Golf Abounding

Matsuo, The Pine Tree

Golf Abounding written by The Gargoyle

Red, Yellow, and Blue

From The Canadian Forum, January 1921, p. 116

After having followed the royal and ancient game for many years, not wholly without success, a sense of dissatisfaction grew upon me. I felt that the real secret of the cult had escaped me, [p.117] the true inwardness and mystery of golf had never been attained by me. Occasionally a drive might show signs of original sin, foundering mysteriously or curling away joyfully to the unknown hazards of the slice. At such times a certain sense of another world, intimations of immortality so to speak, would flit before me. But the dull uninteresting materialism, the ordered mechanical sequence of straight drives travelling with machine-like regularity towards the appointed end, would quickly close upon me again. All was vanity and vexation of spirit.

Occasional gusts of despair swept across me. Once at the end of a round of unusual monotony my caddie proudly announced that every hole had been done in par. I offered him my niblick and implored him to end my miserable existence and to bury me in the pit that guarded the home green.

I visited famous shrines of the cult. I watched Duncan and Vardon and Braid. The dull passivity of their expressions, the unvarying accuracy of their actions, only filled me with greater hatred of the unreality of the whole business. No one seemed to have the faintest sense of wonder and adventure. They were machines, functioning perfectly in a mechanical universe.

When things were at their worst it befel that duty took me to an ancient university. From sheer force of habit, with no hope of finding happiness, I took my clubs. I found that the devotees of the game were wont to resort to a beggarly nine-hole course rejoicing in the melancholy name of Oxley Marsh. Hither I hied one grey afternoon, trundling along in a medieval one-horse tram-car. As I went a curious sense grew upon me that the hour was at hand, that discovery was calling me. Nothing could have been more unpropitious than the surroundings. Before me spread a flat dun stretch of drained marsh broken here and there by decrepit old-fashioned cross-bunkers. On the right a foul-looking sluggish stream dribbled slowly towards its outlet in the river.

I sat down on a bench and waited for what Fate might bring. As I watched two strange figures came out from the tin shed that served as a club-house and made their way to the first tee. One was short and squat, with the dirtiest yellow flannel shirt I had ever seen, no cap, and a thick dishevelled thatch of black hair hanging over a low forehead. The other was tall, with a long Quixotic bearded face, of an exaggerated leanness, with baggy knickerbockers, and rather startling stockings hanging in wrinkled folds about his spindly shanks.

Both were talking loud and fast, but as far as I could discern golf was not the matter of their discourse. The first addressed himself to the ball, squatting down upon his haunches, looking like some grotesque ape sitting on his tail. His driver was nearly as long as himself. Holding it as far away from him as possible he revolved rapidly upon his tail and swept the driver upon the ball in a long flat curve. The ball rose and curled away joyfully to the right with an entrancing slice and plopped into the slowly meandering stream. Waiting not for his partner he gathered up his clubs and with an air of excitement he trotted off to intercept his erring ball at the flects of the stream. Meanwhile his partner stood up tall and straight, heedless of his friend's movements. His ball seemed almost at his toes. Very slowly, with a fascinating deliberation, his club head climbed as if by its own volition until it pointed perpendicularly above his head. There it remained, while I held my breath, how long I dare not say. Then with a lightening swoop it fell upon the ball which fled hopping and bounding like a rabbit towards the ancient cross-bunker. With a few muttered words which might have been some magic formula he also set off, brandishing his driver in his right hand, and ran at full speed after the ball.

I had found it at last. These men had the secret. Golf to them was no dull routine. It was an adventure, a breathless quest, full of the very essence of life. I left my clubs and followed them. I shall never forget what I saw as long as I live. Five times did the ape-like one retrieve his ball from those Stygian waters. Twice it struck the walls of the houses on the far side of the stream and rebounded onto the course. At last, as by a miracle, much battered, it reached the green. The perpendicular friend won the hole in 21 as against 26. I followed them all the way, taking it in turns from hole to hole to follow first one and then the other, for their paths never met till they reached the green. I discovered heights and depths undreamed of in the game. The ball journeyed to strange unknown countries, and I followed, tasting the joys of new creation. I became humble like a little child. My last doubts were swept away as I saw the horizontal one on the last green in a holy ecstasy breaking his clubs across his knee and flinging the fragments to the winds. I was converted there. I found that these men were the most famous exponents of the horizontal and perpendicular schools of golf respectively. For ten years they had played together daily, contesting the merits of their rival theories, finding the game a "never-done, ungaped-at, pentecostal miracle". All that week I experimented on the rival theories. I rioted in slices, pulls, and every kind of topped and foundered ball. The first fine frenzy has given place to a calmer joy, but the joy remains. I am not yet certain which of the two theories yields the greater happiness, but I shall find out before I die. Meanwhile my handicap which used to be +3 has gone up to 24, and there is no happier man alive than I.

The Gargoyle.