by Julie Ganz
To deserve good luck is the sure way, in the long run, to command it. The best player has always the best luck. To be continually whining at the decrees of destiny is to justify their rigorous application to oneself.
It must not be forgotten that the golfer who has got this fatalistic tendency can never be brought to see that any of his misfortunes are the result of his own bad play. It is just his cursed luck. Conversely, the good play of his opponent is only the result of his superior luck. No more disagreeable or depressing partner than the fatalist can be found. His only comments on the game are remarks drawing attention to the marvellous luck that you enjoy, in contrast to the bad luck that invariably pursues him. It is no use getting irritated with such a player. A good plan is to agree and sympathize with him cordially in every particular. This will have an admirable effect in preserving your own game and temper, and may suggest to your opponent, as the game goes on, and if he has any sense of humor, that he is behaving very absurdly.
This habit of blaming luck at golf for all his mistakes, breeds in the golfer all other kinds of absurdities. The player who exclaimed, “Cupped again!” when he topped his tee shot, is a good instance of the disastrous effects of this habit of mind. If he cannot by any possibility set down his bad play to his luck, he will invent all manner of other excuses to account for it. There is a good story told of a St. Andrews player who, having missed a putt, in dead silence, within a foot of the hole, immediately remarked: “Ah, somebody must have moved.”
But these distressing symptoms are only, after all, one effect which the existence of luck in golf produces on its votaries. The fatalist elects to suffer the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but there is another order of mind less passive and humble which takes arms against the siege of troubles and seeks, by opposing, to end them. There are men whose proud and impatient spirits cannot brook the predominance of matter over mind, which the game of golf so often exemplifies. In “fractured club and cloven ball,” in “foozled drives and putts not in,” they see not, like their meek brethren, the finger of fate. These Ajaxes defy the lightning, and with their eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, give tongue to the anger which consumes them. When one has the misfortune to play against “the man with a temper,” much care has to be exercised to avoid risk of offence, for, like the fatalist, he is always searching for occasions, and goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. If, however, his temper has been aroused, the very greatest tact and knowledge of human nature are necessary if one is to attempt to soothe his savage breast. “Touch not the cat without the glove.” But the devastating and demoralizing effect of the golfing temper on even the finest natures is so terrible, that it is extremely dangerous to say anything, however apparently sympathetic, and the patient is much better left severely alone till the paroxysm has passed. The breaking of the club wherewith the fatal stroke has been delivered is a common symptom in these cases, and usually this sacrifice is less an act of reprisal on the club itself, than a solemn protest and testimony against the outrageous injustice of which the golfer conceives himself the victim, and a necessary step towards the rehabilitation of his mind. The angry golfer also frequently relieves his pent-up feelings, by hurling his club far from him, after the ball. This is an extremely dangerous habit, as in his anger the golfer is frequently careless of the direction in which it flies, and his partner will do well to keep an eye on his movements.
Like the “fatalist,” “the man with a temper,” had better be avoided whenever possible. No pleasurable game is to be had in such company, and their peculiar habits are extremely infectious.
The well-balanced mind will not be unhinged by the untoward chances of golf. The wise golfer recognizes that but for these alterations of luck, the game would cease to amuse or charm, and if he has more than his share of bad luck, or bad play today, he says nothing about it, being sure that tomorrow things will go better for him. To go on inventing reasons for one’s bad play is fatal to improvement, and can only annoy and irritate your partner. “Deeds, not words,” is the true golfer’s motto. “In my opeenion,” said a wise old caddie, “A man sud niver mak excuses for hissel at gowf. It’s like being disrespectfu’ to Providence. Gowfers sud jist tak things as they come and be contentit. In my opeenion some fowks like to shaw off a bit, by bletherin’ aboot their bad play.”
“Be not thy tongue thine own shame’s orator,
Look sweet, speak fair.”
Jim Epler
THE STORY BEHIND TIGER WOODS’ NICKNAME
MATTHEW SILVERMAN
This was a far more innocent question before the Tiger Woods extra marital revelations, but let’s just stick to the origin of the name of the world’s most famous golfer and the fact that if your name was Eldrick Tont Woods, you would embrace a nickname, too.
Earl Woods gave his son the nickname Tiger at a young age, just as he introduced the boy to golf not long after he could walk. Earl Woods retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, serving in the U.S. Army Special Forces during the Vietnam War. He served as advisor to South Vietnamese Colonel Vuong Dang Phong, whom Earl nicknamed Tiger. Earl credited the original Tiger—or Tiger One—with saving his life from both sniper and viper in the Vietnamese jungle. The two men lost touch after 1971, but Earl vowed if he ever had a son he would call him Tiger.
Though Earl tried to find out what happened to the original Tiger, it was not until Tiger Woods became a golf superstar and international celebrity that the mystery was unraveled. Golf Digest reporter Tom Callahan went to Vietnam in 1996 to find out what happened to Tiger One. Callahan used the ruse of covering the 1996 opening of Nick Faldo’s golf course in Ho Chi Mihn City, formerly Saigon, to launch his search. Callahan got nowhere, and was reprimanded by the Vietnamese ministry for not going through proper channels. While playing at Faldo’s course, however, a businessman he met suggested placing an advertisement in Vietnamese-American newspapers asking for information. Callahan soon learned what happened to the original Tiger.
Tiger One surrendered to the Communists on June 15, 1975—six months before Tiger Woods was born. The colonel died in a re-education camp in 1976, though his family did not learn what happened to him for a full decade. Callahan also learned that Phong’s widow, who had nine children, was living in Tacoma, Washington. She was completely unaware of who Tiger Woods was. A meeting was arranged in California between the families of the two Tigers: the colonel’s widow and two of her children, plus Earl, Tiger, and Tiger’s mother, Kultilda, whom Earl had met while in the service in Thailand.
Another Tiger Woods nickname, Urkel—after the quintessential nerdy kid on the 1990s show Family Matters—fell by the wayside by the time he left Stanford University to turn pro. But another, happier nickname stuck with him. Earl Woods often called his son Sam as a boy—“because you look like a Sam.” A year after Earl Woods died of cancer in 2006, a daughter, Sam Alexis Woods, was born.
onbekend
BOBBY JONES AND THE STORY BEHIND HIS GOLF COURSE
DAVID BARRETT
Although they had social status and lived comfortably, neither Jones nor his father were rich, and it cost money to compete as an amateur, especially when overseas trips were involved. Jones’s grandfather, the original Robert Tyre Jones (Bobby’s father was christened Robert Purdemus Jones), was a wealthy textile-mill owner, but Bobby didn’t want to lean on him too heavily for support.
So Bobby’s weariness of competition dovetailed with his newfound ability to make big money from the game. He didn’t have to play professionally to reap the rewards. All he had to do was stop competing as an amateur, which he wanted to do anyway. With two children and a third (and last) on the way at his time of retirement, money was an important consideration. Jones’s biographer Stephen R. Lowe writes that the best estimate is that Jones made at least $250,000 from the movie deal (that’s about $3.9 million in 2012 dollars).
That’s not all. Jones also signed with A.G. Spalding & Brothers to design a “Robt. T. Jones Jr.” line of woods and
irons, and a copy of his “Calamity Jane” putter. Jones was heavily involved in the design—he wasn’t the type to merely put his name on things—and the irons, in particular, were hugely successful. Not only did they have steel shafts (which Jones had never employed during his competitive career but were becoming de rigueur), they were among the first perfectly matched sets, and among the first to be numbered one through nine instead of labeled with the old names (mashie, niblick, etc.).
Jones’s other main post-retirement venture wasn’t a money maker. In fact, it was a money drainer. But it was something dear to his heart. In the late 1920s, he began to dream of forming his own golf club and being involved in designing an “ideal” course that would be the greatest in the South.
He had shared that vision with his friend Clifford Roberts. No sooner had Jones retired than the eager Roberts approached him with a proposal to make that dream a reality.
Jones and Roberts met in about 1925 through a mutual acquaintance, Walton H. Marshall, manager of the Vanderbilt hotels, including the flagship Vanderbilt Hotel in New York and the Bon Air-Vanderbilt in Augusta.
Roberts had set out for New York City in 1918 at the age of 24, leaving his life in the Midwest behind and determined to make his fortune. World War I intervened, and Roberts did his training at Camp Hancock in Augusta—his first connection with the place—before serving in France, mostly after the armistice. Back in New York in 1919, Roberts slowly made his way in the world of investment banking and the stock market. The details of his work in this time aren’t clear, but he did well enough to move in high circles even though not particularly wealthy himself.
Roberts joined Knollwood Country Club north of New York City, where he met Marshall. In addition to golf, which Roberts had learned to play during a sojourn in California in his formative years, he and Marshall bonded over bridge and were fellow members of a bridge club in the city.
Jones knew Marshall because he and his father had stayed at the Bon Air-Vanderbilt when visiting Augusta. On a visit to New York during the 1920s, possibly when Jones played an exhibition match at Knollwood, Marshall introduced Bobby to Cliff.
Roberts later wrote about being in a group commiserating with Jones over his loss to George Von Elm in the 1926 U.S. Amateur at Baltusrol in New Jersey. Like nearly everyone, Roberts was a great admirer of Jones. But Roberts had a particular fascination with great men, and a particular ability to get close to them and make himself useful (as later exhibited with President Dwight D. Eisenhower). At some point, Jones told Roberts of his desire to form a club, and when Bobby retired, Cliff sprang into action.
Augusta in those days was a winter resort, favored by those from the Northeast who didn’t want to take the longer train ride to Florida. Roberts had made some winter trips to Augusta in the 1920s, and he determined that it would be an ideal site for Jones’s club.
Importantly, it had an average high temperature in the winter about five degrees warmer than Atlanta because of its lower elevation. And Augusta’s status as a winter resort provided a base of wealthy North-easterners who could be the foundation of a national membership, which is what Jones envisioned.
When Roberts took the idea to Jones in the fall of 1930, Bobby heartily concurred with placing his club in Augusta, as he later expounded on in his book Golf Is My Game.
“Living in Atlanta only a short distance away, I had come to Augusta often over a period of years for friendly golf and an occasional charity match [and also the 1930 Southeastern Open],” Jones wrote. “I had always been impressed by the fact that, especially during the winter season, golf courses around Augusta were considerably better conditioned than courses near Atlanta, and since at that time we were doomed to coarse Bermuda grass for putting greens in the summer, it was in winter golf that our best hope lay.”
Jones’s conception of the ideal golf course he wanted to build included fast, firm greens, which he felt could better be achieved in Augusta.
Also, “Cliff and I had a number of friends among the permanent and winter residents [of Augusta] who could be counted on to form a nucleus around which to build our club. I felt that the financing of such a project would be infinitely more likely to succeed in Augusta than Atlanta.”
Roberts also cited a desire for privacy that Jones could achieve better outside his hometown, where it was said that even his casual rounds drew spectators. Jones didn’t mention this in his list of reasons for choosing Augusta, and it doesn’t really ring true. Every single one of Jones’s visits to Augusta was considered a special event and announced in advance in the Augusta Chronicle. By comparison, casual rounds in Atlanta would have been easier to keep unpublicized.
But Jones did have a vision of Augusta National as a very private, very exclusive club.
“Our aim was to develop a golf course and a retreat of such nature, and of such excellence,” he wrote, “that men of some means and devoted to the game of golf might find the club worthwhile as an extra luxury where they might visit and play with kindred spirits from other parts of the nation.”
The clincher was the piece of property that Roberts found. Or, actually, that Roberts’s Augusta friend, Thomas Barrett, suggested. Barrett, the vice president of the Bon Air-Vanderbilt, knew just the place—Fruitland, a former plant nursery that had been considered a few years earlier as the site of a new resort hotel and golf course. In November 1930, Barrett, Roberts, and Jones gathered to have a look at the property.
“When I walked out on the grass terrace under the big trees behind the house and looked down over the property, the experience was unforgettable,” Jones wrote in 1959 in Golf Is My Game. “It seemed that this land had been lying here for years just waiting for someone to lay a golf course upon it. Indeed, it even looked as though it were already a golf course, and I am sure that one standing today where I stood on this first visit . . . sees the property almost exactly as I saw it then.”
Jones quickly agreed that this was the place. He told Roberts to arrange the financial backing to purchase the property. In February 1931, Jones headed to California to shoot his film shorts while Roberts set about securing the land that would become Augusta National Golf Club.
Zedcor Wholly Owned
THE STORY OF HOW I TRADED IN MY SHAFT
HAROLD HORSFALL HILTON
Occasionally a player who is in possession of one of these weird, impossible-looking clubs is convinced by some well-meaning friend that this old shaft of his is “done for” and that it would be wise for him to have a new shaft put in the club. It invariably happens that it was an ill day for the possessor of the club when he listened to this well-meaning advice as it is seldom, very seldom indeed, that one can get a new shaft put into an iron club that will prove as reliable or serviceable as the old and trusted friend.
I once had a vivid experience of the truth of this statement. I had an iron club with which I played all manner of shots, a species of “maid of all work” which seldom let me down. A day came when I thought that the shaft was becoming a little past its best, and in the belief that the merit of the club lay in the head I had no hesitation in having the original shaft taken out and a new one put in. The result was not at all happy, and in consequence I decided to have the old shaft resurrected, but unfortunately it could not be found; it had disappeared from the club-maker’s shop, as so many apparently worthless shafts do. Well, I tried another new shaft in that head and still another until no less than eight new shafts had been fastened into that head, but not in one single instance did the combination prove as satisfactory as the original one which I had so rudely severed.
Eventually I gave that iron head away in disgust, and the man I gave it to promptly allied it to an old shaft he had lying by, and he told me some three years afterward that never in his life had he had an iron club to equal it. It was just the question of glorious chance; I had thrown a prize away and then drawn eight blanks; he had found another prize at the first attempt. But this has been my experience all through my career, and once a p
layer is in possession of an iron club which suits him and has done him real good service he should not tamper with it, however crooked or bent the shaft may have become, and moreover should not give it away, as he may live to repent the day. A good iron club is of more value than half a dozen good wooden clubs, as the latter are not at all difficult to replace; an iron club always is.
Lisa Ganz
PROBLEMS OF HANDICAPPING: THE STORY
BERNARD DARWIN
Some years ago now, before the war, I saw a friend of mine starting out to play a rather curious match. He was to play one-handed against the better ball of two opponents and to concede the odds of a stroke a hole. Not unnaturally, the game took some time. I had left the club house before it was over. Soon afterwards the hero of it left for India, and I have not seen him since. I am told that he is coming home this year, and the first question I am going to ask him when we meet is whether he won that match. At any rate, his two adversaries could not complain of his lack of generosity, for I have never before or since heard of handicapping on quite so prodigal a scale.
As a general rule it is otherwise. In the immense majority of games, judging by results, the giver of odds is not liberal enough. We have only to look at the records of match-play tournaments under handicap, especially at those of the Calcutta Cup and the Jubilee Vase at St. Andrews, to see how often the players who are handicapped at scratch or better, come through triumphant. In these days of strikes and revolutions it is remarkable that the down-trodden thousands with handicaps in double figures, have not asked for more and got it. They are either very easily dragooned or else a false pride prevents them from acknowledging that they are generally beaten. Perhaps they think that they ought to win if only they played what they are pleased to call their game. But in fact they don’t play it, and they don’t win.