Golf course

“ 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. ”

“ From the high tee to the fifth hole we get a view of a perfect stretch of golfing country, broken and undulating with the sandhills on the left and a vast expanse of rushes on the right, for, in spite of much pruning and uprooting, there are still plenty of the famous rushes left. It is a sight to make glad the heart of man, and at the same time to fill him with gloomy doubts as to whether he is quite good enough to play upon such a course. ”

“ There is nothing so good as the golf of the true seaside links; there could not be. In this, the real thing, we have land formations that are impossible on inland flatness; there are the wildness of dunes and bent that cannot be reproduced artificially away from the coast; we have the perfect turf that is ideal for the game and which has never yet been completely imitated away from shore, and above all, through the rich variety of situation and possibility, we have the course springing surprises on us all the time. This is golf in the highest, the stern, cold, enthralling game. ”

“ Trouble lurks at the sides as well as in the centre of the fairway, and for all the boldness and bigness of the hazards it is really a straight rather than a long driver’s course. The greens are good, and sometimes inclined to be slow; they lie, moreover, in a good many instances, in those pleasing little hollows which are the most adroit flatterers in the whole world of golf. The turf on the outward journey is of the ideal sea-side kind, but on the way home we fancy that we detect something more of an inland character about it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Standard quality golf balls will cost about nine dollars a dozen. Almost any loose-fitting outdoor costume is suitable for playing golf and the tendency in recent years is to wear long trousers in preference to what are known as “golf trousers.”
A golf course—sometimes called a “links,” from a Scotch word meaning a flat stretch of ground near the seashore—should be kept in good condition in order to enjoy the game properly. The leading golf clubs maintain a large force of men who are constantly cutting the grass, repairing damages to the turf, and rolling the greens. ”

“ The day for very plain and purely and obviously artificial construction of inland golf courses is gone, the original inland system in all its stupidity and its surrender to difficulties has become archaic. It has come to be realised in this business that man may associate himself with Nature in a magnificent enterprise, and only now is it understood that this golf course construction is, or may be, a really splendid art. ”

“ Wild and bleak and merciless the course looks—a vast tract of wind-swept heather. In truth it is a very long one, and the casual visitor often brings against it a charge of monotonous length, but when he has played there more often he will probably discover that each of these long holes has a very distinct character, and that each is interesting in a way of its own. ”

“ Then came a time when impious wretches, who had the temerity to think for themselves, began to whisper that there were faults at Sandwich, that it was nothing but a driver’s course, that the whole art of golf did not consist of hitting a ball over a sandhill and then running up to the top to see what had happened on the other side. Gradually the multitude caught up the cry of the few, till nobody, who wished to put forward a claim to a critical faculty, had a good word to say for the course. ”

“ At the eighth we do at last get a chance of a three, for the hole is a short one—142 yards long to be precise—and there is a fair measure of room on the green. So far the golf has been very, very good indeed, but with the ninth and tenth come two holes that constitute a small blot on the fair fame of the course. If they were found on some less sacred spot they would be condemned as consisting of a drive and a pitch up and down a flat field. What makes it the sadder is that ready to the architect’s hand is a bit of glorious golfing country on the confines of the new course. ”

“ These park holes are certainly one of the drawbacks to the course. For six holes we are playing excellent golf in the right golfing country, with heather, and sand, and everything as it should be. Then we go through a wicket gate, the whole scene instantly changes, and, behold! we are playing a hole of the typical inland kind. There is no heather and no sand, save such as has been transplanted to fill up a number of conscientious little bunkers, and it is no great injustice to liken the turf to that of a good smooth field. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is one of those courses that runs, roughly speaking, straight out and home, and the nine holes that we play with the wind in our face we think really beautiful, while with the wind behind us we are just a little bit disappointed. This is, of course, only the impression of a casual visitor; and, moreover, it must often happen that wind is neither for us nor against us, but blows straight across the course. Then the golf must be really difficult, for the fairway is uniformly narrow and the rough wonderfully tenacious ”

“ Your golf course is never the same on any two days, and would not be if you played through all eternity. Sometimes the grass in a certain place is long, and sometimes it is short; sometimes it is thick, and again it is thin; sometimes the ground is hard from lack of rain, and again it is soft and spongy from an excess of rain. There are millions of variations in these conditions, and every one of them must be considered in making a perfect shot. ”

“ It is really good golfing country, with big, rolling undulations and plenty of heather and sand. There are long, narrow gullies running in between the hills, rather reminiscent of another very pretty course, Hindhead. For the most part, however, we are not playing along the gullies, which would have tested our accuracy to the full, but rather go leaping from one hillside to the other; in fact, if we are virtuous we are always on a hill, and the valleys represent the infernal regions—it is only the wicked who go down into them. ”

“ After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean, so to speak, were the heads of many curious caddies, a few of the more ingenious chauffeurs, the golf professional's deaf sister—and there were usually several stray, diffident waves who might have rolled inside had they so desired. This was the gallery.
The balcony was inside. It consisted of the circle of wicker chairs that lined the wall of the combination clubroom and ballroom. ”

“ THE LINKS Many of the best links are laid out where the soil is sandy and the grass sparse and stiff. Such links dry quickly after a rain, and the ball is easily played and seen. The course in this country for the regulation game is sometimes three miles long; shorter courses can be laid out for informal work and practice. The links do not extend in a straight line. It is much better to have them wind about and end near the start. By carefully planning the curves, a golf course may be made to occupy limited grounds. ”

“ It is the duty of every golf course to have a good seventeenth hole, and the seventeenth at Walton certainly need not fear comparison even with the Alps and the Station-master’s Garden. We must begin by hitting a long, straight drive between bunkers on the right and some particularly retentive heather on the left, but that is, comparatively speaking, an easy matter. The second shot is the thing—a full shot right home on to a flat green that crowns the top of a sloping bank. ”

“ 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 proper construction and maintenance of a golf course is an expensive proposition. A private course is altogether out of the question except for the very wealthy. A club in starting with a limited amount of money will find it more satisfactory to begin with the construction of a nine-hole or even a six-hole course rather than to attempt a full course of eighteen holes which will be indifferently constructed or kept up. ”

“ Now as I understand it there are four kinds of golf. First, the ordinary golf, as played by all people who are not quite right in their heads; second, the ideal golf, to be played by me (but not till I get to heaven) on a bowling-green with a croquet-mallet, the holes being sixty-six feet apart and both cutting-in and going-through strictly prohibited; third, the absurd golf, as played by James in pre-war days on his private nine-hole course; and fourth, it seemed, the new golf, such as James would be liable to create during a recovery from shell-shock. ”

“ They do blow the place up in America when [Pg 178] they determine to make a golf course. Forest and rock are of no more hindrance to any idea or scheme than a few daisies might be. I was strongly impressed with this view of things when I was out one day at the Essex County Club at Manchester-by-the-Sea, another of the outer-Boston courses. "Come to golf at Essex in the morning; you will see something of the way in which we do our golf in America that you have never seen before." ”

“ Of course the first thing is to inquire into the object and [Pg 625] nature of the game. A golf course is generally laid out over rolling ground for the sake of variety, and standing at the first tee, or striking-off place, we see before us a stretch of turf that has been cleared of long grass and bushes, and in the distance (say 150 or 200 yards away) a square patch of smooth, hard lawn, in the centre of which a flag is fluttering. The square patch is the putting-green, and the flag marks the location of a small hole four inches in diameter and six inches deep, and generally lined with tin. ”

“ There is among the old holes a beautiful thirteenth, with a narrow little green beset on every side, so that the tee-shot had to be accurate in order to make the second possible. That hole we shall miss sadly, but otherwise the new holes are far the better: long raking holes between hills and rushes that give the course just the extra touch of length and difficulty that it wanted. We emerge on to the old ground again to play the ‘Crater,’ a hole that we are fond of for old sake’s sake, though it is in reality a bad and fluky one, as ‘punchbowl’ holes generally are. ”

“ In the experience of the writer, it is frequently not a difficult matter to get excellent turf in the immediate neighbourhood of a golf course at an extremely cheap rate—a halfpenny a yard or under—and turf obtained from the immediate neighbourhood of the course is much more likely to be suitable than turf obtained elsewhere. ”

“ Coming home the course suffers a little, as I said, from being too flat, and, so as with many of these park courses, it is rather hard to pick out any one hole from among its fellows. Good sound golf will be repaid, and so will the golf that is unsound and bad, but neither the rewards nor the punishments are of a thrilling or heroic order. There is one hole, however, that calls for special mention, the sixteenth, where two really fine shots are needed to reach the green, and the only thing to be said against the hole is that it would be better still if it were number seventeen instead ”

“ The chief items in the construction of a golf course are the following:
1. Carting. 2. Labour. 3. Drainage. 4. Seeding. 5. Turfing. 6. Manures. 7. Sand. CARTING
The cost of carting can often be reduced to a minimum by using a little thought in the work. The stone from stone walls, rocks, the turf from turf walls, or soil taken out of excavations should never be carted away: they can always be used for raising a neighbouring green in [66] the form of a plateau, or in making hummocks or large undulations indistinguishable from the natural ones which are so delightful on seaside courses. ”