I know that I never started out to play a match with Johnny Ball without the full consciousness that if we both played our game I was bound to be beaten, or, rather, that it could only be by an accident if I should win. It is a feeling I have never had, when I was playing tolerably well, with any other amateur, except when playing Bobby Maxwell over Muirfield. But then I cannot pretend that I was playing at all as strongly as I once might have played when I had to encounter that great man. Still I do not suppose I could ever have held him at Muirfield. He was not quite as terrible elsewhere. Curiously enough I have had rather the better of the exchanges, in the so-called "big" matches, amateur championship matches, and the like, that I have played with Johnny Ball. He would sometimes miss a short putt--in fact, I always rated him as good for a couple of missed short putts in the round--and that just gave one a chance to come in. But as to "friendly" matches--though I am sorry to say I have had but few with him--I think he has beaten me every one. It is true they were always on his native Hoylake. With Johnny Laidlay, on the other hand, of whom I never had the same consciousness of being in the hands of a stronger man as I had with the English Johnny, I have had the worse of it in the "big" matches. I beat him, I remember, in an international match, but he beat me at least twice in the amateur championship, and I have not a win from him to my score in that encounter. Yet in the "friendly" matches--and we have played a great many, for I have very often been the guest of his kind hospitality, both at North Berwick and elsewhere--I do not think that I have come off at all the worse. But Johnny Ball, at his best, and especially at Hoylake, was a terror. For one thing he was so very long. Generally driving with a hook, the ball carried very far and then set to work to run till it made you tired watching it. And then he had that wonderful long approach with his brassey, banging the ball right up to the hole, with a concave trajectory--you know what I mean--the ball starting low and rising towards the end of its flight, then dropping nearly perpendicularly, and with no run. It is a shot that I have seen played in any perfection only by three players, and all young ones--Johnny Ball, Hugh Kirkaldy and Jamie Allan. Only the first is still alive, and he does not, probably cannot, play the stroke now. I believe it is a stroke that was easier with the gutta-percha balls than with the modern rubber-hearted things. At all events no one plays the stroke now. Perhaps that foolishly named "push-stroke" of Vardon's comes most near to it, and now and again Taylor gives us something of the sort: but this is with iron clubs, not with wood. In the old days Bob Ferguson had the stroke, with his irons, played up to the plateaux greens at North Berwick with great accuracy; but he did not achieve it so well with the wood.