As for this final at Sandwich, which was played in his pre-aluminium days, Travis has put it on record that he felt confident of winning from the start; and he looked like a winner all through. With the black cigar and the deliberate methods, including the practice swing before each stroke, he was perhaps rather a hard man to play against, but at the same time, and although I have said that he did not play very well when I met him, I think those critics make a great mistake who say that he was not a first-class golfer. He was, and is, a wonderful putter. I know that, not only by the wonderful week of putting that he put in over here at that time, but by what Jim Whigham and others who have played a great deal with him in America have told me. Whigham said that you were grateful, thinking that you had a lucky escape, if you were his opponent and he did not hole the ball from fifteen yards. This was at Garden City, where he knows the greens better than his drawing-room carpet. Indeed, all Travis's record disproves the statement that "he was not fit to win the championship." That he was "lucky to win" we must think. Unless a man is a head and shoulders above his field, he has to have luck if he is to live through a tournament such as our amateur championship; and Travis had no such head and shoulders advantage as this. But put him down at a hundred and eighty or any less number of yards from the hole, and there was no player, amateur or professional, better than he. Perhaps there was no amateur as good. His weakness was out of bunkers and rough ground, but that was a weakness which troubled him little because he very seldom got into these difficulties. I hardly know whether he would have won our championship if Ted Blackwell and the aluminium putter had been introduced to each other a few years earlier; but it is no use arguing about "ifs." As soon as he had won that final, the price of Schenectady putters went up a hundred per cent., and Bobby Maxwell, by way of insult, made me a present of one of them, with which I often putted till our legislation banned them. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 8: Again I have to append the sad note, so often written, that in the interval between the telling of this tale and its publication, he, too, has been taken from the world of living men.] CHAPTER XXXV HOW GOLF HAS GRIPPED AMERICA