Royal And Ancient Game Coming Back In Scotland

Taranaki Daily News, 3 June 1935, Page 12

Royal And Ancient Game Coming Back In Scotland

VARDONISM WANES IN GOLF, AND FUNDAMENTALS RETURN

'AFTER about 25 years’ absence the •A royal and ancient game of golf is coming back to Scotland (writes A. G. Macdonell in the “Manchester Guardian”). It is a long time to be away. Since ' 1907 the only Scots to win a British cham- ’ pionship have been Robert Maxwell, J. 'L. C. Jenkins, W. I. Hunter and Robert Harris, in the amateur, and James Braid and George Duncan in the open. (I will not deal with J., Hutchison and T. D. Armour. They are an essential part- of my, case.) Now, in this year 1935, there is more first-class golf being played in Scotland than in all the rest of the British Isles put together, and if I <were an Andrew Carnegie I would' back my judgment by financing a match between, on the one side, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews and, on the other, the rest of the United ' / Kingdom—a hundred players a side. Why did golf go away from Scotland , and why has it come back at last ? The 1 reasons were, and are, two—one personal and one economic. Take the personal reason first. For many centuries the theory of golf in Scotland has bGen based upon a very few fundamental principles. The chief among them were Slow -Back, Follow Through, and . ; Eye on the Ball. These were immutable. .Young Tom Morris and the great Mar- ' , quis of M6ntrose knew them. Allan 1' Robertson and King James the Sixth F " and First practised them. They were as much an essential of the gaine as the Heathery Hole at St. Andrews or the - ,Cow Hillock on the immemorial links , . of Aberdeen. . . , . • - ' Harry Vardon, Genius. : Then; suddenly, at the end of the nineteenth century, a freak appeared ■? a god-gfyen genius. Born and brought • up W’ithin a stone’s-throw of France, of all ungolfing places,. Harry Vardon swept the world. No Scotsman, save only the indomitable carpenter of Elie, could hold on to him at all, and in those early days' even Braid was hard put to it not to be swamped by the jaunty figure with the- gay buttonhole 7 and, the incomparable grace. Everyone rushed to copy the new Master. Grips overlapped; stances opened; half-iron shots, crisp, snappy hits became fashionable,ancLthe old teaching was lost sight of. The back swing became faster and faster, the follow-through more and ■j '. more curtailed. For a few years the change in the game was'not very apparent. The new school of hitters was young, and the swingers were still numerous. But a powerful new figure emerged in Abe Mitchell, a hitter of astonishing power • and accuracy, and then the rot set in with a vengeance. No one stopped to reflect that •Vardon had learned his unique style' by playing iron shots on the sands .of Jersey, where the ball / /had to be nipped up cleanly without a trace of a, divot; no one even paused to draw a moral from the defeat of young Mitchell, the dashing hitter, at the 38th •' hole in the final of the amateur championship in 1912 by-the elderly John ? • Balb greatest of all pre-war swingers. The golfing world started to hit, and Scotland hit as crisply and snappily as ' r anyone. ' Teaching Americans. Meanwhile, an economic change was in progress, and here we come to the ~/• second of my two reasons why the game left Scotland. The United States was rich and was rapidly becoming

golf-conscious almost to the verge of insanity. Tens of thousands of. wealthy Americans were longing to learn the game, and there were hundreds of poor Scotsmen ready to teach it. In the years before the war there was a steady emigration of young golfers across the Atlantic from Glasgow, from the Lotmans, from Carnoustie and Monifieth, from Leven, Aberdeen, Inverness, and the links of the Ayrshire coast. And each one, as soon as he was settled in a position as professional to an American club, would Write home to summon his brothers or his old school friends to come ’ out as assistants, as club-makers (for those Were the days before mass-production in factories, when the professional was also a skilled club-maker), as green-keCpers, as cad-die-masters, as anything, in fact, which would fill in the time until they, too, could blossom out as full-blown professionals and, ih turn, could send home to Scotland for helpers. .With the war years the tide of American pros-

perity rose higher still, and after, the Armistice the rush of Scots went faster apd faster. Then came the key-ycar in the story.' In 1921 Jock Hutchison returned, to his'native St. Andrews and won our open championship, and from that moment the ancient traditional style of playing the game began, very, very slowly, to return to its native land. Back to Tradition During the long sequence of American victories in championships and in Walker Cup matches it has become the most ordinary of platitudes to say that "all Americahs swing’in the same way” and “all Americans are fine putters.” Take the first point. A fundamental quality that is common to all American cracks ,is the beautiful, slow, easy back swing. In other words, Slow Back, Rule One of the sixteenth, century. The British professional had learned meanwhile to, pick up his club like lightning. Then there is that little tilt of the head 1 jyst before swinging which focuses, as it were, the left eye oh the ball. ■ This was claimed by many as an invention of R. T. Jones, and is now almost invariably practised by the stars. I remember when I was eight years old having that tilt of the head

drummed into, me by the great Archie Simpson, a year or two before he left Aberdeen for America (and, incidentally, Hagen’s back swing is exactly like Archie’s), as I have no doubt It. was drummed into him at Carnoustie 30 years before that, because that tilt is nothing less than a device for jnaking it easier to keep the Eye on the Ball, Rule Two of the sixteenth century. Finally, the American has a long, graceful sweep of the club after the ball has been struck, and this is Rule Three, the Follow-Through. Take the second platitude: That Americans are good putters., They are good putters because they practise.putting, just as Willie Park used to practise, four or five hours a day until he reckoned that he was stone-dead at six feet. Again, Americans are famous for their boldness on the green. Their ball runs past the hole. This “novelty” used to be called in the Middle Ages “Never up, never-in.” Golden Opportunity Passed.

It is all pure Scots golf, and it is as old as the old course at St. Andrews. Now conditions have changed. Owing partly to the depression, partly to the reaching of saturation-point, and partly to the rise of the home-born golfer, there is no longer such a golden opportunity in the United States for the young Scot.' So he stays at home, or even returns home from America, and swings his club slowly and follows through. “Vardonism” is dead in Scotland. Mitchell’s flick is hardly to be seen on the links. The models to-day are the Scotsmen who -had to go abroad to learn the secret of the national game —Hutchison, Macdonald Smith, Armour, Cruickshank, and the rest. Golf has come back to its country. We can only pray that Jack McLean will not prove to be a second Vardon, a. Will-o’-the-wisp of freakish genius, to .lead, us again into the wilderness of hitting.