Golfmanship: Or How to Win Without Actually Cheating

by STEPHEN POTTER

ALWAYS remember that it is in golf that the skillful gamesman can bring his powers to bear most effectively. The constant companionship of golf, the cheery contact, means that you are practically on top of your opponent, at his elbow. The novice, therefore, will be particularly susceptible to your gambits.

Remember the basic rules. Remember the possibilities of defeat by tension. I have written elsewhere of the “Flurry,” as it is called, in relation to lawn tennis. It is an essential part of Winning Golf. The atmosphere, of course, is worked up long before the game begins.

Your opponent is providing the car. You are a little late. You have forgotten something. Started at last, suggest that “Actually we ought to get rather a move on — otherwise we may miss our place.”

“What place?” says the opponent.

“Oh, well, it’s not a bad thing to be on the first tee on time.” Though no time has been fixed, Opponent will soon be driving a little fast, a little tensely, and after you have provided one minor misdirection, he arrives at the clubhouse taut.

In the locker room one may call directions to an invisible steward or nonexistent timekeeper. “We ought to be off at 10.38.” “Keep it going for us,” and so forth.

OPPONENT. — “Who’s that you’re shouting to?”

GAMESMAN. — “Oh, it’s only the Committee man for starting times.”

Your opponent will be rattled, and be mystified too, if he comes out to find the course practically empty.

If for some reason it happens to be full, you can put into practice Crowded Coursemanship, and suggest, before every other shot Opponent plays, that “We mustn’t take too long — otherwise we shall have to signal that lunatic Masterman, behind us, to come through. Then we’re sunk.”

Every beginner in golf gamesmanship must know when to be sympathetic to his opponent, when not. He must know the basic ways of walking, or not walking, off the tee with his opponent. If he is ignorant of that admirable little book Bad Luck in Twenty-five Tones of Voice, he must yet distinguish the mechanical “Bad luck!” suitable when your opponent really has had a stroke of ill fortune, from the exaggerated “ What utterly filthy luck — no, really!” which increases the annoyance caused by a good honest error which hooks him into a bunker.

Here are some notes on certain general gamesmanship plays, in their relation to golf.

Frith-Morteroy Counter in Golf

What I have described as Game Leg Play can easily be adapted to golf. The essence of the gambit is, of course, the display of the slight limp, which with set mouth you try to “disguise.” Trouble in the joints is certainly more effective, against very inexperienced players, than any other complaint.

Strained or rheumatic joints are the points to play on. In the locker room, prolonged swathing of ankles and wrists in elastic bandages can be obscurely irritating to your opponent, even if he fails to sympathize.

Frith-Mortcroy’s counter to any kind of Crocked Ankle Play is always to sympathize and wait. When the opponent begins to limp as if in pain Frith will sympathize and wait till the turn. Then, after Frith’s next bad shot — a topped drive, say he suddenly stands stock-still, head down.

FRITH.—Sorry.

OPPONENT. — What’s up ?

FRITH.—O.K. in a second.

O pponent.—Indigestion ?

FRITH.—No, I wish it was.

OPPONENT.—Why ?

FRITH.— What? I mean it’s something funny.

OPPONENT.—Funny ?

FRITH.— It’s called oteolitis media, or some nonsense. Uneven blood pressure. It’s a tiny heart thing.

OPPONENT.— What, heart?

FRITH. — I’m supposed not to hit the ball too hard. I shall be all right in a second.

Thus, in the classical manner, the opponent’s relatively minor affliction is made to seem ludicrously unimportant, while, if there happens to be a spectator to note it, Frith’s superior sportsmanship, in concealing his dangerous condition as long as possible, will stand out in flattering contrast.

Mixed Foursomes

I have always been an intense admirer of this phrase, “I’m supposed not to hit the ball too hard,” of Frith’s.

In a mixed foursome it is important in the basic foursome play (i.e. winning the admiration of your opponent’s female partner) that your own drive should be longer than that of the opposing man, who will, of course, be playing off the same tee as yourself.

Should he possess definite superiority in length, you must either (a) be “dead off my drive, for some reason” all day — a difficult position to maintain throughout eighteen holes; (b) say “I’m going to stick to my spoon off the tee,” and drive with a Fortescue’s Special Number 3 — an ordinary driver disguised to look like a spoon, and named “spoon” in large letters on the surface of the head; (c) use the Frith-Morteroy counter.

The general play in mixed foursomes, however, differs widely from the Primary Gambits of a men’s four. But beginners often feel the lack of a cutand-dried guide.

In the all-male game of course, when A and B are playing against C and D, the usual thing, if all is going well, is for A and B to be on delightfully good terms with each other, a model of easy friendship and understanding. Split Play is only brought into play by the A-B partnership if C-D look like becoming 2 up. A then makes great friends with C, and is quietly sympathetic when D, C’s partner, makes the suspicion of an error, until C is not very unwillingly brought to believe that he is carrying the whole burden. His dislike for D begins to show plainly. D should soon begin to play really badly.

In the mixed game, all is different. Woo the opposing girl is the rule. To an experienced mixedman like Du Carte, the match is a microcosm of the whole panorama of lovers’ advances.

He will start by a series of tiny services, microscopic considerations. The wooden tee picked up, her club admired, the “Is that chatter bothering you?” The whole thing done with suggestions, just discernible, that her own partner is a little insensitive to these courtlinesses, and that if only he were her partner, what a match they’d make of it.

Du Carte, meanwhile, would be annoying the opposing man, by saying at large, in a sickening way, that “Golf is only an excuse for getting out into the country. The average male is shy of talking about his love for birds and flowers. But isn’t that . . . after all — ”

Du Carte was so loathsome to his male friends at such moments that they became overanxious to win the match. Whereas the female opponent, on the contrary, was beginning to feel that golf was not perhaps so important as sympathetic understanding.

By the twelfth hole Du Carte was able to suggest, across the distance of the putting green, that he was fast falling in love. And by the crucial sixteenth, Female Opponent would have been made to feel not only that Du Carte had offered a proposal of marriage, but that she, shyly and regretfully, had refused him.

Du Carte invariably won these matches two and one. For he knew the First Law of Mixed Gamesmanship; that No woman can refuse a mans offer of marriage and beat him in match play at the same time.

Caddie Play

Remember the basic rule: Make friends with your caddie and the game will make friends with you. How true this is. It is easy to arrange that your guest opponent shall be deceived into undertipping his caddie at the end of the morning round, so that the news gets round, among the club employees, that he is a no good, and the boys will gang up against him.

I myself have made a special study of Caddie Play, and would like to put forward this small suggestion for a technique of booking a caddie for your guest.

There is usually one Club caddie who is an obvious half-wit, with mentally deficient stare and a complete ignorance of golf clubs and golf play. Do not choose this caddie for your opponent. Take him for yourself.

There is such a caddie in my own Club. He is known as Mouldy Phillips. It is obvious from a hundred yards that this poor fellow is a congenital. While preparing for the first tee say: —

Self.—I’m afraid my caddie isn’t much to look at.

OPPONENT.—Oh, well.

SELF.—He’s a bit — you know.

OPPONENT. — Is he?

SELF.—I was anxious you shouldn’t get him.

OPPONENT. — But —

SELF. — It’s all right, I know the course. (Then, later, in a grave tone) It gives him such a joy to be asked.

OPPONENT.—Why ?

Self.—Oh — I don’t think they’d ever have taken him on here if I hadn’t been a bit tactful about it.

It is possible to suggest that in the case of Mouldy you have saved a soul from destitution. Impossible in such circumstances for your friend to refer to, much less complain of, Mouldy’s tremor of the right arm, which swings like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, to the hiccoughs or the queer throat noise he will make in the presence of strangers — habits to which you are accustomed.

Meanwhile you have succeeded in your promise to get for Opponent the best caddie on the course. A man like Formby. “He’s just back from caddying in the Northern Professional,” you say. So he is, and your friend soon knows it. During the first hole: —

SELF.&emdash;I suppose Formby knows this course better than anyone in the world.

FORMBY.—Ought to, sir.

Your opponent will feel bound, now, to ask advice on every shot, every club. Formby is certain to give it to him, in any case. After he has done a decent drive and a clean iron shot, Formby will probably say: “Playing here last week, Stranahan reached this point, with his brassie, from the tee. Yes, he can hit, that man.” Here one hopes that Mouldy Phillips will say something.

MOULDY.—Aa — ooo — rer — oh.

SELF.&emdash;Jolly good, Mouldy. Yes, he’s got us there, old boy.

Here Opponent should be not only distracted but mystified. Formby will redouble his advice, while in contrast Mouldy looks on with delighted admiration at everything I do.

The Left Hand-Right Hand Play

I believe it was O. Sitwell who devised this simple rule for play against left-handers. If (as so often happens) your opponent, though left-handed in games generally, yet plays golf with ordinary right-hand clubs, it is a good thing, during the first hole after the fifth which he plays badly, to say: —

SELF.—Do you mind if I say something?

L.H. —No. What?

SELF.—Have you ever had the feeling that you are playing against the grain?

L.H. —No — liow do you mean?

SELF.—Well, you’re really left-handed, aren’t you?

L.H. —I certainly am — except for golf.

SELF.—Have you ever been tempted to make the big change?

L.II. —How do you mean?

SELF.—Play golf left-handed as well. Chuck those clubs away. Fling them into the bonfire.

Damn the expense — and get a brand-new set of left-handed clubs.

L.H. —Yes, but —

SELF. — You know that, is your natural game. Be extravagant.

L.H. —It isn’t the expense —

SELF.—Money doesn’t mean anything nowadays, anyhow.

L.H. —I mean —

SELF. — Everybody’s income’s the same really.

The fact that your opponent has been advised to play right-handed by the best professional in the country will make him specially anxious to prove by his play that you are in the wrong. The usual results follow. If he is not only a left-hander but plays with left-handed clubs as well, the same conversation will do, substituting the word right for left where necessary.

A Note of Clothesmanship

I have discussed elsewhere the importance of Clothesmanship in golf. I enlarged on Clothesman’s Primary, the wearing of clothes which are absolutely correct yet manly and gameslike, to match the gigantic golf bag, with ball cleaners, resin cases, and wooden-club mufflers dangling from its rich leather.

Then there is the tremendously effective Clothesman’s Secondary, too, to counter this gambit. The baggy flannel trousers, the blue and white braces, and the boots, all made to go with the 1904 golf bag tied up with a clothesline, containing five dingy clubs very stringy round the heads. Many is the match I’ve seen won with this carefully planned outfit.

Bemerondsay Trophy Play

C. Bemerondsay was an awkward, tricksy, inventive gamesman, full of devices, many of them too complicated for the older generation. I remember he tried to upset me once by “letting it be known” that his name “of course” was pronounced “Boundsy,” or some such nonsense. Players uncertain of their position were, it is believed, actually made to feel awkward by this small gambit, and I have heard G. Carter — always conscious that his own name was a wretchedly unsuitable one for a games player — apologize profusely for his “stupid mispronunciation.”

On the other hand, Bemerondsay’s Cup Trick is well worth following. I will briefly summarize it.

In play against a man like Julius Wickens, who goes in for suggesting he was once much better than he is, the dialogue runs as follows: —

Bemerondsay.—I have a feeling you know more about the game than you let on.

WICKENS.—Oh, I don’t know.

Bemerondsay.—What is your golf history?

WICKENS.—Well, just before the war I was winning things a bit.

BEMERONDSAY. — I bet you were.

WICKENS.—Spoons — and things,

BEMERONDSAY.— Oh, you did, did you?

WICKENS.—Then in 1931 I won a half share in the July tea-tray — rather nice.

BEMERONDSAY. — Very nice indeed.

After the match, Bemerondsay asked Wickens round for a drink after the game. “I keep the stuff in my snuggery,” he says, and in they go.

“Somebody must have put the drink in the cupboard,” says Bemerondsay. “Why?”

He opens the cupboard door and to his “amazed surprise” out falls a small avalanche of golf cups, trophies, silver golf balls, engraved pewter mugs, symbolical groups in electroplate. “Oh hell,” says Bemerondsay, slowly.

WICKENS (really impressed).—These all yours?

BEMERONDSAY. — Yes. This is my tin.

WICKENS.—When did you win all these?

BEMERONDSAY.— never know where to put it.

It is of no importance in the gambit, but it is believed by most gamesmen that these “trophies” of Bemerondsay really are made of tin or silverpainted wood, or that at any rate they were bought by Bemerondsay as a job lot. It is doubtful whether he had ever entered for a Club competition, as he was a shocking match player.

Failure of Tile’s Intimidation Play

Americans visiting this country for a championship have sometimes created a tremendous effect by letting it be known that, on the voyage over, in order to keep in practice, they drove new golf balls from the deck of the Queen Mary into the Atlantic.

I believe that W. Hagen brilliantly extended this gambit by driving balls from the roof of the Savoy Hotel.

When they came to our own seaside course, to play in the Beaverbrook International Invitation Tournament, two Americans created a tremendous effect by driving new balls into the sea before the start, to limber up.

E. Tile, pleased with this, determined to create a similar impression before his match against Miss Bertha Watson, in our June handicap. He cleverly got hold of six old or nearly worthless balls, value not more than twopence each, painted them white, and teed them up to drive them into Winspit Bay. By bad luck, however, not one of his shots reached the edge of the cliff, much less the sea. So his stratagem was discovered.

G. Odoreida

G. Odoreida, I am glad to say, did not often play golf. By his sheer ruthlessness, of course, Odoreida could shock the most hardened gamesman. Woe to the man who asked him as a guest to his golf club.

He would start with some appalling and unexpected thrust. He would arrive perhaps in a motor-propelled invalid chair. Why? Or his hair would be cropped so close to the head that he seemed almost bald.

Worse still he would approach some average player of dignified and gentlemanly aspect and, for no reason, ask for his autograph. Again, why? One was on tenterhooks, always.

I remember one occasion on which his behavior was suspiciously orthodox. The Club was Sunningdale. “Thank heaven,” I thought. “Such ancient dignity pervades these precincts that even Odoreida is subdued.”

I introduced him to the secretary. It was a bold move, but it seemed to work. I was anxious when I saw, however, that on that particular afternoon the secretary was inspecting the course. As he came near us Odoreida was near the hole. Without any reason, he took an iron club from his bag and took a wild practice swing on the very edge, if not on the actual surface, of the green. A huge piece of turf shot up. “Odoreida!” I said, and put the turf back with an anxious care that was perfectly genuine.

Two holes later the secretary was edging near us again. Odoreida was about to putt. He took the peg from the hole and plunged it into the green. “Odoreida!” I cried once more. Surely, this time, the secretary must have seen. But I remember very little of the rest of the afternoon’s play. I know that Odoreida won by 7 and 5. I am glad to say that I refused to play the remaining holes.

In other words, gamesmanship can go too far. And the gamesman must never forget that his watchwords, frequently repeated to his friends, must be sportsmanship, and consideration for others.