A Coming Golf Invasion

The British Professionals Are Organizing a Formidable Team to Play Here

BERNARD DARWIN

TO THE very general pleasure the vexed question of dates for the Open Championships of America and Britain has been settled. It has been settled by mutual concessions which, in the old phrase, reflect equal credit on both parties. The way is therefore clear for the suggested visit of a British professional team to America. It is proposed that this team compete with an American team for the Ryder Cup, which was first played for here last summer, and should also take part in the American Open Championship. Our Golf Illustrated is now engaged in raising a fund for the expenses of the tour. The Royal and Ancient Club immediately showed its sympathy and set a good example to other clubs by a handsome subscription, and there ought to be no difficulty in raising the sum needed.

In sending a subscription to this fund, J. H. Taylor expressed, I think, very well what will be a general sentiment. "I have long been an advocate", he says, "of carrying the war into the (friendly) enemy's country and cannot but think that such an expedition, anomalous as it may sound in the language of war, will do much to foster the good relations that are so desirable." And he ends by adapting that splendid, if now hackneyed, line of Henley's: "Our heads arc bloody but unbowed".

I cannot quite encourage myself into the belief that this team will win its match in America but, even if it does not, attack is sometimes the best defense. It will, I hope— nay, I feel sure, make friends. Indeed to receive callers year after year for seven years, as we have done, and never to return the call, seems poor hospitality. From every point of view therefore I do very much hope that the team will sail.

I HAVE said that I hardly believe that our team can win away from home. At the same time I do not want to be too humble. If the match were played on some neutral course—in Mars, in the mountains of the Moon, or in a castle in Spain —I should be prepared to lay my habitually modest wager on our side. Even in America, I think they ought to make a hard fight of it, for, after all, they did win when they were at home. Not only did they win at Wentworth last summer, but they won by a very handsome and altogether surprising margin; they came, indeed, very near to sweeping the board. Now, no sane man would attach too much importance to that victor)-. The points of view from which the two sides entered the fray were, I think, different. The American players had come with the main purpose of winning the Open Championship. They had only lately landed; they were getting acclimatized and playing themselves into form. They accepted this match as a useful means of accomplishing those two ends rather than as an end in itself.

Our players, on the other hand, were already in fighting trim; they had trained and played themselves into their best form and that too early, as it appeared afterwards from their lamentable collapse in the championship; they were out to win the match, to show what they could do, and to gain a measure of revenge for past defeats. With two sides in these diverse frames of mind, it is not perhaps very difficult to say which is likely to win. At the same time our visitors did on that day try their darnedest and our own men did play very fine golf, golf that would have taken a vast deal of beating. If the match must not count for too much, neither can it count for nothing.

I remember two remarks that I heard made after the match was over. One was by Hagen's caddie. "Why is it", he asked, "that these fellows can play like a lot of world-whippers today and then when it comes to the Championship—their own Championship—they can't hit a balloon?" The other was from f. H. Taylor. "I've told our chaps over and over again that they had the golf in them to do it, and now they've done it. I only hope it'll do them good in the Championship". Of the two prophets I am sorry to have to admit that the American was the better.

However, our men played so ill at St. Annes that I really do not think they ever could play so badly again. I am sure they will not play as they did then, when they go to America, and there is this further to be said: They will, of course, be most anxious to do well in the American Championship, but their first object, that which they are sent out for, will be not undivided glory but the team match for the Ryder Cup. It is for that that they will try to play themselves into form and screw themselves up to concert pitch, and it is by that that they must be ready to stand or fall.

Let me try to say something about those who are likely to be on the team, premising that it has not yet been chosen and that I am in possession of no secrets. To what extent it is a team of outstanding personalities will depend largely on whether any of our illustrious old gentlemen make the trip. When the match was played here none of them played.

I THINK it was suggested to one, at any rate, of the Triumvirate, that he should play, but he declined on the ground that the younger men should have all possible chance.

On this occasion, however, the team will want a captain and it has been suggested that Taylor should fill the post. He is ideally suited to it; he is the acknowledged leader of his profession; all the younger players look up to him; he has an unquenchable fire of enthusiasm; and incidentally, if there are any speeches to be made he will make them admirably. Moreover, he is still a great player and has still in him the joy of battle; as he showed at St. Annes last year and in Hagen's championship at Hoylake two years before.

Then again there is Sandy Herd. It seems almost absurd to talk of choosing a man of fifty-nine, but it is also just a little absurd not to choose a man who is virtually the professional champion of the year. Herd won the tournament which in effect carries that title. Of course he might not go even if he were asked. As to that I cannot say, but there is this further thing to be said, as regards both these illustrious veterans. A man may be too old for a protracted tour and not too old to screw himself up for one match, just for that one big occasion, and to let the rest go hang.

As to the others, the team that won the cup at Wentworth consisted of Mitchell, Duncan, Havers, Ray, Compston, Aubrey Boomer, Gadd, Robson and Charles and Ernest Whitcombe. All these arc again in the running for places; indeed I cannot think of any new young men who are likely to turn them out, unless it be possibly Jack Smith, who is probably the most tremendous of all drivers, and, like Abe Mitchell, began his career as an amateur with the artisan club at Ashdown Forest.

The flower of that flock is undoubtedly Mitchell, a wonderful golfer if ever there was one, though not, alas, gifted with a wonderful temperament for the game. I never can make up my mind what, exactly, is the defect in Mitchell's temperament,—whether it is that he cares too much or does not care enough. He has the knack of looking very unhappy while playing, and that makes one think that he cares too much. Hut sometimes I fancy that he has not sufficient will to victory, that he plays his best because it is his job, but having done that, he puts the matter out of his mind. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between the two, that Mitchell, who has a most pleasant personality, dislikes the storm and stress of big matches, not because it is too much for his nerves, but because he would much rather be doing something more peaceful and leisurely. In this respect he presents rather an odd riddle, but about the quality of his game there is no such problem. It is undeniably magnificent, and can make that of almost any other man look rather puny and laborious.

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Then there is Duncan. It seems ridiculous to have to think twice and then put a mark of interrogation after his name, but the fact remains that for some time past Duncan has been disappointing. This autumn he was full of confidence in his own game, but his last excursion to America rather belied it. It is the general belief that Duncan has theorized himself out of his best game. I wish that he would put more trust in his natural genius for the game and be a little less interested not only in how he does it himself, but in how everybody else does it.

Ray and Compston are, of course, also well known in America. Possibly, indeed, Compston will have become, by the time the team sails, too American to be included in it. Certainly he would be an addition to it from a picturesque point of view, with his long lean figure and his towsled red head at the top of it. He is too, of course, a fine golfer. Yet he was a little disappointing this summer, and it is doubtful whether he was ever quite so good as he seemed in his Annus Mirabilis, when there were plenty of people to back him in his 72-hole match against Mitchell. Then he was "a-tiptoe on the highest point of being", but that heavy defeat was a set-back from which he has not yet quite recovered. Ray is hovering near fifty now, but he is a prodigiously strong man and does not think too much about growing old nor, as I should suspect, about how he hits the ball. He just smokes his pipe and hits the ball very hard if not always very straight, but with trust in his tremendous powers of recovery and his good putting. It would be difficult to leave him out, I think.

Among the new men, Gadd is always to me a very interesting golfer, as he is undoubtedly a good one. He is also a thoroughly intelligent one and, incidentally, rose to commissioned rank in the War. Since then he has shown his intelligence by slaving at the art of putting until he turned himself from a bad putter into a good one, and a reliably good one at that. An elegant player he is not. He is of big and burly make with a certain air of rotundity, so that he seems to swing his club up with a curious outward bend in order to get it round his manly chest; but his down swing is fine and free, and his play is both far and sure.

Ernest Whitcombe, who was a stroke behind Hagen hi the memorable Hoylake Championship of 1924, is an eminently sound player with a style that will never "let him down". He should have a good chance of being chosen, but I think his younger brother, Charles, should have a better. The younger brother is, to my mind, the better man, when each is on his best day. He has something of brilliancy which the other lacks and since this team has clearly got to aim high I should put him in it. For several years these two Whitcombes stayed placidly down in the west of England, each at a small course, quite happy apparently. They were essentially country men and did not, as it seemed, want to change their condition. Now, however, they have gone further afield, the one to Bournemouth, the other to a London course.

Aubrey Boomer is of the Jersey School that was founded by Harry Vardon; indeed his father was Vardon's schoolmaster. He and his brother are the professionals at St. Cloud near Paris, so that we only see him here, when the spring and the time of championships come around. He is an extremely good looking young man, with the build of a natural athlete and is,in fact, a good player of other games. He is a very' powerful golfer with a slashing swing, and a turn of the body so big and rapid as always to alarm me a little as to its soundness. Still he is as a rule, reliable enough, and has certainly improved his putting very much by downright hard work and by taking Hagen for a model. His stance on the green is now a flatteringly accurate copy of the great man.

Robson is a very good and graceful player who has been hampered at times by illness. He has an ineradicably cheerful temperament and sees the humour of things that befall at golf— either to himself or to other folk—as acutely as anyone of my acquaintance.

There remains Havers and he is a golfer who seems to have disappointing periods and then brilliant bouts. When he was fifteen, just before the War, he qualified for the Open Championship, a really' astonishing performance for a young schoolboy. When golf began again he was in everybody's mouth as the coming man. Certainly he had grand shots and magnificent power,—yet he never could quite do it. And then at Troon in 1923, he came out of his shell and saved his country's honour by' snatching the Championship from Hagen by a single stroke. Now was the time for him to go right ahead. He was on the crest of the wave, with youth, strength, and a pleasant, easy-going nature to help him; and yet he has not gone ahead but, judged by his own standards, has been something of a failure. The wheel of Fortune should have gone a full circle in his favour by this time and perhaps he will come back into his own.

Such is a short review of some of those who may be invading America early next summer. They are all good golfers, in all senses of the words, and will, I believe, do well. How well, I am not rash enough to prophesy.