The Necessity of Sang Froid in Golf

Golfers are Advised Never to Try for a Brilliant Four, When They Need Only a Safe and Sure Five

BERNARD DARWIN

THAT "the longest way round is the shortest way home", is often as true of golf as of other things; but it is not as true as it used to be. In the higher walks of golfing life, at any rate, safety play has almost disappeared. Everybody has got to go for everything.

With the general improvement in clubs and balls, players and courses, this was bound to happen. If any single great genius accelerated its happening, it was probably J. H. Taylor, who, when he first appeared at an open championship meet, astounded every one by the sang froid with which he hit brassey shots right up to the hole side. From that moment, the old advice, "Take your cleek for safety", became a dead letter; at any rate, as far as score play in championship events is concerned.

However, there is, thank Heaven, more match than score play in the world; and most of us are not champions. Therefore, we still have plenty of opportunities for exercising that quality which is the better part of valour; and it is remarkable how very ill we usually do it. I remember once walking with Mr. John Low, at Prestwick, towards the wall which is now no more. We were over two hundred yards from the wall, on a wide open stretch of turf. The only conceivable stroke for any one to play from that spot would have been "any old shot" that should not be grossly crooked, and should not reach the wall. Said Mr. Low to me, "Now, this is just the sort of shot that 'A' could never play." It was probably true. "A" was a brilliant player of individual shots, but he could not acquire the pedestrian virtue of just jog-trotting along, out of harm's way. His intellect, in such a case, would always soar to a subtle hook, or a slight "drift" to the right; and the ball would soar to perdition.

WITH most of us, it is not this disdaining W of simple things that brings us to grief when we try to play for safety. It is the unconscious effort to steer the ball, to hit it just a little more cautiously and so more gently than usual, that is so disastrous. To play less ambitiously than our wont is intensely difficult. The other day, at Hoylake, I was talking to a friend of mine, who told me the story of how he once did it for a whole round with signal success; and it struck me as a remarkable achievement.

He is not a great golfer—his handicap is, I think, eleven—and some of the credit of the feat belongs to a very great golfer indeed, Mr. John Ball. "B" had still some time to wait before starting in the medal, when Mr. Ball said to him that, with his handicap, he ought to win. "B" modestly disclaimed any such notion; he always made a mess of a card, and so on; but Mr. Ball insisted. "Go into the clubhouse", he said, in effect, "and write down the score in which you can afford to do every hole. At this first one, you can take six. Don't go anywhere near the field (an out-of-bounds territory that stretches all the way to the hole). Give it a wide berth, and play for a six. At the second, you can take a five, and so on. By the time you get to the turn, you'll find you've picked up two or three strokes."

"B", only half convinced, thought he would try it. He made out his humble itinerary, hole by hole; and off he started with his six and his five. Sure enough, when he reached the turn, he had gained three strokes.

At the tenth hole, a difficult two-shotter, he hit two very good shots plump on the green. "You can get a four here!" cried his partner. "No", said "B", firmly, "I only want a five; I am not going to try for a four"—and he took his three putts accordingly. Everything went well according to the itinerary, till he came to the last hole, another good two-shotter, with a deep and formidable cross-bunker in front of the green.

"NOW," said the partner after "B" had hit a good drive, "You can just play short with your iron and get a comfortable five."

"I shall not," said "B"; "I shall hit it with a brassey, as hard as I can."

Of course, you all guess the end of the story. "B" forsook his plan at the last moment, and paid the penalty by getting into the deep bunker and taking a ten. Well, if that is your guess, you are quite wrong. He hit his brassey shot magnificently, and his ball lay close to the hole in two. He would not try for a three—that, he felt, would be tempting the gods too highly— but he got a nice safe four, and he won the medal by a single shot. The moral would be a better one, if he had not made that one desperate departure from the schedule. Even as it is, however, it is a very good moral, though a difficult one to follow.

I must say that I never before heard of such iron self-restraint as was "B's" when he preferred to take three putts on the tenth green, because he had set down the hole as a five. It seems like pushing a good principle too far. And yet he may have been right. A brilliant four might have set his pulse beating too fast, and so unsettled him, while with a five he "kept the even tenor of his way".

Apropos of this incident, there was a little something that amused me in the Oxford and Cambridge match a few days since, which also took place at Hoylake. Mr. Pulling, of Cambridge, a Princeton golfer though a British citizen, won his match by an astonishing burst of brilliancy in the last nine holes. From the tenth to the fifteenth, where he won, he had three threes, a two, and two fours—four under par. At one of the "three" holes, he had two putts for the hole; and I said to him afterwards, "I was rather cross with you for holding that putt for three, when a four would have done as well. I was afraid you had wasted it."

"I did not want to hole it," he answered. "I tried to be short, but the ball would go in!"

THAT is not the usual result, when we try to play short for safety. The natural inclination to be short is so strong in most of us that it needs no encouragement. When we do encourage it, there is no knowing where it will land us. In a foursome tournament last year between the social clubs of London, a certain couple stood dormy, one in the semifinal. They had hit a very good drive to within an easy iron shot of the hole, and their enemies were up to their necks in fir-trees and heather. Then they began to play for safety. They did not get into a single bunker—they never even went near one; but by sheer futility of caution, they came to such a pass that they had to hole a nasty putt of five or six feet to halve that last hole in six and so win the match. One really did not know whether to laugh or to weep in watching them.

On the other hand, there can be too much boldness. I have never ceased to be thankful to a gentleman I once played in a handicap tournament, twenty years ago. It was the semi-final; he was dormy one. I had to give him a stroke at the last hole, and he had hit his tee shot well and straight. It was a black state of things; but he proceeded to make it brighter for me. First of all, he remarked that he hoped his pet driver would last out for the final in the afternoon; and he said it without touching wood or adding, "In a good hour be it spoken." Then, when he could have played short and got the easiest of fives, he went for a big bunker with that very driver, and went in. His driver was not required in the final; neither was his iron, nor his putter, nor anything that was his.

Mind you, it takes a brave man sometimes to play short. It is not always courage that makes us go out for the long shot, but rather a craven desire to get the agony over. I always think one of the bravest examples of playing short is to be found in the story of Harry Vardon's play in the first open championship which lie won,atMuirfield, in 1896. Taylor, who had won in the two previous years, was leading.

WHEN Vardon came to the seventy-second hole he wanted a four to win and a five to tie. The last green at Muirfield is guarded by a big deep sand bunker. It is, comparatively speaking, child's play today; but with the gutty ball, two big hits were needed to carry it. After his tee shot, Vardon had to decide whether to go for it or not. If he did and carried it, he would be a champion in five minutes. If he failed, he might easily take six and lose everything. If he played short, he would have the prospect of playing off a tie with the man who was then regarded as indisputably the best golfer.

The temptation to go for it must have been great; but he played short, and beat Taylor in the play-off by four strokes. I suppose Vardon knew how good he was himself, though other people had not then quite realized it. Still, it was a brave shot, just as was one which was its exact converse; that is, Bobby Jones' last "nothing venture, nothing win" shot over the water-jump at Inwood, when he beat Cruikshank.

"He's in the bunker. All I've got to do is to keep straight." How often have we said that to ourselves, and how often has that little all proved far too much for us. Mr. John Ball was playing a match, the other day, and his enemy put his tee shot into a bunker. Mr. Ball was clearly not looking, and a friend said to him, "You didn't see where he went, did you?" "No," said Mr. Ball. "Why should I? What I've got to try to do is to get the hole in the right number."

There is a great deal of sturdy good sense in that remark. Much has been written about the subtleties of "playing to the score", as it is called; but what a lot of bad holes we might have spared ourselves, if we had not known what our opponent was doing! It is a lamentable confession; but I am not certain that we are not more often short when we have got a putt for a half than at any other time.

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We are apt to talk of playing for safety and playing short, as if they were synonymous: and very often they are; but there is another kind of safety shot that we have all of us played with fast-beating hearts— namely, the "over-at-any-price" shot. It is one of the sovereign virtues of the poor, old, despised cross bunker in front of the green that it makes us play that shot at anxious moments. We go over the bunker and over the green as well. That is one of the chief reasons, I think, why a notably fine home hole has generally got a big cross bunker. Of our championship courses, Muirfield and Hoylake have big bunkers. Westward Ho! has a black and oozy ditch called, by courtesy, "the burn". And in America, what could be more terrifying than the fearful combination of bunker and water that waits for us at the last hole at Pine Valley? When Sandy Head won his championship at Hoylake, he was so determined to get over the last bunker that he came near to wedging his ball under the railings, beyond the green.

On the whole, this form of safety play leads to less dire calamities than playing short: first, because the worst trouble is not, as a rule, beyond the green; and secondly, because we do not make such tragic errors when we are playing to the full power of the club, as when we are trying to be particularly controlled and discreet. To play a half-shot sounds so delightfully easy, and eminent persons tell us that it really is so; but I do not believe them. The nearest approach to an easy shot at a crisis is a "scuffle" along the ground, with no bunkers in sight, no heel to your iron, and six for the match. I found myself in that situation the other day; and then, after I had duly played my scuffle, I was seized with a terror that I should hit the ball twice with my putter, or that my caddie would become temporarily insane and pick up my ball. However, I did not. and he did not. There is no situation so bad but that it might not be worse.