GOLF

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20013, 2 December 1927, Page 5

GOLF

BRITAIN’S FUTURE imitation in golf. ITS VALUE TO YOUNG HOPEFULS. (Specially written for the “Chronicle” by Harry Vardon, Six Times Open Champion.) LONDON, Sept. 8. A great many girls and boys, the hopes of Britain’s golfing future, have ■been seen on the links during the past month or so, the season of their school holidays. Their knowledge of the game and their standard of skill at it seems to me, so far as I have been able to judge |as one who is compelled to rove a good ideal, to be remarkably high. It is certainly very much higher on the averthan in the days when I was voung, sand there appears to be every reason to believe that this country will produce denty of talent as the years roll by. I am told that the quality of the play seen in the recent boys’ championship •it Edinburgh was a revelation to Miss Cecil Leitch, Mr C. J. H. Tolley and other grown-up golfers of renown, who were present. I hear that the 17-years-old Eric Fiddian of Stourbridge, who won, is the living model of the professional at his home course, Michael Bingham, an Irishman with a_style as artistic and dashing as mortal could desire. That is one more piece of evidence of the good that a youthful player may achieve by simply studying the methods of an accomplished examplar. For I am certain that girls and boys need to imitate rather than to be crammed with jgolf lessons, although tuition is useful when a fault has clearly been developed without the perpetrator being able to i diagnose it. It is often said that golf runs in i families. So it does. The other day, I met a dashing young grandfather of [5O whose only confession of a misspent i youth hinged on the fact that he had I never attempted to play a shot on the links till 1925.

| “Perhaps I ought to be ashamed to say it,” he remarked gravely. “I was ! brought up in Scotland, where my I father has been a scratch player all his life, but somehow I didn’t fancy the game. Well, I went up to see the old people in August. And what do you think? I beat the dear old dad right off, and he is still a scratch player. I never siajv him so surprised and delighted. I’ve had a set of clubs specially selected for me, and I’m improving every time Igo round. But, mind you. there’s a lot in heredity in golf. I believe it’s bred in the bone; I believe it’s born in me. You ought to write something about heredity. Anybody who has had a good golfer in his family could play well, even though he has never tried previously. It’s in the blood. ’ ’

Inheritance or Inspiration? That is one phase of the beginner’s enthusiasm. Always does golf breed hope from some source or another; ai ways does it present something which not only excites desire but places it ap parently within reach. Whether there is anything in th« theory as to the transmission of going qualities from parents or ancestors to their offspring is a nice problem. It must be confessed that there are many instances which support the idea that golf runs in families. I do not know any other game in which similar examples are so numerous. In comparatively few cases can famous cricketers.' footballers, lawn tennis players, boxers and others claim a parentage or an e . cestry that excelled at their respectiv 1 sports. There are not even many i•stances of brothers and sisters all of whom are good at a game —not nearly so many os there arc ?n golf. Does this indicate that there is some special quality about the game of the links —let us cite its cultivation of de p thinking —which is capable of beir.i* transmitted and inherited by succee* ing generations? Perhaps not. Perhaps the real truth is that golf is a game in which a lot can be learnt by imitation.

There is no other pastime in which isubconscious mimicry plays so big a ’part. And so a good golfing father —or, |for that matter, a good golfing brother I —is an inspiration. J There have been notable golfing families by the score. Everybody knows [that the father of Mr John Ball, junior, was one of the leading players of his I day. There have been the Grahams ! (Mr John Graham, junior, the finest [player who never won a championship, iMr A.J. Graham, a scratch man or beti ter and their sister, Miss M. Graham,

champion of the ladies); the Jenkins, (one a winner of the Amateur Championship, three brothers rated at scratch, and a sister who was Scottish iady champion); the Hezlets (three sisters who have been finalists in the ladies’ championship, and a brother who has been runner-up in the Amateur Championship); the five Misses Leitch and a brother who was so good that Miss Cecil Leitch once told me that she learnt most of her early golf from ntm (alas! he died when he was little more than 20); the Taylors, the Gaudins (five brothers), th e Kirkaldys, the Parks—but one could go on for a very long while without exhausting the list.

The Importance of Zeal. In a good many cases, these distinguished golfing families had enthusiastic golfing fathers, but not exactly firstclass golfing fathers. Skill at the game does not seem to be so much e quality born in the blood as a gift developed by an atmosphere of the game presented from boyhood. I think that Mr Harold Hilton (whose brother, Mr I R. S. Hilton, was also a very good player) has said that his father, while not being a great golfer, was keen, and impressed upon him as nobody else could do the importance of the followthrough. My own father was a zealot of the Uinks with his own ideas as to his sons (“Harry wins the championships but Tom plays the golf” he used to say with a father’s privilege in the matter of expressing opinions) but he was not a good golfer. In fact, golfing zeal in fathers seems to be even more important than skill as a factor in rearing families that succeed on the Hnks. I believe the Kyles, of St. Andrews — three brothers who might challenge any other three among amateurs, and two sisters who have been leading Scottish pin yers —received all their early instruction from their father, a medical man who didnot profess to be other than a very long handicap player. A keen golfing father is a great help, but a first-class golfing father is even mbore valuable. Imitation of a good player is the art to encourage in the , young golfer.