e glorious life of old Tom
Morris was that for a long time when in the middle of his career he was
nearly always short with his long putts, and his son, young Tom, used
wickedly to say that his father would be a great putter if the hole were
always a yard nearer. Tom, I believe, was always conscious of his
failing, and made the most strenuous efforts to correct it, and this
only shows what a terrible and incurable habit this one of being short
can become, and what necessity there is for the golfer to exercise his
strength of mind to get rid of it in his early days, and establish the
practice of being up every time. Often enough he will run over, but
sometimes the kind hole will gobble the ball, and on the average he will
gain substantially over the nervous, hesitating player who is always
short.

CHAPTER XIV

COMPLICATED PUTTS

Problems on undulating greens--The value of practice--Difficulties
of calculation--The cut stroke with the putter--How to make
it--When it is useful--Putting against a sideways slope--A
straighter line for the hole--Putting down a hill--Applying drag to
the ball--The use of the mashie on the putting green--Stymies--When
they are negotiable and when not--The wisdom of playing for a
half--Lofting over the stymie--Running through the stymie--How to
play the stroke, and its advantages--Fast greens for fancy
strokes--On gauging the speed of a green.

Now we will consider those putts in which it is not all plain sailing
from the place where the ball lies to the hole. The line of the putt may
be uphill or it may be downhill, or the green may slope all the way from
one side to the other, or first from one and then the other. There is no
end to the tricks and difficulties of a good sporting green, and the
more of them the merrier. The golfer's powers of calculation are now in
great demand.

Take, to begin with, one of the most difficult of all putts--that in
which there is a more or less pronounced slope from one side or the
other, or a mixture of the two. In this case it would obviously be fatal
to putt straight at the hole. Allowances must be made on one side or the
other, and sometimes they are very great allowances too. I have found
that most beginners err in being afraid of allowing sufficiently for the
slope. They may convince themselves that in order to get near the hole
their ball should be a yard or so off the straight line when it is
ha