FREAK GOLF METHODS

Evening Star, Issue 19328, 14 August 1926, Page 17

FREAK GOLF METHODS

SOTE LATTER-DAY IMOVATW [Written by Hamit Vakdon, for the ‘ Evening Star.'] It is worth while remarking of the United States golfers who have recently visited Britain and carried off the honors of international rivalry in the open championship, the amateur championship, and the Walker Cup match, that they introduced nothing in the nature of new-fangled notions, such as the irons with sharply corrugated faces which caused so much discussion when the American professionals made their first successful invasion in 1921.

Talks which J have had with them indicate, however, that they are by no means satisfied with the limitations in regard to clubs which obtain here. Most of them, for instance, are favorably disposed towards steel-shafted clubs, and several use such clubs regularly iu their own country, so that they have to adapt themselves afresh to wooden shafts when they visit us. From Archie Compston, I gather that Leo Diezel, one of the first halfdozen professionals in America, favors a tee three inches high. This is only a mild form of the nine incli tee with which Mr H. D. Gillies, the English international, experimented so successfully, until tho Rules Committee condemned it by issuing a notice expressing the hope that golfers “ before making use of abnorrro'l methods f play or of abnormal implements would earnestly consider whether they aiy acting m conformity with the spirit of tho rules of golf.” In making this proclamation, however, the committee was influenced by considerations other than those provoked by the “ sky-scraper ” tee. For example, they had in mind freak methods of putting which have beer, steadily gaining adherents—notably the practice of putting croquet-fashion —with the player facing the hole and swinging the club between his legs. A HOME-FORGED PUTTER.,

I know one man who says he has satisfied himself that this is the infallible solution to all the problems of putting—at any rate, when the ball is within about three yards of the hole, which, after all, is the range at which the getting down of tho putt is usually vital

He points oat that, at other pastimes m which the direction of the object to be propelled is of first importance—as. for example, rifle shooting and croquet—the individual encaged stands facing the mark at which he is aiming. He contends that the golfer obviously handicaps himself where putting is concerned oy standing sideways and taking sidelong glances at his target. What he has done is to put the head of his ordinary metal putter in the fire so as to make it molten and screw it round to the stage where it allows him to face the hole, with the face of the club square to the line of play. He grips the putter in the ordinary way, and declares that since he put this scheme into operation the results have been extraordinarily successful. Its recommendation is that the face of the club moves in a straight line backwards and forwards instead of being diverted from the line of the stroke—this latter the cause, I suppose of most of the failures in the playing of short putts, His principle is at least less unorthodox than the customary method of those who putt facing the hole, for their principle is usually to hold the club with the left hand somewhere near the bottom of the grip and the right hand on the top of the socket, and push the blade at tho ball with the right hand, ft looks as much as anything like the effort of an agricultural laborer to turn a golf-club to some strangely rural account on the soil: it )s a painful affront to the established practices and customs of the links. PIGMY PUTTERS. Exception has been taken, also, to putters about a foot long, which have apepared in some quarters. To use this pigmy putter, the player has, naturally, to bend down so that his nose is nearly touching tho ball, as though ho were trying to smell it rather than strike it. Tho idea is that, condensing himself physically and concentrating himself mentally, he is more likely to get down a short putt than_when he stands up to the stroke find is more or less out of touch with both tho ball and the hole.

There was once a professional who used a, putter for all Dm '.<■■--M fiko a flat-iron. I do not know that he accomplished anv thing won cep =. i with it, and probably the modern employers of Lilliputian putters will fiud themselves just as happy if they revert to normal implements. In golf it is impossible to make a law for every innovation that presorts itself to ingenious minds, or there would soon be so many prohibitions that the rules essential to tho majority would he obscured. Rubber tecs, and tecs which consist of little wooden pegs, are latter-day inventions, but no reasonable person takes exception to them save for a point 1 heard advanced the other day in regard to the wooden pegs—that they may be a source of considerable trouble in course upkeep, since some plovers do not retrieve them and a profusion of them scattered about fairways will work havoc with the mowing maebb'os. The object of the Rules Committee, however, has boon always to discourage freak methods, and driving from artificial tee's cannot be considered in that category. r *” t is Leo Diczel’s three inch tee a freak? Ard if not, what is Mr nillies’s nine inch tee?