Footnotes to Baedeker
At Kingston, Sept. 2, 1912.
Between the fort and the town sprawls the links of the Barifield Golf Club, as “sporty” a course as you please. I remarked a clubhouse and a number of putting greens; for the rest one plays anywhere across the rock-strewn landscape. Wire fences surround the putting greens, on which the grass is tall and thick. A herd of cows were cropping the fairgreens and these I took to be members of the Greens Committee. Although it was Saturday afternoon, only two players were on the links, and they, as long as they remained in view, were searching for balls among the myriad stones of the hillside.
At Manchester, Vermont, we were the honored guests of Dr. P. Sibleius Ferus, the distinguished Latin scholar and gentleman. An evening’s conversation with Dr. Ferus is as stimulating as I conceive an evening with Dr. Middleton to have been. I also shot a round of golf with the doctor on the links of the Ekwanok Club—the most beautiful course I ever expect to see. The score? No matter.
It was a new experience to play golf among the mountains. It is a passionate golfer who can disregard the distracting views from the tees and regard the ball as raptly as certain Hindu gentlemen contemplate their equators. Upon the flat and smoky links on the south side of Chicago concentration is easy. The ball is the handsomest object in sight. There, too, it seems a more important matter than among the mountains. Of course one may look at it this way: A golf ball is a symbol of infinity; it is as perfect a sphere as Aldebaran; the power that sends it winging is one with the power that moves the stars in their courses; the laws that govern its flight and trajectory are as immutable as the laws that bind Arcturus and his sons. The trouble is, if you get to thinking in that groove while addressing the ball you are apt to laugh, and that spoils your drive.
Chicago golfers who may have played around the links of the Claremont Country Club of Oakland, will agree that the course may be classified as “sporty” especially in August. The earth is baked hard and the turf burnt brown, and the ball, however driven, runs like a kangaroo. If the drive deviates from the straight and narrow path the ball rolls down hill to heaven and the caddy knows where. One usually aims ten or more points to the right or left of the flag; and so many shots must be played off steep slopes that a man with one leg six inches shorter than the other would have a decided advantage over the conventionally legged player.
A writer in Drover’s Journal remarks that we are “trying to tell Jerry Travers how to play golf.” The gentleman is wrong, as usual; we should assume to teach a duck how to swim. But putting is a department of golf in which one man’s opinion is as good as another’s.
A child cannot drive a ball 250 yards, but a child can putt better than a number of gentlemen we know who have been playing golf for years—provided the child is permitted to function naturally, as when it plays croquet.
When a seasoned player, distant only a dozen feet from the cup, can putt a ball a yard to the right or left of the hole, it shows that something is practically wrong. Yet one sees such pathetic exhibitions of inaptitude on every green.