WHY DO THE AMERICANS EXCEL AT GOLF?
BY BERNARD DARWIN.
THE first answer I feel inclined to give to the question set me is that the Americans can generally beat us at any game if they put their minds to it. But this does not get us much further, and so I find myself involved in a whole series of questions, something in the style of Mr. Chadband. "But why can they beat us, my friends ? " I go on "let us in a spirit of love enquire." Because they take more trouble. And why do they take more trouble ? To that I am inclined to answer, because they are not ashamed to do so.
The Briton is as keen as need be to win, but he is afraid of seeming to try too hard to win. He thinks that he may be considered "unsportsmanlike." And so before he goes out to wrestle with some recalcitrant club or learn some new stroke, he looks anxiously round to see that there is no lurking and derisive observer in the gorse bushes. The American is entirely free from this kind of false shame. He never pretends not to be keen. He practises assiduously and in public, sending his caddie out into the long field and hitting ball after ball to him. He is not afraid of asking advice as to how to strengthen any particular weakness. And I confess that his frame of mind seems to me the more reasonable of the two. He is said to take his games "too seriously," but that is hardly fair. The words imply that he is a dour, gloomy, unpleasant adversary, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact his golfing manners might be a model for anyone. He is, on the whole, a more cheerful player than the Briton. Certainly he has the gift of ferocious concentra- tion when he is actually hitting the ball, but he seems to possess a natural gift, which he has cultivated for all it is worth, of "letting up" between the strokes. He will make a small joke to his friend who is looking on, and then back to business again. If he treats a game as work—and perhaps he may—he does what every intelligent man does and gets a great deal of pleasure out of his work. I have said that the American takes more trouble. That is not quite the stock British way of expressing it. What we are disposed to say is that he "specializes more." This again is not quite fair nor is it, I think, quite honest. It implies that all our best golfers are constantly playing and playing well all sorts of other games, whereas the Americans give themselves up wholly to golf. Of this year's American Walker Cup team Mr. Sweetser, I believe, ran the quarter for Yale ; Mr. Gardner at one time held the pole jumping record of the world ; he still holds the University record and has been, if he is not still, one of the best racket players in America. I am not aware that our team can do better -than that. They may be wonderful all round athletes, but if so but little of their fame has reached me, unless indeed it be the fame of my friend, Mr. Cyril Tolley, at lawn tennis. And Mr. Tolley has so command- ing a personality that if he were to play a casual game of tiddlywinks eager little reporters would telephone the fact to the evening papers. We really arc rather humbugs in this matter of "specialization."
This much, I think, is true, that the American golfer begins his specialization at a tenderer age than ours do. We begin our golf as boys, but we are not educated in it. I imagine that the American boy plays other games besides golf just as we do, but his father takes care that he should have some coaching in golf. Thus he is taught at the most important time when (and I come back to Mr. Chadband) he is "capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom" because he is "not a stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar," but a "soaring human boy," flexible and imitative as a monkey. As a result he acquires a method that will stand by him in evil times as well as in good. Somebody, who has done not a little towards undermining his country's golf, once coined the famous phrase which describes putting as an inspiration. To-day many of our golfers are largely dependent on inspiration not only for their putting but for the whole of their game, whereas exactly the opposite is true of the Americans.
It has been noticeable during the last few years that a distinctively American style has arisen. A competent observer could generally tell an American golfer at several hundred yards range. The feet close together, the waggle ruthlessly shorn of all its ancient, florid beauty, the leisurely back swing with the very free turn of the body—these are some of the component features of a characteristic and unmistakable whole. I do not want to be too technical. I will not discuss the abstruse question whether ' that lithe body movement is the out- ward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace of beginning the swing with the hips as preached by Mr. H. D. Galles. I will, however, point out the simpler fact that these young Americans practise the good old- fashioned copy-book golfing virtues. They go slow back, they follow through, and above all they make of the golfing shot a swing rather than a hit. The best of them all, the best maker of golfing strokes in the world to-day, Mr. Bobby Jones, is essentially a swinger with all his dubs. At this moment I have no doubt that there arc many golfers in many back gardens trying to cultivate the perfectly rhythmical movement of our new Open Champion and wondering in trembling hope whether they have found out something of his secret. It will almost certainly elude them, for Mr. Jones is a genius who only arises once in a game-playing generation, but it will do them good to try. Fas eel, &c., we have certainly something to learn from the golfers of America.
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