GOLF.

Southland Times, Issue 19757, 3 February 1923, Page 12 (Supplement)

GOLF.

(By

“Cleek.”)

Work is being pressed forward at Otutara but the course is not yet in a playable state. If sheep are not already grazing on the abundantly clothed fairways they will be turned in within the next day or two and should soon make their presence felt. Once the grass is cropped short enough for the horse mower to tackle it the fairways will be got into order in a fortnight and they will be all the better for being heavily grassed. Meantime the grass on the new' ground has been cut for hay, and a surprisingly good sole of strong clean grass is disclosed. Two machines are in “the rough” on the course proper and it will be all cut and shipshape by the end of the week. With Easter only eight weeks away the committee will doubtless use every endeavour fo get the course into order for practice at the earliest possible moment. The “home paddock” of the municipal course is quite playable and as Duff has the horse mower going it is rapidly improving. Quite a number of players are getting very pleasant evening golf, and of course for weeks now the weather has been perfect. The great problem of the day is how to make golf courses fast enough for the everincreasing number of players. Five new courses are now under construction near Glasgow and twice that number near London. The same thing is going on all over Britain and to an even greater extent in America. It is reported that within the next two years £lOO,OOO or more will be spent on new courses near Melbourne. J. H. Kirkwood must be finding his game again. After wanning the open championship of California, beating Hagen, Sarazen, Hutchison and other stars, lse finished third in the Texas open championship in which Hagen and Melhorn tied with the remarkable score of 279 for 72 holes. Kirkwood’s share of the purse was 500 dollars. Playing at Kansas City lately Kirkwood had rounds of 68 and 70 in a 36-hole match, establishing a record. At the Antelope Country Club, Lincoln, Nebraska, Hagen was round in 65 and Kirkwood in 66, a wonderful scoring achievement for the partnership. Hagen and Kirkwood have had a highly successful tour in the States, playing consistently good golf and meeting w’ith very few reverses.

The Hutt Club (Wellington) proposes a new step in connection with the replacing of divots question. At their next annual meeting they will consider the question of instituting a fine of 10s for each offence after any one player is found guilty of three omissions to replace divots. What is the difference between an Esquimaux shanty and the last stroke of a match? One is a hut at the pole and the other is a putt at the hole. Maxwellton braes are bonnie Where early fa’s the dew, And ’twas there that Annie Laurie Once did the eighth in two. She did the eighth in two, And the long thirteenth in four, 0. I wish I was her partner, And had to keep her score. Very drastic action has been proposed by a star player who in the matter of failure to replace divots would make the punishment fit the crime and render the lot of the neglectful divot extractor, like that of the policeman in the play, a most unhappy one. His proposal involves the employment of a camera fiend to follow round the players on medal day, snap a few of the deepest unfilled divot holes, and post the developed photographs, appropriately labelled, on the notice-board the following Saturday. George Duncan advocates the square stance. He has recently declared that “Of the younger generation Mitchell is the only fine driver who stands open, and he only does so a very little.” Duncan himself originally played with an open stance, but he tells us* in- ‘Present Day Golf’ that as soon as he determined to master the over lapping grip he found himself terribly inclined to slice. To counteract this he squared the stance arid has stood square ever since. ‘The most natural shot in golf is, I think, the slice, and the reason is that it is natural to sway the body when hitting. What we find causes us to sway in spite of ourselves, is that the hands are held too high in addressing the ball. This causes the clubhead to go straight back from the ball, sometimes outside of it, with the result that the body sways to the right, and the stroke is hopeless. It may be that the cause of the hands being held too high is that the club is too upright. A good test of whether the club is suited to the player is to sole it in the ordinary way as if addressing the ball. Then if the second joint of the first finger of the left hand cannot be seen, the club is too upright. Get a club which will allow you to start your upward swing with your hands nearer the ground, and the slice will not come nearly so easily.”—George Duncan. GOLF LANGUAGE. There was a discussion in the club house the other day about the origin of the word “caddie,” and most people seemed to think that it was a corruption of “carry” (writes a correspondent in a London paper). But the fact seems to be that “caddie” is simply the French word cadet, meaning a younger brother, and comes down from

days when players fagged out their younger brothers to carry their clubs. Golf, though it came to England from Scotland, is not of Scottish origin. Look in the Encyclopaedia, and you will see that golf derives from the Dutch word, kolf, meaning “club.” If. you go further into the matter you will find, among terms commonly used by golfers all the world over, other evidences of the Dutch origin of the game.

“Putt,” for example. This word is not, asmost people suppose, a corruption of the common English word “put,” but has come down from the Dutch word putten, meaning to place in a hole. “Fore!” again, the shout that one so often hears when a player, about to drive, wishes to warn those in front. This is another distinctly Dutch word. It is really voor, and means “in front” or “in advance.”

A third golfing term which, though it has puzzled even the makers of dictionaries, can be only Dutch, is “niblick.” * The niblick, for the benefit of non-golf-ers, is a short, stiff club used for playing out of bunkers. Originally it was “knibloch,” an old Scottish term for a chunk of wood, but go still farther back and you get the Dutch knobbdachlig, which means, I think, a knot of wood.

“Stymie” is one of the few golfing expressions, which appear to be truly Scottish. “Stymie” is, or was, used in Scotland to mean an obstruction to the eyesight. Farther south we will speak of a “stye” in the eye. The allusion is obvious, for when a stymie is laid your adversary’s ball blocks your direct access to the hole.