The Best Golf Stories Ever Told

by Julie Ganz

  They looked at one another. Teddy proceeded:

  “He just cleared out ten minutes ago without a word to any one. Mr. Green thought you ought to know.”

  After a short pause, the president remarked dryly, “Yes, we ought to know.”

  “Sure!” said McGlade, smoking with calm joy.

  Teddy Thornton departed.

  The president regarded his colleagues with a lurking smile. “How about it, gentlemen?” he said.

  They chuckled gladly.

  “No man can play straight golf and live crooked,” declared McGlade, wisely. “Atkinson, you don’t play; what do you think of it?”

  “I never thought much of the fool game,” said Atkinson, solemnly; “but I’m going to a professional next week to learn it.”

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  THE STORY OF THE GREAT CHALLENGE: AN EXCERPT FROM THE ENCHANTED GOLF CLUBS

  ROBERT MARSHALL

  One warm, delicious evening late in July I was dining at Lowchester House. It was almost my last dinner engagement for the season, as all the world and his wife had suddenly got sick of the baking pavements and dusty trees of the great city, and were making in shoals for green fields or briny sea.

  The ladies had just left us, and we men were preparing to enjoy the heavenly hour that brings cigarettes, coffee, and liqueurs in its wake. Through the wide-open French windows of the dining-room (which look out over St. James’s Park) came softened sounds of busy traffic; a ravishing odour of sweet peas stole in from the garden, and the moon gave to the trees and shrubs without those strange, grave tints that are her wonderful gifts to the night.

  As a rule such an environment impresses and invigorates me pleasurably. I enjoy the journeys of the eye as it travels lightly over polished mahogany, glittering silver, and gleaming glass, noting here the deep red of the wine and roses, there the sunsetlike effulgence of the hanginglamps, the vague outlines of the pictured oak walls, and the clearer groups of well-groomed men that sit in easy comfort under a blue canopy of lazily curling smoke. Or, as the glance passes to the scented garden without, noting the blue-green and silver wonderlands that the moon creates in the most commonplace and probably grimy of trees, and the quiver that the soft July wind gives to branch, leaf, and flower.

  But tonight, somehow, such things had no charm for me.

  And yet Lady Lowchester’s dinner had been good. The cutlets, perhaps, a trifle uninteresting and the wine somewhat overiced; but, on the whole, distinctly good.

  How, then, account for my mood?

  Katherine was of the party, but at the other end of the table from mine. A tall, well-built, massive man, good-looking, and possessed of an attractive smile, had taken her in to dinner, and I have rarely seen two people so completely absorbed in each other.

  Therein lay the sting of the evening.

  I had eaten and drunk mechanically with eyes riveted, as far as good breeding would permit, on Katherine and her neighbour.

  Who was he?

  I know everybody that one meets in London, either personally or by sight, yet I had never before come across this good-looking Hercules. I must find out.

  He was talking to Lowchester as, leaving my chair, I carelessly joined the group at the other end of the table.

  “Yes, I first held the Open Championship five years ago,” I heard him say.

  I pricked my ears. Of what championship was he speaking?

  “And again last year, I think?” asked Lowchester.

  “Yes,” replied Hercules.

  I quickly inquired of my neighbour as to what championship was under discussion.

  “Why golf, of course,” was the response. “That’s Jim Lindsay, the finest player living.”

  So that was it. No wonder Katherine was so deeply absorbed during dinner.

  I hated the man at once. I lost not a moment. I darted my eyes across the table, caught his, and stabbed him with one of those withering knife-like glances that only the descendants of the great can inflict.

  Then I discovered that he wasn’t looking at me at all, but at one of my shirt studs which had escaped from its buttonhole. He drew my attention to it. I grunted out an ungrateful “Thanks!” and hated him the more.

  Now, as a rule, after dinner—wherever I may be—I manage to hold the conversation. So much a habit has this become with me, that I can scarcely endure to hear another man similarly exploiting himself. Not, I am bound to say, that Lindsay was belauding his own prowess. But, what was worse, he appeared a centre of enormous interest to the men around him. They drew him out. They hung on his words. They gaped at him with reverential admiration. Truly golf must have made many converts during the last three years I had been in India. Bah! And I knew it to be such a childish game.

  “I’ve taken a house close to the links at St. Magnus for the summer, Lindsay,” Lowchester presently observed. “And as you tell me you’re going there next month, you must let me put you up. There’s lots of room, and Mrs. Gunter will be with us during August and September.”

  “I shall be delighted; it will suit me exactly,” replied Lindsay.

  So Lowchester too had become a golfer! Lowchester—who used to live for hunting and cricket! Lowchester—the President of the Board of Education! Good heavens!

  Presently we were all in the hideous gilded and damasked drawing-room; for Lowchester House is a sort of museum of the tawdry vulgarities of the early fifties.

  The rooms were hot. That no doubt was the reason why presently Mrs. Gunter and the champion were to be seen hanging over the railing of a flower-laden balcony; but the heat could in no way account for their gazing into each other’s eyes so frequently, or so raptly.

  I seized on a slip of a girl in pink, led her close to the window, and in tones that I knew must be overheard by the occupants of the balcony, began to relate how I won the Lahore Polo Cup for my team in ’92.

  I was well under way and just reaching a stirring description of the magnificent goal I scored by taking the ball the whole length of the ground, on a pony that had suddenly gone lame, when Katherine and the champion pointedly left the window and proceeded to another and more distant one.

  So! My reminiscences bored them! Polo was nothing if golf were in the air!

  It was enough. I could stand no more. I peevishly bade my hostess good night, and passed through the rooms.

  As I entered the great hall, which was but dimly lit, my eyes encountered a portrait of the famous (or infamous) Cardinal Smeaton, one of Lowchester’s proudest pictorial possessions. The great Scotch prelate, I could have sworn, winked at me.

  I was moving on, when suddenly, close to my shoulder, I heard the words, “I will meet ye at St. Magnus!”

  I started and turned. There was no one near. I gazed fixedly at the portrait, but never was marble more immovable. I was about to investigate a recess and some pillars, near me, when I observed a footman at the hall door eyeing me with mild but interested scrutiny. He came forward with my coat and hat, and putting them on I passed listlessly into the courtyard and thence to St. James’s Street, where I mechanically entered the doors of the Racing Club. I rang the bell and ordered a brandy-and-soda.

  * * * * *

  The Racing Club, as the reader knows, is the smartest sporting club in London, and the Inner Temple of the popular game of “Bridge.” But tonight cards held no temptation for me; and I sat alone in the reading-room, chewing the cud of a humiliation that was quite novel to my experience.

  The incident of the Cardinal’s wink and the unknown voice had already escaped my memory, and I was rapt in rankling memories of the unsatisfactory evening I had spent.

  To me, it was inconceivable that even the finest exponent of a wretched game like golf could oust an all-round sportsman like myself from the circle of interest at a dinner table. It was not so much that I had not been afforded an opportunity to talk, as that when I did I was listened to with a wandering and simulated attention, suggesting that the listeners were only waiting for me to sto
p. The moment I paused between two anecdotes, someone precipitately led the conversation away to a channel that had no possible interest for me.

  Then Katherine had indubitably avoided and ignored me. It has always been understood between us that if I am in a room with her, mine is the first claim on her attention. Yet, tonight, there was, if not an open rebellion, at least a new departure.

  It was extremely galling, and I ordered a second brandy-andsoda.

  Must I, then, take to golf in self-defence?

  Of course I could pick it up easily. There is no minor game that I have not mastered with ease, after about a week’s hard application; and to acquire the art of striking a ball from a certain distance into a hole presents no alarming difficulties to the adroit cricketer and practised polo player. Still, to go over, as it were, to the camp of the enemy, to apply myself to a game that I have openly and avowedly sneered at, was not altogether a pleasing prospect.

  How it would tickle my pals at Hurlingham, Ranelagh, the Oval, and Lord’s!

  I took from the bookshelves the Badminton volume on Golf, and with a third brandy-and-soda applied myself to a rapid study of its contents. I admit that I was somewhat dismayed at the mass of printed matter and numerous diagrams that confronted me, but reflecting that I had often seen voluminous books on such trivial games as croquet or tennis, I concluded that the principle of sporting journalism is to make the maximum of bricks out of the minimum of straw.

  I had not read more than three chapters when half a dozen men, including Lowchester and Lindsay, entered the room.

  “My dear Jacky,” said the former, “you left us very early tonight.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I found the atmosphere indoors a bit oppressive; and I’m not as yet a convert to golf, your sole topic of discussion during the evening.”

  “You ought to try the game,” said Lindsay. “There’s more in it than outsiders imagine.”

  “‘Outsiders’ in what sense?” I inquired, with an obvious courtship of a wordy wrangle.

  “Oh! only as regards golf, of course. For aught I know you may be a celebrity in many other branches of sport.”

  “I am” was on the tip of my tongue, but I repressed it.

  I felt strangely antagonistic towards this man. A sort of magnetic antipathy (if I may be allowed such a seeming contradiction in terms) warned me that we should influence each other’s lives in the future, and that to the detriment of one, if not both of us. In fact, I felt myself being drawn irresistibly towards the vulgar vortex of a “row” with him.

  “Golf,” I suddenly found myself asserting after one of those deadly pauses that give an altogether exaggerated significance to any casual remark that may break the silence, “Golf is a game for one’s dotage.”

  “A period that sets in quite early in the lives of many of us,” retorted Lindsay.

  There was another pause. Lowchester was chuckling quietly. A club waiter with thin lips was grinning faintly.

  “Which means?” I asked, with an affectation of bored inattention.

  “Well, it means,” was the reply, “that to stigmatise as only suitable for one’s dotage a fine, healthy, outdoor sport, that employs skill and science, and exercises one’s patience and temper as few other games do, suggests to my mind incipient dotage in common perception.”

  I did not understand this at first, so merely remarked, “Really,” an ambiguous and useful word, which commits one to nothing.

  But as I reflected on Lindsay’s words, I perceived a deadly stab at my authority as a judge of sport. My blood tingled. I seized a fourth brandy-and-soda and drank it. It was Lowchester’s, but I was only aware of this when the glass was empty. My lips compressed themselves. I recalled Katherine and the champion hanging over the balcony. The thin-lipped club waiter was loitering with an evident desire to overhear what else was to be said. Lowchester looked at me with gently humorous inquiry in his eyes. The others regarded me with the sphinxlike calm that is the ordinary expression of the average Englishman when he is thinking hard but not lucidly. I had, in fact, an audience, always to me an overpowering temptation.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said, in the calm, deep tones born of a great determination. “After one week’s practice on the St. Magnus links I’ll play you a match on even terms, and I dare to hope lick your head off at your own game.”

  There was a pause of a moment. Then, as if to clear the oppressive air, a chorus of “Bravo, Old Jacky!” broke out from the bystanders.

  Only Lindsay was silent, barring, of course, the waiters.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I accept, of course,” said he; “you leave me no alternative. But the whole scheme is absolutely childish, and, as I fear you will find, quite futile.”

  ‘‘I’ll take my chance of that,” I replied. “I can reach St. Magnus by August eighth, and on the fifteenth I’ll play you.”

  “It’s a match,” cried Lowchester, and proceeded to enter it in a notebook. “Any stakes?”

  “I will privately suggest to Mr. Lindsay the stakes to be played for,” I answered. “May I ask you to come with me for a moment?”

  Lindsay assented, and I led him to an adjoining room that was empty.

  “The stake I suggest—and it must be known to none but ourselves—is this: The winner of the match shall have the first right to propose matrimony to a certain lady. I mention no names. It is enough if we agree that neither of us shall propose to any lady whatsoever on or before August fifteenth, and that the loser shall further abstain from any such proposal till August twentysecond. This will give the winner a clear week’s start, which really constitutes the stake. The subject is a delicate one,” I hastily added, as I saw his surprise and evident desire to go further into the matter, “and I shall be obliged if you merely signify your assent or dissent, as the case may be.”

  With a certain bewildered yet half-amused air he replied, “I assent, of course, but—”

  “There is nothing more that need be said,” hurriedly interrupted, “except that I shall be glad if you will join me at supper.”

  For at one of my own clubs, when a stranger is introduced, even by another member, I trust I can ever play the host with tact and grace. I asked Lowchester and Grimsby to join us, and during supper I was able to recount the chief exploits of my life to the attentive audience that a host can always rely on.

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  THE STORY OF AN EXCITING FINISH: A SECOND EXCERPT FROM THE ENCHANTED GOLF CLUBS

  ROBERT MARSHALL

  Editor’s Note: The following chapter appears several chapters after the chapter about the Great Challenge in Marshall’s original book. At this point, Marshall has described most of the match, and the opponents are about to finish playing the last hole.

  My ball was duly fished out of the burn and dropped behind my shoulder. I returned my own faithless driver to Kirkintulloch, and once again took hold of the Cardinal’s. As I did so a telepathic throb of excitement passed through the bystanders.

  I played the shot.

  It eclipsed all my former efforts. I never have seen, nor shall I ever see again, such a hard-hit ball. With a trajectory scarcely higher than that of a rifle bullet at a medium range, it winged its way straight to the hole, dropping eventually within a yard or so of His Eminence. And then, straining my eyes, I saw a sight that startled me into a sudden realisation of the latter’s purpose. He had, so to speak, fielded the ball—that is to say, he had dashed towards it as it fell; and now, by a series of nervous but skilful kicks, he was directing its course straight to the hole! The red skirts were held high in his hands, and the white bony legs flashed to and fro as he sped in the wake of the running globe. I could not, of course, actually see the ball, but, by an intuition that admitted of no doubt whatever, I knew what he was up to. I held my breath in an agony of suspense as nearer and nearer to the red flag flew the gaunt figure of the Cardinal. I swear my heart stopped beating, and the paralysed crowd seemed similarly affect
ed, though the sight that I saw was mercifully denied to its eyes. There was no doubt about it. The Cardinal had so manipulated the ball that I had holed out in three.

  But the match was not yet over.

  What Lindsay’s feelings at the moment were I know not, but he managed to play a clever second stroke that landed him on the green, some seven feet from the hole.

  And now came the supreme moment.

  If Lindsay holed his put we halved the match, if he failed I won the day.

  Such was the pressure of the excited crowd that only the most strenuous efforts enabled the rope holders to maintain a clear circular space round the hole. It measured about fifteen yards in diameter, and within this charmed circle stood Lindsay and his caddie, Wetherby and Kirkintulloch, old Jock Johnson (the keeper of the green), Hanbury-Smith (the captain of the golf club), and myself. All other spectators were without the pale, with the important exception of the Cardinal.

  I looked about me. My part in the game was over. I had but to watch and wait. I was thankful the final shot was Lindsay’s and not mine.

  The faces of my betting friends had changed again in expression, and become drawn and strained. The unfortunate gentlemen no longer chattered and chuckled. The magnet of luck was again slowly but surely attracting golden coins from the depths of their purses, and such pangs could only be borne with dumb fortitude.

  The crowd was so terribly congested that two women fainted. I looked anxiously at Mrs. Gunter, but—thank Heaven!—the rich carmine still glowed on her cheeks.

  At length, putter in hand, Lindsay approached his ball, and even the breathing of the crowd seemed to be suspended.

  I moved to a spot some six feet from the hole, on the opposite side to Lindsay. As I did so my eyes fell on the ground, and I saw a startling and curious sight.

  My terrible ally, the Cardinal, had stretched himself at full length, face downward, on the turf, so that his ghastly head was directly over the hole and his shadowy feet close to mine.