Wild heart of youth

BERNARD DARWIN

A veteran golfer shows how the twilight sportsmen of England happily hold their own with rising young stars

■ As I sit down to write, T am gloating in advance over a week to be spent in Scotland at the end of September. A kind host with one of the most delightful houses in the world has bidden seven of us to stay with him for a tour of matches in Ayrshire, a country of many and great golf links. We were all at Eton and more or less at the same time, save for one insurgent youth. It is going to be tremendous fun; not merely the matches but the staying together in that lovely place with a salmon river running below the terrace and the most diabolical of little garden courses on which we shall play after dinner in the long Scottish twilight. There is the old bowling green, too, about which there is a ballad. Some ancestor of our hosts once planted a neat beech hedge round it that he and bis friends might be sheltered as they played their bowls and drank their port wine. Today the tall beeches mingle their branches in an arch overhead so that the place has something the air of a cathedral, while at one end two Napoleonic Eagles in stone stand looking gravely down the aisle. It is going to be very pleasant to take a final stroll there on the soft mossy turf before turning in to bed.

In thinking about it all beforehand, which is the most ecstatic part of a holiday, I have taken the trouble to jot down our ages and the average, even when reduced by that one juvenile, is forty-six. It is a little sad to know we are so old but it is also a little glorious, because we really do not play golf so very ill; we are going to play against Prestwick and Troon—championship courses both—and I think we shall give these young men from the west a run for their money. Only two or three years ago most of us played for the Old Etonians against the old boys of Rugby in the Public Schools Competition, ten on a side. Our united ages then came to considerably over 400, theirs to a little over 200, and we won !

■ I am not saying these things boastfully or for the pleasure of licking the chops of

anticipation—I do it to point the moral that it is a mistake to give up games too early, as I think people in America are inclined to do. England has a definite notion implanted in its head about games and sports in America. Possibly it is a wrong one but we are wedded to it. It is that America thinks of these delightful things as too exclusively the property of youth, that it is ready to scrap its middleaged game-plavers too soon and that they themselves, yielding to the popular clamour, deem themselves old when they are almost young.

With this we contrast our own custom of going on playing as long as we like, or as we can, sometimes badly, sometimes rather well, so that our teams get silted up with veterans who keep the young out of their heritage.

Even if we do these things but ill we go on fishing, hunting and shooting, playing lawn tennis and squash and cricket and if the young think we are cumbering the ground they are kind and don't let us know it.

In England, as it seems to us, one who has once been a good player is sure of a tolerant respect. It is bis past rather than his present that is remembered. He may play very little better now than many a middle-aged duffer of the rank and file but his position differs from theirs; he is and always will be somebody. America, so we fancy, is a worshipper of rising suns and once a hero has ceased to win he is a hero no longer. What does it matter that he could once run the hundred yards in ten seconds if now he is fat and rheumatic and old?

Perhaps this conception of the American attitude is wrong. If it is not it may soon become so. To take the game I know best, I cannot believe that the Joneses and Sweetsers and Von Elms are all going to give up in their early thirties and quietly take a back seat before the inrush of youth. A few years ago the middle-aged golfers of America had not begun as children; they fell easy victims to a race of boys teethed on a club, but those boys, as they grow older, will still have the natural supple swing of youth, which they breathed unconsciously into their growing frames; the new generation has no fundamental advantage over them and they will not yield to it without a struggle.

As far as golf is concern'd, it mav be that I am only attacking a phantom of my own imagining and that the Country Club habit has revolutionised America so that it plays just as much as we do, old or young. Witness the activities of the Golfing Seniors around New York. Generally, however, I think we do still lead or lag behind, according to the point of view. We are either more energetic or more idle, call it which you will, in going on with our games when school and college are finished and work has begun. If a man has of sheer necessity to work so hard that he really has no time for out of doors, good luck to him and may he become a millionaire or attain whatever else be his ambition. Yet I cannot help wondering whether some of these very virtuous people are quite so busy as they suppose. Do they not sometimes, even as children enjoy pretending to be Red Indians, enjoy pretending how desperately busy they are? Might they not make time for games or sports if they were not quite so much occupied in telling everybody that they have not a moment to spare?

■ Perhaps this is dangerous ground. At any rate we have over here a number of middle aged and reasonably hard-working citizens who still play running-about games—lawn tennis and squash (Continued on page j4) and cricket and even now and again football. Only three years ago there was a master at Eton who was fifty-six and played football for the masters against the School, when the masters won; and I may add, in parenthesis that the Eton "Field Game" is a very fast one in which there is no loitering till the ball is passed to you, but you must be for ever following the ball.

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I admit that this hero was an exceptional one even amongst schoolmasters. They seem to have the gift of perennial youth; they come straight back to school from the University and so never give up active games and they have more time to play them than have those cooped in offices. Still, though they are in this respect luckier, they are made of the ordinary clay and show others what they might do, by not giving in too soon.

Cricket does not crack brittle bones as does football nor try the heart or the wind so highly and some of our cricketers go on a long time. I he supreme example is Lord Harris who once Captained England. lie was born in 1851 and till a few years ago played in club cricket almost regularly. Now he makes at least one appearance a year, on the Fourth of June, the great Eton festival of strawberries and white waistcoats, mothers and sisters. He plays against the School second eleven and still makes some runs though he is allowed a youthful ally to run them.

How long to go on and when to stop must be apart from the doctor's orders, a matter of temperament. There are some who do not like to feel that their ancient sceptre is departing. I

once asked one of the greatest of amateur cricketers whether he ever played nowadays and he answered: "No, I find I don't play as well as I did and I don't like it." That was a brave answer from one who had always been the bravest of the brave as a player. I honoured him for his candour but it is not he who is to be envied but rather the man who loves the game well enough to play it even a little worse.

If this be true of the famous, it is equally true of the obscure and indeed I have been talking too much of the leaders and not enough of the rank and file. After all, they are the people who really matter.

It is comparatively easy not to stop; it is terribly hard to begin again after an interval. Laziness, self-consciousness, the anticipated agonies of stiffness are all against a come-back.

Playing games with strangers is very well in our fiercely competitive youth but as we grow older we think less of the victory—perhaps the grapes are sour—and more of our company. I know one pair of old friends who play golf so much together that they keep their reckoning not by holes but by rounds, and sometimes in December one of them announces that he is dormy on the year. The old jokes, the "old grouse in the gun-room" stories belong, more than to any other race of men. to the old players of games. So. let us go on playing, even if we feel like Barre, the famous old French court-tennis player, who leant panting over the dedans and murmured reproachfully of his adversary, "Mon dieu, mon dieu, it est si jeune.'