The Golf Courses of the British Isles. Bernard Darwin
stroke whereby the ball shall sit resolutely down on a slanting green surrounded by bunkers, and stay there. The fourteenth is a two-shot hole for Mr. Angus Hambro, and rather more for most other people, save under favourable conditions. Then comes another short hole—I should have said there were four and not three—but this is a long short hole; a wooden club shot is often needed, and when that wooden club shot has to be held up into a stiff right-hand wind, the difficulties of the situation are not easily to be overrated.
Then we face homewards with three good long holes, all of which may be done in fours, though most people would thankfully strike a bargain with Providence for two fours and a five. The most difficult of the three, as is only right and fitting, is a seventeenth hole, and here Mr. Colt has worked a great transformation and turned a hole that once possessed no merits whatever into a thoroughly good one, with a most difficult second shot—one of those shots which produce an instinctive and fatal tendency to slice. After that two good, straight, steady shots should get us safely on to the home green, and we have finished at last; if we have done a score which is perceptibly lower than 80, we have done well. If we have not been too frequently ‘up to our necks’ in untrodden heather—nay, even if we have—we ought to have enjoyed ourselves immensely.
From Sunningdale we go to Walton Heath—a thing far easier to accomplish in the imagination than by a cross-country journey, and there we have another fine, long slashing course laid out in the grand manner, especially to suit the rubber-cored ball.
The course is the work of Mr. Herbert Fowler, who is perhaps the most daring and original of all golfing architects, and gifted with an almost inspired eye for the possibilities of a golfing country. He is essentially ferocious in his methods, and there is no one else who is quite so merciless in the punishing of shots that are quite respectable, that are in fact so nearly good that the striker of them, in the irritation of the moment, calls them perfect. This fell design he will accomplish either by trapping the long shot that is almost straight but not straight enough or by planting his green amid a perfect network of bunkers. The result is that there will always be found some to call down maledictions upon his head, and in truth some of his devices are almost fiendish, but they are nearly always interesting.
The trend of modern golfing architecture is all against the old-fashioned cross-bunkers, which used as a matter of course to be dug at regular intervals across the fairway, but, curiously enough, the cross-bunker plays a not unimportant part at Walton. Two holes in particular come to mind, the long seventh and eighth, where bunkers have to be crossed and cannot be circumvented, while the crossing of them in the proper number of strokes is a very essential matter, since the necessity of playing short often involves the loss of a whole stroke.
Wild and bleak and merciless the course looks—a vast tract of wind-swept heather. In truth it is a very long one, and the casual visitor often brings against it a charge of monotonous length, but when he has played there more often he will probably discover that each of these long holes has a very distinct character, and that each is interesting in a way of its own. Some courses impress themselves very quickly on the memory so that each hole stands out quite distinctly, while others leave only a vague and blurred recollection, nor is it merely a question of the holes being absolutely good or bad. When a man has once played the first six holes at Sandwich he is likely to remember them all the days of his life, even if he has avoided the Sahara and the Maiden; whereas he may retain only the haziest recollection of St. Andrews after two or three days’ play. So it is with the long holes at Walton Heath; they have in reality plenty of character, but it is hard at first to distinguish one from another.
WALTON HEATH
The second shot at the seventeenth hole
The short holes, on the other hand, make a vivid and lasting impression, and, as I think at least, give to the course its chief distinction. There are four of them, and all four are good. Of these four the sixth is by common consent the best and most difficult; so difficult as sometimes to be paid the high compliment of being called ‘impossible.’ When the professionals were playing at Walton in the News of the World tournament, and playing with their wonderful and monotonous accuracy—shot after shot clean, long, and straight as an arrow through the wind—it was pleasant to find that there existed in the world quite a short hole which could show them to be vulnerable. I stood on the first day watching a succession of couples play this sixth hole, and though there was usually one ball safely on the green, there were never two; it was really a most cheering and satisfactory spectacle.
Even on the stillest of still days the shot is one which can scarce be approached without a tremor. The distance can be compassed with a firm pitch with an iron club of moderate loft, and the green is undeniably of adequate size, but it is ringed round, save immediately in front, with a series of bunkers very deep and horrible, and, to increase our terror, the ground ‘draws’ unmistakably towards them. Often as we stand on the tee in a frenzied attitude, trying to steer the ball to safety with vain gesticulations of the club, we see it light upon the turf, and breathe a sigh of relief. Alas, we were too hasty! The ball trembles and totters for a moment or two, in a state of indecision, and then, as if magnetically drawn towards Scylla on one side or Charybdis on the other, slowly disappears from our sight. Once in the bunker there is nothing to do but employ the ‘common thud’ of Sir Walter Simpson, and we ought with ordinary fortune to get out in one, but the ball must be made to drop wonderfully dead and lifeless, scattering showers of sand as it goes, or else it will run quite gently and deliberately across the green into the bunker on the other side. It is one of those holes at which, were the fates amenable to a compromise, many a stout-hearted player would write down four on his card and proceed to the next tee with the ball in his pocket.
Another hole of similar character, but a degree or two less formidable and by just so much the less fascinating, is the twelfth. Perhaps it would be just as terrible were it not that the prevailing wind is here behind the player, whereas at the sixth it seems to blow persistently across. With the wind behind the hole is brought within the compass of an ordinary, straightforward, inartistic thump with a mashie, and that shot, which is the bête noire of all but the truly great, the push with the iron, is not brought into requisition.
The other two short holes, the fifth and the tenth, are never very short, and, when the wind blows strong in our faces, too long for us to entertain any great hopes of reaching the green. In any case, unless the ground be abnormally hard and fast, we had better behave with due humility and take a wooden club. At the fifth our chief care must be to hold the ball well up to the right, a task usually made more difficult by a strong pulling wind. There are many chronic and many occasional slicers in the world, but there are few who can deliberately hit the ball to the right and make it hold on its way when they want to: wonderfully few who can do so without a disastrous loss of distance. It is the chief beauty of the hole that it calls imperatively for this most difficult of shots, since the slope of the green is from right to left and a series of graduated horrors await the pulled ball: a mere bunker for the moderate sinner, a tract of wet ruts and hoof-marks for the rather more criminal, and a waste of heather for the utterly depraved. Nor is it sufficient merely to hit the ball somewhere out to the right. Good intentions by themselves are not enough, and there is a bunker lurking on the right-hand edge of the green; if we go so far to the right that this bunker lies between us and the hole, we shall have to employ all the arts of a Taylor if we are to be within reasonable putting range next time.
Now we must leave the tenth, though an excellent hole, especially as played by Braid with a vast, low skimming cleek shot, and look at some of the longer holes. Of these there are three which fix themselves in the memory, the second, seventeenth and eighteenth. A hole more satisfactory to do in four than the second it would be hard to imagine, since both the drive and the second must be long and straight and the second must almost inevitably be played from a hanging lie. We may, if we like, approach it in cowardly instalments and play our tee-shot deliberately short of the sloping ground; if we do, we may possibly escape a six, but by no means shall we get a four. It is the hole for a man brave and skilful who can use his wooden club when the ground is not flat, neither is the ball teed.
It is the duty of every golf course to have a good seventeenth hole, and