I couldn't think of anything to say except that he must have had a deuce
of a lot of raw material to start with--and if I put the accent on the
raw it was unintentional.
"Well," said Archie, "his heart is in the right place anyway."
When you can't think of anything else to say for a man, you can always
say that his heart is in the right place. It sounds well, but it doesn't
mean anything. Archie proposed that we should let Small go around with
us that afternoon. I didn't like the idea, but, of course, I kept mum;
the man was Archie's guest.
Small got in bad on the first tee. I knew he would when I saw who was
ahead of us--Colonel Jimmy and the chinless boy. Like most elderly
mechanical golfers, the Colonel is a stickler for the etiquette of the
game--absolute silence and all that sort of thing.
Archie introduced Small to the Colonel and the Colonel introduced us to
the chinless boy, who said he was charmed, stepped up on the tee and
whacked his ball into the rough.
While the Colonel was teeing up, Small kept moving around and talking in
that megaphone voice of his. Colonel Jimmy looked at him rather
eloquently a couple of times and finally Small hushed up. The Colonel
took his stance, tramped around awhile to get a firm footing, addressed
the ball three times, and drew his club back for the swing. Just as it
started downward, Small sneezed--one of those sneezes with an Indian war
whoop on the end of it--"Aa-chew!" Naturally Colonel Jimmy jumped, took
his eye off the ball and topped it into the long grass in front of the
tee.
"Take it over," said the chinless boy, who was a sport if nothing else.
"I certainly intend to!" snapped the Colonel, glaring at Small.
"You--you spoiled my swing, sir!"
"Quit your kidding, Colonel!" said Small. "How could I spoil your
swing?"
"You sneezed behind me!"
Small laughed at the top of his voice. "Haw! Haw! That's rich! Why, I've
seen Heinie Zimmerman hit a baseball a mile with thirty thousand people
yelling their heads off at him!"
"Yes," said Archie, "but that was baseball. This is golf. There's a
difference."
"Gentlemen," said the Colonel, "when you are through with your
discussion, I would really like to drive."
III
I played with Small all the afternoon without yielding to an impulse to
slay him with a niblick, which speaks volumes for my good disposition.
It was a harrowing experience. Small proceeded on the usual theory of
the beginner, which is to hit the ball as hard as possible and trust to
luck. The most I can say for his day's play is that I never expect to
see golf balls hit any harder. His wooden club shots hooked and sliced
into the woods on either side of the course--he bought a dozen balls to
begin with and was borrowing from us at the finish--he dug up great
patches of turf on the fair greens, he nearly destroyed three bunkers
and after every shot he yelled like a Comanche.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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