That We Shan’t Make a 73
Sir: I absolutely refuse to putt for a hole if a ball which has already been holed is not removed. What is your pet golfing superstition?
H. F.
Pursuing a red ball over the wintry lea is a pastime that leaves us cold. But, for compensation, one does not hear, in the locker room, that the shower is “the best part of the game.”
“Golf,” writes Professor William Lyon Phelps in “The New Republic,” “has done more for swearing than any other modern employment; it has made taciturn gentlemen as efficient as teamsters. The disappointments of golf are so immediate, so unexpected, so overwhelming. Nearly all men, and women, too, must swear naturally in their thoughts; else how explain such easily acquired efficiency!”
Professor Phelps’ observations coincide with ours. Once, having addressed the recreant ball in terms more pointed than polite, we remarked to the caddy: “The ladies never talk that way, do they?” “Oh,” said he, “they say worse things than that.” Which moved us to inquire: Should a youth of tender years caddy for a lady?
“Golf is the peculiar pastime of a peculiar people”; and particularly peculiar are the persons into whose soul the iron has entered and displaced the wood. A friend of ours, Colonel Talmadge, of Glen View, is one of these eccentrics. He was starting out for a round one day, toting a ton of iron, when his partner inquired: “Where are you going with all those dental instruments?”
The news that a golf pro in Louisiana was buried with his favorite clubs set us wondering what might be the width of the River Styx. While waiting for the ferry the shade might tee up a few balls and see whether he could carry the hazard.
“Golfing Wonder—One-Legged Man’s Win in Open Tournament.”
—London Mail.
He couldn’t kick, eh?
The grounds and greens committee of the Evanston Golf Club concludes: “Transgressions of the rules embodied in paragraphs 1 to 14 shall be reported at once to the rules and etiquette committee.” But why, a member wants to know, send the fourteen points abroad again?