Ernest Holderness

A Sketch of the New British Amateur Golf Champion

BERNARD DARWIN

MR. Ernest Holderness, who won our Amateur Championship for the first time this year at Prestwick, is a very fine golfer, as you will see for yourselves if he is able to go, as I hope he will be, with the British team to America. He is also an extremely interesting one in several ways.

For one thing he is the most genuine possible amateur. By that I mean no reflections on the amateur status of previous champions, but if you look at the list of their names, you will find that most of them have lived a comparatively leisurely existence in the open air. Mr. Holderness is a very hard working Civil servant with a responsible post in the Home Office, and Civil servants, for all the jokes that are made about them, do work extremely hard. He can play golf only at his week-ends or on his holidays. The standard of golf is getting very high and a championship week is a strenuous and exhausting ordeal. Therefore, it is delightful to find that the honour can still be won by a man who does not give up his life to playing; a man to whom the game really is a game.

Another pleasant thing about Mr. Holderness's victory is that he has triumphed despite a physique and a temperament that were thought to bar his way and has thus falsified the prophecies of many croakers, even among his best friends. In the last few years—ever since the war in fact—his friends have known that he had in him golf of the very highest class but they have added regretfully, "He will never quite do it". And truth to tell—it is easy to say it, now that he has proved himself —Mr. Holderness was sometimes very disappointing. He would play beautifully accurate and powerful golf for a round or two and then fade away; he would play least well when most was expected of him.

Controlling Taut Nerves

NATURALLY a long strain is harder to bear for one who is not very strong and lives largely an indoor life. He is, moreover, highly strung. The latter is far from being a fatal defect in a game player. I do not believe in the man who is said "not to have a nerve in his body". He who starts on a big match, without feeling something of an agonizing thrill—perfectly calm, light-hearted or even a little bored—is apt to fall down with a sudden crash when the finish comes. It is the nervous player who can control his nerves who is the man to back. No man alive ever looked more inscrutably tranquil than did Mr. Travis with his traditional black cigar, when he beat us all at Sandwich in 1904, but his friends said that he was really wrought up to a high pitch of tension but had a wonderful mastery of himself. This is something of a digression but not quite irrelevant. Mr. Holderness has been disappointing when he was tired, or could not quite get a grip of himself. This year he looked, as he always does, rather unhappy while playing, but he had himself and his game well under control and no man could have played with a more dour courage under exquisitely trying circumstances.

Oddly enough it was only a week before his victory that he had depressed his friends more than usually. Representative matches do not seem to suit him. Last year at Hoylake he was far from his best in the match against America, and this year he played downright poorly for England against Scotland. He made a very shaky beginning and lost the first five holes, to Mr. Gordon Simpson. This, against so steady and relentless an adversary, was hopeless. The match was inevitably lost, and thus it happened that for the first few rounds of the championship nobody paid very much attention to Mr. Holderness.

This, no doubt, was the very best thing that could have happened to him. His first few opponents were not quite in his class; he had nothing to bother his head about save the comparatively simple task of beating them, and very quietly and determinedly he set to work playing himself back into form and confidence over their dead bodies. It was only when he had played himself into the last sixteen that people began again seriously to consider his chances. His opponent in this, the fifth round, was Mr. Hope, a very fine young player from the neighborhood of Prestwick, who had just knocked out that admirable golfer Mr. John Anderson and with him America's last chance. I watched a little of this match and Mr. Holderness was himself again; his tendency to cut, always a sign of weakness, had vanished. He was hitting the ball with plenty of fire and dash and that other tell-tale symptom of shortness on the green had also vanished.

Yet next morning there was a very bad quarter of an hour when he went out to play Mr. Hilton. Once again he began very, very shakily and lost all the first three holes. He pulled himself together and won the fourth; the fifth was halved, and then at the sixth Mr. Hilton missed a short putt. To be one down at the sixth is a vastly different business than three down at the third. On the way home Mr. Holderness came right away to win by 4 and 2, and such a retrieving of a bad start must have given him back his confidence once and for all. He fought a most sturdy fight against Mr. Hunter in the afternoon and when once he had him in his grip, never showed the least sign of relenting.

A Disturbing Gallery

AS to the final, long accounts have been written of it and I will not tell the story all over again. The golf was very fine, just about as good as I have seen in a final, and the conditions were most difficult, for so tremendous a crowd was never before seen on a golf course. Moreover, it was a Scottish crowd: the Scottish spectator is passionately patriotic and Mr. Caven, Mr. Holderness's adversary, is a west of Scotland man. It was said that the whole of Johnston, where Mr. Caven works, had simultaneously shut down in order to watch its champion. To have some fifteen thousand people all praying inwardly for your opponent's ball to go into a hole and your own ball into a bunker is a state of things that must have some effect. It was a very generous and sportsmanlike crowd. It did its level best to be fair but the fierce shout of joy for a good shot of the Scotsman had a positively terrifying ring in it. If ever there was a test of nerve, this was it, and both players came out of it with flying colours.

The putting, whereby the tremulous hand and brain are most often betrayed, was wonderfully good, even allowing for the fact that the Prestwick greens are very slow and very true. If ever putting can be considered easy, this putting was easy, but in the final of a championship, you can call no man happy even when he is dead. Moreover, the fine putting on both sides lasted to the very end—nay, it rose to a brilliant culmination. Mr. Holderness had been two up with two to play, but he had lost the seventeenth. The last hole is just the distance of one good, full drive. Mr. Caven was across the green to the left: Mr. Holderness just on the green, perhaps fifteen yards short. Mr. Caven's second ran five yards past the hole. Two for the championship for Mr. Holdernes, but his approach putt was not a very good one and he was a full three yards away. "Still," he must have thought to himself, "he can never hole that one; it will be all right." But Mr. Caven did hole it, and there went up to Heaven a great Scottish yell.

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Mr. Holderness must at that moment have had hard work to prevent his heart from sinking into his boots. A few minutes before, in a lesser degree a few seconds before, he had seemed safe: now that horrible thirty-seventh hole was looming very near. He hit the ball perfectly truly—there was never a doubt, and his hand was ready to pick the ball out almost before it was in. Between two such putts at such a crisis who can award the palm? Mr. Caven's was the longer but there never could have been a more agonizing one than Mr. Holderness's. If tapping a little ball into a little hole can ever he heroic, then both putts were the putts of heroes.

His Essentially Modern Style

THE new champion is about thirty-two years old. He went to school at Radley, and Mr. Croome, who was his house-master, tells me that he was the very best boy football player he ever saw. The football authorities wanted to play him for the school team in his first winter term, but very soon after that he had a serious operation and that was the end of his football for good and all. Meanwhile he used to go for summer holidays to Dornoch, that delightful town in the far north of Scotland where, curiously enough, Roger Wethered also played much of his boyhood's golf. When he went up to Oxford, he had obviously all the makings of a fine player, and was very good indeed in his last year. Now he lives near Walton Heath, as fine an inland training ground as need be, where the holes are long and the winds searching, It is there that he plays his week-end golf very often with Harry Braid, son of the famous James.

Mr. Holderness has a manner of play both easy and graceful in the extreme. I know that J. H. Taylor has always dedared it to be the best style among our amateurs of today. "He's an artist, sir," says the great man, with that formidable shake of the head that makes him so emphatic, "a perfect artist." It is an essentially modern style, an upright, indeed very markedly upright swing, and a square stance. There is something reminiscent of Harry Vardon and Duncan about it, but Mr. Holderness takes up the club a little straighter, I think, than either of these great men. When he is off his game, he is, as is natural, apt to cut the ball a little, but at his best he is exceedingly straight, driving a rather low ball with the slightest "drift" in the air from left to right, the type of ball that keeps blessedly clear of all flanking hazards. He comes through well and freely, and there is crispness and nip about the shot which shows that he is much stronger and more wiry than he looks.

In his iron play he takes the ball noticeably clean and seems to hit it with rather a more upward blow than is today orthgdox. On his day he is amazingly deft with the little on the edge of the green, and certamly no one could call his iron play weak. Yet it is not quite as good as his wooden club play, lacking a little something of the firmness and conviction of the strongest modern iron players with their downward punching blows. He has a pleasant, easy, natural stance on the green with the body leaning a little forward and the feet close together. Certainly he putted better at Prestwick than I have ever seen him do before, and what is more he was consistently bold. He was always giving the hole a chance and not approaching it as too many people do, by timorous installments,

Mr. Holderness's victory was exceedingly popular. It is always pleasant to have a champion who is beyond all possible question worthy of his honour, and his quiet, modest and yet masterly manner of playing, with no trace of affectation, no wearisome attitudinizing, makes an instant appeal. Now that he has begun winning championships there seems no reason why, given the time, he should not go on doing so. It is one thing for a man to know that he ought to be able to do it: quite another to know that he has actually done it. Mr. Holderness should now be a very terrible person indeed, for he has given us proofs