Henry Leach

“ It is then that the agony of golf is experienced; it is then that the golfer is not happy. And it is then, on the retreat to town, that one may seem to hear the Mediterranean call, and see a vision of a sun glistening on a flowered and song-laden land where golf is played. Take the chance, unhappy man; make the change then if you can.
The strongest emotions often arise from the widest and most sudden contrasts. Our beautiful English summer comes to us too slowly and gradually through the vicissitudes of spring for the fullest delight. ”

“ No man plays a part in golf; his individuality, in all its goodness and weakness, is unfolded in the light. He is known entirely and for his own true self. The game gives us fresh air and the most splendid exercise. These are enormous advantages in golf, and we extol them in defence of our enthusiasm and they are accepted; yet, honest to ourselves, we know that we do not play golf because of fresh air and exercise, and indeed we only think of them as gain when, in the slavery to which we have been subject, our emotions for a day have been shivered and shocked by failure. ”

“ No more tantalising will-o'-the-wisp is there than form at golf. It is a game that lures a man, it coquets with him, trifles with his yearnings and his hopes, and flouts him. So does it excite him, and, hurting his pride, stirs his ambition and his desire to obtain the mastery. The spirit of adventure and conquest is aroused, and the strong man who has failed in no undertaking before declares that he will not fail in this. And so, with his everlasting hope, he perseveres and will not give in. But it is the game that wins. ”

“ This of all others is the most delightful golfing season. The white sun of summer has been toned to gold, and the air is sweet and cool; the turf is moist again. It is soothing; but there is a pathos in it all that the golfer, sensitive and sympathetic observer as he has become, must always feel. One may tramp a country lane and notice little, but the men of this game have been trained to notice. Here present is the season of the fall, the rest after achievement, when Nature closes in upon herself and lapses to her sleep. She has done her season's work, done it wisely, ever well. ”

“ Only the nature of the hope sometimes varies as we have shown, and the most wonderful feature of this wonder of golf is the sublimely simple way in which the man of a match, when all seems lost, when the cause seems wholly ruined, when by nothing human does it seem that a situation hanging upon a thread so thin can possibly be saved, believes in the future still. Providence still exists for him. Every human reckoning would show that he approaches the impossible, and yet he sees it not, but only the narrow way of escape to success beyond. ”

“ So we discover that there is a virtue in what is little more than five thousand yards, a generous amplitude of short holes, and enough to satisfy of those that can be done with a driver and an iron of sorts. In a mood of ease and languor, when even strong men who like the game find joy in a mixed foursome, we come to admire the Riviera system; and we may find men at nights hard in argument upon the points and delicacies of the fifth hole or the fifteenth, the aggravations of the sixth and the sixteenth, when they would disdain to think of such like in their golfing life at home. ”

“ Pay the American now and then, and with proper delicacy, that little compliment that is so very well deserved about the magnificence of his achievement in making a country like that in such a short space of time, and about the excellence of many of his established systems. It is a compliment that can and should be paid with the most absolute sincerity. The American has the right to be proud of his own country, and we should be proud of the American, for that his blood is much the same as ours—trite observations, no doubt, but commonly disregarded. ”

“ But in the making of a golf course, while we have indeed to see that certain requirements of our own are well suited, knowing how particular and hyper-critical we have become, yet we wish to keep to plain bold Nature too, and we want our best work to be thoroughly in harmony with her originals. I believe that if we could express it properly to ourselves, we wish now to make our golf courses look as if they were fashioned at the tail-end of things on the evening of the sixth day of the creation of the world—just when thoughts had to be turning to the rest and happinesses of the seventh. ”

“ After the failures of a summer season hopes arise for better fare when cool autumn makes the play more pleasant; when there has been one whole bad year there is hope enough that the game will mend in the time that follows.
In this way it is hope all through, hope always, in the beginning and the end and in the small things with the great. Hope is the most human, most uplifting of all the emotions. Banish this emotional quality from the human mind and the golf clubs would be disbanded, for the game would cease to be golf for another day. ”

“ It has nearly become an established rule that they golf the most who golf the last, for there is no man of the links so keen, so simple and humble in his abandonment to the game, as he who but lately held aloof and laughed, with many a gibe upon the madness of the class. Savages have attempted golf and found they liked it, and the finest intellects are constantly exercised upon its difficulties. So this diversion, pastime, game has become a thing of everywhere and everybody as no other sport of any kind has ever done. ”

“ Society is high at Cannes, the people come along to La Napoule, six or seven miles from the town, in their motor-cars in a long procession, and it is the proper place for the luncheon party and such social entertainments as go well with a verandah, sunshine, and the flowers. One would go to the golf club at La Napoule even though one did not golf; many do—perhaps too many. Those who eat and chatter, kiss hands and smile, but never take a divot are losers of something that is heartening. ”

“ We cannot entirely escape from this unnatural confinement which modern conditions of life have forced upon us, but for a little while at intervals, through the medium of this sport, we may experience the sense of space, of freedom, of the something that comes near to infinity. Unconscious of this cause, a golfer on the links is uplifted to a simpler freer self. He has a great open space about him, the wilder the better, and the open sky above. He takes Nature as he finds her, accepting her every mood, and that is why this game is and must be one for all weathers. ”

“ One who can hold himself up to the big wind and drive a ball that whistles through it to the full drive length, then play a good second and all with fine allowance and good wind work with his irons, so that the game works out well enough for any day, is one whose contentment is a state to be envied. Rarely does one feel the thrills of the golfing life better than when playing well in a lashing wind, with clothes that soak and stick; the sense of mastery is magnificent. Yet of such luxuries of winter golf one may sometimes tire. ”

“ Golf, not being a game of sides as other games are, and, if it comes to that, not generally a game in which national peculiarities exert an influence, hardly lends itself to international treatment. Players who feel internationally before a contest relapse to individualism completely when they are pitching to the green and putting to the hole. Do not tell me that in the throes of a six-feet putt that shall win or lose a day a man thinks of his trusting country and not of his tortured hopeful self. It is not possible in the combination of golf and human nature, and there is no blame to the men. ”

“ The traditions of golf are the second of its wonders. All things that are old have certain traditional sentiment clinging to them, and it makes a good flavouring to life, for it is suggestive of age and time and continuity and eternity. Had golf no traditions now, those emotional effects in its subjects might be produced the same, but yet the sport would not be the same rich colourful thing that we know it to be, but something grosser. And again we could stand for golf and say that no other sport can testify to its past and present worth and greatness with such excellent tradition. ”

“ He knows that really the putting is easy, but he knows also that he must not miss, that an inch lost here is as much of a loss as two hundred yards in the driving—and he fears his fate. It is consciousness of the stupidity of missing, nerves, fears, imagination, that make this missing of short putts by the cleverest players, champions as much as any others, the most remarkable thing that happens constantly in any game. ”

“ The head-masters of schools say that it is a selfish game and that it is bad for them. I wonder how much these principals have thought of the moral qualities that must exist in the good golfer who knows how to play a losing match and perhaps save it, and how long in real argument before an impartial tribunal the contention would hold that it would be better for the young boy to stand for hours in the deep field at cricket on a hot summer's day than for him to learn to play golf and learn to keep a tight hold of himself when the whole scheme of things might seem to be breaking up. ”

“ Men who go to the sea in ships take golf clubs with them; I have known golfers carry their materials into deserts, and one of the greatest and noblest explorers the world has known took them with him to one far end of earth. Surely this is a very remarkable thing, a feature of life that is strange as it is strong, and it is not nonsense to suggest that this is no ordinary game and cannot be considered as a game like others. Somewhere in a mysterious way it touches the springs of life, makes emotions shake. ”

“ London golf is a gentler thing, a little softer, but it has charms that are all its own, and they are the charms of green Nature and the delights of changing seasons. By the sea it is warm or it is cold, and there is little difference else from the beginning of the year to the end. But in London the golfer notices the seasons as he does nowhere else, and they are everything to him and his happiness. ”

“ Madrid are picturesque; they make good harmony with those antique watchmen who seem to have been reincarnated from our own eighteenth-century London, walking the slumberous streets at night, lanterns in their hands and jangling bunches of giant keys suspended from their girdles, their business being to open the outside doors of blocks of flats for late-returning occupiers who in an unthinking languorous way of Spain would carry no keys, but leave the affair of their homecoming to the fortune of the night, the vigilance of the watchman, and the blessing of Providence. ”