An Apology for Throwing Golf-Clubs

The Fear of Killing Your Partner is the Best Excuse for not Doing It

BERNARD DARWIN

THE decorum of golf has been enhanced, but its picturesqueness diminished, by the fact that clubs no longer hurtle through the air as they once did. I do not mean that we have all become models of deportment (I am the last person in the world who would dare say so) nor that a club is never sent flying after an errant ball, but who is there to-day that, with intense and deliberate savagery, throws all his clubs into the sea (and then has to rescue them) or into a pond, or onto a railway track?

Whoever batters his putter-head against a stone wall? I declare it is years since I heard the satisfying crack of a shaft bent over a furious knee. Just as the taste for eloquence has gone out and we like level-headed matters of fact from our orators, just as few men today gain a reputation for their powers of flowery and varied objurgation, so the loss of temper as a fine art is on the wane, and in some respects the world is the poorer.

OF COURSE we ought not to throw our clubs about. We ought not to want to do so because, as one irascible old gentleman once remarked to his soothing wife "I know its only a — game". But if we do want to, if we feel that something will snap inside us if we don't, then it is in a way almost a pity that we are not allowed to. Certain it is that if we yield to temptation wc may feel ashamed of ourselves, but wc also very often experience a sensation of blessed relief. The storm cloud dissolves itself in one brief, terrific shower, and the sun shines out again. We arc not allowed to throw our club with winged words, but we do sometimes drop it on the ground after a bad shot with a forced and hollow laugh, and an air of utter dejection. And that brings us no relief at all. After one real outburst we may try to the utmost, try viciously, venomously and sometimes victoriously; but when we let our club fall feebly to earth it is as much as to say that we can do no more, since Heaven is palpably against us. A distinguished American doctor wrote an article the other day in which he painted in horrific colours the strain imposed by golf on its middle-aged devotees. I am sure he would uphold the ebullition of swift anger against sullen and cowardly despair.

Then again, people arc often a little unjust to us—the genus irritabile—that throw or want to throw our clubs. They think that we are angry with our enemy because he is beating us, whereas wc are only angry—oh! so angry—with ourselves. I admit that our action is liable to another interpretation, and perhaps we deserve that it should be, but we arc misunderstood creatures nevertheless. The other day I found myself placed at Sunday luncheon next to a very cross little boy. He sat there glowering for some time with rather pink eyes and refusing to cat. Then he looked at his plate of good roast beef and uttered in such a tone of concentrated venom as I had never heard, the single word "Beastly". I was stupid; I thought it was the beef that had annoyed him, but it was not. It was the world in general, and he himself in particular that were beastly. If he had thrown his plate on the floor—and I trembled lest he should—it would have been purely a symbolic action.

Still there it is—people will be stupid and misunderstand. There were once two dear old gentlemen, nearing eighty apiece, who played many and happy rounds together. One day one of them, being something ruffled in a bunker, discharged his niblick into the air, and by pure ill luck it alighted on the other. Nothing had been further from the thrower's design. If he had any design at all it was to break the niblick, and yet from that incident there seemed to spring up a coolness and for some time the two old gentlemen did not play together nearly so often as formerly. This was like the case, tried before a deceased and very famous Judge, in which a farmer wounded a boy who was stealing apples from his orchard. The farmer's plausible defence was that he had fired merely to frighten the thief and not to hit him. The Judge in his summing up to the Jury observed "The prisoner says that he aimed at nothing. Unfortunately he missed it". I have always felt sorry for that farmer.

I ONLY remember once to have had a club thrown at me, and that by one of the most good-tempered golfers of my acquaintance. I had been holing putts in an extremely offensive and fortunate manner, and on the home green yet another went in to win the bye. My friend said in a perfectly level, placid voice "He's holed another" and forthwith sent his putter slithering along the ground at me from behind at the height of my ankles. Luckily some sixth sense came to my rescue for, all unseeing, I leaped into the air and the putter passed under my feet.

Apart from the fear of killing a partner there are eminently practical reasons for not throwing clubs. There is for instance this much more powerful deterrent, that you may break the club. Only the other day I came across a golfer of great celebrity putting with a cleek. I asked—tactlessly as it turned out-— what had happened to his usual club of aluminium and he answered, not without embarrassment that he had thrown it at a tee box. He had thrown it moreover with so fatally true an aim that he had broken, not only the shaft, but the head as well—a thing he could scarcely have done, if he had tried. There is to be sure some greatness of soul required to throw a club at a tee box. It means that the thrower has envisaged the consequences and, rather than not give vent to his wrath, is prepared to abide by them; but it is not a course to be recommended. In his book of reminiscenses Mr. Hilton tells of the historic and tragic eight at a short hole—the Himalays at Prestwick—which almost certainly prevented him from winning his third Open Championship. When the tragedy of the eight was played out he relieved his feelings by throwing his putter at the tee box, but fortunately he missed it. The escape steadied him and he played so nobly that in the end he was only just beaten by Harry Vardan and Willy Park. I do not suppose that he has ever thrown a club from that day to this, but if he has, then I feel sure he threw it into the open country. People who propose to consign some document to the flames in a melodramatic manner, often look first to see that the fire is safely out, and though it may slightly lessen our satisfaction wc should first look round for tee boxes when we throw clubs.

Of course if we really mean to break a club, because nothing less will satisfy, it is another matter. In the old days of skeered or spliced club there was a method recommended as conducive to a root and branch policy. It consisted of kicking the club vigorously at the splice, whereby both shaft and head could be destroyed. Whether this game was worth the candle may be doubted, but anything is better than breaking the club when you only mean to frighten it. As crockery will fly inexplicably out of the housemaid's hand, so a club will sometimes break through the most innocent act. In Mr. Horace Hutchinson's "Fifty Years of Golf" there is a pleasant little picture of old Tom Morris as the arch-misser of short putts. "Once, but once only" says Mr. Hutchinson "I saw him beat his putter on the ground so hard after a missed putt that the shaft broke. I think it must have been sprung before, for he did not really give it such a very severe strain, but of course that was quite overlooked, and the joke served for many a day to tease the old man with, as 'Tom, what is this I hear? Getting in such a rage that you're breaking all your clubs! Awful!' The poor old man would smile despairingly and generally solace himself with some quotation from his dearly loved poet Burns. 'Scotland wi' a' thy faults I lo'e thee still' was his most favourite text for consolation."

I DO not know whether the tempers of golfers have really improved or their powers of self-restraint have become greater, or whether there is some subtler cause for the decrease in club breaking. Once upon a time when men played with the gutty ball with the flinty heart, club heads were always breaking. It was the fortune of war and a man who went out to play a match with only one driver was rightly accounted to be tempting providence. In an account of one of the early amateur Championships is the statement that "young Mr. Ball" (alas! that was some years ago now) "broke his favourite brassey". To-day with the soft ball and the hard club head nobody breaks his favourite club in a championship; it lasts almost for ever. This change may have had its effect. The horrors of war necessarily made us think cheaply of human life; the blessings of peacehave restored our old estimate. So when clubs were always breaking, one breakage the more, although a wilful one, did not seem to make so much difference, but now, when they are almost invulnerable, the death of a club is a serious and awful thing, and he who once threw at sight now thinks again and so refrains.

I should, I confess, like to think that the old fires are still smouldering.