He knew every obscure rule and insisted on every penalty. Question him,
and he fished out the book. That book of rules stiffened his match play
tremendously, besides making his opponents want to murder him. It was
rather a rotten system, but Kitts hadn't a drop of sporting blood in
his whole big body, and the element of sportsmanship didn't enter into
his calculations at all. He claimed strokes and holes even when not in
competition, and because of this he found it difficult to obtain
partners or opponents.
"He's a golf lawyer, that's what he is--a technical lawyer!" said Cupid
one day. "And I wouldn't even play the nineteenth hole with him--I
wouldn't, on a bet!"
Come to think of it, that is about the bitterest thing you can say of a
golfer.
II
Our Annual Handicap is the blue-ribbon event of the year so far as most
of us are concerned. The star players turn up their noses at it a bit,
but that is only because they realise that they have a mighty slim
chance to carry off the cup. The high-handicap men usually eliminate the
crack performers, which is the way it should be. What's the good of a
handicap event if a scratch man is to win it every year?
Sixty-four members qualify and are paired off into individual matches,
which are played on handicaps, the losers dropping out. The man who
"comes through" in the top half of the drawing meets the survivor of the
lower half in the final match for the cup, which is always a very
handsome and valuable trophy, calculated to rouse all the cupidity in a
cup hunter's nature.
When the pairings were posted on the bulletin board Kitts was in the
upper half and Windy in the lower one. Kitts had a handicap of 8
strokes, and was really entitled to 12, but Cupid wouldn't listen to his
wails of anguish. Windy was a 12 man, and nobody figured the two
renegades as dangerous until the sixty-four entrants had narrowed down
to eight survivors. Kitts had won his matches by close margins, but
Windy had simply smothered his opponents by lopsided scores, and there
they were, in the running and too close to the finals for comfort.
We began to sit up and take notice. Cupid read the riot act to Dawson,
who was Windy's next opponent, and also had a talk with Aubrey, who was
to meet Kitts. "Wilkins and Kitts must be stopped!" raved Cupid. "We
don't want 'em to get as far as the semi-finals, and it's up to you
chaps to play your heads off and beat these rotters!"
Dawson and Aubrey saw their duty to the club, but that was as far as
they got with it. Windy talked from one end of his match to the other
and made Dawson so nervous that any one could have beaten him, and Kitts
pulled the book of rules on Aubrey and literally read him out of the
contest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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