THE COMPLETE GOLFER
By Harry Vardon
CHAPTER IIITHE WAY TO GOLF
The mistakes of the beginner - Too eager to play a round - Despair that follows - Settling down to mediocrity - All men may excel - The sorrows of a foozler - My advice - Three months' practice to begin with - The makings of a player - Good golf is best - How Mr. Balfour learned the game - A wise example - Go to the professional - The importance of beginning well - Practice with each club separately - Driver, brassy, cleek, iron, mashie, and putter - Into the hole at last - Master of a bag of clubs - The first match - How long drives are made - Why few good players are coming on - Golf is learned too casually.
There are different ways of learning to play the great game of golf, each of which enjoys its share of patronage. Here as elsewhere, there are, of course, the two broad divisions into which the methods of doing all things are in the first instance classed the right way and the wrong way fnd, generally speaking, the wrong way has proved the more popular and is accountable for much of the very bad golf that one sees almost every day upon the links.
There are two mistakes to which the beginner is much addicted, and to them is due the unhappy circumstance that in so many cases he never gets his club handicap down to single figures.
Before he has ever played golf in his life, but at that interesting period when he has made up his mind to do so, and has bought his first set of clubs, he is still inclined to make the same error that is made by so many people who know nothing of the game, and loftily remark that they do not want to know anything—that it is too absurdly simple to demand serious thought or attention, and can surely need no special pains in learning to play.
Is[Pg 26] not the ball quite still on the tee before you, and all that is necessary being to hit it, surely the rest is but a question of strength and accuracy of aim? Well, we need not waste time in discussing the opinions of the scoffers outside, or in submitting that there never was a game less easy to learn than golf. But the man who has been converted to golf most frequently has a vestige of this superstition of his heathen days lingering with him, and thus at the outset he is not inclined to waste any time, as he would say, in tuition, particularly as it happens that these new converts when quite fresh are invariably most delightfully enthusiastic.
They have promised themselves a new sensation, and they are eager to get on to the links and see how much further than the two hundred yards that they have heard about they can drive at the first attempt or two. Then comes the inevitable disappointment, the despair, the inclination to give it up, and finally the utter abject despondency which represents the most miserable state on earth of the golfer, in which he must be closely watched lest he should commit murder upon the beautiful set of clubs of which at the beginning he was so proud, and which he spent his evenings in brightening to the degree that they resembled the family plate. Then after this passage through purgatory come the first gleams of hope, when two holes in succession have been done in only one over bogey, and a 24 handicap man has actually been beaten by 3 up and 2 to play—a conquest which, if it is the first one, is rarely forgotten in the golfer's lifetime. After that there is a steady settling down to mediocrity. There is afterwards only an occasional fit of despair, the game is for the most part thoroughly enjoyed, there are times when, after a round in which driving and putting have been rather better than usual, the golfer encourages himself over his cup of tea with the fancy that after all he may some day win a medal and become a senior; but in the main the conviction forces itself upon him that it is impossible that he can ever become a really fine player. He argues that this is not at[Pg 27] all his own fault. He points out to himself that circumstances are too strong for him. He considers that he is not very young—at least not so young as many of the experts of his club who have been golfing ever since they were boys. His limbs have not that suppleness which makes the scratch player. His eye is not so keen as theirs. Besides, he is a business man who has to give up so much of his time to the earning of his daily bread that it is impossible he should ever devote himself to the game with that single-mindedness which alone can ensure proficiency. He must take himself as he finds himself, and be satisfied with his 18 handicap. These are the somewhat pathetic excuses that he makes in this mood of resignation. Of course he is wrong—wrong from the beginning to the end—but there is little satisfaction in that for the earnest lover of the game who would see all men excel, and who knows only too well that this failure is but a specimen of hundreds of his kind—good golfing lives thrown away, so to speak. If a man is not a cripple, if he suffers from no physical defect, there is no reason why he should not learn to play a good game of golf if he goes about it in the right way. There is indeed a one-armed golfer who plays a very fair game, and one may admit all these things without in any way suggesting that golf is not a game for the muscles and the nerves and all the best physical qualities of a well-grown man. No great amount of brute force is necessary, and fleetness of foot, which men lose as they grow old, is never wanted; but still golf is a game for manly men, and when they take it up they should strive to play it as it deserves to be played.
Now I know what severe temptation there will be to all beginners to disregard the advice that I am about to offer them; but before proceeding any further I will invite them to take the opinion of any old golfer who, chiefly through a careless beginning (he knows that this is the cause), has missed his way in the golfer's life, and is still plodding away as near the limit handicap as he was at the beginning. The[Pg 28] beginner may perhaps be disposed to rely more upon the statement of this man of experience and disappointment than on that of the professional, who is too often suspected of having his own ends in view whenever he gives advice. Let the simple question be put to him whether, if he could be given the chance of doing it all over again from the beginning, he would not sacrifice the first three or six months of play to diligent study of the principles of the game, and the obtaining of some sort of mastery over each individual shot under the careful guidance of a skilled tutor, not attempting during this time a single complete round with all his clubs in action, and refusing all temptations to play a single match—whether he would not undergo this slow and perhaps somewhat tedious period of learning if he could be almost certain of being able at the end of it to play a really good game of golf, and now at this later period of his career to have a handicap much nearer the scratch mark than his existing one is to the border-line between the senior and the junior? I am confident that in the great majority of cases, looking back on his misspent golfing youth, he would answer that he would cheerfully do all this learning if he could begin again at the beginning. Now, of course, it is too late, for what is once learned can only with extreme difficulty be unlearned, and it is almost impossible to reform the bad style and the bad habits which have taken root and been cultivated in the course of many years; and if it were possible it would be far more difficult than it would have been to learn the game properly at the beginning.
My earnest advice to the beginner is to undergo this slow process of tuition for nothing less than three months, and preferably more. It is a very long time, I know, and it may seem painfully tedious work, simply knocking a ball backwards and forwards for all those months; but if he does not accept my suggestion he will have harder things to try his patience during many years afterwards, while, if he takes my advice, he may be down very near[Pg 29] to scratch at the end of his first year, and he will be very thankful that he spent the period of probation as he did. He will constantly be giving a half to players who have been playing for more years than he has months, and he will be holding his own in the very best golfing company. He will be getting the finest delight out of the game that it is possible to get. It is said that the long handicap man gets as much pleasure out of the game as the short handicap man. As the former has never been a short handicap man he is evidently not qualified to judge. The scratch man, who has been through it all, would never change his scratch play for that of his old long-handicap days—at least I have never yet met the scratch man who would. No doubt the noble army of foozlers derive an immense amount of enjoyment from the practice of their game, and it is my earnest prayer that they may long continue to do so. It is one of the glorious advantages of golf that all, the skilled and the unskilled, can revel in its fascinations and mysteries; but there is no golfing delight so splendid as that which is obtained from playing the perfect game, or one which nearly approaches it. The next best thing to it is playing what one knows to be an improving game, however bad, and the golfer whose play has been incorrectly established has not often even the knowledge that his game is improving. He declares more often than not that it gets worse, and one is frequently inclined to believe him.
Now the middle-aged man may say that he is too old to go in for this sort of thing, that all he wants is a little fresh air and exercise, and as much enjoyment as he can get out of playing the game in just the same sort of way that the "other old crocks" do. He would rather play well, of course, if it were not too late to begin; but it is too late, and there is an end of it. That is the way in which he puts it. So large a proportion of our new converts to golf belong to this middle-aged class, that it is worth while giving a few special words of advice to them. Mr. Forty and Mr.[Pg 30] Forty-Five, you are not a day too old, and I might even make scratch men of you, if I were to take you in hand and you did all the things I told you to do and for as long as I told you. Given fair circumstances, there is no reason why any man should despair of becoming either a scratch player or one who is somewhere very near it, and it is as easy to learn to play well as it is to learn to play badly.
So I advise every golfer to get hold of the game stroke by stroke, and never be too ambitious at the commencement. I have heard it stated on very good authority that when Mr. Balfour first began to play he submitted himself to very much the same process of tuition as that which I am about to advise, and that under the guidance of Tom Dunn he actually spent a miserable fortnight in bunkers only, learning how to get out of them from every possible position. The right honourable gentleman must have saved hundreds of strokes since then as the result of that splendid experience, trying as it must have been. He is in these days a very good and steady player, and he might be still better if parliamentary cares did not weigh so heavily upon him. I may humbly suggest that the way in which he began to play golf was characteristic of his wisdom.
Therefore, when the golfer has become possessed of his first set of clubs, let him proceed to the shop of a good professional player—presumably it will be the shop where he bought his clubs—and let him place himself unreservedly in the hands of this expert in the game. Most professionals are good players and good teachers, and the golfer cannot go far wrong in this matter if he allows himself to be guided by his own instincts. I say that he should place himself unreservedly in this man's hands; but in case it should be necessary I would make one exception to this stipulation. If he thinks well of my advice and desires to do the thing with the utmost thoroughness from the beginning, he may request that for the first lesson or two no ball may be put upon the ground at which to practise swings. The[Pg 31] professional is sure to agree that this is the best way, though he encounters so few beginners who are prepared to make all the sacrifices that I have suggested, that he might have hesitated in recommending this course of procedure himself.
A golfer's swing is often made for good or ill in the first week of his experience. His first two days of practice may be of the greatest importance in fashioning his style. If, when he takes his first lesson or two and makes his first few swings, he has a ball on the ground before him which he is trying to hit, all his thoughts will be concentrated on what appears to him to be the necessity of hitting it—hitting it at any cost. No matter what he has been told about the way to swing, he will forget it all in this moment of anxiety, and swing anyhow. In such circumstances a really natural and proper swing is rarely accomplished, and, before the golfer is aware of the frightful injustice he has done himself, his future prospects will probably have been damaged. But if he has no ball before him he will surely learn to swing his club in exactly the way in which it ought to be swung. His whole mind will be concentrated upon getting every detail of the action properly regulated and fixed according to the advice of his tutor, and by the time he has had two lessons in this way he will have got so thoroughly into the natural swing, that when he comes to have a ball teed up in front of him he will unconsciously swing at it in the same manner as he did when it was absent, or nearly so. The natural swing, or some of its best features, will probably be there, although very likely they will be considerably distorted.
At the same time the young golfer must not imagine because he has mastered the proper swing when there is no ball before him, that he has overcome any considerable portion of the difficulties of golf, for even some of the very best players find that they can swing very much better without a ball than with one. However, he may now taste the[Pg 32] sweet pleasure of driving a ball from the tee, or of doing his best with that object in view. His initial attempts may not be brilliant; it is more than likely that they will be sadly disappointing. He may take comfort from the fact that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they are so. But by and by a certain confidence will come, he will cease, under the wise advice of his tutor, to be so desperately anxious to hit the ball anyhow so long as he hits it, and then in due course the correctness of swing which he was taught in his first two days will assert itself, and the good clean-hit drives will come. There will be duffings and toppings and slicings, but one day there will be a long straight drive right away down the course, and the tyro will be told that the professional himself could not have done it better. This is one of the most pleasurable moments in life.
His system of practice thereafter should be upon the following lines. He should continue to practice diligently with his driver until he gets these good, long balls nearly every time, sternly resisting the temptation even to so much as look at any of the other nice new clubs that he has got in his bag, and whose mysteries he is exceedingly curious to investigate. It may take him a week or a fortnight or a month to master the driver; but he should do it before he gives a thought to any other club. When he can use the driver with confidence, he may take out his new brassy and go through the same process with that, until he feels that on a majority of occasions, from a fairly decent lie, he could depend upon making a respectable brassy shot. He will find unsuspected difficulties in the brassy, and in doing his best to overcome them he will probably lose to some extent the facility for driving which he had acquired. Therefore, when he has become a player with his brassy, he should devote a short space of time to getting back on to his drive. It will not take him long, and then he should take out both the clubs he has been[Pg 33] practicing with and hammer away at the two of them together, until after a large amount of extra practice he finds that he is fairly reliable in driving a ball from the tee to begin with, and putting in a creditable second shot with his brassy from the lie upon which he found his ball.
During this second stage of learning he must deny himself the pleasure of trying his iron clubs just as rigorously as he restrained himself from the brassy when he was practising drives only; but when the driver and the brassy are doing well, he may go forward with the cleek. He will not find this learning such dull work after all. There will be something new in store for him every week, and each new club as it is taken out of the bag will afford an entirely new set of experiences. After the driver and the brassy it will be like a new game when he comes to try cleek shots, and in the same way he will persevere with the cleek until it is evident that he really knows how to use it. The driver, the brassy, and the cleek may then be practised with on the same occasion, and if he has made the best use of his time and is an apt pupil, he will find himself now and then, with these three shots taken in turn, getting beyond the green at some of the longest holes. Next it will be the turn of the iron, and so in due season he will be able to practise with the driver, the brassy, the cleek, and the iron. The mashie will follow, and then the five of them together, and at last he may have an afternoon on the green trying his skill with a putter, and listening for the first time to the music of the ball—no such music as this to the golfer's ear, though it consists of but a single note—as it drops into the tin and is holed out at last.
He is at work now with all the clubs that are usually necessary to play a hole; but at the risk of seeming over careful I would warn him once more against going along too fast, and thinking that even at this stage he is able to embark on match play with all the days of studentship left behind. When he takes out his full set of clubs, he[Pg 34] will find, in using them as occasion demands, that he is strangely erratic all of a sudden with one or two of them. Let him have half an hour's practice once more alone with these troublesome fellows until the old order of things has been restored. Let him treat all other offenders in the same manner. He must be determined that there shall not be a club in his bag that shall be allowed to play these tricks with him. Let one day's hard labour be the invariable penalty, until at last they are all obedient in his hands, and the joyful day comes when he feels that he can pick any tool out of his golfing bag and use it skilfully and well, and that after examining a ball in any lie, at any distance from the hole, or with any hazard before him, he knows exactly how it should be played, and feels that he has a very reasonable chance of playing it in that way and achieving the success that such a shot deserves. Such a stroke will not be brought off correctly every time; the golfer has not yet been born who always does the right thing in the right way. But the more one practises the more frequently will he succeed. Following Mr. Balfour's good example, the beginner may do worse than spend a few days trying the most difficult strokes he can discover on his links, for in actual play he will find himself in these difficult places often enough to begin with, and a little special study of such shots at the outset will prove a very valuable investment of time. The ball should be thrown down carelessly at different places, and should be played from the spot at which it settles, however uninviting that spot may be.
When he has secured a fair command over all his clubs, from the driver to the niblick, the golf student may play a round of the links; but he should do so only under the watchful eye of the professional, for he will find that in thus marching on from hole to hole, and perhaps getting a little excited now and then when he plays a hole more than usually well, it is only too easy to forget all the good methods in which he has been so carefully trained, and all the wise[Pg 35] maxims he knows so well by heart that he could almost utter them in his sleep. Let him play a few rounds in this way, and in between them devote himself as assiduously as ever to practise with individual clubs, before he thinks of playing his first match. He must settle his game on a secure foundation before he measures his strength against an opponent, for unless it is thus safeguarded it is all too likely that it will crumble to ruins when the enemy is going strongly, and the novice feels, with a sense of dismay, that he is not by any means doing himself justice. Of course I am not suggesting that he should wait until he has advanced far towards perfection before he engages in his first match. When he has thoroughly grasped the principles and practice of the game, there is nothing like match play for proving his quality, but he should not be in haste thus to indulge himself. Any time from three to six months from the day when he first took a club in hand will be quite soon enough, and if he has been a careful student, and is in his first match not overcome with nerves, he should render a good account of himself and bring astonishment to the mind of his adversary when the latter is told that this is the first match of a lifetime.
During the preparatory period the golfer will be wise to limit his practices to three or four days a week. More than this will only tire him and will not be good for his game. I have only now to warn him against a constant attempt, natural but very harmful, to drive a much longer ball every time than was driven at the previous stroke. He must bring himself to understand that length comes only with experience, and that it is due to the swing becoming gradually more natural and more certain. He may see players on the links driving thirty or forty yards further than he has ever driven, and, wondering why, he is seized with a determination to hit harder, and then the old, old story of the foozled drive is told again. He forgets that these players are more experienced than he is, that their swing is more natural to[Pg 36] them, and that they are more certain of it. In these circumstances the extra power which they put into their stroke is natural also. To give him an exact idea of what it is that he ought to be well satisfied with, I may say that the learner who finds that he is putting just two or three yards on to his drive every second week, may cease to worry about the future, for as surely as anything he will be a long driver in good time.
In the course of this volume there are several chapters describing the way in which the various strokes should be played, but I am no believer in learning golf from books alone. I do not think it likely that the professional teacher who is giving the pupil lessons will disagree with any of the chief points of the methods that I explain, and, read in conjunction with his frequent lessons at the beginning of his golfing career, and later on studied perhaps a little more closely and critically, I have hope that they will prove beneficial. At all events, as I have already suggested, in the following pages I teach the system which has won Championships for me, and I teach that system only.
It is perhaps too much to hope, after all, that any very large proportion of my readers will make up their minds to the self-sacrificing thoroughness which I have advocated, and undertake a careful preparation of from three to six months' duration before really attempting to play golf. If they all did so we should have some fine new players. It is because they do not learn to play in this way that so few good players are coming to the fore in these days. One is sometimes inclined to think that no new golfer of the first class has come forward during the last few years. In my opinion it is all due to the fact that nowadays they learn their game too casually.
