a proposal for an international golf team

BERNARD DARWIN

an expert chooses a formidable line-up of which each member is distinguished by a particular ability

• There may be, unknown to me, several kinds of what I will call Composite golf.

There are, at any rate, two kinds that I know well.

One, the simpler and more sophisticated, I always connect with a certain match against Cambridge when winter is just turning into spring and there is light, after tea, for a little agreeable tomfoolery. The players are divided into several teams, each under a captain. In each team there is one man armed with a driver, one with a spoon, a third with an iron, a fourth with a mashie and a fifth with a putter. The teams play matches against one another over three, or perhaps four holes, and as a fresh situation arises the captain calls upon the man with the appropriate club. It is a rollicking, amusing enough game in which the player who has been chosen for his skill with a particular club, wholly fails as a rule, to exhibit it. The mighty driver anxious to justify himself, tops into the nearest bunker and the man who is famed for holing everything can hole nothing.

That is quite good fun, but the other game is an improvement on it. In the second form of the game there is no captain to make a choice; the players are bound to follow each other in a definite order, whether or not they have the suitable club. I have generally seen this game played with four clubs—driver, iron, mashie and putter. Now, at the first hole, suppose the driver and the iron player do their parts, the green is probably reached in two, the mashie player may then make a sufficiently good imitation of an approach putt and the putter pops the ball in for a par four. That is "according to plan". The team can again begin the second hole with the driver and so on. But things do not for long happen so considerately. If the first hole is not done in four, the fifth shot—perhaps holing a putt of six inches—must be made with the driver (what a sad waste!) and the next tee shot with the iron. It is only a matter of time before the ball lies under the steep face of a bunker and the inexorable sequence of clubs points to the man with the wooden club to blast it out. Putting is done with anything but a putter and the player wielding that club finds himself trying to make a high-lofting, quickstopping pitch.

• It is extraordinary what a resourceful golfer can do with an "instrument singularly ill adapted to the purpose" and some of the most brilliant shots I have ever seen have been made in games of this kind. A few years ago when there was an Amateur Championship at St. Andrews, there set in a fashion for playing these matches after dinner, the players being all attired in orthodox dress clothes with stiff shirt fronts. When, in the deepening twilight, the man with a mashie holed a long putt for the match on the last green there was such a crowd to see him do it that it might almost have been the final of the championship.

These are but frivolous, if pleasant, memories, but they have set me thinking about something a little more serious. Supposing— and it is only a fantastic supposition—you had to choose a team from the whole world to represent it at composite golf against some other planet,—Mars, let us say—whom would you choose? I will give you a lead by trying to choose my own team. Golfers have so vast an armoury of clubs nowadays, with all their numbered irons that we might have a team of a dozen or so—However, I will vote for only seven.

Our first man shall use the driver and the brassy, our second the spoon, our third the driving and medium irons (Perhaps one should call them No. i and No. 2) our fourth the light iron or mashie, our fifth the mashieniblick, our sixth the niblick pure and simple for serious recovering work and our seventh, that heaviest responsibility of all, the putter.

• Before we commit ourselves definitely we have got to look all around our subject with great care. There are one or two players whom we should be glad to have on our side in one of several capacities, but that is not allowed and so we must consider how to make the best use of them. There is Mr. Bobby Jones, to begin with. We should be perfectly content to have him to putt for us and putting is terribly important; yet somehow that does not seem the ideal job for him. Confound the fellow! he is so good at everything. There is really only one club out of the seven which on the whole I would not entrust to him—that is the mashie-niblick. Heaven knows he is skilful enough with it, but there are a few who are better, perhaps, and it is not a club with which he "fancies" himself, or it was not when last I saw him.

Let us defer this great problem of Bobby for a moment and turn to the other man who could be so priceless a Jack-of-all-trades for us—I mean of course Walter Hagen. Obviously, good driver as he is, we should not choose him for the tee shot, but at any one of several shorter ranges from the hole he would be invaluable. There is no one more likely than he, perhaps no one as likely, to hole the crucial putt for the team. Shall we give him the putter? Stop a bit—he is a supreme genius with the mashie-niblick. There is that comparatively low shot of his that stops as if the ball were tethered by a string. Yet if we give him the mashie-niblick he will not play so many of those lovely pitch-and-run shots from just off the edge of the green as we should like, because he plays those as a rule, I think, with some straighter-faced club. Finally is he not the world's greatest recoverer and will not even our team, of all the talents, have to do some recovering? But Hagen would be wasted on the niblick because he seldom uses the blasting or explosive shot, but rather twitches the ball away with a dare-devil delicacy. This is the greatest quandary of all.

• However, if the decision rests with me, I shall give him the No. 4 place on the side. He will assuredly play the mashie or light iron shot up to the pin as anyone else will and with these two clubs we shall be able to utilize his services for the pitch-and-run shot as well. There is one player to whom I should very much have liked to give those two clubs and that is Mr. Chick Evans. I used to think him the most accurate player I had ever seen at what I may call the intermediate pitching lengths. But then I have not seen him lately and there is not room for everybody and we must have Hagen for those pitch-and-run shots. So, rightly or wrongly, the die is cast.

That is one difficulty disposed of and now we come back to the Bobby problem. Well, I have made up my mind by this time. He is going to have the driver and the brassy on the rare occasions when it will be needed. I cannot think of any other man who is likely to make the rest of the game so easy for those that follow him. And he is so very long—I believe we are all a little inclined to forget that, because we are so dazzled by his brilliant accuracy. I must admit that I had to quell a strong patriotic impulse to choose Abe Mitchell for this driving job. He is a glorious hitter with wooden clubs, fully worthy of the honour and if I don't give him this place I don't see how to squeeze him in with the team. However, duty is duty; and Bobby shall have the place and anyhow I can indulge my patriotism, without any scruples, over the spoon. That place surely must belong to George Duncan. He will very likely not have much to do but there is no one who could do it better or with such complete mastery over his instrument and over the wind if there is one. He shall be appointed our spoon player and I hope the Captain will give him as many chances as possible and will not rely too regularly on the man with the big irons.

Who is that man to be—the No. 3 on the side? Once upon a time I should have gone to England to look for him and should have chosen Vardon, but I am afraid he is not quite young enough now. It really is terribly difficult; there are so many good ones, but two particular ones come into my head, Armour and Horton Smith. I think Horton Smith will have to wait. Armour seems to me the man. He is so beautifully crisp and moreover he seems to me the iron player that all the other good iron players admire, just as there is sometimes a writer who is particularly the novelists' novelist. At any rate, nobody can possibly complain at this choice. It is an eminently safe one. No. 4 we have already chosen in Hagen; so now for our mashie-niblick player and this does really seem to me a toss-up. I would have had Hagen if he were not booked already. There is Mr. Jesse Sweetser; he always impresses me as extraordinarily good at this distance. I do not know if this is because I saw him hole that pitch outright at the second hole at Brookline when he gave Mr. Bobby Jones such a terrible beating. Or I might take Johnny Farrell who ought to come in somewhere, or—oh! This is getting desperate and I am going to take a firm line and choose an Englishman in the shape of Mr. Roger Wethered. I am not prepared to say that he does not make more indifferent shots than one or two others who might be named, but I do believe that he makes more brilliant ones than anybody. I know no one who can make the ball bite the turf quite as he can. No one who, when in the mood, can so entirely dispense with all necessity for putting by laying the ball stock stone dead. I was talking to a man the other day who some years ago lost a great fight to Mr. Wethered at the last hole in one of the early rounds of a championship. He said—and he is a trustful man—that on six occasions Mr. Wethered put his mashie niblick pitch so near the hole that he just had to be given the next putt. And the putts conceded in a championship are not very long ones!

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The rough work with the niblick I shall give to my old friend James Braid and I do not care how old he is. He is still young enough and strong enough to move mountains of sand and I never knew anyone who could judge the size of his mountains with such accuracy. He is for me the champion exploder of all time. I have only heard of one golfer who ever threw doubt on his superlative skill. This was a charming lady of musical comedy fame who was his partner in a foursome. At hole after hole she put him in the depths of the heather and he heroically extracted the ball. At last she found a place so bad that even Braid could do comparatively little and no one else could have done anything at all. By dint of hewing to pieces a young tree he did move the ball a few yards. Then the lady turned to him with a smile and said: "Well, Mr. Braid, it is a comfort to see that even you can miss sometimes."

Now we come to our seventh and best player, the putter. Here England and Scotland are, I fear, out of the hunt and I must go to America unless indeed I went to France for Arnaud Massy. A truly lovely putter is Massy, but I cannot quite choose him. Hagen, not being available, Johnny Farrell seems a good choice and I will have him if an attempt which I contemplate should fail. I shall try, first of all, to persuade Mr. Jerome Travers to come back with his Schenectady putter. He need no* practice much. Let him just get the feel of the ball on his club and I am content. These things are all matters of opinion, but at any rate. I am quite certain of my own opinion, that Mr. Travers was the best putter I ever saw.

So there is the side complete: R. T. Jones, Jr., G. Duncan, T. D. Armour, W. Hagen, R. H. Wethered, James Braid, J. D. Travers. We have had to leave out a lot of good men— Sarazen, Mitchell, Compton, MacDonald Smith, Farrell, Diegel (who might have played those iron shots) and ever so many more. However, as it is, I hope our side will give the Martians something of a match at Composite Golf.