'HEALTH AND ATHLETICS. GOLF : A GAME OR A TREATMENT?
BY BERNARD DARWIN. IN his interesting article on " Health and Athletics," Dr. Saleeby asks, " In short, is golf really a game or a treatment ? " He asks his question so epigram- matically that, possibly because I am stupid, I am not quite sure what he means. If, as is to be inferred from his preceding sentence, he is talking only of golf for the young, then I think all golfers would answer him in much the same terms. Golf, they would say, is in itself a great game, and on that point they would refuse to argue ; they would add that for schoolboys it is neither a good game nor a judicious treatment, since there is no running about in it, and it lacks the essential qualities of a team game.
Golf, as a treatment for grown-up persons, is a subject giving far more chances of argument. If we believe what millionaires and Cabinet Ministers say to interviewers, then golf is the most beneficent thing in the world. It distracts their minds and sends them back with a new zest to making millions and treaties. They should know best, but they play for the most part so supremely ill that it is doubtful whether they supply any rule for other people who have fewer important things to occupy their minds. These humbler people do sometimes hit the ball, and when they don't they are apt to think overmuch about why they didn't ; and I am not in the least sure that this is good for them. Years ago the author of The Art of Golf wrote of the game, " It is possible, by too much of it, to destroy the mind ; a man with a Roman nose and a high forehead may play away his profile." Quite lately Dr. Dearden declared—I must summarize him from memory—that for golfers of a certain temperament the only health- giving moment in a round was that in which they relieved their pent-up emotions by breaking a club over the knee.
Clubs are not broken to-day as were those of yester- year. Golfers do not get so angry over their game. Gone long since is the man who threw his clubs into the sea and was nearly drowned in rescuing them. Gone, too, that most beloved of golfers, who, on the first green at Prestwick, prayed that fire and brimstone might come down and destroy it. The whole race of Colonels seems to grow yearly less apoplectic. But possibly what golfers have gained as regards anger they have lost as regards worry. No game affords such baleful scope for worrying. It is not merely that being a game of slow movement it gives limitless opportunities for bitter reflection, nor that the remorse may endure when the game is over and the spectre of a short putt perch upon the golfer's pillow. In its nature golf allows of so much thinking, and modern golfers do think so much.
The ball will sit on the tee, in the attitude of one expecting chastisement, as long as its owner, wrapt in thought, pleases to keep it there. Golf can be played, as it were, by numbers. At the word one the player can start the club back with his left hand : at the word two he can let the wrists begin to bend and so on. This is not a good way of playing. Sir Walter Simpson said the wisest thing that ever was said about golf when he declared that " As soon as any point of style is allowed, during the shot, to occupy the mind more than hitting the ball, a miss, more or less complete, will result." Comparatively few people are wise enough to act on this truth though they may recognize it. Once the devil of theorizing has entered into a golfer it is very hard to exorcise. And consider what opportunities that devil has ! The golfer needs no opponent in order that he may go on making his experiments. Indeed he prefers to do so in solitary practice. He can grow physically tired in the process but he can grow much more mentally tired. To hit on a new device, to believe it to be the discovery of all the ages, to find it, just when the sun is clipping and you are going home, nothing but hollowness and vanity, to have to begin inventing all over again in the twilight—here are all the elements of a nervous breakdown.
Most people have only played one game, if any, " seriously," and find it hard to judge of the games of others. When, to give an egotistical example, I play lawn tennis, which I do occasionally and with a notable lack of skill, I am sufficiently interested to know that my footwork is exactly what it ought not to be, that I spoon the ball mildly upward when I ought to be driving it with " top spin." I do intermittently try to hit the ball properly : I sometimes get cross when I fail, but the moment the game is over I have no thought but that exercise is jolly and that I want a bath. Of course the serious lawn tennis -player must think a great deal, but however assiduous a student he may be, at the supreme moment of striking the moving ball presumably enforces a merciful blankness of mind. Wherefor I sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that his lawn tennis is better for him than my golf is for me.
Moreover the golfer, as if his case was not bad enough already, has new and terrible temptations constantly spread before him. Like the Duke of Wellington, if my quotation is correct, he is "much exposed to authors." Learned persons are always writing for him books of technical instruction. If he buys one of them—nay, if he only picks it up for ten minutes from the club house table, he will have painfully to prove through his own experience that each one of his new teacher's doctrines is fallacious. Those who write about golf should not be able to sleep at nights from thinking of the lives they may have blasted. Yet somehow,they do. And perhaps after all golf is not really quite so disastrous a treatment as I have made it appear. Calverley chose the organ- grinder " for encomium as a change " and on the same principle I have chosen the game that I love for a little criticism.
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