A confrère faced a daunting task last week. As golfing correspondent
of the Times, it fell to John Hopkins to do the honours with the speech of acclaim at the induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in Florida of his fabled predecessor Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), whom many consider the father of sportswriting. In view of the prim pretensions of US sport when on its best starched-bib parade, the occasion was aeons away from the British Lions’ tours John and I covered in rugby’s relishable old amateur days.
In his address, Hoppy quoted the antique aphorism that the quality of writing about games improves as the size of the ball used becomes smaller. Thus those best served by Eng-Lit were cricket and golf, which leaves Darwin the first monarch. This grandson of Charles once described the origin of the sportswriter species: ‘A trade into which men drift, since no properly constituted parent would agree to his son starting a career in that way.’ Still spot-on, I fancy. Darwin’s first piece in the Times appeared in 1907, two dense, unbroken columns lugubriously headlined ‘Golf and the Championship’, but notable because previously newspapers had included only a jumble of downpage numbers, decipherable only to cricket or horserace folk, under the single strap ‘Sporting Intelligence’.
Darwin himself was a good amateur player. In my own hacker’s days, often would I sheepishly quote his ‘law of nature that everybody plays a hole badly when playing through’. Darwin revelled in the great triumvirate, Vardon, Braid and Taylor — and, of course, Jones, as well as Cotton and Hogan, too. Obviously, the crude epithet had not been invented, but Darwin twigged the superstar: ‘The steady-going will often beat the more eager champion and they will get very near the top, but there, I think, they will stop. The prose labourer must yield to the poet.’ He would have deplored today’s inescapable celeb-slant in all sports pages; only in his final years began the postmatch interview; it was a first when the breathless winner of the Open at Portrush in 1951, Max Faulkner, was brought to the press tent for interview. Darwin headed for the exit, growling, ‘Times readers don’t care to know what you thought of your round, but what I thought of it.’ Mind you, Darwin was essayist first and reporter second. He is said to have watched only the first two holes of Cotton’s legendary second-round 65 at Sandwich in 1934, ending his (still sublime) account of the day: ‘Then it was time to go in for tea. As for the rest, the scores must speak for themselves.’ Last week in Florida, Hopkins mused on that handful of imperishables inspired by pathfinder Darwin’s nerve and descriptive verve — his immediate successor, elegant Peter Ryde, incomparable Pickwickian Henry Longhurst, the US classics master who knew that, in fact, the landscape shaped the sport, Herbert Warren Wind, and genial (to me, anyway) lyricist of the links Pat WardThomas. Once or twice a year, the latter was my kindly, paternal, press-tent mentor at the golf. Just as Hopkins did for Darwin last week, in the late 1970s Pat did the honours at the Hall of Fame for the all-time supreme woman amateur player Joyce Wethered (Lady Heathcoat-Amory). He came home to tell how the tough assignment had got off to a bad start: ‘On calling me up, the MC inadvertently announced me to the august company as Miss Ward-Thomas. So once at the podium I curtsied extravagantly. Not a smile: America’s golfing stuffed shirts thought I was a dangerous nut or something.’
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