"The greatest golfer in the world"

BERNARD DARWIN

■ A few weeks ago, when our Amateur Championship was played at Westward Ho!, Miss Joyce Wethered came down to watch it. A day or two before the tournament began she went out to play a four hall match with three distinguished male golfers. One was her brother, Roger, former Amateur Champion; the second was Robert Harris, who has captained our Walker Cup team and been Amateur Champion; the third was J. B. Pease, most illustrious of all veterans, who, at 59, only just failed—at the twenty-first hole—to reach the semi final and this year, at 62. got into the last sixteen. There was a good stiff wind blowing, such as makes the great Devonshire course truly alarming, and Miss Wethered holed it in 72 strokes, which is a better score, as far as I know, than any man did in the course of the Championship under decidedly easier conditions. Naturally enough her side won the match, hut furthermore, the three other players agreed that she, unaided, had beaten the best ball of the whole three of them, and I have no reason to doubt that they spoke the exact truth. Thus she confirmed the statement of Bobby Jones, who, after playing with her at St. Andrews last year, roundly declared that she was "the greatest golfer in the world."

• There have been various great vintage years in golf. Once upon a time it used to he 1869, which produced Harold Hilton, Frederic Tait, Johnnie Low and a number of minor hut still reasonably bright luminaries. Then it was 1870 with Harry Vardon and James Braid, the third of the triumvirate, T. H. Taylor, being a few months too young and so belonging to 1871. Now it is 1901 in which annus mirabilis were born Bobby Jones and Joyce Wethered, the man on St. Patrick's Day and the woman on the 17th of November. Those who know their Trilby may recollect how Glorioli, the great singer, said that ''Every century, two human nightingales Avere born —only two! a male and a female." I am inclined to adapt his words to golf and to say that in this twentieth century the two supreme golfers of either sex were born in the very same year. And now, by a strange irony, these two, at the very height of their powers, have both retired and left their crowns for other lesser mortals to pick up and wear Avith a knowledge that they only do so on sufferance.

They have retired from different reasons though in both cases a certain inevitable satiety must have played its part. I Avill not go again into Bobby's reasons; that question has been thrashed out. Miss Wethered has had no such material inducements: she has simply grown weary of the pother and the turmoil of championship and acted up to a doctrine, Avhich many profess but feAV quite genuinely hold, that golf is to be played for pleasure. She certainly is not a female Alexander crying for more worlds to conquer; she is, if I may respectfully say so, far too modest and too sensible for that. When, in 1929, she came out of her shell to play at St. Andrews, people thought it was because of the formidable American invasion of that year. I do not think it was anything of the kind; it was simply that she loved the old course at St. Andrews and here was one chance, perhaps, in a lifetime, of playing in a championship there. I know just one other course—I am too discreet to name it —which might tempt her again, just because she has spent pleasant times near it. I don't say it will, but it might. As it is, she does not like being gaped at and mobbed and bothered for autographs and rushed over by stampeding crowds and, since a game is a game and not a business or a duty, why in the world should she do what she does not like?

■ This is not a statistical article and so I will only just set down Miss Wethered's record. It was in the summer of 1920. when she Avas eighteen years old, and when nobody had ever heard of her, that she made her first appearance in the English Ladies Championship at Sheringham. In the final she met Miss Cecil Leitch. then at the very height of her fame, and, after being six down with thirteen to play, won the match by 2 and 1. She won that championship for the next four successive years and then gave it up once and for all. In 1921 she first played in a Ladies Open Championship at Turnberry and reached the final where she met Miss Leitch, who had, in the first round, knocked out that great American player, Miss Alexa Stirling. Miss Leitch played very finely and had an adequate revenge for Sheringham by 4 and 3, but it Avas clear that even her sceptre Avas departing and that the newcomer would soon be neither to hold nor to bind. Next year they met again in the final at Princes', Sandwich, and Miss Wethered, playing truly magnificent golf, won by 9 and 7. In 1923, at Burnham, Miss Wethered, by one of those singular pranks of chance, Avas heaten in the semi final by Mrs. Macbeth, but in 1923 she won with supreme ease and then in 1924 she and Miss Leitch met again in the final at Troon. Miss Wethered won at the 37th but I think the real heroine that year Avas Miss Leitch. She had struggled through to the final, whereas her rival had swept there with triumphant ease, and she had clearly not been her best or most composed self. Yet when the final was reached,

''Her cares dropped from her like the needles shaken

From out the gusty pine."

She was calm and radiant and played the game of a lifetime, so that she Avas unlucky to lose. In that match the crowd Avas almost overwhelming and Miss Wethered had now had about enough. She played once more in 1929 at St. Andrews and beat Miss Glenna Collett at the 35th hole of a never-to-be-forgotten final and that—save for an annual appearance in the mixed Foursomes at Worplesdon—is the end of the record. Yet, if nothing he ever added to it, no one who has seen her can possibly doubt that she is the greatest woman golfer AVIIO ever lived or ever Avill live.

And now, how, except by pure genius, did she come to play so Avell? Miss Wethered is, I hope, a friend of mine and will not thank me for Avriting about her. I hinted to her that I was going to do it. I asked her the things I did not know and got rather jejune ansAvers. Seven cities competed for the honour of being Homer's birthplace and three courses—Dornoch in Sutherlandshire, Worplesdon and West Surrey in Surrey—compete for the honour of having produced Miss Wethered. Yet something is due to Bude in Cornwall, for it was there that she first began to play when she Avas nine or ten years old. She did not then much like the game nor Avas she very good at it. It Avas not till she Avas sixteen, and at Dornoch, that the real keenness—and her keenness is of an essentially placid kind —came to her. Then she did work hard at the game and religiously kept her scores. She even made charts or graphs of them with curves showing her rises and falls and the curves rose at least to the hundred mark. I asked her brother, Roger, whether she was very good in those days and he, with that sincerity which is such a blessed quality in brothers, answered no, that she showed no abnormal promise and had rather a clumsy style. Apparently, too, this same brother—some two or three years the elder—Avas cruel only to be kind, in not being too sympathetic or making things too easy. In the book the two wrote together some years ago, called Golf from Two Sides, Miss Wethered said, "I can remember some years ago how annoyed I used to feel on those occasions when I asked my brother a question about golf, which I Avas either too lazy or too ignorant to find out for myself. His invariable answer was that it was no use telling me anything, since I should never be any good until I found out things for myself. The warning might not be too acceptable at the moment but the principle he expressed was sound."

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So she toiled on, finding out things for herself, and I suppose did practise reasonably hard, but I cannot say that she has ever been a great practiser, judged by American standards. I am tempted to draw a fancy picture of the infant Joyce, firing away rows and rows of balls with the fury and precision of a machine gun, hut I refrain. It would not he a true one and, as far as I know, she has not for a good number of years now practised except when there was something wrong.

This does not mean that she has not applied a shrewd mind and great powers of observation to the game, because she has. I have seen two respects in which she has changed her method, since I have known her; that is to say, since 1920. She used to keep her left foot immovable on the ground, or very nearly so, throughout the swing. How she did it I know not, for her swing looked supple and easy enough, and there was no sign of a hitch. Some years ago, possibly under the influence of Duncan, she let her left heel come off the ground and this piece of orthodoxy enhanced the freedom and power of her swing. I think too that Bobby Jones has had some small share in the moulding of her, for she watched him very closely when he first came to this country and imported into her method an impalpable something of his. The net result has been, as I said, increased power and a tendency to drive with a slight draw (hook would be a wrong word), whereas originally her ball tended to turn from left to right. In short, to use a modern catch word, perhaps she hits more "from the inside out" than she used to do. Certainly she hits farther and today can fully hold her own in point of length with really good average male drivers who are not in the giant class.