Bad Manners in Golf

I

WHEN a man looks to see if he has laid me a stymie I consider it an impertinence.’ These formidable words fell from an old friend of mine, a good golfer in his day, a man of great kindliness but some austerity of manner, one who loves the rigor of the game and was brought up in its strictest tradition. They may at first sight seem almost too stern for the offense in question, and yet I am not sure.

It is irritating enough to have a man lay us a stymie, but it is infinitely more irritating to have him step in front of us as we are brooding over it, take a quick glance at the line, and then leave us to it, with an ill-concealed smirk of triumph upon his face. If in addition he should so far forget himself as to say, ‘It’s not a stymie — there’s room to get past on the left,’ then there is nothing malicious or revengeful that we are not disposed to do to him. Proof of those words having been uttered would make it impossible for any jury of golfers to bring in a verdict of murder, and I doubt if they would even agree on one of manslaughter.

Yet the object of our hatred has probably acted in perfect innocence. He has not done it to annoy. He has only forgotten his golfing manners for one fatal moment, or even, perhaps, has never learned them.

The golfer is admittedly a hypersensitive creature, and many things goad him to fury which would seem harmless to the outer and uninitiated world. A very famous English judge once said to a young barrister, ‘I am afraid I did many improper things when I was at the bar. In fact, I know I did’; and few of us who have played golf for any length of time can altogether acquit ourselves of breaches of the unwritten code of golfing manners. We have all said things to our opponents which would have incensed us if they had been said to us. The words have passed the barrier of our lips before we were aware of them. We have been very sorry afterwards, and then perhaps we have done the same thing again when the same set of circumstances have presented themselves.

I am not thinking so much of the offenses which are particularly mentioned in the etiquette of golf — the talking or moving on the stroke, the standing, as it is called, ‘behind the player’s eye,’ and so on. Of these we have all been at times guilty through sheer inadvertence. I am thinking rather of the things that we say to our opponent, and which would so much better have been left unsaid.

One friend of mine regards as constituting almost the blackest crime in the whole golfing calendar the six simple words, ‘You let me off that time.’ It is so hard not to say them sometimes; they represent such a natural outburst of relief. The other fellow has two putts for the hole, his ball is but a few yards from it, and hope has died within our breast. He does not lay the first one quite dead, and our drooping spirits revive a little; it seems just possible that the impossible may happen. He misses the short one, and our pent-up feelings find expression in the forbidden words. It is eminently natural, and even the greatest and most benevolent of men have fallen into a like error.

‘A double, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick, after winning a second rubber against the fat gentleman, whose partner had committed various crimes. ‘A double, sir,’ and we cannot doubt that he smiled as he said it. ‘Quite aware of the fact, sir,’ replied the fat gentleman sharply. I suppose he forgot his manners, too, but we can sympathize with his remark.

And now that we have approached the subject of short, putts, what a rich cause of offense they are! What a chance do they give for bad manners! The other day I was watching a foursome tournament of some importance, and there came beneath the eyrie where I was perched a match between two prominent amateurs on the one side, a worldfamous professional and an amateur on the other. What had happened before, I do not know, but here, on the twelfth green, they were holing out putts of six inches and less with a grimness of demeanor which baffles all description. I never learned exactly how it had started or ‘ who began it,’ but there was no doubt that all four were now playing in a state of cold anger.

Of course we may say, and we constantly do say, that no one has any right to resent, being asked to hole a short putt, but the fact remains that there are putts so short that it is vexatious to be asked to hole them, and when one party begins, the other determines to play him at his own game. This is a fundamental weakness in golfing human nature; nor, as far as I can see, will any legislation eradicate it. The law cannot insist on A holing his putt when B has picked up or kicked his ball away and given up the hole.

Of course, as I say, we ought not to get cross, and I do not think we do unless there is something indefinably defiant and offensive in our opponent’s manner as he stands watching us hole out that six-inch putt. If he stands still and in silence, we have no real cause for complaint, but suppose he waits a perceptible moment of time, looks at our putt, and then says, ‘I think I’ll see that one in’ — only blanks and asterisks can express our just indignation. The words are permissible only in the most lighthearted of palpably postprandial games, and then they are better not spoken. In the case of any opponent who does it more than once, we are justified in having a permanent engagement should he invite us to play again.

The converse crime is that of the man who makes as if to knock the ball in onehanded and says, ‘Will that do?’

A terrible miss he often does make if we have the moral courage to say ‘No,’ and we are entirely justified in saying it. Only the question is whether life is long enough for these little unpleasantnesses. We had better either make the best of it as ‘pretty Fanny’s way,’ or not play with that particular adversary again.

There are variants of this last formula, such as ‘Do you think I can miss that one?’ — to which the suggested answer is ‘I don’t know, but I hope so.’ These are things seldom said in a match that can be called serious, but there is a thing occasionally said in a very serious match that is deserving of severe punishment — namely, I should like to give you that one, but I am afraid I ought not to.’ I once heard that said at the last hole of a championship match, and the man who was bidden to hole the short putt, missed it and the man who had said the dreadful words won, by the unjust workings of Providence, at the twentieth or twenty-first hole. The obvious inference is that it was said on purpose, but I am not dealing with deliberate ‘propaganda,’ and in this particular instance I believe him who said it to be as honest a man and a golfer as need be. It was simply one of those unutterably foolish things that we may say in moments of excitement, and for which, let us hope, we suffer remorse in the watches of the night.

I remember once when I was playing in the semifinal of a foursome tournament. My partner and I were dormy one, and he laid the third shot within the comfortable distance of a foot from the hole. The enemy had a putt of some six feet for his four, missed it, and then said to me in a tone of concentrated venom, ‘I meant to make you hole that one.’ It was rather futile and not very gracious, but how easy it is to be magnanimous in the moment of victory! Indeed, I am afraid that my satisfaction was maliciously enhanced. Besides, I am sadly conscious of having spent my golfing life in a glass house and am very wary as to throwing stones.

II

There is one clear moral to be drawn in this matter — namely, that the less we say the better. I was once playing with a great and wise golfer, now dead, when I apologized to him for some childish outcry over my ill fortune. He himself had suffered in his youth from a fiery temper and was very kind and sympathetic. He said that he had found it a good rule to try to make no comment either on his own shots or on his adversary’s. It is an admirable rule, and, though I have wholly failed to follow it, I have never forgotten. Of course it has exceptions, and an occasional ‘Hard luck’ is surely not only permissible but laudable; but it should be reserved for a calamity to the enemy which really does come under that head — a fine shot trapped by inches or an unfortunate kick.

The adversary will not, unless he be a very simple fellow, believe that we are anything but glad at his misfortune, but he will be a little grateful to us nevertheless. There is some value even in the obviously base coin of an unfelt sympathy. He knows that we cannot be sorry, but, unless he is a very fierce realist, he likes us to pretend that we are. However, we must not pretend too much or too often. Can anything be more infuriating to a golfer, who is putting badly, than his foursome partner’s parrot cry of ‘Well tried’?

One golfer of my acquaintance complained bitterly the other day of an opponent that ‘the brute did not say “Sorry” when he laid me a stymie.’ Doubtless he was both illogical and exacting, for we are not, save in very exceptional circumstances, sorry when we lay the enemy a stymie and, moreover, we have not done it on purpose. Yet it has become a regular if empty form of politeness to say ‘Sorry,’ and we say it not altogether for his sake but also for our own. We feel sometimes, and quite unreasonably, a little mean when we have laid a stymie, and salve our consciences by this fiction of apology. It is a foolish custom, and yet it is probably both wise and civil to yield to it now and again.

Too much butter, like too much sympathy, is to be deprecated, but occasional praise of the opponent’s shots is only decent. Yet we must beware of asking him in humble admiration how he does it, for if once he begins to think on that subject he may be able to do it no more. The illustrious Mr. John Ball had (and has, when he plays — all too seldom) a curious and characteristic grip of the right hand. Between the rounds of a championship a worshiper, in the innocence of his heart, approached him and asked if he would demonstrate this grip. ‘No, no,’ said the great man, ‘I’ve been had that way before — I ’ll show you after the round.’ There never was a less self-conscious golfer than Mr. Ball, and if he was afraid of being made to think, how much more easily will others fall into the fatal pit of thought!

Sir Walter Simpson (Robert Louis Stevenson’s companion of the Cigarette and the Arethusa) has given a pleasantly immoral description of the baiting of such a trap. ‘He [the opponent],’ he says, ‘is thoroughly stretched, supple, confident, and consequently out comes one of those extra-long shots. If you and he both leave him alone, he takes no heed, and other extra ones follow at intervals. But, if you are a cunning player, flatter him about his shot, point out that his next is as long, and, if he takes the bait, the third may be long too; but your experienced eye will detect that he has staggered and overexerted himself to produce it. It is a question of your tact against his sense, whether you get him broken down altogether, or whether he returns to hitting steadily and without prejudice.’

Here, however, I am verging on the realms of propaganda. In that debatable — or perhaps it is not debatable — land there have dwelt great men. That mightiest of all cricketers and most delightful and kindly of men, Dr. W. G. Grace, had his own standards of conduct. A friend once told me how he and W. G. were playing in a foursome match and one of the opponents began with several very long, straight shots. ‘George,’said W. G. confidentially, ‘ this man’s driving too well for me. You watch me talk him off his game.’ ‘Oh, I hope that may not be necessary, Doctor,’ said George, with some natural compunction, but he saw his partner put his arm round his enemy’s neck and tell him a series of stories with great bursts of Homeric laughter. The enemy, flattered by these friendly attentions, was reduced to a state of giggling futility, and the spiky gorse bushes became his grave.

However far we may get away from it, — and I am conscious of meandering, — we always seem to come back to the point that the less we say, the less harm we can do. Of a set and serious combat, Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote that the most we can expect of an opponent is that he ‘should play in silence and as badly as possible.’ Yet fortunately all games — indeed, most games — are not of such deadly character; there is a gradation in these matters, and good championship manners are something too grim and formal for the friendly foursome of every day. When all is said, golfing manners are good or bad much as are manners in general. We can all think of the perfect partner or adversary, the cheerful, unselfish fellow who wants to enjoy his game and wants to make everyone else enjoy it too, who wins without exultation or patronage, who loses without rancor. Some nameless quality shines out of him, so that it is a positive pleasure to see him play, whether in a big match or a small.

I can still vividly remember a match in the Amateur Championship at Deal in 1923, now fifteen long years ago. Two of the American Walker Cup team, Mr. Francis Ouimet and that excellent golfer from California, Mr. Jack Neville, had the misfortune to draw one another and so cut one another’s throats in an early round; it may even have been the first. It was a good and close fight, which Mr. Ouimet won, but the point was not in victory or defeat; it was in the manner of the playing. The two did not talk much to one another; each played as hard and as keenly as he could, and yet that match radiated a delightful and friendly atmosphere. Nor was it I alone who was thus impressed. Everybody who had watched said afterwards what a joy that match had been to see. There was something indefinably pleasant in the spirit of the combat. Here was an example of how two gentlemen should play golf, for others, however faintly pursuing, to follow.

It is not given to many to play the game in that, way. It would be easy to name others who have, as regards all outward forms, perfectly good golfing manners, and yet exude an atmosphere of hostility. They are by nature and instinct killers; that is the way they are made. Their manners can only be good in a negative sense, and no one has the right to ask any more of them; but they cannot give the same pleasure in the watching. Perhaps I may be allowed to quote an admirable description of a typical killer in another game, Spofforth, the Australian bowler, once known far and wide as ‘the Demon.’ The writer, Mr. Neville Cardus, is looking at some pictures of the famous bowler: ‘They were taken long after his days in the sun were over, yet there lurks in the pictures of the man a sense of sinister power. The bowling action is spring-heel-Jackish; the form of him lithe in an inimical way; his face set in hard, predatory lines. He was the Australian of Australians, a stark man that let in with him the coldest blast of antagonism that ever blew over a June field.’

There are such players in all games, and we can appreciate their qualities; nor is there anything to be said against them, save only that they do not add to the enjoyment of the game; indeed, ‘game’ becomes in their presence an inadequate and inappropriate word. Killing can be done in different ways. There was no greater slaughterer of his enemies than Mr. Bobby Jones at his zenith, but there was nothing unpleasant in seeing that carnage. He never appeared for an instant to be reveling in blood; corpses must needs bestrew his victorious path, but he did not trample on them. He was the highwayman who was forced to take his victim’s purse, but took it with the courtliest of bows. In short, he was the proof that it is possible to have the competitive instinct developed in the highest degree and yet remain the perfect opponent.

III

Manners and customs are not, of course, one and the same thing, but different customs can beget different codes of manners in different countries. For instance, in England we usually play four-ball matches on the principle that the partner who is palpably out of the hunt at a particular hole should not continue to the bitter end. He is regarded as something of a selfish nuisance if he does so. In America, on the other hand, the players have generally, in my experience, some wagers as to their individual scores for the round, very likely with others who are playing in a separate match. Therefore they very properly hole out, although they cannot affect the result of that particular hole. I recall playing a four-ball match on a course near Chicago in the year ever memorable as Mr. Ouimet’s, 1913. At the first hole my partner was near the hole in two; I, doubtless deservedly, was in a bunker by the green in three, and picked up my ball accordingly. Thereupon my kind host assured the few onlookers that such was the English custom, lest they might think that I had abandoned the struggle in a tantrum. That mild little story is an illustration of the fact that what are good manners in one country may be odd ones in another, and vice versa. It is simply a question of not impeding the players behind, and depends on what is called the pace of the green.

I think that, owing to the universal popularity of four-ball matches and the general holing-out, the average pace of the green is slower in America than in England, and yet, in my experience, the average American golfer plays more quickly than his English brother. Certainly those who have come over with Walker Cup teams set us a good example in this regard. In England we have been suffering from an epidemic of drearily slow golf among those who ought to know better. I hope that it has now passed its peak, but there is still much room for improvement, still too much dawdling and pottering, still far too many stomachic prostrations — if I may so term them — in the studying of putts.

A few years ago there was a competitor in championships who, owing to a nervous affliction, could not bring himself to hit the ball until after some seventy waggles. In one tournament he drove two successive victims to the verge of madness. The third, being forewarned and extremely strong-minded into the bargain, took out a deck chair and a newspaper and won his match. Who shall decide as to the exact quality of his manners? Desperate diseases require desperate remedies.

His was a case for some sympathy, but there are others who deserve none. Dear me, into what a malignancy of hatred we can be worked up as regards those whom we know only as ‘the people in front ’; and yet it is very often not their fault, for they have other people in front of them, and so on ad infinitum. At St. Andrews, when the full tide of summer golf is surging, we always take three hours to get round, and the best are as the worst, for they all travel at the pace of the green. Yet I have personally been driven to the point of frenzy there by a bishop in front of me, whereas, had he been a golfer, I should have remained placid. I am afraid we are snobs in this matter and do not mind being kept back by a champion.

Yet snobbishness is a venial sin as compared with some of those of which we are guilty, at any rate in desire, in this matter of keeping back. It is worse even than that of short putts in producing bad temper and bad manners. There are golfers who will go to almost any trouble in order to avoid what they deem the indignity of being passed; they will run, they will pick up the ball, they will ruin their own pleasure in order, as it appears, to ruin that of somebody else. They will lose a ball, reluctantly signal to their pursuers to come through, and then, on finding the ball, dash forward again. That is unspeakable; once the signal has been given, it must be abided by, even though those who are coming through make the most deplorable bungle, as players anxious to pass invariably do.

It is often a sore temptation to drive into those confounded people in front, but, whatever the provocation, we put ourselves in the wrong if we do. In my boyhood there was more latitude, and so far more squabbles, sometimes even pitched battles, on this point than there are to-day. The ‘etiquette’ of golf now lays it down that ‘ no player should play until the party in front are out of range.’ The elder tradition was that those behind were entitled to play when those in front had played their seconds; and if it was acted on literally, as it sometimes was, the lives of short-driving old gentlemen were in the gravest peril. Occasionally the party driven into would declare open war and drive the invading ball into the sea. Alternatively, if hidden by a sand hill, they would adopt guerrilla methods and stamp it into the ground. Either plan was likely to lead to an explosion, and I think golfers were altogether more explosive fifty years ago.

Where is that race of peppery colonels, now only to be found in works of fiction, before whom caddies fled aghast, who threw their clubs into the waves and then were nearly drowned in rescuing them? If they throw their clubs now, is it into the Styx? Where is that most delightful of Scottish golfers who said to his putter, ‘Don’t you presume on my good nature any longer,’ and battered it to death against the stone wall at Prestwick? The wall has gone, and he with it. It is some years now since I saw a shaft cracked across an infuriated knee; I have not even cracked one myself. There is for everything a time and a season. Those colonels are dust and their niblicks rust,

Their souls are with the saints, we trust.

Something of picturesqueness has doubtless departed with such barbarous customs, and doubtless also it is all for the best. As the golfer said, in response to his wife’s consolations, ‘I know it’s only a d-d game! ’