misuse words. We construct an artificial and needless barrier between mind and matter. By “matter” we simply mean something perceptible by our five senses; and by “mind” we simply mean something imperceptible by these senses. What “matter” really is we know as little as we do what “mind” really is. Suppose we had fifty senses; suppose we could actually perceive electricity, magnetism, ethereal vibrations, molecular motion, radial emanations, the interplay of emotion, the working of memory, the miracle of thought; suppose we could detect every and all of the myriad manifestations of energy as exhibited in the whole of this wonderful world! Would not the barrier be very hastily thrown down, and matter reveal itself as in reality one and the same with mind?

How extraordinarily limited is our conception of matter—so we call it! We say it has weight, color, shape, sound, smell, texture, temperature, or taste—just seven or eight properties, just seven or eight (for “energy” is but a name for the unknown)! And every one of these is highly problematical, and even vanishes altogether under certain conditions: there is no weight at the center of the earth; form and color disappear in the dark; and all the rest go with paralysis or paresis. What if matter had six or seven hundred properties? What if mind had an infinite number of senses—or rather, what if mind required no senses for the perception of matter? Would not percipient mind and perceptible matter prove themselves identical; and perhaps the soul of man find itself coincident conterminous with the Soul of the universe?

Chapter XIX

Necessarianism

Speculations such as these carry us far. I seem to see in the conscientious golfer, doing his utmost, poor soul, to make matter (or mind) transcend its own powers, a type and symbol of mankind; of mankind warring with its environment, striving to overcome its limitations, reaching up to some unknown ideal, pressing towards some inscrutable goal.—What potentialities may not lurk in Man! If Amoeba has developed into Man, into what may not Man develop! Some day we shall get some arch-angelical record rounds.—I wonder what Par golf on the New Jerusalem links will be!—but these be transcendental themes.

One more speculative point, and we will drop metaphysics.—The golfer, strive as he may, is the slave of himself. Perhaps nothing is borne in upon the golfer more strongly after months of practice than that his place on the Club Handicap is determined by this his slavery to himself. There is not a golfer living but would say, “If I could, I would.” The links prove the fatal and irrefragable claim of cause and effect. Every golfer wills to excel, and every golfer sedulously searches for the causes of failure.—“Tis only one more proof of the transcendental identity of mind and matter. If, at the biologists aver, omnis celluba e cellula, and ratiocination and emotion are impossible without cells, surely then also omnis idea ex idea, and thought and volition are links in an interminable chain….

Chapter XX

Multiple Personality

The net-work of chains in the golfer’s brain must be multitudinous. Golf seems to afford a corroboration of the theory that there are in man several layers of consciousness. Indeed, the late Mr. F.W.H. Myers might have found in golf a pertinent proof of the existence of his “subliminal self,” to the functions of which he attributed so important a share. Why a man should, say in June, play a superlatively excellent game, and in July play an execrable one, in spite of the fact that he is in July just as fit as he was in June, that passes the wit of that man, poor wight! He broods over it; he almost weeps over it; he tries remedy after remedy, but in vain—beef and beer, total abstinence; a more elaborate waggle, no waggle, right foot forward, left foot firmer; a cigar before a game, no tobacco at all—all to no propose. He knows to a nicety how every stroke should be played; but he is blessed, so he says, if he can play it.—Can it be that the so-called human “individual” is after all a duple, triple, quadruple, quintuple, or multiple personality? Almost it would seem so. You take your stance at the first tee, and Personality No. I severely makes up his mind to play carefully and well. At the approach, Personality No. II presses. At the put, Personality No. III is over-anxious, and is short. At the second tee, Personality No. IV flings care of the four winds of heaven. No. V takes his eye off the ball. No. VI goes into the bunker. No, n swears (let us hope subliminally). By this time the exasperated golfer compares himself to the Gadarene demoniac.

Indeed, a veritable demon seems to enter into a man on the links. Otherwise what on earth possesses him that he should transgress the most elementary and the most easily obeyed of rules? Why should he take his eye off his ball? Why should he “press” or hurry his stroke? There lies his ball awaiting his pleasure, and would await it for a fortnight, for that matter—there is not even a time-limit for the address; and every spectator, by the stern etiquette of the game, is in duty bound to stand mute and patient the while he prepares to strike. What on earth possesses him that he should look up before he strikes or strike in a hurry? And yet man after man spoils stroke upon stroke by these infantine follies—and, worse and worse, spoils them consecutively! There is no physical or artificial impediment whatsoever. Some ninety or a hundred yards of level turf lie between ball and hole. A club precisely made to suit that particular shot is handed you. Time and time again you have been taught exactly how to stand, exactly how to swing. And yet how often it has taken three, four, and even five strokes to cover those hundred yards! It would be laughable were it not so humiliating. In fact the impudent spectator does laugh—until he tries it himself; then, ah! Then, he too gets a glimpse into that miracle of miracles, the human mind, which at one and the same time wills to do a thing and fails to do it; which knows precisely and could repeat by rote the exact means by which it is to be accomplished, yet is impotent to put them in force. And the means are so simple so insanely simple. We need not be surprised that the impudent spectator does not even affect to conceal his laughter in his sleeve.—But neither need we be surprised that the experts, the adepts, those who have gone through the humiliation of failure, watching these puerilities from the veranda, are moved rather to wonder than to laughter. They have had more glimpses into the profundities and complexities of the erring golfing mind than they care to reckon, and they know that the secret of this extraordinary and baffling conflict of mind and matter is a psychological problem beyond the reach of physiology and ontology combined.

Chapter XXI

The Mind—A Civic Community

Talk as neurologists and psychologists may, what this fearfully and wonderfully made thing called “mind” is we have not the remotest conception. Five layers of consciousness? Why, there is a whole civic community underneath each one of us his hat or her bonnet. Trained watchmen sit at eye-gate and ear-gate and touch-gate and smell-gate and taste-gate, and report to the Mayor and Aldermen of Mansoul regarding all personages who demand admission. Go on board ship, and not until the watchmen have assured themselves that the sound and vibration of the screw are harmless, will they let the city sleep, though the central counsel argue never so hard. Let the screw stop at the end of the voyage, and immediately the watchmen rouse the whole city, shouting that something has gone wrong. And, if the encephalon is a municipality, the bodily frame is, as it were, a whole nation under its government, whence, according to reports received from the portals, orders are issued for the mobilization of forces and the undertaking of huge campaigns—one battalion of muscles holding the legs in firm position; another sending the arms flying in all directions. And—mystery of mysteries, miracle among things miraculous—not only are there guards and officials and troops, but apparently there is a generalissimo or an emperor, who can look on and analyze and criticize the doings and functions of this nation and capital—can actually try to discover the method of its own working and put down in black and white the provisions of its own constitution; for surely, reader, this is precisely what you and I are attempting to do at this moment! The mind itself, so it seems, can turn round upon itself, get outside of itself, and examine its own workings! What a stupendous puzzle! Ah! There must be more in the human mind than watchmen and aldermen and mayor; there must be lords spiritual as well as temporal—perhaps a shrine and altar, and, behind a veil, a Holy of Holies. In microcosmic Mind I seem to see in miniature a tiny facsimile or homologue of macrocosmic Spirit, that spirit which not only externalizes itself in Nature, but, as Plotinus of Lycopolis hath it, “possesses sight and knowledge of itself” (apud Tennemann).

But alas! How often the little microcosm goes wrong! How desperately ignorant it is of itself!—Well, few things bring home to us better the depths of this our ignorance of ourselves than its vagaries and eccentricities of the links. What particular giant-cell in the cortex of the brain fails to act when we take our eye off our ball? Will any electrode teach us that? And what cortical monitor indignantly upbraids that cell immediately afterwards? Will any theory of “multiple personality” explain for us what? Constantly one part of the mind takes another to task for dereliction of duty. Cannot the mind see to it that the municipality as a whole and the nation under its rule act in unison? Can it be that there is going on in each individual human being a gigantic constitutional struggle exactly analogous to that which is going on and has ever been going on in every nation upon this terrene periphery—a struggle to determine who shall rule, what powers the ruler shall have, and how his actions may be checked? So it would seem.—

Looked at nearly, golf does, indeed, raise for our consideration deep and curious questions. But golf cannot answer them, any more than can the neurologists or the psychologists—or, for the matter of that, the constitutional historians. For in golf, so it would appear, the political constitution of this little human individual community is put to the severest and utmost test. So extremely complex, requiring the harmonious cooperation of so many sets of forces, is the task imposed by golf, that the whole body politic is thrown, every time it sets out on a round, into the throes of a constitutional crisis. A huge and difficult political problem suddenly confronts it, a problem for the correct solution of which the nation must act harmoniously and as a unit. The Republic is in danger, and the inhabitants rush about looking for one whom to appoint as Dictator.—Or, as the French say, well for that man among whose myriad cell-population there is always a Cincinnatus ready to leave his plough and attend to the game! For unless there is, there will be consternation in the capital, and no concerted action, but only vague hurryings and recriminations, and rushings to and fro of disorderly mobs. But alas! Cincinnati are rare, very, very rare. It takes a great national cataclysm to throw up a great leader of men. Only, indeed, in great cataclysms are great men thrown up. What an upheaval produced a Napoleon, what a revolution a Washington! Ordinary events do not produce extraordinary men.—Perhaps this is why an ordinary round can be performed only by an extraordinary player. What exasperates the ordinary man about golf is that it seems to be a game utterly and absolutely unamenable to reason. You may speculate in stocks; you may lay odds on a horse-race; but the money-market and the turf are child’s play compared with the uncertainties of golf;—and this in spite of the fact that, though you cannot control the market, and know your horse only by hearsay, on the links it is on your own individual efforts that you count. My opponent to-day had had a bad night; so he dolefully told me, and expected defeat. What was the result? His record round for his links!—No; golf is not amenable to reason.—And here we find another factor in the extraordinary fascin