The Soul of Golf

ing to account for the fascination of golf have used the old threadbare tale. As a matter of fact, golf is about as unlike the game of life as any game could well be. As pl

o in golf. There is no double life here. All is open, and every one knows what the player is striving for. The least deflection from

ient. Explaining it seems almost like tearing a violet to pieces to admire its structure; but many have tried, and many have failed, and there are many who d

s, but they have no idea how or why they produce them; and the strange thing about it is that although golf is perhaps a

amount of mechanical accuracy. This, on consideration, is apparent. The ball is the smallest ball we use, the striking face of the club is the smallest thing used in field sports for hitting a ball, and, most

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. So, in a modified degree, it is

orable. It lays down the one path-the straight one.

There is at any time beauty in the flight of a golf ball well and plainly driven; but for grace and the poetry of flight stands alone the wind-cheater that skims away from one's

light through the air, merely a golf ball; a golf ball 'twas and nothing more. To the other man it is a faithful little friend sent out to do a certain thing in a certain way, and all the time it is flying and running it is sending its message back to the man who can take it-but how few can? They do not know what the soul of golf means. So, when our golfer pulls or slices his ball badly, and then-does the usual thing,

no greater mistake than this. If a game is worth playing well, it is worth knowing well, and knowing it well cannot mean loving it less. It is this peculiar idea which has put England so much in

he championships are well distributed throughout the world-anywhere but in England; and we say it does not matter; that the chief end of games is not winning them. Nor is it; but we did not talk like that when we were winning them, and the trouble is not so much that we are losing, as the manner in which we are losing. The fact i

the wrong end of golf, for a beginner, they go forth and cut the county into strips and think they are playing golf. Is it any wonder

the soul of music. There is no more chance for one to gather up the soul of g

that the right way to teach anything is to give the beginner the easiest task at first. About the easiest stroke in golf is a six-inch put. That is where one should start a learner. The drive is the stroke in golf that offers the greatest possibility of error, so he is always started with it. It is his own fault. "Teach me the swing" is the insistent cry of the beginner, who does not know that he is losing the best pa

ast what happened while the ball was in the air, that all he cared about was getting it there.

arvellous increase in the popularity of the great game, for golf is undoubtedly a great game. The motor has, unquestionably, played a great part in its development. Many of the courses, particularly in the United Kingdom, are most beautifully situated. Many of the club-houses a

e many charms of the game, and to him who really knows it and loves it as i

riting of George Duncan, the famous young professional golfer, during the first half of the big foursome at Burhill, a great sporting paper said that a certain mashie shot was a "crude stroke." The man who wrote tha

e pitched the ball well up against the wind, which caught it and, on account of the spin, threw it up and up until it soared almost over the hole, then it dropped like a shot bird about a yard from the hole, and the back-spin gripped the turf and held the ball within a foot of where it fell

fellow waving his club at him twenty or thirty feet away, and standing ready to spoil his shot?-yet that is what the lawn-tennis player has to put up with. There is a good deal of exaggeration about this aspect of golf, even as there is a good deal of nonsense about the interference of onlookers. What can be done by one when one is accustomed to a crowd may be seen when one of the great golfers is playing out of a great V formed by the gallery, and, needless to say, playing from the narrow end of it. Golf is a good test of a man's disposition without doubt, but as a game

rough practice which leads one to the soul of golf. Many a good professional can produce beautiful shots, such as the wind-cheater and the pull at

portsman as he is a golfer, and would be ashamed to pretend to a knowledge which he has not. When I had told him, he said, "Thank you. Of c

ults which are in themselves worth losing the game for. Many a golfer, or one who would like to be a golfer, will wonder at this. Many a game at billiards has been lost for the poetry of a fascinating cannon when the win was not the main object of the game; but in this respect billiards and golf are not ali

every golfer to striv

part that appeals most forcibly to the ordinary golfer. It is this to which the attention of players and writers has been most assiduo

on may possibly be found in the fact that golfers are a most conservative class of people, and that they follow wonderf

le or nothing of the subject they are dealing with. The natural result is that the great players suffer severely in "translation," and their names are frequently associated with quite stupid statements,-statements so foolish that one, knowing how these things are done, refrains from criticising them as they deserve, from sympathy with the unfo

which have been worshipped almost from time immemorial, fetiches which are the more remarkable in that they receive mental and theoretical worship only, and are, in actual pract

is the ridiculous assertion that putters are born, not made. I

en more when he is experienced than when he is not, neither I nor any other player can offer any words of instruction such as, if closel

the words was himself one of the worst putters, but that by careful study and alteration of his defective methods, he became a first-class performer on the green.

y were allowed to consider it down in 2 every time. This gives us 36 for puts. With this before us we cannot exaggerate the pernicious effect of the false doctrine which says that putting cannot be taught, that a man must just let his own individuality have full play, and similar nonsense; whereas the truth is that one might safely guarantee to convert into admirable putters many men who, from their conformation and other characteristics

ayer to almost a suicidal frame of mind. Fortunately the fallacy soon exasperates a beginner, and he "says things" and "lets it have it." Then the much-worshipped "sweep" becomes a hit, sometime

and it has ruined many a promising player. The votaries of this fetich must surely find one thing very hard to explain. If we admit, for the sake of argument, that the left arm is the more important, and that it really has more power and more influence on the stroke than the right, can they explain why the left-handed players, who have been provided by a benevolent providence with so manifest an advantage, tamely surrender it and convert their left hand into the right-handed

is not correct. It is expressly laid down that it is fatal to sway, to draw away from one's ball during the upward swing; the player is specially enjoined on no account to move his head. A very simple trial will convince any golfer, even a beginner, th

inds of aspiring golfers to such an extent that many of them thought more o

and he scarcely thinks of it as something beyond the ordinary game. It brings him into closer touch with the best that is in golf. He is able to obtain more from it than he could before. He is able

ly Review in the United Kingdom, and in The North