Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 1935. ROYAL AND ANTIENT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 55, Issue 138, 23 March 1935, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 1935. ROYAL AND ANTIENT.

The first of the winter pastimes to be officially brought into being in this County this year is golf, the Ashburton Club having held its opening this afternoon. Golf has gone everywhere. Where it began is of less consequence than its wide sway in the world. As to its first national home, there is reason to believe that the Dutch gave it foothold thus at a time earlier than its entry to Scotland, often hailed as its country of origin. The claim is seriously made, in a standard history of the game, that “the early Dutchmen played golf, they painted golf, but they did not write it.” Presumably, it was deemed superfluous in the learned narrative to say that they spoke it. However that may be, they could not keep its virtues silent, and in due time, after these Dutchmen had done their part in improving a recreation enjoyed in simpler fashion by unrecording ancients, Scotsmen laid shrewdly acquisitive hands upon it. Yet even they could not keep it, and have had to be content to employ it among their means of influence abroad. So from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, long the most famous seat of the game although not the oldest in Scotland, its law goes forth wherever players of it are banded in constituted fellowship. From land to land, in modern days, it has spread by a subtle contagion, until scarce a corner of the earth is without a course of some sort. Despite the Scottish lineage acknowledged in a select vocabulary —that, it should be said, which is embodied in the rules of the game —this pursuit has become naturalised throughout the Old World and the New; and if at any time there should be discovered some region newer still it would not be long before a golf links the very word is redolent of its home soil—would be laid out there. And golf, in token of its universal genius, has gone into history, literature, art, even the art of humour that makes the whole world kin. It may be that the ideal ;s tantalisingly unattainable. What boots it ? In the game is all inducement to strive for a mastery far greater than even an eighteen-up crushing ot Colonel Bogey in an unforgettable round. Health of eye and nerve, ot thew and sinew, of thought and spirit, is in the purpose, even when drives are duffed and putts go astray in sheer catastrophe, and it is better to have golfed and lost than never to have golfed at all. No real recreation is without a charm, an exhilaration, a benison; and golf can hold place with any for its gifts to life.