20. Temperament

The secret of success in golf lies in temperament and that is true whatever grade of golf you may aspire to play. Tournaments are not always, not even usually, won by the greatest stylists. They go to the men with the best balanced outlook on the game. And how fre­quently we have seen the fellow with a rank, bad swing take the half-crown off a man who looked far better on the tee.

Do not mistake me. It is an excellent thing to be a stylist, if your style is supported and molded by a good golfing temperament. Harry Vardon before the Great War and Bobby Jones in the years that followed it were perfect stylists, but they were also perfectly balanced in the psychophysical sense and won more tourna­ments than any other golfers. On the other hand, Tay­lor and Braid, who were never deemed stylists at all, almost equaled these two in collecting championships because they were temperamentally in the champion­ship class. But you will not find any golfer who is tem­peramentally weak or unreliable habitually winning big events, however brilliant a stylist he may be.

I suppose we might say that a man's style at golf is evolved from the reactions on one another of his temperament and his physical make-up. We may all learn to write from the same copy-book but we will grow up to sign our checks differently, and, though I have been teaching golf for thirty-five years now, I have yet to find two people who play alike. No matter how much you tried to teach two people to play alike, the results would be surprisingly different.

We do not all play golf for the same reason, of course, and that may affect the way we play it. Some of us play it for a living. Many play it on doctor's order and more still for exercise! There are more individual reasons too, and I have come across some odd ones in my time. A lady came to me once with her child, a girl of about fourteen. She said, "I am not going to make my daughter an intellectual; I want you to make her a golf champion." "I'll do my best," said I. "But why do you want her to be a golf champion?" "Oh," she said, 'look at ... and . . . and . . . ," and rattled off the names of champions who had made fine mar­riages! That was the idea, and I may tell you that in due course it proved successful.

Sometimes, of course, we forget why we took up golf, and the game or some aspect of it runs away with us. That is the way fanatics are born.

I remember one old fellow who sent his valet round to get me out of bed at one o'clock in the morning be­cause he had something to tell me that could not wait. When I got to the old chap's place, there he was in the garden, swinging away like mad by the light of a lantern hung on a tree. There was a table with glasses on it and a bottle of whiskey, and, while I recompensed myself for being turned out, he explained to me that he had just discovered the secret of golf! He had his two elbows tied across his chest with a double strand of Sandow elastic which kept them, and especially kept the right one, from lifting at the top of the swing.

Well, I had just about forgiven him that one when he again sent for me in the middle of the night. I tod­dled down because he was amusing and really not a bad old chap. Well, there he was in the garden again, swinging away in his pajamas. This time he had a piece of elastic pinned to his coat between his shoulder blades; he pulled it over his right shoulder and held it between his teeth. He said it prevented him looking up, which I believed, and that it was the secret of good golf, which I did not.

Of course, the tricks did not work because he could not tie himself up with elastic out on the course, and, having got used to swinging with it, he naturally went to bits when he took it off. He would have done much better if he had used his imagination instead of elastic. But that happened to be how he got his fun out of golf!

So as you see, golf is not the same thing to all men; and according to the way we look at the game, so will our ambitions be formed and the temperament in which we approach it be developed.

If a fellow is content to be able to knock the ball one hundred and fifty yards down the fairway, there is no point in explaining the flail to him—he would not be interested. Comparatively few people are inter­ested in playing the game as well as they could play it. In particular, most youngsters think of nothing but hitting their tee shots "miles" and do not seem to mind missing 80 per cent of their other shots, though as we all know, it is the "other shots" which enable you to go round in a reasonable score. If you can chip and putt decently, you can always get yourself a de­cent score. I know lots of men who can go round St. Cloud in under 80 and never hit a clean golf shot the whole time.

Now these matters of what one wants to do in golf and how one wants to do it are directly related to tem­perament, but let me get right back to the heart of the subject by telling you a story which is about tempera­ment and nothing but!

It started when a lady came to me for lessons. She did well, so well that one day she said, "Do you know, my game has improved so much that my husband is going to take a course of lessons with you. I'm so sorry." "Why be sorry?" said I. Tm delighted." She looked at me with a slight smile. "You don't know my hubby," she said. "He is the most violent-tempered man in the world."

Well, in due course he turned up. He looked wild and he was wild in the sense that he let his emotions run loose! Being prepared, I naturally took up a meek and mild attitude, which egged him on to more and more furious bursts of temper every time he missed the ball—which incidentally was every time he swung at it! And every time he missed he would fling his driver on the ground and yell to me, "What did I do wrong that time?"

I suggested a few things which I knew would not work, and he got wilder still. Then, suddenly after a particularly furious burst of rage, I said to him quietly, "Let me see your driver." He handed it to me ungra­ciously. "Old friend?" I asked examining it. "Got it at Oban," he growled. I looked him in the eye, shut my lips, took the club in both hands, and broke it in two across my knee—and threw the pieces in a corner of the shed.

He went gray and gray-white and speechless. While he was contemplating the wreckage, I bent down and put another ball on the tee. Then I straightened up and said, "Take your brassie." He went to his bag like a lamb and went on with the lesson much more quietly— which was lucky for him because if he had kept on fuming I would have broken every club in his bag. He is a different man and a very different golfer to-day.

At a later lesson I told him the true story of a golfer who on his first appearance at St. Andrews became so enraged with his putter that he threw it out of bounds at the Elysian fields and tore up his card. Yet the next time he played there he won the Open! But he did not win the Open until he had curbed his temper.

Now these two stories are nearly everyone's. But to get as mad as the proverbial meat-axe because we miss a shot is the sign of a young golfer. The experienced golfer does not get mad when he misses a shot because he knows that if he does so the chances are that he will miss the next one too. And I doubt if it is any more dif­ficult to build up control of your temperament in golf than it is to build up control of your swing once you appreciate the need.

But I think we must go back again from this point to the question of why you play golf. Because the state of mind and the temperamental strains of (a) sl tired business man playing purely for relaxation and (b) a Pro fighting for a championship on the last green are so immensely different that their problems are differ­ent—or at least arise in very different intensities.

Many big business men and men in public life have told me how great a relaxation they found golf to be. Nothing takes your mind so completely off the daily worries as does a round of golf. Each of us, whatever his rating as a golfer may be, has to pay attention to the job in hand; so much attention that for a couple of hours we are in a new world and the problems and tensions of our normal world are forgotten.

During the building up of the Treaty of Versailles, Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Sir Elmsley Carr, and Sir George Riddell used often to come out to the club between sessions. I still have a book which Mr. Wilson left in my shop one day, on the same day in fact that I had a chat with Admiral Beatty and Mr. Boyden, an American lawyer who was in Paris on the same job. I remember seeing Mr. Winston Churchill play once at Barton-on-Sea and I have been told that during his hardest days at Berlin, just before the present war, Sir Nevile Henderson never missed an opportunity of get­ting in a round—or even a few holes—between those fateful conversations.

Sir George Riddell was the best golfer of those I have mentioned, but men of this eminence rarely make first-class players; they play simply for exercise and relaxation, not always for even pleasure.

Again there are plenty of people, too many in fact, who play purely as a pastime. I say too many because to my mind these are the most devastating of all golf bores. A keen man is always interesting because of his keenness, but to hear a recapitulation of a round which was only played to pass the time—and is only being recapitulated to pass some more time—is the depths beyond which golf boredom cannot sink.

At the other extreme of keenness, you find the Amer­ican Pros. They will play all day, fill in between rounds with practice, and take you out before breakfast or after dinner to see if you can't give them a few hints! I remember a championship week at Muirfield. We had all played our two qualifying rounds and had an hour's practice and were not sorry to get back to the club house and relax. But in came Lawson Little. "Come on, boys," he said, "come outside and see me hit a few shots." So out we went and sat on a bank to watch him hit literally hundreds of drives—asking questions all the time. That at ten o'clock at night! It keeps light late in Scotland in June.

I wonder if you remember Tom Webster's cartoon of Leo Diegel going out for a little putting practice— with a whole armful of putters to try out. I saw Leo actually do that. It was another championship occa­sion, and he lost the title on the greens. He had lost his touch and tried to get it back by changing his putter, but the trouble was that he was nervous and jumpy. One has to be very calm and quiet to putt well.

Temperament is pre-eminently important in put­ting because good putting is so largely a matter of confidence. You can only stroke the ball when you are quietly confident; otherwise you jerk it. You can al­ways drive or play big shots reasonably well, because that is done more with the grosser muscles, but the finer touch required for putting is a much more deli­cate matter and so is much more liable to be put out of gear and jerked by nervous tension.

Bad putters habitually stab the ball: that is why they'are bad putters. Good putters jerk the club when they are nervous, which is basically quite a different fault.

My teaching is built up around the principle of play­ing by feel: that is, through our muscular reflexes and controls. This leaves it to our muscles to swing the club and sets us free to give a little attention to our mental state—to inhibit the urge to hurry, and to go quietly and methodically about the job. We know that when we are in a quiet state we can play the shot as well as we know how; therefore if we can make ourselves quiet and relaxed, we will allow our muscular control system to work.

To illustrate this point let me tell you a little story from my own experience. In 1927 I was runner-up in the Belgian Open at Knocke and won the Dutch Open at The Hague, both in the same week. They were then 36-hole tournaments, and in each I did a 69 in the second round. Now here I should tell you what you may already know, that I was never a first-class golf tournament player for two reasons: I was not physi­cally strong enough, and temperamentally I was too highly strung.

The story is about the last hole I played at The Hague, to complete my 69 and beat Henry Cotton by one stroke. After an indifferent drive from the last tee, the home green seemd to get smaller and smaller—it was triangular in shape with the hole tucked well down in the apex, a clump of trees to the right and a bunker on the left. Henry was playing behind me, and I had a pal standing on the 17th green who signaled to me before I played my second that Henry had got his 4 and we were level over the 35 holes.

I deliberately pushed out all the surge of thoughts and emotions that came rushing into my mind and said to myself, "Now you old fool, keep quiet and play this shot as if you were showing a pupil at St. Cloud how it should be played." Well, I got myself quieted down and then played my shot—straight onto the flag but about ten yards short.

Knowing that I was a good putter, I said to myself, "Well, I shall tie anyway." But I did not a bit relish the idea of having to go out and play another 18 holes. But there it was—or rather there I was, on the green but ten yards from the hole. So I went through the same back-chat with myself, to get quieted down. Then I putted, a firm, clean stroking—and when I did look up, it was just in time to see the ball drop into the hole, to win me the title by a single stroke.

Tournaments are mental agony to most Pros, and having had my fill I have never played in another since that day. We all know the horrid feeling that creeps over us as we walk to the first tee—and the sigh of re­lief when the ball does get away. Then we calm down and are better until the bad luck chips in (as it is apt to do in golf!). Then we begin to get annoyed, and that is the worst possible state for a golfer.

What can be done about it? Well, I will tell you a simple little story about a very young pupil of mine, and you can read into it whatever you can read into it.

One day I was out on the course amusing, rather than teaching, a little girl of seven. On one occasion she showed a little impatience and I said to her very seriously, "Don't you get angry! Only badly brought-up little girls get angry, and you are a nicely brought-up little girl." I always remember the way she looked at me—sideways, like a little robin. After that she would say to me sometimes, "Am I getting angry?" And I would say, "Well, your ears do look a little white; let me feel your pulse/' or I would put my ear to her back to hear if her heart was beating too fast. She took it all so seriously and was intensely pleased when one day I said, "Now that's better; not so angry as last time you did that!" And then one day I told her she was quite cured (which she was) and she was in ecsta­sies!

All very childish if you like. But those lessons in golf psychology stood her in good stead. She grew up to be a champion and her manners on the course were al­ways a pleasure to see and a pattern to be followed.

If you wish to hide your character, do not play golf. It will be revealed on the course. I was telling this one day to a very irascible chap, and he said, "Well, what would you do about it, if you were me?” I replied quietly, "Ride a bicycle."

Of course, it is not only golfers who are afflicted this way. I was telling these stories one day to my little girl, who though only eleven is an ardent pianist, and she told me the following tale of Schubert. One day Schu­bert was composing at the piano, and he became an­noyed with the little finger of his left hand—because it would not articulate properly and so hindered the flow of his thoughts. He became furious with it and wrenched it back with such violence (as if to show the refractory finger how far it should articulate) that he dislocated it. And ever afterwards, so the story goes, he was a finger short when he wished to play.

When we come to bedrock, what do we mean when we say that a man has a "good golfing temperament"? We mean that he has sufficient control of himself to produce his best shots whatever the circumstancesmay he. The man who has this starts with a greater advantage than the man with the ideal golfing phy­sique or the man with the fine natural style.

Can you acquire the golf temperament? You cer­tainly can, as I had to do to a considerable degree. And you have got one very great help which I lacked in my novitiate—the idea of learning golf by feel. For one of the main advantages of this method is just that it can make your game storm-proof, can make you capable of producing your best shots when you need them, irrespective of your state of mind and the condition of the game.

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