Fifty Years of GolfHutchinson, Horace G. (Horace Gordon)
History
Fifty Years of Golf
Hutchinson, Horace G. (Horace Gordon)
Golf
and had revenge for the year before, in the Muirfield final, but it was
by no means as I pleased.
I started badly and let Bobby win the first three holes. Then I steadied
down and he gave me chances. It is always a different thing playing
Bobby anywhere else than at Muirfield. Had he gained this start there I
should never have seen the way he went. But he let me get hole after
hole back until on the eighteenth green we were all even, we had played
three apiece, I was stone dead and my ball laid him a dead stymie. It
was not a stymie at all difficult to loft. There was nice room to pitch
the ball and let it run on into the hole. Still, at that crisis of the
match, it was a fine piece of work on Bobby's part to play it perfectly
as he did. Then I holed my unimportant little putt and we had to start
out to play extra holes.
My second shot to the first (or nineteenth) hole, I put carefully into
the bunker guarding the green. Bobby, I suppose, determined to be over,
seeing that I was in, rather over-ran the green. A bunker near the hole
never had the terrors for me that it has for some people: we were too
familiar with them at Westward Ho! Tom Vardon said to me afterwards,
respecting the stroke which I played out of that bunker: "That was a
plucky shot of yours, to go straight for the hole like that." Of course
it is always pleasant to be told one is a hero, but really there was
nothing very heroic about this. If the sand were taken at the right
point behind the ball there was no trouble about the stroke. If you hit
differently from your intention there was bound to be trouble, but that
is the case with most golfing strokes.
What happened in this case was that I howked the ball out fairly near
the hole, about a couple of yards off, perhaps, and Bobby, playing from
the far end of the green, put his just inside it. But whereas I had a
straight up-hill putt to the hole, he had to come along the curve of the
slope, so that my putt was far the easier. I holed it all right. Bobby
allowed a little too much for the slope and that was the end of that
business. "Now see, Horace," he said, as we walked back to the
club-house, "that you don't get beaten by that American."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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