Is Golf Petter Now Than It Was Thirty Years Ago ?

Taranaki Daily News, 24 June 1935, Page 14

Is Golf Petter Now Than It Was Thirty Years Ago ?

PLAYERS HAVE GREAT ADVANTAGES

>«TS GOLF better than it used to be?” , is a question which-often arouses animated discussions in club lounges, and it is one to ..which no satisfying reply can be given, because there are ' ao many side issues which have to be considered (says a writer in the Manchester Guardian”). That there is more good golf than there was 30 years ago js certain, but there are many more players than there were and it is doubt;ful whether the proportion of good players is as large as it was when there were few links. Years ago those who played golf gave most of their time to the game, but nowadays many thousands of those who play are unable to give more than their week-ends and summer evenings to it and, moreover, have no ambition to improve their play to the championship class. Great alterations have been made in the game since the beginning of the century. Hammer-beaten feathers and guttie balls have been superseded by skilfully wrapped rubber, which can be cent great distances with little expenditure of muscular force; hickory shafts, which were affected by the Weather and which often soon; lost their straightness, have gone out of fashion, partly because, good hickory has become scarce, but principally because Steel manufacturers have produced shafts which work the same winter or gunamer, sunshine or rain,, and which can be matched so accurately that oneclub has much the same, “feel” as another; and, perhaps most important of all, the character of v the links has changed enormously. , In the old days little attention was paid to the fairways, and the rule that the ball must be played from where it lies meant more frequent punishment ' than it does to-day. Bunkers then were largely natural hazards from which it was oftexi extremely difficult to release the ball; whereas now most of them are carefully constructed with the idea of allowing a player to get free if he makes the correct shot, and are usually kept in good condition, so that, differences in punishment are avoided. Greens, too, have improved. Instead of any reasonably good surface being selected for the putting part of the game surfaces are carefully levelled wd covered not with any kind of grass

which cares to grow' but with fine grass selected on the advice of experts, who devote their time to’ finding the varieties best suited by the soil and the climate. When al! these advantages are con-sidered-balls which are easy to lift from the ground, matched clubs, and greatly-improved links, the rough of which is little more difficult to. play from than some of- the old. fairways used to be—those who argue that the famous old golfers were better than are the best of to-day have a good backing. Is there, for instance, a player of today good enough to win the amateur championship of 1935 and to repeat his success in 1959? John Ball won his first title in 1888, and in 1910 and 1912 he won his seventh and eighth amateur championships, although A. Mitchell and many well-known players were against him. It was in 1894 that Taylor, Vardon, and Braid began their long reign of supremacy, and those who like to see style as well as results and who knew Vardon when he was a’ young man cannot find anyone more worthy of representing the gracefulness of gblf. Taylor, Vardon, and Braid won championships because they gave every thought to hitting the ball properly, and there is no doubt that their methods would be as successful to-day as they were in the years when it was as certain as anything in a game can be that one of them would win. ' ■ Among the pre-war amateurs H. H. Hilton and F. G. Tait were on a level with J. Ball, and of the modern players only R. T. Jones and W. Hagen can be said to have equalled' or beaten their records. And if our modern young men think that they can crash the ball much farther than the ancients did let them remember that E. Blackwell at St. Andrews in 1892, on., a day when there was a cross'wind, reached the fifth hole, 520 yards, with two shots, and the fourteenth, 516 yards, also in two. In that same summer Blackwell drove a guttie ball 366 yards. Those three feats show what the old stalwarts could do with the implements of their days, and if the years had not passed over their heads those stalwarts could still show our young men how to perform great deeds.