Bernard Darwin

“ At the fourteenth we need a long, straight drive, followed by an iron shot that must be played firmly and boldly home on to a plateau guarded in front by a steep and unclimbable bank, and to the right by a pit of destruction, where the horrors of sand and whins are intermingled. Of the remaining holes, the seventeenth and eighteenth are both good, especially the former, which, with its tee-shot among the whins, has an air of Huntercombe about it. The sixteenth, however, does not seem at all worthy of its fellows, being, as it appeared to me, as essentially vicious as a hole can be. ”

“ The ordinary golfer, whose head is not too full of modern architectural ideas, would jump with joy on first beholding Prestwick. There is nothing subtle or recondite about it; it has a beauty which explains itself. There are the great sandhills bristling with bents and the little nestling valleys beyond them, a rushing burn and a stone wall, and it is perfectly clear that man was meant to hit the ball over them. All the ground on the near side of the wall, which is the ground of the old twelve-hole course, is of this glorious ‘natural’ character. ”

“ Looking across the fourth hole
Small wonder if the visitor falls in love with Harlech at first sight, for no golf course in the world has a more splendid background than the old castle, which stands at the top of a sheer precipice of rock looking down over the links. Wherever we go it is never out of sight, and though we may glance away at the hills with Snowdon in the distance, we always come back to the castle with a never-satisfied longing. It is so obviously splendid that we might imagine that we should in time grow tired of it, but we never do. ”

“ In our second shot we shall have to decide whether or not to carry a bunker that stretches across our path, and then comes the crucial shot, the approach on to that dreadful green that slopes right away from us to the sea—without the ghost of a charitable back wall. It is so frightening that we are strongly tempted to approach it on the instalment system, and it is really wonderful how many instalments may be necessary, as with limbs palsied with terror, we push and poke the ball over that treacherous and slippery surface. ”

“ The flag is fluttering in the distance close to the first tee at the range of an absolutely full shot, and on the very narrowest, most tapering strath imaginable. To the right is a field, which is out of bounds; to the left is a hollow of broken, sandy country; close to the hole is the seashore, but that we shall hardly reach against the wind. Here, if our score be good or our adversary in trouble, we may play short without much shame, but even so we shall have to play very short and very accurately, and the third shot will not be without peril. ”

“ The fourteenth is, I think, almost the best hole on the course, and certainly the tee-shot is the most alarming. We can see all our troubles only too clearly here—a sandy road full of the deepest ruts on the right, called in spirit of ostentatious levity the ‘Old Kent Road,’ and on the left a prickly and seductive hedge. If only there was a mountain in the way at this hole, we should probably come less frequently to grief. As it is, we concentrate all our attention on being straight, and are all the more terribly crooked in consequence. ”

“ The first of them entails a shot over the ‘Castle’ bunker, and never was a bunker that more thoroughly belied its true character by a mild and harmless exterior. All that we see in front of us is a grassy bank, with a guiding flag fluttering on the top; and, ignorance being here most emphatically bliss, we may hit a fine shot as straight as an arrow and be congratulated on reaching the green. It is only when we have climbed to the top of that innocent-looking bank that we shall see what we have escaped, a perfect Sahara of sand that stretches nearly to the edge of the green. ”

“ A really fine slice at the fifteenth will take us comfortably on to the green—but it is the fourteenth green, and, choose we never so wisely the spot on which to drop our ball, there still remains a hedge to negotiate: it is not an easy green to approach—if you elect to play short of the green and run on, your ball stops dead; while if you play a nice, firm shot on to the green, it invariably abandons all idea of being a pitch at all, and suddenly converts itself into a magnificent running approach and careers gaily right across the green towards the ninth flag. ”

“ With a wind behind we may hope to get home with a high, hard hit with an iron, but on a still day it must need the very best of brassey shots, and a shot, moreover, that shall soar high in the air and then fall comparatively straight to earth. Beyond the green is a waste of sand, and the hole lives up to its name, for there is a view of a big stretch of sea. The sixteenth is a ‘dog-legged’ hole that makes some demand upon our cunning, and we must hit long and straight along the bottom of a gully for the last two holes, so that the course ends as it began, very well. ”

“ A fine slashing hole again is the sixteenth, where the green is guarded by a grass ground ditch and a low wall of earth, which one would take to be an artificial bunker that has fallen into disuse, except that it dispels the illusion by looking infinitely less ugly and more artistic. When the wind is not too strongly against us, here is a grand chance of hitting out with the brassey and reaping a due reward. Then again, for sheer terrifying splendour of appearance, what could be better than the tee-shots at the thirteenth, commonly called ‘Apollyon,’ and the home hole? ”

“ The subtlety of the short holes is the thing that will probably impress the advanced student, while the more elementary will retain vivid recollections of the knotted horrors of the Sea hole and the utter hopelessness of the eighteenth bunker. Certainly that eighteenth bunker—we never ought to get in it—is a pit of desolation; its sides are so steep and so smooth that wherever the ball may pitch down it will roll to the bottom, ultimately to repose in a footmark. To the man who has a good medal score in prospect, it looms vast and uncarryable—a thing against which it is useless to struggle. ”

“ There stands the Maiden, steep, sandy, and terrible, with her face scarred and seamed with black timbers, but alas! we have no longer to drive over her crown: we hardly do more than skirt the fringe of her garment. In old days the tee was right beneath the highest pinnacle, and sheer terror made the shot formidable, but the tee-shots to the fifth endangered the lives of those driving to the sixth, and the tee had to be put far away to the right. ”

“ There are, it is true, two blind and mountainous tee-shots over the famous ‘Himalayas,’ but they appear rather esoteric than otherwise. The holes on the far side of the wall are in their nature essentially flat, and in one or two instances a little artificial. As one plays the eighth hole alongside the railway by Monkton Station, one cannot repress the feeling that one might as well have stayed inland. Well bunkered and difficult enough is that particular hole, and yet so utterly lacking in the least breath of the sea, and the fairway is just a smooth avenue mowed out of a big field. ”

“ It is a terrible place this double green of Point Garry, worn, bare, and sloping down to the rocks and the beach, and we come to it, besides, at two of the most agitating moments of the round; at the first hole, when we have not had quite enough golf, and at the seventeenth, when, if the match has been a fierce one, we have perhaps had too much. Our terror is perhaps less acute at the first hole, because we are then playing on the part of the green that is furthest from the sea ”

“ The tee-shot has to be played at an unpleasantly difficult angle, and if we slice it we may find ourselves in some innocent householder’s front garden, while in endeavouring to avoid such a trespass, we shall most probably pull it into a region of ruts and heather. If we avoid both forms of errors, we have still the second shot to play, long and straight and of an aspect most formidable, for the avenue of rough down which we drive narrows as it approaches the green, and there is an indefinable temptation to slice. ”

“ Now we come to the links of the Royal Blackheath Golf Club, which is very justly proud of the fact that it was instituted in 1608. That is indeed a great record, and, as we hack our ball along with a driving mashie out of a hard and flinty lie, narrowly avoiding the slaughter of a passing pedestrian, we feel that we are on hallowed ground. Moreover, though we may speak flippantly of the bad lies and the numerous live hazards on the course, the golf is good golf—far better and more searching than is to be found on many smoothly shaven lawns covered with artificial ramparts. ”

“ A good two-shot hole follows, and next comes one of the most amusing of short holes, which, whether intrinsically good or bad, deserves to escape the zeal of the iconoclast because of its singular character. One hundred and thirty are all the yards it can boast, but between tee and green a terrible monster rears its head in the form of some ancient rifle butts. They tower so high above and so close to us that even with a mashie and a teed ball we are all too likely to err. ”

“ One great characteristic—I think it is a beauty—of Sandwich is the extraordinary solitude that surrounds the individual player. We wind about in the dells and hollows among the great hills, alone in the midst of a multitude, and hardly ever realize that there are others playing on the links until we meet them at luncheon. Thus, on the first tee, we may catch a glimpse of somebody playing the last hole, and another couple disappearing over the brow to the second, and that is all; the rest is sandhills and solitude. ”

“ One such great opportunity came when it was discovered that heather would, if only enough money was spent on it, make admirable golfing country, and the architects have made the fullest use of it, lavishing upon the heather treasures of thought, care and ingenuity which the non-golfer might say were worthy of a better cause. Nothing can ever quite make up for the short, crisp turf, the big sandhills and the smell of the sea; seaside golf must always come first, and inland second, but the best inland golf can no longer be reproached with being a bad second. ”

“ The shot is a blind one, and we have not the supreme felicity of seeing the ball pitch and run down into the valley to nestle by the flag. We see it for a long time, however, soaring and swooping over the desert, and, when it finally disappears, we have a shrewd notion as to its fate. If the wind be fresh against us, we must play away to the right for safety, and the glorious enjoyment of the hole is gone, but even so a good shot will be repaid, and every yard that we can go to the left may make the difference between a difficult and an easy second. ”

“ So appalling is it that at one time some tender-hearted people thought that it was refined cruelty to keep such a horror till the last; so they shuffled the course round and turned the eighteenth hole into the ninth, in order that, if a man was fated to ruin his score, he should be put more quickly out of his agony. This was rightly considered, however, to be mistaken kindness, and the big bunker is still kept as a crowning joy or misery. The three short holes are certainly things of beauty and of the three the best and the most paralyzing is the eighth. ”

“ Never was there a better instance of the art of forcibly turning a forest into a golf-course than is to be found at Stoke Poges. The beautiful old park turf was always there, cropped from time immemorial by generations of deer, who little knew what service they were doing to the green-keeper, but in every direction there stretched thick belts of woodland, and yet a golf course was going to be made and opened in less than no time. ”

“ It is the chief beauty of the hole that it calls imperatively for this most difficult of shots, since the slope of the green is from right to left and a series of graduated horrors await the pulled ball: a mere bunker for the moderate sinner, a tract of wet ruts and hoof-marks for the rather more criminal, and a waste of heather for the utterly depraved. Nor is it sufficient merely to hit the ball somewhere out to the right. Good intentions by themselves are not enough, and there is a bunker lurking on the right-hand edge of the green ”

“ Even now, when the pampering Haskell has noticeably reduced its terrors, it is still a driver’s course, in the sense that it is one on which one derives the maximum of sensual pleasure from opening one’s shoulders for a wooden club shot. Moreover, long driving does pay—for the matter of that, it pays anywhere—because there are several second shots which are enormously more formidable, when they have to be played with something like a full shot. There is, for instance, the ninth—a hole of which men used to speak with the same reverential awe with which they alluded to the ‘Maiden’ at Sandwich. ”