GOLF

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19208, 10 January 1925, Page 6

GOLF

FOUR-BALL GOLF A NEW KIND AND THE OLD WAY. (By Harry Vardon, Six Times Open Champion). We played a now kind of four-ball match on ihe Sandy Lodge course, near London, the other day. Ernest Whitcombe. whose performances this year single him out as the best. British golfer of the season, and F. W. Richardson, the local professional, opposed J. H. Taylor and me. Instead of the holes being decided by each side counting only its better ball, we totalled the scores taken by each pair of players, so that a 4 and a (i (aggregate .10) halved with two s’s (also aggregate 10), whereas, in the ordinary four-ball match, the man doing the 4 would have secured the hole for his side. Naturally, such a game takes a long while to play, because everybody has to hole out on every green, and although individually we were proceeding at our normal pace, and none of us has the reputation of being slow, wo took nearly three hours for the round. Consequently, this kind of contest is not to be recommended when the course is fairly full —even though, the committee allow four-ball matches —but there are some interesting possibilities in it. Its weakness is that, when one man is very much below his best- —as happened in this case—he is likely to be such a heavy handicap to his partner as to spoil the whole scheme. It must be very dispiriting to do holes in par figures only to find that the other member of the side is taking two more than par, and so spoiling the effect.

It reduces the player who is in reasonably good form to a singular condition of impotence. In the ordinary four-ball match he might bo able to carry the side on his shoulders, because he would not have debited to his account the mistakes made by his partner. In an ordinary foursome, an ally’s opportunities for bringing joint destruction upon the confederacy are limited in the sense that .he plays only half the number of strokes. Moreover, when lie makes a slip, it can sometimes be retrieved by his yoke fellow who, having the same ball to play, knows that something daringly brilliant must be attempted.

Four good golfers, each playing something like his proper game, would very likely obtain a lot of excitement and fun out of such a match as that in •which we took apart, but they would have to be prepared for disappointment. brought about by one man being off-colour. BROKEN CONCENTRATION. Whether anybody will ever be able to devise a scheme for improving the four-ball match »a.s we know it is a moot point. It has certain defects, although it is such a companionable kind of game when four friends want a •lay’s golf together that it is much practised. Of course, they might play an ordinary foursome, a form of the game on which, personally, I have always been keen. But the person who is only able to visit the golf course once or twice a week is not to be condemned if he declines to engage in a form of the game that allows him only half the number of shots, and therefore half the ■periods of personal hope and expectancy that he enjoys in any other kind of contest on the links. One weakness of the four-ball match —a weakness which certainly does not exist in the variation which we had at Sandy Lodge—is that it is apt to encourage intervals of slackness. Oue man gets into a bunker, perhaps does not struggle very far out of it, or takes two shots to recover from it, and promptly decides to leave it to his partner to save the hole, assuming that the partner has by this lime made good progress towards the green. But. the first man usually persists in playing out the hole—not because he has the slightest hope of helping his side, but because he wants to do something, and go forward hitting shots with the ot hers.

lie generally performs this business in a more or less perfunctory manner, born of the fact that he is not trying for anything in particular, and the slack attitude towards the game which is thus developed—although only a passing phase —is frequently bad. It is one of the phenomena of golf that the concentration is very hard to recover once it is broken.

On unimportant occasions, I have myself slackened for a hole, and found it difficult afterwards to hit the shots with the same accuracy as previously, though trying my hardest to do so. A professional, too, has a good deal of experience of this broken concentration. as the result ot' the interruptions of spectators who like to speak to him between the shots. SINGLES BEST. The golfer who persists in playing out the hole in a four-ball game “for the sake of exercise” when he has no chance of doing any good, also slows down the pace of the match. From every point of view—his own and other people’s—he. would do far better to pick, up his ball and think how he is going to tackle the next hole.

The four-ball match would not be slow if the inevitable somebody or other, who found himself out of the hunt at this, that, or the other hole, would pick up and let the game go forward without hindrance. This form of the game is barred at many clubs during week-ends and other crowded periods, because of the delays that it creates, and, interspersed with singles, it is bound to be a nuisance, when the individual who is out of it finishes the hole to the bitter end. At the same time, I know one club which solved the problem of enabling everybody to obtain a round on Sundays during the short winter days by making four-ball matches compulsory. It was found that, by starting the players in quartettes—and only in quartettes —more could obtain a game than when such matches were prohibited. That condition was obtained by not allowing a mixing of singles and fourball contests, and the scheme could be out into operation only by the arrang-

ing of a good many engagements before the day, and making up the other matches as the players arrived. For the purpose of developing one’s golf, I have long since arrived at the conclusion that no form of the game is so good as the single. When the responsibility is entirely upon oneself, the concentration is the greater, and there is good training in playing out the hole, even when the situation looks hopeless. There is no slackness born of the feeling, “I’m leaving this to my partner.’’ There is always the hope that one may save a desperate situation by holding a raashie shot. It is the development of the careless way of playing a shot that does harm.