I have thought the matter out, and I suggest the reason. It is one of the prettiest points in psychology that one will encounter in the whole of a long lifetime of the most careful thought and study. You don’t really want any mind at all for putting purposes. The whole thing is too simple, and instead of a mind and brains being any use for the purpose in hand, they are a positive disadvantage, and are continually getting in the way. III Consciousness is often fatal in putting, and it is the conscience making a coward of the man that makes him miss his putt. To hole a three-feet putt over a flat piece of green is really one of the easiest things in the world; there can be no doubt about it. But while there is one ridiculously easy way of doing the putt, there are about a dozen more or less difficult ways of missing it, and these dozen are uppermost in the mind of the golfer when he comes to his effort. Thus the missing of the short putt represents the greatest triumph of matter over mind that is to be found in the whole range of sport, or, so far as I know, in any other pursuit in life. But why should a man be given to these morbid thoughts of the ways of missing, and why should he not be of hopeful, courageous disposition, and attack the hole boldly and with confidence, instead of remembering these dozen ways of missing? That is what non-golfers ask. It is an easy question to set; but there is another factor in the situation that has to be mentioned. There is the sense of responsibility, and this sense of responsibility is probably greater in a man when he is making a putt of from three to five feet than it is in the case of any other man at any time in any other sport, because he will never, never have the chance again that he has got this time. If he putts and misses, the deed is irrevocable, the stroke and the hole or the half have been lost, and nothing that can happen afterwards can remove the loss. If a man makes a bad drive, or if his approach play is weak, he can atone for these faults by being unusually clever with the subsequent stroke in the play to the hole, and he thinks he will. But the short putt is the very last stroke in that play, and if it is missed there is no possible atonement to be made. Thus there is something of the awful, of the eternal, of the infinite about the putt; the man is awe-stricken; he knows it is easy, but he is conscious of those dozen ways of missing. So he misses. I have put the question to a number of the best-known players of the day as to what were their precise thoughts--if any--when they came to making the final putt of a great match, which in many cases gave them a championship. Their answer almost universally was that their thought was, “What a fool I shall look if I miss this putt!” Thus they knew that they ought not to miss it, but they were burning with consciousness of the fact that they were terribly liable to do so. So matter triumphs over mind. IV