Then it is less interesting to consider what style of player Mr. Balfour
is, than what kind of man he shows himself to be amid the trials and the
triumphs of the links, where, it is indisputably held, a man’s entire
human nature, despite all efforts at repression, is forced up to the
surface for all to see. Here, then, we see the real Mr. Balfour as he is
never seen on the Front Bench at Westminster. There are no mashie shots
to foozle, and no drives to top into the bunker in the House of Commons,
to make a man feel that life is yet a feeble, disappointing thing. To
the Parliamentarian, the nearest thing in pleasure to laying a long
approach shot “dead” against the hole is a successful speech, or the
engineering of a majority on a division which is something above par,
and these are dull things in comparison. Mr. Balfour, then, as we have
studied him many times at this testing game, is a man of many and
quickly changing emotions, of a temperament somewhat highly strung and
nervous, and capable of enormous enthusiasms and alternative
depressions. There is nothing that is phlegmatic about this Ministerial
golfer. There is something of the schoolboy left in him. One day I saw
him driving from the tee and getting a beauty, so that his ball was
cleanly flicked for the best part of two hundred yards in a straight
line to the hole. It is not in human nature to wait for tardy praise in
such ecstatic moments, and he, his face aglow with pleasure, turned
about to his opponent, exclaiming, “I _do_ push them away, don’t I?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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