On Limiting the Flight of Golf Balls

BERNARD DARWIN

A British Golfer Considers—Quite Impartially—the Adoption of a New Type of Ball

THE other day I read an article by my friend Mr. William C. Fownes, President of the United States Golf Association. "Article," is perhaps too mild a word for it. I should call it, rather, a war cry or a clarion call. It was a plea for the defence of the game of golf. Mr. Fownes said, in effect, that in every game there is what he terms a "defence barrier" against the player, in some games the barrier is provided by the adversary, in others (such as golf) it is provided chiefly by the nature of the battlefield and weapons. In golf, he says, the defence-barrier has, owing to the ever increasing power and perfection of the ball, become something too low, very ordinary players surmount it too lightly; very good players with almost ridiculous ease. Courses cannot forever be made still longer and still more full of bunkers. And so he wants to know what is to be done about it.

Golf is said, and I am afraid with some truth, to he a selfish game and we do not often find it treated with such obvious unselfishness as in this trumpet call by Mr. Fownes. I say that because he is now arriving at a time of life when he probably does not find the game notably too easy. I venture to make that assertion because I know that he is almost exactly my age. We both want to hit the ball as far as we can over a defence-barrier not unduly high. Therefore, he must be allowed to have the highest motives in his crusade. He is standing as a single-hearted champion for the honour and glory of golf as a great game, which, to be at its greatest, should always be almost too difficult for any player.

THIS being so I wish he could have been where I was on, as it chanced, the very day on which I read his wise and spirited words. This was on the pleasant links of Woking where was being played the first match of the "Guttie Club." It was so interesting a match and, as I hope, so un-parochial in its interest, that I may perhaps be allowed to say something about it here.

The "Guttie Club," of which I am by far the humblest member, consists of some twenty or so golfers, amateur and professional, nearly all of whom were originally brought up on the old guttie ball. We have no subscription, no colours, and no links—but we like to play now and again with the "guttie" friend of our youth, not only out of sentiment but because we think that, in some ways, it provides a more varied and entertaining game and an opportunity of playing shots that have now become all too scarce. Our team, on this occasion, was gleaming with purple and gold material. For the professionals we had Taylor, Braid, Herd, and Ray; and, for amateurs, Roger Wethered and Cyril Tolley (they are our babies who came t,o the guttie ball as a new thing), Robert Harris, Horrance, Hezlet, Storey and Gillies. There were one or two others of lesser fame, but still considerable golfers.

Our adversaries, who played with the modern rubber-cored ball, were carefully graded for the purpose. I suppose each guttie player could, under ordinary circumstances, have conceded his opponent, playing with the modern ball a start varying between three and four strokes. On this occasion they played even. The course was not at its fullest length; the tees were what I may call the middle ones, and it was an easy day with practically no wind. This last a matter of some importance for the more easily deflected guttie ball. After a fierce fight the "Guttie Club" halved the singles and won the foursome, and so the match.

The result does not much matter. What did matter was the behaviour of the new guttie and the pleasure or pain that it gave to its users. I call it expressly the new guttie because it was not the old one, and extreme purists might say that it was not a guttie at all. At any rate it was a solid bulk made out of rubber which is used in making the outer cover of rubber-cored balls. It was lighter than the guttie used to be: too light, in fact, so that it drifted rather too easily to right or left under the influence of a very slight inaccuracy of hitting. This was a mistake in manufacture which can easily be remedied and as there was not a strong wind no harm was done. On one point all its users were agreed, namely, that it was a wonderfully pleasant ball to play with. It went sweetly off the club and there was no laborious feeling of hitting an unresponsive stony-hearted brute. It was probably a rather kindlier ball than the old guttie ever was. At the same time I think that all of us had, with the lapse of years, come to believe that golf with a guttie had been much more of a toil than it ever in fact was. So we were more agreeably surprised than we might have been.

SOME people could of course hit the ball a good deal further than others, but a fair estimate is, I think that in the ease of a tee shot cleanly struck it went some forty yards shorter than the modern rubber core. In the case of two wooden shots the difference became, of course, double. In the case of a stroke not cleanly struck it was very marked. A half hit stroke sends the rubber core a long way; it sends the guttie only a very short way—in that respect the guttie at once puts that "defence barrier" much higher up—to the greater glory of the game.

The most enjoyable part of the game with the guttie was the playing of wooden club shots through the green. Naturally there were a good many more such shots to play and the hitting of them was a real joy. The ball left the ground not grudgingly (as the rubber core does) from a hard lie, but willingly and good-humoredly. It was possible to take a driver through the green—for most people a vanished pleasure—and the actual flight of the ball brought back delicious memories. It would start low, then gradually soar in a beautiful arc and then fall straight down, to remain spent arid lifeless on the green. This was the type of shot that Mr. John Ball used to hit, when he was in his prime, with the ball far back by his right foot, and one had almost forgotten that such a shot existed. There was, on our side, one golfer who habitually plays with a slight hook or "draw" and has so much difficulty in getting the ball up through the green as often to be reduced to his cleek. He was happiest of all among us because he could now not only take the braver club of wood but could cut the ball up to the right if he had a mind to it.

It became, as it used to be, very important to take a wooden club in case of doubt, because the disparity between wood and iron was much more marked than with the rubber core. The long iron shots soared away gracefully and with a delightful click but the ball fell straighter, and shorter than one expected and there was a decided tendency not to be up. As regards the shorter shots—the pitches —these were, as I thought, definitely easier to play with the guttie. I do not know how it might have been with a strong following wind but in a calm the ball could be pitched right up to the hole to sit down in the true and charming "poached egg" manner. Moreover when it pitched it made no shell-hole as the modern heavy artillery ball does. In regard to the putting there is nothing very luminous to say. The ball was a pleasant one to putt with, a little but not a great deal slower than the rubber core and once the player grew accustomed to it he felt quite at home.

THE match was primarily a friendly and jovial occasion but it would be idle to say that it was not also in some degree a serious experiment. Therefore one naturally looks at it from the point of view of the possible reformers, to see if there emerges from it any definite hope for the good of the game. One thing may surely be said quite definitely. Only the most bigoted zealot would dream of trying to compel the golfing world in general to play with a ball it disliked and, if he did so dream, he would know in his heart of hearts that it was impossible. No, we are all free men and not slaves and golf is played for pleasure.

At the same time a good many people are beginning to wonder whether they do get as much pleasure out of the game as they might. Does Mr. Bobby Jones, for instance, get the maximum of pleasure by playing hole after hole with a driver and a mashie-niblick? I am sure he does not. It would amuse him far more, I think, if he could use all the clubs and shots in his bag in the course of a round and that, be it observed, with less walking to do. He—and I take him as the most obvious example of the good golfer—would, with a less powerful ball, have more chances of showing and enjoying his varied skill, much of which is, as things now are, wasted. And I believe the same remark applies to people in very much humbler walks of golfing life. Moreover, besides giving more pleasure the game would be intrinsically a better game, demanding more from the player and offering him richer rewards.

Yet to say this is to be a very long way from solving the problem of limitation. That which most enthusiasts for the cause of limitation fix their eyes upon is I suppose, first of all, some limitation of the ball to be used in championships and competitions of the first importance. That is a consummation to be wished, and, if it could be done, very likely the man in the street would follow if the limitation was not a very stringent one; and then one begins to doubt whether a slight limitation would effect any real good. I have seen eminent persons experimenting with slightly "limited" balls and they hit it a terribly long way. I saw Roger Wethered, one day, carry, with one of these experimental balls, a bunker that no one had ever carried before with any ball.

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On the other hand let us assume a really stringent limitation. Assume for example a championship played not with the actual solid ball that was used by us at Woking, but with an improved, glorified and rather heavier form of it. The game would be a magnificent one; I am quite sure of that and the champion would have had to play all the shots in golf, and most splendidly earned his laurels, but— there does seem to me, at present, a big "but". It is not good that the world in general should play one game and the champions another. It is true that in billiards something of the sort happens. The professional champion's skill is so great that, in order to amuse his public, he has to reduce and hedge it in by limitations; but even so he plays with the same implements as do you or I or any other duffer. I may be faint-hearted but at the moment I find this obstacle a very difficult one to surmount.

It may be that some genius will invent a homogeneous ball having at once the qualities to make of golf a pleasure for the average player and a supreme test for champions. That would be the ideal—perhaps an unattainable one. All that one can say at present is, I think, that this working experiment is one step on the road; that it showed that golf can be a most delightful and skilful game without any necessity for a ball that flies preposterous distances.