Bobby Jones on Golf

by Robert Tyre Jones

  So, if the expert distrusts these shots, how unwise it is to describe the manner of execution to a less accomplished player without a few words of caution. Some time ago, I offered my explanation—I now offer the words of caution. It should be interesting to the average player to know what the better men are doing, but he will be better off to let his interest stop there. Golf simplified, and not full of complications beyond his ability, is what he should have.

  Leo Diegel was the only man I ever knew who actually thrived on difficult shots. Diegel played nearly every shot with a slight fade or draw, scarcely ever using a straight flying shot; and, although I do not hesitate to say that Leo could do more with a golf ball than any other man, he was still one of the most erratic of golf’s great players; his inconsistency was almost entirely attributable to his preference for the more intricate shots.

  5 RESOURCEFULNESS AND JUDGMENT

  Let a person post himself at any point on the course during the progress of an open championship, or of any really first-class tournament, and watch the entire field go by. Of these he will, of course, be impressed by the Palmers, Players, Nicklauses, and the others who bear illustrious names; but I am sure he will be surprised by the number of fine shots played by men of whom he has never heard; and if he is an intelligent observer, he will appreciate that these fine shots are not mere accidents. There will be unknown players in the parade whose swings bear every evidence of the excellence displayed by the most famous man in the field. What, then, is the difference between those who finish always near the top and those who sometimes finish not at all?

  The answer, I think, is that the successful man carries a resourcefulness, and a quality of judgment, the lack of which dooms the other fellow, despite his mechanical skill, to a permanent place among the also-rans. Knowing what to do and when to do it is the necessary complement to mechanical skill that maintains a few men at the head of the procession, with many others clutching closely, but vainly, for their coattails.

  Traveling about the country playing exhibition matches in various sections, the itinerant champion very often finds himself soundly drubbed, or sorely pressed, by the local pro of whom the mighty one had never heard until he set foot in the clubhouse. Yet, if the two men were set down upon a course with which neither was familiar, the unknown would have little chance. That is a factor which, if it were more generally appreciated, would considerably decrease the number of disappointments devoted friends experience upon the failure of their local pride to set the championship field back upon its heels. It is not easy to understand how 69’s and 68’s at home can be so easily converted into 80’s on foreign soil.

  This does not mean necessarily that the strange course requires a type of play of which the man is incapable; no, without doubt, in time, and in a not very long time, he could play the new course as well as his own. But he has not the faculty which the first-class player possesses of quickly sizing up the requirements of the shot and of choosing the club and the method of playing it. That is what I mean by resourcefulness and judgment. Skill alone may be enough to play a course so well known that such decisions are made automatically, but to conquer an unfamiliar layout, considerable work must be done by what lies between the ears.

  Fortunately, sound judgment in golf can be acquired in much easier fashion than can mechanical skill; experience over various courses and under varied conditions will teach a lot to any man; if he can play the shots, the rest can be learned by proper thought and application.

  The average golfer may ask what this has to do with him. Apparently little, but the point is that by training himself to visualize and plan each shot before he makes it, and by giving careful thought to his method of attack, he can improve his game more certainly than by spending hours on a practice tee. Some men, for one reason or another, can never learn to swing a golf club correctly; but everyone can improve in the matter of selecting the shot to be played.

  The importance of good judgment is made no less because the average player has fewer shots at his command than the skillful professional. The problem is nevertheless the same—how best for the particular individual to play the particular shot. Good judgment must take into account the personal equation as well as the slope and condition of the ground and the location of bunkers and other hazards.

  6 SLOW PLAY

  There can be no odium attached to slow playing when the motives of grandstanding and of upsetting an opponent are eliminated—and these can be entirely eliminated from this discussion; but I regard it as a mistake, considering both the player’s efficiency and the welfare of the game in general Golf depends for its growth upon public interest, and competitions are designed to stimulate public interest. Nothing can be less entertaining to the spectator than a round of golf drawn out by minute examinations of every shot.

  After all, the deliberation necessary depends entirely upon the man who is playing the game; it is his business to play the shot, and he should never be required to play until he is ready.

  Some situations one finds on a golf course require some amount of study before the player can determine the best way to overcome the difficulty; but these are unusual. The vast majority of shots from the fairway are but repetitions of countless hundreds played before. At least, to one familiar with the course, as all tournament contestants are, the decision should be a matter of seconds.

  There is one very cogent reason why the older heads and more prominent players should make an especial effort to avoid unnecessary delay; that is, because of the effect of their examples upon the youngsters coming along. Youth is naturally confident, and playing with assurance, is not so likely as the older man to quail at the difficulties of a shot.

  Whenever I see a much-considered shot go astray, I can’t help thinking of the lawyer who had unsuccessfully defended a client charged with murder. The trial had been long drawn out, lasting nearly a month, and the lawyer had made quite a lot of noise and stormed eloquently in his argument. Meeting a brother lawyer on the street a few days later, the case came up in discussion. The lawyer, whose client had been convicted, asked his friend what he thought of his conduct of the trial. His friend replied, “Well, I think you could have reached the same result with a whole lot less effort.”

  More often than not, the first impression in golf is the best. There is no man capable of hitting a golf ball with sufficient exactness to warrant concern about the minute undulations a very close examination might reveal. If he can care for the difficulties he can see at a glance, he will have done well enough.

  7 PRACTICE SWINGS

  There is nothing in the rules of golf prohibiting a practice swing under any conditions or in any circumstances. Provided that nothing be done to cause the player to be guilty of improving his lie, touching the sand in a hazard, removing an obstruction or growing thing, or of doing some other act prohibited by the rules, he has the legal right to take as many practice swings as he chooses in whatever direction he may desire. Even in a bunker, he may swing the club as often as he likes, so long as he does not touch the sand or otherwise improve the lie of his ball. Many players are under the impression that a practice swing may not be taken within a club length of the ball, but the only requisite of this nature is that the absence of the intent to strike the ball must be clear.

  While thus defining the player’s legal rights, it is only fair to say that his moral right to make a nuisance of himself is not so clear. It is probably natural that a man playing golf is interested in nothing so much as his own game. It is also natural that he should attend to his opponent’s game only enough to hope that said opponent will encounter enough trouble to cause him to lose the hole. But if he feels this way, he ought to remember that his companion probably entertains some such notions of his own play, and that he certainly has not come out to spend the greater part of the afternoon watching someone else take practice swings and fiddle around over a golf ball in making preparations to strike it. The ethics of the game allow each person a reasonable opportunity to
play each shot carefully, but they demand also that the player step up promptly to do his bit without unnecessary delay.

  The habitual practice swingers, and there are numbers of them, have an uncanny talent for taking their swings at precisely the wrong times. Everyone has had the experience and knows how annoying it is hearing the swish of a club behind him just as he is in the midst of his swing. He has to be very fond of the culprit to restrain a desire to bash him on the head with the club, even when he knows that the guilt is only of thoughtlessness.

  8 SCORING

  Why is it, someone asks, that so often after making an exceptionally good score on the first nine holes, a player apparently loses all touch with his game and comes home in astonishingly bad figures? Isn’t it strange that this explosion should occur when he is in his best stride? Apparently, there is a lower limit fixed upon the score a given person may turn in, and if he goes many strokes below his allotment in the early stages, it is more than likely that the closing will even the count.

  Yet it is no such law of averages, or anything like it, that is responsible for the leveling process. It is almost impossible to measure the force with which the awareness of a good score in the making weighs down upon the performer. The nearer he approaches his goal, the harder each shot becomes, until the meanest obstacles appear almost insurmountable. There is far less nervous strain involved in overcoming the effects of a bad start than in maintaining the standard set by a well-made beginning.

  This mental pressure is responsible more than anything else for the fact that the third-round leader rarely finishes in front of an Open Championship field. What presses him down is not that he has “shot his bolt,” as the saying is, for if the fourth round were a separate affair with everyone starting even, he could probably do as well as anyone; but the thought of the few strokes’ lead he must protect makes him overfearful and overcautious. The man drawing up from the rear, on the other hand, finds himself in an aggressive frame of mind, with nothing to think about except playing golf. Very often he can play himself into a winning position before he has time to appreciate the import of what he is doing.

  The shopworn admonition to forget the last shot and play the one in hand was meant to apply as much to the good ones as to the bad. It is just as important to forget the 3’s as the 6’s.

  I have never forgotten the comment made to me several years ago by a well-known professional. We had just heard at the clubhouse that Walter Hagen had run into a phenomenal string of sub-par holes. “You know, Bobby,” said the pro, “the greatest thing about Hagen is that after he makes a few birdies he thinks he can keep on doing it, whereas if you or I do it, instead of continuing to play golf we begin to wonder if this isn’t too good to be true. We begin to be suspicious of our good fortune and to expect a 6 or 7 to jump up any minute.”

  Of course, one may say that it is easy to understand why there should be a considerable mental strain in a tournament, but the same conditions do not bear upon a Saturday afternoon of golf. It is a different situation, of course, but every golfer knows what it means to beat his best score over his home course. The putt that turns the trick is fully as momentous, for the player, as the winning stroke in any championship.

  In 1916, my best score at East Lake was 74, not in competition, of course, and like anyone else, every time I went out to play I tried to beat it. I tried all that summer and all the next year without success. I remember at least four occasions when I stood on the seventeenth tee needing only two pars, a 4 and a 3, not merely to beat 74, but to beat 70. Each time I arrived at that point, I began to think of what I was about to do, and each time I would use up just enough strokes to bring my total up to 74. It was two full years before I could break through the barrier raised by that 74. If I could have refrained from thinking about it, I should have probably beat it in a few months.

  So the average player’s difficulty in breaking 90 or 85 is no different from the expert’s trouble when he tries to win a championship. When I hear a man censured for collapsing in the last round of a competition when he apparently had it won, I always want to ask the critic if he has ever had three 5’s to beat his own best score and if he got them. Whether the score be 70 or 100 is of little moment. It’s all a question of what it means.

  9 THE IMPORTANCE OF PUTTING

  The experiment of substituting eight-inch cups for the standard 4 ¼-inch size brings us back to the old contention that too much of the game of golf is played on the putting green. Someone is always trying to improve or reform something and golf has not escaped.

  I remember some years ago a professional tournament played over an English course—Wentworth, I believe—in which an attempt was made to reckon points for accurate approach shots. A series of concentric circles was laid out around each hole and the players were awarded so many points for score, and in addition, a varying numer of points depending upon which circle they were able to hit with their second shots. Like the Florida experiment, this was a protest against the importance of putting in golf as it has always been played.

  The argument runs something like this: Par is intended to represent perfect golf. The average par of an 18-hole course is, roughly, 72, and par figures always allow two putts to a green. Thus, in an 18-hole round, par figures allow the player 36 putts and 36 other shots distributed among his remaining clubs. Since one-half of the strokes of a perfect round of golf may be played with a putter, is there not too much premium placed upon skill with the club? Would not the distribution be fairer if the hole could be made of such size as to make one putt per green, instead of two, a reasonable allowance?

  One answer to this is, of course, that excellence in driving and in iron play receives its reward as certainly as does excellence in putting. Often, of course, bad putting can nullify the advantage gained in other departments, but certainly a long, straight drive makes the second shot easier, and an accurate second shot places the player in winning position.

  The advocates of the larger hole would eliminate from the game the unfair result coming about when one player holes a long putt and “steals” a hole from a man who has outplayed him to the green. Their contention is that the hole should be large enough so that the holing of any reasonable putt after a fine second shot would be practically certain. But they overlook the fact that the “thief” would then be holing from off the green and from bunkers quite as often.

  The dub hails the larger cup with delight, because he conceives that he will no longer be blowing the short putts and that all the little ones that now rim the hole will begin to fall in. But here again the thing is entirely relative. Instead of rimming and missing from two, three, and four feet, he will experience the same disappointment when he misses from ten, twelve, and fifteen feet. No matter what we do to the hole, we will never cease to hear about the ball that might have gone in but didn’t.

  It seems to me that the larger hole might have just the opposite effect from that claimed for it, for I believe it would make more difference in the putting game for the man who was continually leaving himself away from the hole than for the fellow who is always banging his second shots up close. The second man seldom has to worry about taking three putts, even with the present hole size, and if he is at all a good putter, he will pick up a number of one-putt greens, whereas the other fellow, playing a bit wider on his approaches, will scarcely ever get down in one, except by accident and often, if his touch is not just right, he will be taking three.

  I have no real fear that these experiments will lead to anything. I do not think that making the hole larger would make the game any better, but even if it would, I should still recall what I consider the best argument advanced against a change. I once heard someone say, when a discussion like this was going on, “Surely, go ahead and make the hole any size you please. But when you do, do not call the game golf.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1 TOURNAMENT PREPARATION

  2 COMPETITIVE ATTITUDE

  3 CONSISTENCY

  4 EIGHTEEN
-HOLE MATCHES

  Competition

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1 TOURNAMENT PREPARATION

  There are two distinct kinds of golf—just plain golf and tournament golf. Golf—the plain variety—is the most delightful of games, an enjoyable, companionable pastime; tournament golf is thrilling, heartbreaking, terribly hard work—a lot of fun when you are young with nothing much on your mind, but fiercely punishing in the end.

  Competition in any line of sport is today frightfully keen. In golf, both the professional and amateur fields embrace far more dangerous players than were to be found twenty years ago. The game is spreading like wildfire.

  This means that to keep step with the field, from a competitive angle, is growing more and more difficult every year for the men who have businesses and professions to look after. One has either to enter a competition, conceding to his opponents the advantage of practice and preparation, or to take the time himself at the expense of other endeavors to play himself into form.

  Aside from the time required for preparation, there is the equally important question of keenness. When a youngster embarks upon a career in competition, the whole thing is a great lark; no one knows who he is nor expects him to do anything; he can play to beat all if he likes, fight as hard as he can and congratulate himself if he makes a good showing. Being completely free of responsibility, he can have a great time. But let him begin to win and all this changes; he is now expected to do things; he carries a weight of responsibility on his shoulders; he is followed about the course, and if he fails, he is not allowed to forget it for a long time.