Now, what does the other man do in like circumstances? Unreasonably and
foolishly he refuses to accept the inevitable, and declines to give up
the idea of getting to a point a hundred yards or more in front with his
next shot, which he would have reached if he had not been in the bunker.
He seems to think that the men who made the bunkers did not know their
business. Having been bunkered, he says to himself that it is his duty
to himself and to the game to make up for the stroke which was lost by
supremely brilliant recovery under the most disheartening
circumstances. He insists that the recovery must be made here in the
bunker, and thereafter he will progress as usual. It never occurs to him
that it would be wiser and safer to content himself with just getting
out the hazard, and then, playing under comparatively easy and
comfortable conditions, to make his grand attempt at recovering the lost
stroke. He would be much more likely to succeed. A stroke lost or gained
is of equal value at any point on the route from the tee to the hole,
and it is a simple fact, too often never realised, that a long putt
makes up for a short drive, and a mashie shot laid dead for a previous
stroke from which the ball was trapped in the bunker. But the
unphilosophic gentleman, who is ignorant of, or tries to resist, these
truths, feels that his bunkered stroke must be compensated for by the
next one or never. What is the result? Recklessly, unscientifically,
even ludicrously, he fires away at the ball in the bunker with a cleek
or an iron or a mashie, striving his utmost to get length, when, with
the frowning cliff of the bunker high in front of him and possibly even
overhanging him, no length is possible. At the first attempt he fails to
get out. His second stroke in the hazard shares the same fate. With a
third or a fourth his ball by some extraordinary and lucky chance may
just creep over the top of the ridge. How it came to do so when played
in this manner nobody knows. The fact can only be explained by the
argument that if you keep on doing the same thing something is sure to
happen in the end, and it is a sufficient warning to these bunkered
golfers that the gods of golf have so large a sense of justice and of
right and wrong that by this time the hole has for a certainty been
lost. The slashing player who wants to drive his long ball out of the
bunker very rarely indeed gets even this little creep over the crest
until he has played