Golf club

“ Continuously from the green beneath the great tent of the Golf Club, where the inexpert remained to take lessons under the direction of two or three professionals, the players started whither the game and their more or less skill led them, and their rough outlines grew less and less in the far distance, till at times the links, or the horizon, became perfectly deserted, as if no players existed, as if they had been dissolved by the air or swallowed by the earth. ”

“ Even on the stillest of still days the shot is one which can scarce be approached without a tremor. The distance can be compassed with a firm pitch with an iron club of moderate loft, and the green is undeniably of adequate size, but it is ringed round, save immediately in front, with a series of bunkers very deep and horrible, and, to increase our terror, the ground ‘draws’ unmistakably towards them. Often as we stand on the tee in a frenzied attitude, trying to steer the ball to safety with vain gesticulations of the club, we see it light upon the turf, and breathe a sigh of relief. ”

“ It is certainly to the old holes that the memory returns most fondly. The club-house stands in the bottom of a deep hollow, with hills rising pretty steeply out of it on three sides, and the first tee-shot has to be driven straight up a gully between two of them. Then comes a shot demanding the agility of a chamois and a maximum of local knowledge. With the left foot a good deal higher than the right we play an iron-shot into the distance, and if all goes well, shall find the ball on a green which is walled in by cops and bunkers. ”

“ While pheasant-shooters are enjoying the first day of the season, the votaries of a sport not less noble, though less noisy, are holding the great festival of their year. The autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews is in full swing, and the words will suggest pleasant memories to many a golfer. Golf is not one of the more brilliant and famous pastimes of the day, though it yields to none in antiquity and in unassuming merit. ”

“ His corny hands and his bag of clubs are his passport to every links. By the perfect system that we have, every man who is a golfer and a member of a golf club is ipso facto a travelling member of nearly every other golf club in the world, and is admitted to full playing and other privileges without delay on paying the trifling fees of temporary membership, sometimes with even less than that. And one golf club seems very much like another—just a branch of it; the atmosphere is the same, and the men are the same. ”

“ The Longmeadow Country Club, on the Saturday afternoon following Armstrong's abrupt dismissal, was a scene of gaiety and beauty without compare. Set in broad acres of wood and lawn, the club-house proudly dominated far-flung golf-links and nearer tennis-courts. Shining motors stood parked on the plaza before the club garage, each valued at several years' wages of a workingman. Men and women—exploiters all, or parasites—elegantly and coolly clad in white, smote the swift sphere upon the tennis-court, with jest and laughter. ”

“ Golf taught the American people to play games. It took them out from their great office-buildings and from their five-o'clock cocktails at the club, into the open air; and they found that the open air was good. So around nearly every golf club other sports grew up. Polo grounds were laid out by the side of the links, croquet lawns appeared on one side of the club-house and lawn-tennis nets arose on the other, while traps for the clay-pigeon shooters were placed safely off in a corner. ”

“ The golf club, although naturally to a less extent, embodies this fundamental error in mechanics, for instead of hitting the ball dead in a line with the shaft, it gets it in the middle of the face which projects from one side of the shaft. ”

“ Everybody could not hunt, but everybody could play golf, or fancy that he or she was playing golf, or, at least, look on from a respectful distance while golf was being played. The golf-links on Matcham Common had therefore become the most popular institution in the neighbourhood, and the scarlet coat of the golfer was oftener seen than the fox-hunter in pink, and people came from afar to see the young ladies of Matcham contest for the bangles and photograph-frames which the golf club offered as the reward of the strong arm and the accurate eye. ”

“ Even now as I write I believe there is a gigantic project in view at a certain hole, which I would rather die than reveal. All these things happen at the instigation of a very small secret Junta, and after a little grumbling, such as is only right and proper, the members settle down and admit that the alterations are exceedingly ingenious and the course more entertaining than ever. It appears to me to be the ideal way in which to conduct a golf club, but it is an ideal that can very seldom be attained. ”

“ This day is the medal-day; the day on which all the best gentlemen-players assemble to compete for the blue riband of the golf course. To-night there is going to be a large dinner of the Golf Club. To-morrow night a ball—hence the multitude of ladies and non-golfing gentlemen, this being the only time when the latter are tolerated here. All the houses in the neighbourhood are filled, and so the place is really rather gay. ”

“ There are also all over England clubs specially devoted to particular objects, golf clubs, yacht clubs and so forth. In these the members are drawn together by their interest in a common pursuit, and are forced into some sort of acquaintanceship. But these are very different in spirit and intention from the American Country Club. It exists as a kind of center of the social life of the neighborhood. There may be and often are golf links connected with it. There are tennis courts, sometimes swimming baths. There is always a ball-room. ”

“ Phipps essayed to brighten our drab lives by allowing us to play golf with him. Now this sort of thing may be done in some clubs, but not in ours. We do not permit our sacred institutions to be "rushed" by the golfing novice. We are not snobbish, but we plead guilty to being the least bit set in our ways. They are good ways, and they suit us. The club is an old one, as golf clubs go in this country, and most of the playing members are men past forty years of age. Nearly all of the foursomes are permanent affairs, the same men playing together week after week, season in and season out. ”

“ It is clear that at the moment of impact with a golf club, as they are now constructed, there is a very great tendency for the club to turn in the hands. This is shown very clearly when one happens to hit with the toe of the club a little lower than it ought to be, so that the toe strikes the earth. ”

“ It is a very great mistake indeed to attempt to introduce any standard golf club or to lay down any regulation whatever as to how the golf club shall be made. The good sense and sportsmanlike instincts of the golfer should be sufficient to govern the question of what may and what may not be used. ”

“ There is hardly any one spot in England where a game of golf cannot be played somehow. The links may be laid out on heavy, wet, clayey fields in Warwickshire, or among the fortifications at Chatham, on the cliffs at Brighton, on the Downs of Guildford, or among the coal-pits of Dudley and West Bromwich; but holes are cut, and more or less of a golf links made, and each links has its club; whilst each club has its prizes, medals, and spring and autumn meetings. ”

“ The Golf Club gives many interesting tournaments and is one of the social centers in summer for the elite, as is the race track where one may meet the world and its wife. The track is good and the horses as fine as one can see anywhere, all of which helps to render this sport most fascinating. ”

“ One may disagree with the idea that the Club entertains of the duty and responsibility towards the great world of golf which time and circumstances have cast upon it; but no golfer of understanding would speak disrespectfully of this Club, which in many respects is the finest institution of its kind in existence, and is entitled to the very utmost veneration. Chiefly by its efforts there has been given a dignity to the game of golf which has had much to do with its established greatness. Every golfer everywhere owes a debt to the Royal and Ancient Club. ”

“ As far back as my earliest acquaintance with the royal and ancient game, the Old Guard was an institution of the Yavapai Golf and Country Club—a foursome cemented by years and usage, an association recognised as permanent, a club within the club—four eighteen-handicap men, bound by the ties of habit and hopeless mediocrity. The young golfer improves his game and changes his company, graduating from Class B into Class A; the middle-aged golfer is past improvement, so he learns his limitations, hunts his level and stays there. ”

“ The eighteenth, too, is full of charm, and when we have successfully carried the spur of a big hill and played our second over some more bold and broken ground, we can hole out in a deep hollow, with the eyes of the whole club watching us from above as they sit in front of the club-house. ”

“ One has no more chance of cutting round a stymie with a club of this nature than one would have with a bar of soap, for the simple reason that on account of the breadth of its sole—for if it be not an aluminium club, it is at least shaped on the same lines—it is impossible to get the face of the club sufficiently underneath the ball for the loft to get to work so as to impart that side roll which is of the essence of cutting round. ”

“ Except where the course has been designed and the construction work supervised by the modern golf architect, there is hardly a golf club of any size which has not frittered away hundreds of pounds in doing bad work, all for the want of the best advice in the first instance.
There can be little doubt that the poorer the club the more important it is for it not to waste its small funds in doing the wrong kind of work, but to get the best possible advice from its inception. ”

“ She insists on every one's playing croquet before lunch, to which she gathers in a curiously mixed collection of neighbors. Immediately after lunch every one is driven to a country club to see some duffer golf—for some reason there is never "time" in all the prepared pleasures for any of her guests to play golf themselves. After twenty minutes at the golf club, they are all taken to a church fair. The guests are all introduced to the ladies at the booth and those who were foolish enough to bring their purses with them from now on carry around an odd assortment of fancy work. ”

“ The thirteenth, a ‘dog-leg’ hole, is one of the best on the course, where we have to play carefully for position from the tee and must avoid some heavy bracken and thick long grass. The green, too, is well guarded and full of excellent undulations. The fifteenth brings us right up to the club-house, and there is some temptation to curtail the round and fall a victim to lunch, especially as the sixteenth takes in the length of two full drives up a hill and directly away from the club. ”

“ The members of the club pay one hundred dollars a year subscription, and nowadays it costs about five hundred dollars for admission. Every member must be the possessor of a hundred-dollar share in the club, and these shares are now at a premium of about five times their par value. At few other places in the golfing world is there such a nicely appointed club-house as there is here. One could put two or three of the largest dining-rooms that our golf clubs possess into the one of Glen View, and the furnishing is finely and tastefully done in a Flemish style. ”

“ A drive over the ‘Goose-dubs’ brings us to a fairly ordinary fourteenth hole close to the club, and we turn back to play the last four, the famous loop.
The chief characteristic of the fifteenth is that no two persons are agreed on the best way of playing it. We may lash out for death or glory with a driver, or play short with the pusillanimous iron: we may go out to the right, or away to the left, but wherever we try to go we shall heave a sigh of relief if our ball finishes its agitating career upon a piece of turf. ”

“ The caddies know that you are a golfer and what is your handicap; and if you are the real thing that is enough for them. Be not a golfer at heart or a namby-pamby person hanging to the game, and their contempt is rarely hidden. In the hotels they know what golf means to people; the chambermaid on calling you in the morning may tell you the direction the wind is blowing, knowing that it matters more than any hot water. The men in the club-makers' shops are sorely concerned in your domestic difficulties about the length of the shaft of your driver and your quarrel with an iron. ”

“ The unobservant player never seems to realise that one of the chief charms of the best seaside links is the undulating fairways, such as those near the club-house at Deal, part of Sandwich, and most of the old course at St. Andrews, where the ground is a continual roll from the first tee to the last green, and where one never has the same shot to play twice; on these fairways one hardly ever has a level stance or a level lie. It is this that makes the variety of a seaside course, and variety is everything in golf. ”

“ It is astonishing how few players, even of quite a good class, are content to leave the question of elevation entirely to the club. It probably would be no exaggeration to say that quite ninety per cent of the players make an attempt, however extremely slight it may be, to assist the club in lifting the ball from the earth. According to the best theory in golf, this is quite wrong, for the blow should be at least in a horizontal direction, which practically it never is, and preferably in the line of the arc formed by the club head in its travel through the air on its downward path. ”