A Line-o’-Gowf or Two
Hew to the Line, let the divots fall where they may.
The Pleasures of Hope
Hope springs eternal in the human jar;
Man never is, but always to be par.
“Let firmness combined with ease be your motto,” advises George O’Neil. Or, as Horace suggested to Maecenas, on the links of Ancient Rome, “Otium cum dignitate.”
Woman’s place, as Socrates said, is in the home. One of her appeared on a public golf course yesterday in so transparent a skirt that four members of a foursome topped their approach shots, and one of them left his ball on the green.
Golf would be a perfect game if it were not for the golf gabble; and this must be accepted as inevitable. If a person who is conscious of the absurdity of golf gabble is unable to quit it, how hopeless is the case of the unconscious gabbler.
Here’s an example of it: We bring off a good iron shot, and instead of ascribing it (silently) to chance or happy circumstance, we must announce to our companion that at last we have solved the secret of the iron shot. And so we gabble our way around the course, till the sound of our own voice is wearisome to our own ears.
It’s a Scotch game. We borrowed it from the Scotch, but we added the gabble.
Olds Grant Rice and Bill Hammond of the N. Y. Mail and Sun respectively came out and golfed with ye Scribe. Grant is a regular player, but Bill is kind of irregular.
The Saturday Review says that the fascination of golf is understandable, but “the wicked hate of the non-player is less easy to grasp.” Nobody objects to the game itself; it is the incessant gabble about it that bores one to tears. Tie a non-player to a bench in the locker room of any golf club and he would go mad within the hour.
Golf is a gabby game because it is so stuffed with ifs—“if I hadn’t hooked,” “if I hadn’t looked up,” “if the ball hadn’t hit the bunker,” etc. And it is all a great waste of breath, nobody is interested in your “ifs,” not even the man you are playing with.
Hon. Brand Whitlock, staff correspondent for the Line at Brussels, advises us that there is a good golf course there, and that the Flemish caddies touch their caps politely and do not seek to draw players into intimate and animated conversation.
In Wilmette, we gather, the goats are those who play golf on Sunday, and the sheep are those who go to church. This classification is flattering to neither flock.
Curious golfers who may follow the learned arguments on “what constitutes a good hole” must conclude that the purpose of the architects is not to make the game easy for democracy. Par figures mean nothing to the average player; they are for the few gifted beings who participate in national tournaments. As courses are now laid out, there is a “short way to the green,” calling at the outset for a carry of, say, 190 yards. The next thing will be to station a policeman at the bunker, to chase off the course a player so unlucky as not to carry the hazard.
“Golf is the pastime of small men with large incomes, who are too old to play tennis and too dull to talk to women.”
—Walter Pritchard Eaton.
It is also the pastime of large men with small incomes, who vary golf with tennis, and who are too busy to hang around a samovar discoursing the drayma.
To be entirely fair to Mr. Eaton (although one is under no compulsion to be fair to a dramatic critic), he put the sniffy remarks about golf into the mouth of one of his short-story characters. Tennis players should not scorn Golf. We have discovered that playing golf improves our tennis game at least fifty percent. Golf compels deliberation in striking; and waiting for a tennis ball, instead of leaping at it, is the secrecy of accuracy; not to mention the turn of wrist when the racquet (or golf ball) is taken back. This is what keeps the tennis ball out of the net and the golf ball out of the rough.
Of course you know that Lady Brassie is a champion golf player in England.
A golfer in Rockland, Me., has a cat which chases the ball and sits by it until the player arrives. This is interesting chiefly as being the solitary reason for a cat’s existence.
“Each caddy should be at his ball by the time the player arrives.”
—Indian Hill note.
But what happens is: “Hurry up, kid! I’ve found the ball.”