An Old Man's Game

A Recent Victory of Sandy Herd's Proves That Golf Can Be a Game for the Elderly

Bv BERNARD DARWIN

Z' II 'A HAT golf is an old man's game is a taunt not so often heard nowadays, when everybody plays it; but when golf was younger and golfers fewer it had olten to be endured with such serenity of manner as could be mustered. Perhaps there will be a recrudescence of it now, not, it must be owned, without some justification, because it has just been most gloriously exemplified. The Nezvsof the World tournament, which carries unofficially the match play professional championship of Britain, has just been won by a man who is fifty-eight years old, the evergreen Sandy Herd. That this should be possible does not reflect perhaps to the credit of our younger players; it may go some way to explain why they have made so disappointing a showing against the conquering invaders from America. But this is a poor, grudging spirt. Away with melancholy! Let us rather take off our hats to this venerable hero, with no after-thoughts, but with single hearts, full of admiration.

Sandy has twice been to America and has many friends there. Still, I will try to sav something of what manner of man he is, as well as something of his long career. And the best description of him I can think of is in another man's words. They arc the words written some hundred years ago by old John Nyrcn, who has preserved to us for ever the memory of little Hamblcdon, the first home of cricket, and of its early heroes. Writing of his uncle, Richard, who was the Commandcr-in-Chicf of Hamblcdon's army he said: "He was a good face-toface, unflinching, uncompromising, independent man. He placed a full and just value upon the station he held in society, and he maintained it without insolence or assumption. He could differ with a superior, without trenching upon his dignity or losing his own." That seems to me an almost perfect description of Sandy Herd and there is another passage in Nyrcn's immortal book (the epithet is no exaggerated one) which also reminds me of him. Richard Nyrcn had helped to pull a hopeless match out of the fire for Hamblcdon and those who had bet on the other side were lamenting their losses. The sturdy old fellow turned short around upon them. "Another time," said he, "don't bet your money against such men as we are." 1 can imagine that 1 hear Sandy Herd saying that.

TT TNCOM PROMISING, unflinching—that is Herd to the life; one who would never change or hide the natural man that is in him.

11 always seems to me eminently characteristic of him that he has never altered his grip of the club, the grip which he calls "natural" and what some of the moderns call "old-fashioned"; that he has never even experimented with the overlapping theory and feels something of contempt for those who have changed to these newfangled ways. Yet with all this uncompromising spirit of his, he is wise and canny and has moreover a kind heart and a delightful nature. How popular he is could be seen from the real agonies suffered by his friends and supporters while he was winning this tournament. There were one or two critical moments when he had had what seemed a winning lead and dissipated it; he played on our emotions almost unbearably and those who had followed him through all his matches, even to the thirty-eighth hole in the final, felt broken old men, far older than fifty-eight, when he won at last. It was

the pleasantest of sights to see his old friend and rival, J. H. Taylor, walking round with him and heartening him up, telling him that the hole was "in a soup plate", and he would be sure to get his putt down, and making other such encouraging, if possibly fallacious, statements. And what a following lie had of his own family! There was his wife, his mother, David who had come up from Littlcstone, two sons, a daughter, I think, and at least one small grandson; even so 1 am not sure that I have the tale of Herd complete. At any rate his following was a fine testimony to a truly lovable character.

There is one quality of Sandy's that can not be left out and that is his perennially juvenile enthusiasm. If his outside is compartivcly dour, there is a bubbling spring of eagerness within. His delight in a drive just a little longer than the rest is that of a small bov whose strength is growing and who has just acquired a new and more powerful driver. I was watching him in the first round and he hit a particularly good shot at a certain hole. "That was a long shot, wasn't it, Harry?" he asked of Taylor and on being assured that it was, he added, "I'm touching them up a bit just now, when I get hold of them." This youthful delight in the game is not only a joy to witness but it goes far to explain his eternally good play. He is physically a very strong man; nobodv but a strong man could have stood the long drawn out strain of those four days of hard matches; but neither his skill nor his strength would avail without his keenness. Of the four great contemporaries, Vardon, Braid, Taylor and Herd (and Herd is the oldest of them by some three years) Taylor and Herd are, I think, the keenest and they have lasted the longest.

ITT Herd ever reilects that he is growing older, II it is only resolutely to put the base thought away from him. He not only defies, he refuses to acknowledge the flight of time. He secs no reason why a young man should beat him and so he goes out and beats the young man. The fact that he has done more holes in one than any other man (seventeen is now, I fancy, his tally) is not without significance. He sees no reason why he should not hole his tee shot, he means to hole it and every now and then he goes and does it. In this particular tournament not only was the winner fifty-eight but the runner-up, Bloxham, was forty-eight and handicapped by permanent lameness into the bargain. No doubt the conditions were something in favour of age. In point of yards the Mid-Surrey course at Richmond was long enough for anything or anvbody; the tecs had been put back to the back of beyond; some had even been improvised for the occasion on the ladies' course to make the holes longer still; but the ground was very hard and on hard ground the ball laughs at tape measures. There was then no great occasion to strive after length and moreover there is no such artist in the world as Sandy, unless it be Jim Barnes, in sucking all possible advantage out of sun-burned ground. He is the master of a delicately controlled hook—"draw" is perhaps the better word—which, without any vast carry, makes the ball literally fizz when it alights and run, in vulgar language, "like a scalded cat". It is a liberal education to see him settle himself down lor his shot. He faces somewhat out to the right to begin with, but with each one of his multitudinous waggles, his left foot creeps a little more forward and his right foot a little more back, until at last he is in position for the perfect hook. Moreover the hard ground gives him the opportunity of using his wonderfully varied armoury of iron shots. There is a particular hole at Richmond, the seventh, at which he got,

1 think, four "birdie" threes. He never lost it throughout his matches and it was the greatest fun to watch him play it. The hole is on a gently rising plateau, not unlike some to be found at his native St. Andrews. As he was playing this hole on the first day he turned and said to me, "There were times when I could have played this shot fine—I'm afraid of it now." However he had a good look at it, put away the familiar mashie-niblick and for the honour of St. Andrews took an iron and played the pitch and run. The shot was a beauty and after that he always played the low, running shot to that hole, and none of the pitchers got so close to it as he did. Finally, the fast greens suited his style of putting which is of the coaxing or trickling rather than the bold, hard hitting order. It was wonderful how often the ball fell in at its last gasp as if in obedience to the striker's brandishing of his putter, half'menacing, half imploring. I should add that these technical explanations of his success do not detract in the least from the merits of it.

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Sandy Herd played in his first open championship—in a plasterer's fustian trousers and with only four clubs— nearly forty years ago. I think that his first was at St. Andrews in 1888 when the championship and its magnificent prize of 110 was won by Jack Burns, who afterwards gave up golf, became a plate-layer on the railway and boasted that he "had not been off the line for years". That is a long time to look back, and when we think of his later victory and all his other wins and "all-but" wins between 1888 and 1926 it is impossible not to wonder why he lias not won even more. Comparisons are inevitable between his one championship—in 1902—and the six of Vardon and the five apiece of Taylor and Braid. It must be admitted, I suppose, that he was not quite the player that each of the triumvirate was. It is useless to fight against facts and figures. Yet golfing history will assign him a throne only a very little lower than theirs. Luck is a dangerous word, yet, I will dare to say, Herd has not been a lucky golfer. One championship still, I fancy, rouses faintly bitter memories in his breast, namely that at St. Andrews in 1 895. With the last round to play, he led Taylor by three shots, and he started with three fours and a five, a splendid beginning at St. Andrews with a "gutty" ball. Then there swooped down on him a violent hail storm which "blattered" at him for half an hour, so that he dropped many putts on the hail-covered greens. Taylor started late when the storm was past and the wet greens were ideally suited to his pitching: he pitched like a fiend, played a superb round and beat poor Sandy. "Ifs and ans" are unsatisfactory things but that really was a piece of cruel luck and if Herd had won that championship, it might well have been the predecessor of more, for he was an astonishingly brilliant player at that time, and confidence is begotten of victory. As he himself says in his book of golfing memories, "There is no telling what the effect would have been on me as a Champion at twenty-seven. The thought of it haunts me still."

Yes, Sandy has not been lucky but there was something else as well. That bubbling enthusiasm which has stood him in such stead in his later years was perhaps less well curbed and so a hindrance rather than a help in his earlier ones. He had something too much of the artistic or poetic temperament which looks forward in imagination. He grew excited at the prospect

of glory. A braver fighter there never was, but some others could wait rather more patiently and stolidly for victory to come. He could begin with astonishing bursts of brilliance, but the hanging on to the lead with the steadygoing golf which was all that was then wanted—that did sometimes beat him. Even now, when he is rather more phlegmatic, the old tendency peeps out now and again. When I am watching him putt in a big match, I look at his feet. When they remain immobile I know that the ball will go very near the hole if not into it, but when I see them move the moment the ball is struck then I know that their owner is a little too anxious to see the result and I fear the worst. In this his latest but not, let us be sure, his last victory, there were traces of the old Sandy. In the final he was at one time five up, playing invincibly, and he was pulled down to all square. Again he got away to be three tip, and again the tenacious Bloxham got all three holes back. He was dormic one and once more the cup was dashed from his lips. But if he faltered once or twice when success seemed almost sure, he never talked when his back was against the wall. Then he fought like a tiger, and it was not an inappropriate ending that so resolute a warrior should hole his winning putt in a torrent of rain, under a canopy of black clouds.

Golfing times have changed since Sandy began his golf—the cobbled streets of St. Andrews, playing at a lamppost, a champagne cork with a screw nail in it serving him in lieu of a ball. When he gave up his two first loves of baking and plastering for golf, got his first job and came back with forty golden sovereigns in his purse, it was more money than his parents had ever seen in all the course of their lives, and it reconciled them for the first time to his following so "ne'erdo-well" an occupation. One thing about Sandy had never apparently changed, and that was the pair of blue trousers in which he played. I speak figuratively. No doubt he has had a whole dynasty of them: at any rate, when other people took to knickerbockers and variegated stockings, he was faithful to his light-coloured coat and his blue trousers. And then came a shock, for one fine day only two or three years ago, he appeared in "plus fours", and the world seemed to be topsy-turvy. Judge then of my delight when on the first day of this Richmond Tournament I saw him once again in blue trousers. A jersey had superseded the old light coat, but the trousers had come back. Then I thought he would win and I hope, now that the trousers have enjoyed so fine a triumph, he will discard those new-fangled knickerbockers once and for all. Without them he is not quite the only original and genuine Sandy Herd.