“What kind of clubs do you Stygians use?” I asked.
“Oh, very much the same kind that you chaps do,” returned Boswell.
“Everybody experiments with new fads, too, just as you do. Old Peter
Stuyvesant, for instance, always drives with his wooden leg, and never
uses anything else unless he gets a lie where he's got to.”
“His wooden leg?” I roared, with a laugh. “How on earth does he do
that?”
“He screws the small end of it into a square block shod like a brassey,”
explained Boswell, “tees up his ball, goes back ten yards, makes a run
at it and kicks the ball pretty nearly out of sight. He can put with it
too, like a dream, swinging it sideways.”
“But he doesn't call that golf, does he?” I cried.
“What is it?” demanded Boswell.
“I should call it football,” I said.
“Not at all,” said Boswell. “Not a bit of it. He hasn't any foot on that
leg, and he has a golf-club head with a shaft to it. There isn't any
rule which says that the shaft shall not look like an inverted nine-pin,
nor do any of the accepted authorities require that the club shall be
manipulated by the arms. I admit it's bad form the way he plays, but, as
Stuyvesant himself says, he never did travel on his shape.”
“Suppose he gets a cuppy lie?” I asked, very much interested at the
first news from Hades of the famous old Dutchman.
“Oh, he does one of two things,” said Boswell. “He stubs it out with his
toe, or goes back and plays two more. Munchausen plays a good game too.
He beat the colonel forty-seven straight holes last Wednesday, and all
Hades has been talking about it ever since.”
“Who is the colonel?” I asked, innocently.
“Bogey,” returned Boswell. “Didn't you ever hear of Colonel Bogey?”
“Of course,” I replied, “but I always supposed Bogey was an imaginary
opponent, not a real one.”
“So he is,” said Boswell.
“Then you mean--”
“I mean that Munchausen beat him forty-seven up,” said Boswell.
“Were there any witnesses?” I demanded, for I had little faith in
Munchausen's regard for the eternal verities, among which a golf-card
must be numbered if the game is to survive.
“Yes, a hundred,” said Boswell. “There was only one trouble with 'em.”
Here the great biographer laughed. “They were all imaginary, like the
colonel.”
“And Munchausen's score?” I queried.
“The same, naturally. But it makes him king-pin in golf circles just
the same, because nobody can go back on his logic,” said Boswell.
“Munchausen reasoned it out very logically indeed, and largely, he said,
to protect his own reputation. Here is an imaginary warrior, said he,
who makes a bully, but wholly imaginary, score at golf. He sends me an
imaginary challenge to play him forty-seven holes. I accept, not so much
because I consider myself a golfer as because I am an imaginer--if there
is such a word.”
“Ask Dr. Johnson,” said I, a little sarcastically. I always grow
sarcastic when golf is mentioned.
“Dr. Johnson be--” began Boswell.
“Boswell!” I remonstrated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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