Hazard (golf)

“ A ball knocked into a hazard must be played as in match-play at golf; but if it has not been extricated after each side has taken a shot at it, it may be lifted and dropped a club-length outside of the hazard at a point agreed upon between the two captains. A ball in a hazard may not be teed, and this gives a chance for finesse. For instance, suppose that the ball is perilously near the Red goal, and it is Red putter's turn to play. With a straight drive he can only get it a few yards back, and Blue driver, whose turn it is to follow, will be almost certain to get it over. ”

“ Considering the nature of the ground on Cowley Marsh, how singularly well it was suited by its dreary name, and that the only hazards were the cricket pavilions and the occasional hedges, it is wonderful how much real interest might be got out of the golf there. Whatever else a cricket pavilion may be as a golfing hazard, it is an uncompromising one. You have to be beyond or to the side of it. If hard up against it, even the strongest driver cannot send the ball through it; and it gives occasion for pulling and slicing round it which are good fun and good practice. ”

“ THE VAN CORTLANDT PARK GOLF COURSE.—A TYPICAL HAZARD.
The sixth hole is a very short one. It starts with an easy hazard, a little ditch not more than ten yards from the tee, which anybody but the most inexperienced should be able to drive over safely. The return trip consists of only three holes, but they are all harder than any of the preceding. There is long grass, and the railroad track along the right of the first two, and then the shore of a pond as a boundary for the ninth. Therefore any swaying to the right will prove expensive; to the left the ground is level and safe. ”

“ If you dislike long losing hazards, you must and can try and play the cannon and potting game at the top of the table; if you hate those strokes, because you cannot do them, play an open game and go in for losing hazards from baulk. You can do this far more easily at billiards than you can at golf. It is possible to do it to a small extent only at golf. I have seen a player who was bad at lofting a ball over a bunker forty yards from the hole, play the previous stroke short in order, instead of having to play a forty-yards shot, to make one that took eighty yards to get over the bunker. ”

“ On the green her actions are as characteristic as ever. In running the ball up to the hole she either hits the ground behind it and sends it six inches, or plays a shot which necessitates the departure of her long-suffering partner, niblick in hand and scarlet in the face, to an adjacent bunker. Short putts she invariably holes out by an ingenious and unblushing push-stroke, which no one has the heart to question or the courage to criticise. So the game proceeds. It is not golf, but then you never expected it to be. ”

“ As for "putting" the short strokes on the green, near the hole, if I hit sharp, the ball runs over the hole yards and yards beyond, or if I hit mild, it stops with an air of plaintive resignation, after dribbling for a foot or two. And the worst of it is that, sometimes, you will play as well as another for half-a-dozen holes. Then one thinks one has The Secret! But it falls from us, vanishes, we are topping and slicing, and heeling, and missing again as sorrily as ever.
The beauty of Golf is that there are so many ways of going wrong, and so many things to think of. ”

“ The lofted fifty yards shot is perhaps the most difficult shot in golf, and what does the nervous golfer do in most cases? He either cuts it too fine and is very short in the attempt to lay it dead, or else, frightened of the bunker that lies so dangerously near to him, he determines to get over at all risks and overruns the green by forty or fifty yards. If you watch an amateur billiard-player in a handicap before a crowd, you will soon see whether he is nervous by the way he judges the strength. The most common failing of such players is that they hit too hard ”

“ There can be no doubt that golf is terribly trying to a man. The hideous feeling of discomfort that comes over a player when he has topped his ball and made a deep hole in it, the terrible persistency with which ball after ball is sliced, the missing of one or two really short putts, the bad luck that attends him when putting really well, the way the hole is missed by a tenth of an inch, the frequent bad lies—all these combine to make life a burden. But though golf may be more trying to the temper than any other game, every game has its trials. ”

“ Nobody of proper feeling will claim a hole because his opponent's caddie has sheltered the ball from the wind with his body, or because the ball has been moved by the wind after the player has put himself in a certain attitude, though he has no more touched it than he has the moon. Golf, indeed, has come to be so much hedged round by rules that these defeat their own object, and by respectable people are ignored. It always appears to me that rules of any game should be such that it is to the advantage of the game that they should be enforced always and by everybody. ”

“ It is always well to have the holes well guarded with hazards on all sides. Of course few holes can be thus completely surrounded, but when laying out a links it is well to keep this object in mind, for hazards call out the skill of a player. Sometimes there are not enough natural hazards along the course, and it is necessary to throw up banks of earth, or to plant bushes, or to dig ditches. If it becomes necessary to throw up a bank across the course, it is better to build it in a sort of curve rather than along a straight line, for it thus makes a much better golfing hazard. ”

“ At the moment of impact the face of the club must be, to all intents and purposes, at a right angle to the intended line of flight. For instance, in a slice, any attempt to produce the slice by laying back the toe of the club, or any tricks of this nature, must result in disaster. It is impossible for the person playing the stroke to time anything to be done by him during impact, and it stands to reason that nothing will affect the ball except what takes place during impact. ”

“ It may be so, but we shall not on that account seek to increase the risks of golf. It is one of the glories of the game that it is such fine sport and commands the wild enthusiasm of the best sportsmen, though it threatens the life neither of the player nor any of the living creatures made by God that give the fulness to Nature, and add, though it may be unconsciously, to the golfer’s joy as he strides over the links on a fine morning. In other sports, when man goes wandering over the hills, he takes his gun with him that he may kill something. ”

“ Or, on the other hand, leaving out of the question the hole which is hiding just on the other side of the hazard protecting the green, it often happens in the summer-time, when greens are hard and fiery, that it is absolutely impossible to make a ball which has been pitched on to them in the ordinary manner stay there. Away it goes bouncing far off on to the other side, and another approach shot has to be played, often by reason of a hazard having been found, more difficult than the first. ”

“ He has missed his stroke, and takes five strokes after all to get into the hole. It can’t be helped; but do take care. How fiercely he is scowling at you. Please don’t laugh, or I shall have to take you home again.
I dare say you are not aware of the fact, but golf is one of the most nervous and fidgety games imaginable. Some men cannot hit a ball if any one near them is speaking or moving. And a story is on record regarding an enthusiastic lover of the game, who positively refused to play with a man who had the misfortune to have on a pair of light nankeen inexpressibles. ”

“ Any player who is unlucky enough to put his ball into them (and there are one or two holes at which even a good shot may find its way there) must always encounter a considerable risk of breaking his club in the endeavour to play out again. I believe that attempts have been made to grow these rushes elsewhere, but the seeds that have been carried away from their native Westward Ho! have never prospered. Perhaps some golfers may reflect that this is just as well, though with all their faults and dangers I certainly do not condemn them as a hazard. ”

“ It is now established beyond any doubt whatever that the pull is played by an outwardly glancing blow, the converse of the inwardly glancing blow of the slice, but if to obtain a pull we are to follow Vardon's advice and take the club straight back away from the ball, how are we going to come back by the same track as we went up, which is straight down the line of flight, and at the same time to obtain an outwardly glancing blow? The thing is a manifest impossibility, and, as a matter of fact, is not practical golf. ”

“ If a ball lie or be lost in water or in casual water in a hazard, a ball may be dropped in or as far behind the hazard as the player may please, under penalty of one stroke; but if it be impossible from want of space in which to play, or from any other cause, to drop the ball behind the hazard, the player may drop a ball at the side of the hazard as near as possible to where the ball lay, but not nearer to the hole, under penalty of one stroke. ”

“ However, there can be no doubt that putting under this utterly wrong impression has done a very great amount of harm to the game of players who might otherwise have been many strokes better. Let our golfer understand that there is one way, and one way only, in practical golf to put the ball, and that is to roll it up to the hole. ”

“ The chief thing to bear in mind is that there must be, in the case of play with the driver and the brassie, no attempt to hit the ball, which must be simply swept from the tee and carried forward in the even and rapid swing of the club. The drive in golf differs from almost every other stroke in every game in which the propulsion of a ball is the object. In the ordinary sense of the word, implying a sudden and sharp impact, it is not a "hit" when it is properly done. ”

“ Although we admit that the impact is merely an incident in the travel of the club head, it is the most important incident, and it is on that incident that the mind should be concentrated, so that the idea of cumbering one's mind with any thought of the follow-through is very bad golf. The only portion of the stroke which should be on the player's mind at all is that which leads up to impact, for it is obvious that if that has been correctly performed, one need not trouble much about the follow-through, as that will come quite naturally. ”

“ To get the strength of every green fixed in your mind is difficult for any man, for a nervous man well-nigh impossible.
There is another reason why golf is a greater test of nerve than billiards, and that is the variety of weapons that you must have for different strokes. You play with the same cue at billiards, with the same bat at cricket, with the same mallet at croquet, with the same racquet at tennis, lawn-tennis, and racquets; golf is the only game in the world, as far as I know, where it is absolutely necessary to have a minimum number of five or six clubs to play a game with. ”

“ You cannot in golf ever be quite certain how the ball will lie except on the tee and putting-green. You experience during your walk of 150 yards to the ball alternate feelings of hope and fear, hope that the ball is lying on a smooth place and easy to hit, fear that it is in a cup or has a lump behind it. There is also the uncertainty that has a twinge of agony about it, and that is the question how you are going to hit it; even the best players foozle sometimes. Without uncertainty there is no really first-class game where a ball is concerned ”

“ In all games of skill, and in all sports where the object is propelling anything to a given point, one always tries, almost instinctively, to get the eye as much in a line with the ball or missile and the objective point as possible. This is seen in throwing a stone, aiming a catapult, a gun, or an arrow, in cueing at a billiard ball, and in many other ways, but in golf it is impracticable. The player must make his stroke with his eye anywhere from four to six feet away from his little club face. One may say that this is so in hockey, cricket, and lawn-tennis. ”

“ When the head has been kept quite still and the club has reached the top of the upward swing, the eyes should be looking over the middle of the left shoulder, the left one being dead over the centre of that shoulder. Most players at one time or another, and the best of them when they are a little off their game, fall into every trap that the evil spirits of golf lay for them, and unconsciously experience a tendency to lift the head for five or six inches away from the ball while the upward swing is being taken. ”

“ Lord, how hard he hits!
'Tis strange he does not knock the ball to bits!
Sometimes he hits it fair, and makes a stroke
Whose distance Saddell's envy might provoke;
But take his common play; the worst that ever
Play'd Golf might give him one, and beat him clever.
Bad tho' he be, the Captain has done more
Than ever man who play'd at Golf before:
One thund'ring ball he drove—'twas in despair—
Wide of the hole, indeed, but kill'd a hare! ”

“ A course that is laid out for the latter very often inflicts severe punishment [Pg 215] on the scratch player, and it is surely hard that the man who has spent many years in the most patient and painstaking practice should be deliberately treated in this manner when the comparative novice is allowed to go scot free. Moreover, when a bunker is so placed that a long carry is needed from the tee, the handicap man will find his game much improved by playing on the course. At first he finds he cannot carry the hazard, and for a little while contents himself with playing short. ”