The English golfer does not generally love St. Andrews at first sight,
but he shows that interest in her which leads him to talk about her and
awakens the suspicions of his friends. Then he may speak of her with
indifference, but he goes back to her again and again, and at last one
day, when he returns to his home after one of these visits, he feels an
exquisite soreness at heart, a sweet longing, a strange exaltation, and
he knows that a change has come over his golfing life, that he is at
last in love with St. Andrews, and that he cannot do without her.
Forthwith his plans for future golfing expeditions are changed and
modified. He must now always think of St. Andrews. If he is a man of
leisure he must go there at least once a year, and even if he has but
little time to spare he will be going to Scotland once in a twelvemonth
with his bag of clubs, and must so arrange his itinerary that he shall
touch Leuchars Junction going or coming, and shall run down that little
strip of railway which makes to the golfer the finest travelling in the
world, for two or three days of heartening play on the premier links.
All golf is good, but there is something subtle about the St. Andrews
golf which makes it not quite like the other, and the man who learns to
love it, though the love come in his riper years, when the emotions are
slow of action and may be weak in result, is faithful to it for the rest
of his golfing days.
Probably no man has been able completely to define the charm of the
place. Its charm is of its golf, for though it has some natural beauty,
and is greatly historic and of celebrity for its ruins, it casts no
enduring spell over the man who does not know the use of a driver. The
constant talk of it and its tradition has something to do with the
charm, no doubt. The stranger, who has never struck a ball there, feels
something of nervous ecstasy as he hears the brakes go on the train that
slows down on its approach to the station. There, during the last two
minutes of his journey, is a view of the links, the Swilcan Burn, the
players going out to the second and approaching the seventeenth--and
there goes a ball on to that famous road!--just like the fathers of golf
used to do in the olden days as it is written in the books. Then,
walking in St. Andrews, one seems to breathe golf as never before. All
the men and boys one sees are players or caddies; there is a knot of men
at the street-corner talking about the 76 that one of the professionals
did in his evening round; there are many golf shops; it is all golf. On
the walls, and in the hotels and post offices, there are displayed
official notices, giving the warning that those who play on the course
with irons only, or who practise putting on the eighteenth green, may be
fined 20_s._ or--wonderful enactment!--be sent to prison for a period. A
personage of no less consequence than a Cabinet Minister, this being
Mr. Asquith, has been stopped under this rule. The pipes that one hears
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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