Mr. Wethered and Mr. Ouimet

How the British Amateur Champion Vanquished—and Tied—America's Golfing Prodigy

BERNARD DARWIN

ABOUT this time last year I had the pleasure of writing an article for Vanity Fair, subject was our then Amateur Champion, Mr. Holderness. It seems only fitting, then, that this time I should say something about Mr. Holderness's successor, Mr. Roger Wethered.

Mr. Wethered is not a stranger to American golfers. He visited America in 1920 and again last summer, but, to many who watched him then he would, I think, have appeared a stranger as he played at Deal in the Championship, and at St. Andrews in the Walker Cup match. In America he has never yet come near to doing himself justice, and even at home he has never played as he did this year —no, not when he tied with Jock Plutchinson for the Open Championship.

When Miss Joyce Wethered appeared at Deal on the day of the Championship Final, having traveled half through the night from Somersetshire to see her brother win, she exclaimed after watching a hole or two, "Why, this is a new Roger!" It was perfectly true. Pie was playing like a man newly inspired. When we talk of inspired golf we are prone to think of the rare days on which we walk up to the ball and slash at it as hard as we can with a reckless, insolent confidence. That is but a treacherous, ephemeral, form of inspiration, and it was not Mr. Wethered's. His was rather the inspiration of control. He had suddenly mastered the art of, as it were, understating his case, of hitting not up to the very limit of his powers, but well within them, and the result was a sense of stability which his friends and supporters had never before enjoyed to the full.

I cannot better describe this change in Mr. Wethered's game than by saying that he played more like his sister. Those who have seen her will know that higher praise is hardly possible. Miss Wethered was playing at Rye, when we of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society had the very great pleasure of entertaining the American golfers there. Mr. Hilton was looking on, and was asked by some admirer who he thought the best golfer he had seen that day.

Mr. Wethered and His Sister

MR. HILTON said, "Guess," and his questioner conscientiously began. Was it Tolley? No. Was it Ouimet? No. Wethered, Sweetser, Gardner, Holderness? No, No, No, No. Well, then, who the devil was it, asked the questioner, beginning by this time to be rather irritated. With a chuckle Mr. Hilton gave him the answer—"Joyce Wethered." She was in his judgment, he added, the best striker of a golf ball now in existence. It is a verdict with which, I believe, most competent judges in England would agree, and so I pay Mr. Roger the best compliment I can when I say he has learned to play more like Miss Joyce.

It is incidentally rather amusing to observe how the fame and the achievements of this brother and sister see-saw up and down. Miss Wethered is now only twenty-one, three years younger than her brother, but she began the game of winning championships when in the Autumn of 1920 she beat Miss Leitch in the final of the English Ladies' championships. Next year she reached the final of the British Open and the French championships, though losing to Miss Leitch in both cases, and her brother, meanwhile, despite his great private reputation, had been disappointing in the big events. Then came the swing of the pendulum, and his wonderful achievement at St. Andrews when he beat all the British professionals, and the American ones as well, except Jock Hutchinson, with whom he tied for the Open Championship.

The brother's stock rose, and the sister's fell a little. I remember writing a letter of congratulation to a member of the family in which I not very elegantly said, "Roger has wiped Miss Joyce's eye this time. "

The Ladies' Championship

HOWEVER, back went the pendulum again. Roger had a couple of rather disappointing years, including his failure to qualify in the American Championship at Brookline, whereas his sister went from strength to strength, won the Ladies' Championship, gave Miss Leitch a severe beating, and generally devastated the whole realm of ladies' golf, playing such a game as no lady has, I believe, ever approached. Then, when she was "a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, " she failed dramatically and utterly unexpectedly in the semi-final of the Ladies' Championship at Burnham, just at the very moment that her brother was saving his country at Deal by beating Mr. Ouimet. And so he steps on to the throne just as she vacates it. It seems a pity that they could not in one and the same year occupy twin pinnacles, side by side, but there is plenty of time before them and they will do it yet.

This family history has taken me a little away from my theme, namely this revelation, apparently Heaven-sent, to Mr. Wethered, of how to hit hard and not too hard.

I have just been reading a magazine article by Mr. Tolley on the subject of long driving, and a passage in it comes pat to my purpose. "When I went up to Oxford," he says, "I first played with Mr. Roger Wethered. During our first game we each managed, by dint of much exertion and strain, to outdistance the other several times, but this lasted for only a few holes. By the time we reached the fourteenth it was quite impossible to estimate who was the longest driver—the only thing we could pride ourselves on as the game progressed was that we were less distance in the rough than our opponent."

That pleasant little page well describes Mr. Wethered in some of his earlier moods. For some time, however, he had, I think, realised that tremendous hitting did not pay, but he could not light on the secret—and a difficult one it is—of comparatively gentle hitting. As one of his friends described it to me, " When Roger tries to hit the ball less hard he does not hit it at all." Even a week before the Championship began he was hitting some desperately erratic shots. His two last tee shots at Sandwich, when he wanted two fours to tie with Mr. Ouimet and Dr. Willing for the St. George's Vase, were two of the most colossal slices the human eye ever saw. And then suddenlv the revelation seems to have come.

Braid, we know, went to bed a short driver and woke up a long one. Mr. Wethered woke up just in time at Deal, a straight driver. Gone was the tremendous wide stance, that leads to forcing, and the crouch with the hands low; gone the terrifying swish of the club through the air. Instead we had a player standing up easily to his ball and giving it by comparison a mere pat, and that with the air of one who says,"That's far enough for me if the other fellow can hit farther, let him do it with my blessing."

A year before, at Prestwick, some wag, after watching a round of Mr. Wethered's, had remarked, "Now 1 know what is meant by golf from two sides. " That, it will be remembered, was the title of the book on golfand a very good book too —written by the brother and sister. The neat, if rather unkind, little pleasantry would have been quite inappropriate at Deal, and I doubt if it will ever be appropriate again.

Our new Champion has not only had a driving revelation, but also a putting one. That was by no means so sudden. For some time before the Championship his friends had been saying that "Roger has become a good putter". So in fact he had, and his putting at Deal especially in his match against Mr. Ouimet, and in the final against Mr. Harris, was not merely consistently good, it was consistently deadly. You know how frightened we are over here of American putting and putters. Well, if Mr. Wethered had been an American, if his name had been Travis, or Travers, we should have been saying that his putting was black witchcraft, and useless to contend against. He seems to me to be the one putting Ethiopian who has really succeeded in changing his skin. We have all of us at one time or another declared that we have changed our putting styles, but our friends can see no difference; to their eyes we are in the same old attitude; they say of us pityingly: "Poor old chap, he thinks he's learnt to putt just because for a day or two the ball is going into the hole."

Mr. Wethered's Technique

WITH Mr. Wethered there is a genuine difference. He has changed his attitude. He used to stand with his feet some way apart, and the weight forward on the left leg. Now he has adopted a more American pose, the heels close together, and the body much more upright. What is more important, he has acquired a smooth free method of striking the ball. There is nothing of the push, the poke or the prod about it; the club head is doing the work and going through beautifully after the ball. The really good putter always conveys the impression of a billiard player, and Mr. Wethered made the rather slow and heavy Deal greens look as smooth as the board of green cloth.

I have said nothing about his iron play. There he did not need a revelation. It has always been a strong point. And yet his most profitable shot, with an iron club is one that arouses keen controversy. He is extraordinarily effective in the laying of little chips from just beyond the confines of the green dead at the hole side. He plays the shot with an old-fashioned niblick having a face so tiny that there hardly seems room on it for the ball. This face is entirely plain, but Mr. Wethered can, if he will, get so much back-spin with the club that no amount of slots or ribs could do appreciably more. This stroke he plays day in and day out with the utmost steadiness, and yet he plays it in an unorthodox way. He seems to flick the club at the ball with a switch of the wrist, There is about it something of the action of a man cracking a whip. I have never seen any other good golfer play this shot in this way. Pundits shake their heads over it and imply, rather than say, that some day there will come a crash. There may, but all I can say is that this dreadful dawn seems at present far off. And indeed, for myself, 1 do not criticize the stroke, but rather regard it as an extraordinarily remunerative eccentricity of genius.

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No account of Mr. Wethered's golf this Spring could possibly be complete without some word of his two great battles with Mr. Francis Ouimet—the first in the semi-final at Deal when Mr. Wethered won by 2 and x, and so in all human probability stopped the Championship Cup from crossing the Atlantic; the second in the Walker Cup at St. Andrews where they ended all square in a common blaze of glory. The second of these two matches was, I think, all things considered, the finest golf match I ever saw. Many of us who saw it will judge all future combats by the standard of it, and years hence shall wag our aged heads and say, "Ah, but you should just have seen that match between Francis Ouimet and Roger Wethered!"

Both matches were a privilege to watch. They were played in the friendliest and most delightful possible spirit. They were played at a brisk and cheerful pace, with no undue or wearisome scrutiny of the line or the scenery, and they were fought out to the last gasp with unflagging courage.

The Limits of Conquest

AFTER the first match, at Deal, Mr. Ouimet said that he had holed all the putts he could against Mr. Tolley in the morning, and that you could not go on doing that sort of thing all day. It was as true and just a comment as it was a modest one. He had played beautiful golf up to the greens in the morning, and when he got there he had holed all the crucial putts. He played very nearly as well in the afternoon, but this time the putts did not quite drop. No wonder they did not, for man plays golf as well as his enemy will allow him, and Mr. Wethered was playing the kind of golf which makes it almost impossible for the other man to do likewise.

For thirteen holes the Englishman very slightly, yet distinctly, out-played the American. Then there came an intensely critical time. At the 14th—a short hole—• Mr. Wethered, who was four up with five to go, was just on the green with his tee shot, and Mr. Ouimet was not. It looked as if England might win quite easily by 5 to 4. But Mr. Ouimet laid a chip stone dead, and his adversary, a little startled perhaps, took three putts. Instantly the whole face of the match seemed changed, At the next hole Mr. Wethered was bunkered and Mr. Ouimet holed a chip, Two holes gone. At the 16th came the supreme crisis. Mr. Wethered playing the odd, laid his ball on the lip of the hole. It was so nearly in that Mr. Ouimet practically had only half a hole to play at with the like. He hit the edge of the hole— how we all held our breath!—but the ball did not go in. The worst of the danger was over. Mr. Wethered was dormy two and making no mistake he settled it at the next hole.

That had been a fine spurt of Mr. Ouimet's though an unsuccessful one. He made another—still finer and more dramatic—at St. Andrews, and it succceded. I suppose anybody who knows St. Andrews would agree in this, that could golfing bargains be struck with Providence, a man would always accept 4, 5, 4. for the last three holes at a desperate moment, and accept it gladly. The two fours are "par" fours: the seventeenth is perhaps technically a "par" four too,in the sense that the green can under favorable conditions just be reached in two shots, but the green is so narrow and so beset with horrors that a five is good cause for thankfulness. Mr. Wethered was two up with these three holes to play, and he did them in 4, 4, 4; and yet he could do no more than halve his match, since Mr. Ouimet finished 3, 4, 3. Those figures are more eloquent than pages of description. They were done, moreover, at the end of a most exhausting day, and before as big a crowd as I have ever seen at St. Andrews,

The Last Hole

THE scene at the last hole was tremendously impressive. Right away from the tee beyond the famous burn to the green, a distance of near four hundred yards, there ran a black unbroken avenue of people. All round the green the crowd stood four or five deep. Every window ⅛ every house had its spectators. The balcony of the Royal Ancient Club House was packed. And when Mr. Ouimet went up to play his last fateful five putt, to save the match, all that great assembly was wrapped in a solemn silence. Down went the ball, hit as true as steel, and it is pleasant to recall the cheers that broke the silence when the British champion was so gallantly robbed of the victory,

The putting in the second round of that match, was something to be remembered. There are only two short holes— two legitimate threes—at St. Andrews, though there are one or two other holes where long drivers can nearly reach the green. Those two short holes were duly halved in three, and beyond these the players had six more threes between them —Mr. Wethered two and Mr. Ouimet four. Any invading golfer from Mars who should have attempted to play their better ball would assuredly have had a poor time of it. It was the best possible golf, played by the best possible golfers, in the best possible sense of the word, When they meet again I earnestly hope I may be there to see.