Fifty Years of GolfHutchinson, Horace G. (Horace Gordon)
History
Fifty Years of Golf
Hutchinson, Horace G. (Horace Gordon)
Golf
On the way home from Biarritz we used sometimes to take a rest at other
French golfing places, and most delightful was Dinard, where the course
goes out beside a sparkling sea. It was good golf and beautiful. And on
one occasion we took the Channel Islands on our way, and there my wife
had yet another chance of hearing pleasant things said of me. Stuart
Anderson was at Jersey. He was son of the English clergyman whom we have
all known at North Berwick. A match was arranged--I think with some
little money on it, though I had none--that I should play him thirty-six
holes; and coming out in the train from St. Heliers to Gorey, where the
links are, my wife heard some one say to another, discussing the match,
"I hope Anderson beats that fellow Hutchinson; he swaggers so." However,
on that occasion, I escaped the salutary chastisement. I played fairly
steadily, and after a while Stuart Anderson broke up a little and let me
win pretty easily. The course at Jersey is a worthy school for those
great golfers, the Vardons, Ray and so on that it has sent out since;
but at that time the one who gave most promise was Renouf. He was not
more than a boy, but he was a demon putter.
I had for caddie at Jersey a very small and very stolid little boy. Most
of the Jersey folk are bi-lingual, speaking English and French
indifferently, but this little boy seemed to have no tongue at all; I
could not get a word out of him. But towards the end of the round there
is, or there was, a hole which was just to be reached by an extra long
drive from the tee. I made a very fine drive to this green, and the
ball, as we came up, proved to be stone dead, just six inches to the
right of the hole. And then this astonishing little boy did open his
mouth, and, still with the solemnity of a cod-fish on his face,
ejaculated this comment on what was perhaps the very finest stroke I
ever played in my life--"Too much to the roight!"
It was perfectly just criticism. The shot was "too much to the
roight"--by six inches, at the end of a very long drive. Had it not been
so, the ball would have been in the hole. I do not know to this day
whether that little boy was a humourist of the very finest and
dryest--really of the _extra sec_--quality, or whether he was just the
very stupidest thing ever made in the Channel Islands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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