hile I am not prepared
to endorse the opinion that is commonly expressed, that a golfer is born
and not made, I am convinced that no amount of teaching will make a
golfer hole out long putts with any frequency, nor will it even make him
at all certain of getting the short ones down. But it will certainly put
him in the right way of hitting the ball, which after all will be a
considerable gain. Experience counts for very much, and it will convert
a man who was originally a bad putter into one who will generally hold
his own on the greens, or even be superior to the majority of his
fellows. Even experience, however, counts for less in putting than in
any other department of the game, and there are many days in every
player's life when he realises only too sadly that it seems to count for
nothing at all. Do we not from time to time see beginners who have been
on the links but a single month, or even less than that, laying their
long putts as dead as anybody could wish almost every time, and getting
an amazing percentage of them into the tin itself? Often enough they
seem to do these things simply because, as we should say, they know
nothing at all about putting, which is perhaps another way of saying
that their minds are never embarrassed by an oppressive knowledge of all
the difficulties which the ball will meet with in its passage from the
club to the hole, and of the necessity of taking steps to counteract
them all. They are not afraid of the hole. The fact is that putting is
to a far greater extent than most of us suspect purely a matter of
confidence. When a man feels that he can putt he putts, and when he has
a doubt about it he almost invariably makes a poor show upon the greens.
Do I not know to my cost what it is to feel that I cannot putt, and on
those occasions to miss the most absurdly little ones that ever wait to
be popped into the hole without a moment's thought or hesitation? It is
surely the strangest of the many strange things in golf, that the old
player, hero of many senior medal days, victor in matches over a hundred
links, will at times, when the fortunes of an important game depend upon
his action, miss a little putt that his ten-year-old daughter would get
down nine times out of ten. She, dear little thing, does not yet know
the terrors of the short putt. Sometimes it is the most nerve-breaking
thing to be found on the hundred acres of a golf course. The heart that
does not quail when a yawning bunker