The Complete Golfer. Harry Vardon
THE CHOICE AND CARE OF CLUBS
Difficulties of choice—A long search for the best—Experiments with more than a hundred irons—Buy few clubs to begin with—Take the professional's advice—A preliminary set of six—Points of the driver—Scared wooden clubs are best—Disadvantages of the socket—Fancy faces—Short heads—Whip in the shaft—The question of weight—Match the brassy with the driver—Reserve clubs—Kinds of cleeks—Irons and mashies—The niblick—The putting problem—It is the man who putts and not the putter—Recent inventions—Short shafts for all clubs—Lengths and weights of those I use—Be careful of your clubs—Hints for preserving them.
The good golfer loves his clubs and takes a great and justifiable pride in them. He has many reasons for doing so. Golf clubs are not like most other implements that are used in sport. A man may go to a shop and pick out a cricket bat or a billiard cue with which he may be tolerably certain he will be able to play something approaching to his best game when he is in the mood for playing it. The acquaintance which is begun in the shop is complete a few days later. But a man may see a golf club which he strongly fancies and buy it, and yet find himself utterly incapable of using it to good advantage. He may purchase club after club, and still feel that there is something wanting in all of them, something which he cannot define but which he knows ought to exist if his own peculiar style of play is to be perfectly suited. Until he finds this club he is groping in the dark. One driver may be very much like another, and even to the practised eye two irons may be exactly similar; but with one the golfer may do himself justice, and with the other court constant failure. Therefore, the acquisition of a set of clubs, each one of which enjoys the complete confidence of its owner, is not the task of a week or even a year. There are some golfers who do not accomplish it in many years, and happy are they when at last they have done so. Then they have a very sincere attachment to each one of these instruments, that have been selected with so much difficulty. It is not always possible to give reasons for their excellence, for the subtle qualities of the clubs are not visible to the naked eye. Their owners only know that at last they have found the clubs that are the best for them, and that they will not part with them for any money—that is, if they are golfers of the true breed. In these days I always play with the same set of irons. They are of different makes, and to the average golfer they appear quite ordinary irons and very much like others of their class. But they are the results of trials and tests of more than one hundred clubs.
Therefore no golfer in his early days should run away with the idea that he is going to suit himself entirely with a set of clubs without much delay, and though his purse may be a small one, I feel obliged to suggest that money spent in the purchase of new clubs which he strongly fancies, during his first few years of play, is seldom wasted. Many of the new acquisitions may be condemned after a very short trial; but occasionally it will happen that a veritable treasure is discovered in this haphazard manner. With all these possibilities in view, the beginner, knowing nothing of golf, and being as yet without a style to suit or any peculiar tastes that have to be gratified, should restrain himself from the desire to be fully equipped with a "complete outfit" at the very beginning of his career. Let him buy as few clubs as possible, knowing that it is quite likely that not one of those which he purchases at this stage will hold a place in his bag a year or two later. As he can have no ideas at all upon the subject, he should leave the entire selection of his first bag to some competent adviser, and he will not generally find such an adviser behind the counter at a general athletic outfitting establishment in the town or city, which too often is the direction in which he takes his steps when he has decided to play the game. In these stores the old and practised golfer may often pick up a good club at a trifling cost; but the beginner would be more likely to furnish himself with a set which would be poor in themselves and quite unsuited for his purpose.
The proper place for him to go to is the professional's shop which is attached to the club of which he has become a member. Nearly all clubs have their own professionals, who are makers and sellers of clubs, and I know no professional who is not thoroughly conscientious in this part of his business. It pays him to give the completest satisfaction to his clients, and particularly to the members of his own club. This professional is also a first-class golfer, who knows all, or nearly all, that there is to be known about the game, and who in his time has had imposed upon him the difficult task of teaching hundreds of beginners their first steps in golf. Thus he knows better than any man the erratic tendencies of the golfing initiate and the best means of counteracting them. Experience has given him the faculty for sizing up the golfing points of the tyro almost at the first glance, and therefore he can supply him at the beginning with those clubs with which certainly he will have most chance of success. He will suit his height and his build and his reach, and he will take care that the clubs in the set which he makes up are in harmony with each other and will have that lie which will best suit the player who is to use them. And even though, when the beginner gathers knowledge of the game and finds out his own style—which neither he nor the professional can determine in advance—some of them may gradually become unsuitable to him, they are nevertheless likely to be in themselves good clubs.
A beginner may at the outset limit himself to the purchase of six new clubs. He must have a driver, a brassy, a cleek, an iron, a mashie, and a putter. At an early opportunity he may add a niblick to this small set, but there is no need to invest in it at the outset, and as this club is one which is least likely to require change, it is best that it should not be bought until the player has some ideas of his own as to what is wanted. By way of indicating what will be needful to make this set complete for the purposes of good golf, when the player has obtained a fairly complete experience, I may mention the instruments that I take out when playing an important match. I have two drivers, one brassy, a baffy or spoon, two cleeks (one shorter than the other), an iron, sometimes one mashie, sometimes two (one for running up and the other for pitch shots), a niblick, and sometimes two putters (one for long running-up putts and the other for holing out). This selection may be varied slightly according to the course on which the match is to be played and the state of the weather, but in general principles the constitution of the bag remains the same, and a player who is equipped with such a set ought to be able to play any hole in any way, and if he cannot do so it is his own skill that is lacking and not an extra club. We may now consider in order a few of the points of these clubs. I shall have occasion, when dealing with the method of play with each of them, to call attention to many points of detail which can only be properly explained when indicating particular objects which it is desired to achieve with them, so for the present I shall confine myself chiefly to general features.
Take the driver to begin with, and the preliminary word of advice that I have to offer concerning the choice of this club is at variance with the custom of the present moment, though I am confident that before long the golfing world will again come round to my view of the matter—not my view only, but that of many of the leading amateur and professional players. One of the problems which agitate the mind of the golf-club maker deals with the best and most effectual method of attaching the head of the club to the shaft. For a very long period this was done by what we call scaring or splicing, the neck of the club having a long bevel which was spliced with the shaft and bound round for several inches with black twine. Latterly, however, a new kind of club has become the fashion with all but the oldest and most experienced players, and it is called the socket driver. The continuation of the neck of this club is shorter than in the case of the spliced driver, and instead of there being any splicing at all, a hole is bored vertically into the end of the neck and the shaft fitted exactly into it, glued up, and finally bound round for less than an inch. This club certainly looks neater than the old-fashioned sort, and the man who is governed only by appearances might very easily imagine that it is really more of one piece than the other, that the union of the shaft with the head has less effect upon the play of the club, and that therefore it is better. But experience proves that this is not the case. What we want at this all-important part of the driver is spring and life. Anything in the nature of a deadness at this junction of the head with the shaft, which would, as it were, cut off the one from the other, is fatal to a good driver. I contend that the socket brings about this deadness in a far greater degree than does the splice. The scared or old-fashioned