THE AMERICAN INVASION
From GOLF BETWEEN TWO WARS by Bernard Darwin
Publihed by Chatto & Windus, London 1944
IN 1920 there first appeared in this country at the age of 28 IWalter Hagen, not only a very fine player but an extraordinarily picturesque figure, a godsend to those who like to write "colourful" descriptions and retail anecdotes. He was a man as to whom it was hardly possible to take a neutral view; you might like or dislike him but he compelled your attention; his character and flavour were such that they could not be neglected. The sum of his golfing achievements is so large that it is only possible to set down a few of them, and in any case the man himself was to most people more interesting than his feats; he had such a way with him that crowds were ready to watch him when he had not the remotest chance of winning. In fact apart from numberless big tournaments in his native country-and he had the happy knack of winning when there was the largest number of dollars at stake-he won two American championships and four British ones. Yet I am inclined to cite as his most remarkable feat the winning for four consecutive years of the American P.G.A. tournament. That correspond to our `News of the World' tournament and is played for by matches and, considering the strength of the opposition, to win it four years running (he won it in another year as well) was truly astonishing. It showed more than anything else that power of dominating, almost of cowing his rivals which was one of his strongest assets.
There have been, I think, more skilful and certainly more mechanical and faultless players than Hagen, but none with greater sticking power or a temperament more ideally suited to the game. He was a strange mixture of two usually contrasted elements, on the one hand the casual and the happy-go-lucky, on the other the shrewd, long-headed, observant and intensely determined. His manner while playing was a reflection of his nature, for he could "let up" between strokes and converse in a carefree manner with a spectator and then switch off this mood and switch on one of single-minded attention to the next stroke to be played. No doubt while he was talking with such apparent insouciance his mind was busy looking ahead, but he had an almost unique power of relaxing and never presented that aspect of stern and solemn pugnacity without which the less happily gifted cannot concentrate their minds. Much, too much, has been written of Hagen's gifts as a "showman" and no doubt he fully understood that his casual manner, with a touch of flamboyant swagger about it, went down well with the crowd. No doubt also he could and did turn it on as some people can turn on, sometimes too palpably, their charm. But the casualness was natural to him and not forced. It helped him to take a strenuous life easily and unexhaustingly. It likewise enabled him to run things fine in point of time and even to be late in a way which might exasperate other people but did not cause Hagen himself to turn a hair. Others might wish to lie in bed or to stay in their baths, but they could not do so because of some malignant sprite whispering in their ears that they might have to hurry to the tee or even be disqualified. Hagen stayed in his bath as long as he pleased and trusted to the chapter of accidents. Possibly he was rather a spoilt child in this matter in that promoters of tournaments knew his value and were always ready to make allowances for what was "pretty Fanny's way". There were occasions, notably in a certain match here against Abe- Mitchell, when Hagen did considerably ruffle everyone by this inconsiderate lateness. There were not wanting those who said that it was part of a deep-laid scheme to disturb his adversary, much as in older and less scrupulous days men would deliberately fret a nervous adversary by breaking away at the start of a hundred yards' race. Personally I think such accusations were utterly unfounded. I do not for a moment believe that he had any such design; this would not have accorded with his code; he was just irretrievably casual and had the bump of punctuality, if there be such a thing, very imperfectly developed.
That Hagen had an overpowering effect on some of his opponents was clear enough. His demeanour towards them, though entirely correct, had yet a certain suppressed truculence; he exhibited so supreme a confidence that they could not get it out of their minds and could not live against it.
They felt him to be a killer and could not resist being killed. He had a very shrewd eye for their weaknesses and, strictly within the limits of what was honest and permissible, he would now and then exploit them to his own advantage. I heard a story the other day of Hagen's tactics which seems to me eminently characteristic, and I believe it to be true. He was playing in one of those four consecutive finals of the American P.G.A. tournaments which he won, and with one hole to play the match was all square. Hagen having the honour sliced his drive and the ball sailed away into a wood on the right while his adversary went rigidly down the middle. Hagen carefully examined his ball and emerged from the wood for a minute to have the crowd moved back, as if he were going to make the best of a bad job and play out sideways. He went back into the wood, had another look and then, as if suddenly spying a loop-hole of escape, played a magnificent iron shot through a gap in the trees right on to the green. The flabbergasted enemy put his ball tamely into a bunker and the match was over. Now it would be a poor compliment to Hagen's intelligence to imagine that he had only just seen this loophole. He had seen it at once; he had reckoned that his second shot would be a disappointment to the enemy and that the disappointment would be heightened by the little preliminary drama. That was legitimate whether according to the law or to Hagen's code of ethics. You may approve or disapprove but you cannot but be struck by the cold, clear brain that can thus think things out at such a moment.
Hagen's dominating personality and his extreme astuteness have given rise to many stories, some of which at least are apocryphal, and to his being endowed by the public imagination with all manner of mysterious and almost sinister powers. This is to my mind largely nonsense. For instance, whenever the Ryder Cup Match was about to be played and Hagen was the American captain, it was said that he would out-manoeuvre our captain, whoever he might be, and twist him round his finger. That Hagen was an excellent captain no one can doubt, as good a one as a team could desire; but when all is said what can the captain of a golf side do besides putting his men in the best possible order and encouraging them in every possible way? He is not like the captain of a cricket eleven who may turn the whole fortunes of the day by understanding an enemy's weakness and making an inspired change in the bowling; he does not even know beforehand in what order the enemy will be arrayed. He can be the best possible leader but he can be no more, and to attribute to him Machiavellian designs or mesmeric powers is absurd. People like to believe these things because they enjoy having their flesh made to creep, but such stories must not be taken too seriously. Let me say something of the more technical and perhaps less interesting side of Hagen's game. He was, I should say, a strong rather than a conspicuously accurate driver with a tendency to make one or two really crooked shots in the course of a round, and a preference for a strong shot with an iron to a wooden club through the green. On the whole his wooden club play was the least impressive part of his game, though it became both sounder and more stylish on his later visits to this country. When he first appeared here there was a touch of something that the hypercritical might call "straggling" about his swing, and this disappeared. Duncan has pointed out about certain players (Ray was one of them) that they came gradually to keep their bodies throughout the swing in the same space which it occupied in addressing the ball. Perhaps, if it be not fanciful to say so, something of this change came to Hagen. He looked less forceful and more compact. His long iron play was always very fine but it was in pitching, in all sorts of bunker shots, especially the more delicate ones, and in putting that he excelled. He had a fine stance on the green, comfortable and yet rock-like, and a velvety touch. It would hardly be possible to name a better putter day in and day out,,but that which more than anything else at once fascinated the crowd and made him so formidable was his power of recovery.
If it could be said of anyone that he was not afraid of bunkers it could be said Of Walter Hagen. He wasted no time on vain regrets; he assumed that he would make a wild shot or two in a round and accepted the results not merely with philosophy but, as it almost seemed, with a lifting of the spirits. "There she lies," he was supposed to say of a ball in trouble and that was the one important fact; how it had got there was part of the irrevocable past and did not matter; the point was how to get it out again as well as possible, and no man had a greater repertory of recovering shots nor used a greater variety of clubs for them from a putter upwards. Especially was he skilled in taking the ball out cleanly from a bunker, a shot needing immense confidence, since a grain or two of sand may ruin it. I shall never forget one such shot he played at the fifteenth hole at Sandwich, I think in the second championship he won there. It was in the last round and he was apparently well set to win though he had nothing much to spare, for Sarazen was behind him with a good chance. That bunker is a fairly deep one with a fairly steep bank, and many a stout-hearted player, however good the lie, would in his situation have played an `explosion' shot and made as sure as might be of his five. Hagen took one good look at the ball, then flicked it out with exquisite precision close to the hole, and that as if it were the easiest shot in the world, played in the least important of half-crown games. The beholder of such strokes, and he played many of them, was divided between a desire to damn his eyes for his impudence and fall on his neck for his dauntless skill.
I had first seen Hagen at the Country Club at Brookline in i g 13, but he was then only beginning to come into prominence in his own country and he had not, I am afraid, made any particular impression on me. I have a much clearer recollection of Jim Barnes, then of Tacoma. Barnes, although the sturdiest of Englishmen and Cornishmen, had then an aspect which to the stranger suggested the Wild West. His mop of fair hair, his tall and lanky frame, his looseness of build everything about him brought to mind some of the San Francisco figures in The Wrecker. Both he and Hagen were well in the hunt almost to the end in that championship, for when both Vardon and Ray faltered in the last round they gave several people a good chance of catching them, though only Francis Ouimet succeeded in taking it. I was, however, so much occupied first in watching our own two champions and then in chasing Francis with a frantic crowd over his last nine holes, that Barnes and Hagen had to be left to the imagination. By a good fortune that does not always attend the reporter, both faded out a little and finished three and two strokes respectively behind the winners. It was in any case a different Hagen who came here in 1920, seven years older and with the prestige of two American championships at his back. He was obviously good and he and Barnes accomplished at least one considerable victory in a four-ball match, but I do not think we were very much afraid of him; our faith in our own men was as yet unshaken and as it turned out there was nothing to fear. Barnes finished sixth but Hagen failed rather dismally, though everyone admired the good-humoured way in which he ploughed round on the last day with never a soul to watch him. He might have said with Disraeli, "The time will come when you will hear me," but the time had not quite come yet.
He played far better at St. Andrews in 1921 than at Deal in 1920 and America's time had come, but through another agency. The winner was Jock Hutchison, a St. Andrews golfer born and bred, who had emigrated to the United States sometime before and was about 37 years old. I said just now that the reporter was not always fortunate and I look back on the Championship of 1921 as one of my unlucky ones, in that I seemed constantly to be watching the wrong man. As all the world knows Mr. Wethered tied with Hutchison and I should be ashamed to tell how few strokes I saw him play. Kerrigan, another American invader, was third, and in the course of a particularly hectic last round there came to me a rumour that Kerrigan had certainly won, whereupon I reflected gloomily that I had not seen him play one single stroke. I saw plenty of Hutchison for he was one of the favourites from the start and led the field on the first day; whatever else happened he represented the post of duty. He did not strike me then as by any means the typical St. Andrews player. If he had breathed the St. Andrews swing "into his growing frame with the sharp salt breezes of the East Neck of Fife" it had been considerably modified and Americanised since. In any case I think it must always have possessed characteristics markedly its own, for it gave an odd impression of a man swinging by numbers. It was all very rhythmically done, but there was that suggestion of a "three-piece" swing, with the three pieces perfectly and smoothly dovetailed.
That which above everything else won Hutchison his championship was his pitching. I do not know if he was the first man to carry the punching of the faces of irons to an extreme point but he was the first to show us here the value of it. His iron faces were rough and bristling with punches and he had thoroughly mastered the art of playing with them, so that he could almost bring the ball back from the pitch, and playing his strokes as he did with confidence and boldness he could largely set at naught many of the characteristic difficulties of his native greens. There was nothing about this that was not perfectly legitimate, but there was, I think, a fairly general' feeling that it came too much under the head of "buying a shot in the shop". So when this practice of roughening faces was later made illegal there were no dissentient voices. It had incidentally been otherwise when in 1904. Mr. Walter Travis had won the Amateur Championship putting with a Schenectady putter and this club was subsequently barred here but not in the United States. Then there was a feeling that the club had been barred because a stranger had beaten us with it. That certainly was not the reason, but the barring was perhaps from the point of view of international politics a maladroit gesture, the more so because Mr. Travis had not made himself very popular here-I think we were partly to blame-and had said some unfriendly things about us when he got home again.
However, I am wandering from the point and must come back to St. Andrews. From the start Hutchison set a fierce pace for he began with a'72, a fine round helped by at least one stroke of luck when he holed his tee shot at the eighth hole, and very nearly by another when he was within an inch or so of holing out again at the ninth, which is 300 yards or so in length. It is said that a spectator rushed forward and took the flag out and that had he stood still the ball would probably have gone in. Well, that is one of the many `ifs' of history and at any rate Hutchison had little to complain of with two consecutive holes in three strokes. He led the field by two strokes from Duncan, the holder, Massy, Kerrigan, Barnes and Hagen, so that already the foreign legions were massing at the top of the list and Britain's position was clearly threatened. Mr. Wethered, who was to come near to being its saviour, had begun with a 78 and attracted no attention. In the second round Hutchison played very well again for a 75 and kept the lead; Barnes with another 74 was second now only a stroke behind; then came Duncan and Herd, with all St. Andrews praying for him. Mr. Wethered improved with a 75, but he was still six strokes behind Hutchison. The third round is always said to be the critical one in an Open Championship and it certainly had this time a kaleidoscopic effect on the field. When it was finished Herd, having again improved by one stroke, sent everybody into the seventh heaven by leading with 222. Equal with him was Barnes with a third 74. Mr. Wethered had made a great stride with a 7i and was z25 and Hagen with a 72 joined him. Kerrigan had come back again after a bad second round and was 226. Hutchison had had his bad round of 79 and was also 226. It seemed as if almost anything might happen.
I have already confessed that I scarcely saw Mr. Wethered play a stroke that day, but apart from the magnificence of his golf, and it was truly magnificent, there are two things perhaps worth saying about it. On the last day he had a late starting time and he wanted to go south that night to play in a cricket match next day, whereupon a place was made in the list for him and his partner to start earlier. This seems an entirely natural and simple thing to do, but in looking back I think it was a mistake. The professionals did not like it for they argued that if one of them had asked for this favour it would not have been granted, and I daresay they were right. The time of starting can make a great deal of difference one way or the other, as all experience shows, and it is therefore better on these occasions to stick quite rigidly to the draw.
So much for the first thing; the second is that unlucky kick which Mr. Wethered gave to his ball in the third round. It is always assumed as an incontestable and logical proposition that if he had not incurred this penalty stroke he would have beaten Hutchison by one stroke. This seems to me an unjustifiable assumption. If he had not incurred the penalty Mr. Wethered might have beaten Hutchison by one stroke or by more than one stroke or he might not have tied with him. To assume otherwise is to neglect one obvious fact, that every happening in a round of golf has some effect on the player's mind and the state of his mind has some effect on his stroke. It is such an assumption as we all make about our own rounds, but it is founded on unsound premisses. All we can say about this penalty stroke is that Mr. Wethered did very unluckily lose a shot at a particular hole. What would have happened if he had not, no human being can tell.
Again I am wandering and again I must get back to strict business. Mr. Wethered was out early and improved on his 72 with a 71. There was only one sad thing about this great last round, and here is, I admit, another of those prohibited 'ifs' though of a different kind. He needed a four for 70, he had hit a fine drive and he pitched very short and took a five. There are some who have an almost fanatical regard for running up at St. Andrews and would say this was in the nature of a judgment. I would not say so, for there is no finer pitcher than Mr. Wethered and none with greater power of back-spin and he was right to play his own game. One can only grieve because a five at that last hole is not merely a loss of a stroke, it is a waste of a stroke.
While Mr. Wethered was doing these superb things the situation was gradually getting clearer. Herd and Barnes fell right away with 8o apiece. Havers and Duncan came well up but not quite well enough. That terrifying and by me unseen Kerrigan had a 72-good enough, heaven knows, but not quite the incredible score which rumour had given him, and was two behind the leader. It was now only Hutchison who could do it and he had a 70 to tie. It was a desperate deal to ask and yet, 'as I remember, many people thought he would do it and he looked like it all the time. I remember that he hit a prodigious hook off the last tee when he wanted a four to tie and thus he duly got his four. There were those who complained that such a drive ought to have been trapped. Such remarks showed a sad lack of golfing sense. There is, humanly speaking, no trouble at the home hole at St. Andrews and a man can drive as far to the left as he pleases. If there had been trouble it is in highest degree the improbable that Hutchison would have hit that hook.
The excitement that night at St. Andrews was tremendous, for there were present all the ideal elements-America versus Britain, and yet Scotland against England, for Scotland does not lightly give up its claim to its citizens; professional against amateur and that amateur engagingly young, and, another point not to be forgotten at St. Andrews, a member of the Royal and Ancient. Next morning before the play began there was the sensation of a lull before the storm and of half painful, half-agreeable shivers down the spine, which is sometimes the almost unbearable prelude of a great foot race. I can still see Hutchison, adding a little touch of preliminary drama, "warming up" in true American fashion by hitting ball after ball away from the edge of the turf on to the beach. I never remember a more intense thrill before a game, but it was a thrill in which high hopes did not figure. All hearts, save some local ones perhaps, might be with the amateur, but, grandly as Mr. Wethered had played, there was a feeling not to be fought down, that if play goes on long enough the professional is almost bound to win. For four rounds the amateur had held him but these were the fifth and sixth rounds. In fact Hutchison always looked likely to win. Mr. Wethered hung on well in the morning with 77 against 74 but faded just a little in the afternoon and took 82 against 76. The United States had won its first Open Championship, though it was imperfect consolation that Hutchison was a Scot in disguise. The cup had to make its first voyage across the water since Massy had won at Hoylake.
In the next year, 1922, came Hagen's turn. The American professionals have a habit of saying of a tournament that it was So-and-so's tournament, meaning, I take it, that So-and-so was from the start playing winning golf, that the run of the green was with him, that his victory was all the time predestined. I have always had it in my mind that this 1922 Championship was Hagen's, that he looked all the time a winner. I am still inclined to think that there was such a feeling in the air at Sandwich, but a glance at the scores show me that such an intuition came very near to being wrong and that I had forgotten a good deal. Duncan's wonderful last round spurt (there is something of tragic bitterness' still in remembering how it just failed) had wiped everything else from the mind. In fact it looked very like an American championship from the start and still more so with one round to go, but it was not at all sure that the agent of victory was to be Hagen.
What happened was very briefly this. Hagen got briskly off the mark and after the first two rounds he was at the head of the field with a 76 and a 73, with Barnes one stroke behind him. -Hutchison, defending his title, had had his bad round to begin with: his scores were 79 and 74.. Incidentally if he had the luck with him at St. Andrews he did not have it at Sandwich. A just too strong approach at the fourth hole went through the fence by a few inches while other more fortunate balls rebounded from it, and I believe he hit the rail of a bridge over the Suez Canal at the fourteenth. No doubt he ought to have taken care not to hit that rail and bad luck is a thing hard to define, but at least that other indefinable thing, the run of the green, was hardly with him. Once again the third round appeared to alter the whole complexion of affairs, and here a curious parallel may be drawn between Hutchison and Hagen. At St. Andrews Hutchison had slipped back with a 79 in the third round and now it was Hagen's turn to suffer in exactly the same degree. Hutchison bounded forward with a 73. So with one round to go it was Hutchison who led with 226 and behind him came in a triple tie, Hagen, Barnes and Charles Whitcombe, who had made a sudden and splendid thrust with a 72. It still looked like an American win for, fine player as we knew Charles Whitcombe to be, this 'was the first time he had been prominent in a championship and he was hardly to be regarded as of the same stature as those three invaders. As to Duncan he seemed to have put himself out of court with an 81 and was six shots behind the leader.
There was no fading-away by any of the leading four in the last round. Barnes 73, Whitcombe 75, Hutchison 76 all wrought manfully but Hagen played irresistibly well for his 72, and when he led by a stroke all was apparently over. He himself, and I have a clear vision of him, was smoking a cigar in evident relief ancL in complete solitude near the first teeing ground. Duncan remained far out in the distance and I resolved, rather against the grain at the end of a tiring day, to go and look for him. Partly a sense of duty urged me on and partly a wild hope. I knew that in Jack White's year both Taylor and Braid had broken 70 in heroic attempts to catch him in the last round and what had happened once might happen again. But the Sandwich of 1922 was a different course from the Sandwich of 1904. Duncan was to be sure incalculable, but the hope was a faint one.
Trudging across the course, cursing my own conscience, I picked up Duncan and his partner by the twelfth green and then I had my reward in six holes of delicious agony. He had but a handful of spectators with him and these were divided between joy and despair. They were full of joy over Duncan's astonishing play up to the flag and of despair because he could not crown these inspired approach shots by holing the putts.
As I have said elsewhere, Duncan in a 'crazy' mood does produce those feelings' *for the putts look so holeable for those who have not got to hole them. I cannot believe that he had been putting downright badly, but his approaching had given him chances of doing wholly marvellous things and he had not quite clinched them. Still he had good hope and he continued to play superbly and to get no help from Providence on the greens. One shot I seem to remember particularly, a lovely second lashed right up to the fifteenth pin, and a three at that hole would have been worth much fine gold-but the putt never looked in "off the club". Still on he went till he had a four for a 68 and a 68 would tie with Hagen. We thought he would do it; the tee shot was perfect and out came his spoon. Clearly he played to let the ball drift in a little from the left, his natural shot with the club. It started away to the left but alas! it never quite came in. In the case of a minor player I should say that here was bad luck, that he hit the ball just too well and truly. That is what most of us would say about a shot of our own, but that will not serve in the case of such a player as Duncan. There is nothing to say but that he did not quite play the shot he intended. ' His pitch or pitch-and-run was hit hurriedly and ended very short. It was all over; the man who had first set up a mark to be shot at had won again and the spurt had failed. But it remains one of the great spurts of golfing history.
The next year saw a temporary, not as we fondly hoped a permanent turning-back of the tide of American victories, for Havers won at Troon, with Hagen hot on his heels. It was the first time the Championship had been played at Troon, which came well out of the ordeal. It is a good and testing course if it lacks the charm of its neighbour Prestwick. It is well suited to the spectator, who having gone straight ahead for a certain number of holes can rest and be thankful near the little short hole which is called "The Postage Stamp", while the players struggle with the hillier circuit at the far end. Then he can pick them up again, having seen a good many amusing odds and ends from his eyrie, and so plod steadily home. Havers's win was a gallant and thoroughly well deserved one for he was the most consistent golfer in all the field. In the last year before the war when barely 16 he had achieved the remarkable feat for a boy of qualifying for the Championship; he had been fourth at St. Andrews in 1922 and now, having just had his 26th birthday, he came right to the front. He had a splendid physique, a fine notably upstanding and controlled style; he was not perhaps a very good putter by those American standards by which people had now to be judged, but he seemed good enough ; he had a good temperament with apparently just a valuable touch a4d no more of lethargy. When once he had won he raised high patriotic hopes and everyone looked on him as a future rock of strength against invasion; and yet in fact he never won again and never but once looked likely to. He remained as he is still, a very fine hitter of the ball, but the appetite for championships did not come to him in the eating. There are some players in whom ambition once satisfied is never quite so keen again and perhaps-I do not profess to know-he was one of them.
At any rate at Troon Havers played with a calm power hard to over-praise. For three consecutive rounds he had a 73 and then had to face the horrid ordeal of the fourth with just two strokes in hand from Hagen, three from Macdonald Smith and only one from Kirkwood. There was a time in the middle of the round when he frittered away a putt or two but the rest of the game remained steadfast enough. I remember, when it was clear that he could afford to drop no more shots, the joy of seeing him hit a straight and magnificent stroke right on to the plateau green, of the one-shot seventeenth hole. He finished in 76 and it was just good enough. Hagen was supposed to like and I believe genuinely did like a chase in which he knew exactly what he had to do. Even so I have a notion that he was human enough to play better as a rule when he had not that horribly precise knowledge. Now he had 744 to tie and he took 75. So did MacDonald Smith and there was a general disposition, soon to be shaken, towards believing that the lean years were over for good.
Two invading players figured in that story about whom I must say something before I end this chapter: Macdonald Smith-and Kirkwood. The latter indeed we had seen two years before but this was Macdonald Smith's first appearance, to be frequently renewed later. Kirkwood, an Australian who afterward settled in the United States, was certainly a remarkable, player, and since he was at different times 3rd, 4th and 6th in the Championship it must be conceded that he was a very good one, but somehow he did not look quite good enough. His style was a little lacking in rhythm and power as compared with that of the great masters: there was not the conspicuous firmness of foot and balance which marks them. Yet his mastery over club and ball was astonishing and his exhibition of trick shots, accompanied by very entertaining patter, was highly popular. It used to be said of him rather unkindly that he could do anything with a ball except hit a perfectly plain-sailing straight shot, and it may well be that what Mr. George Glennie would have indignantly called his "monkey tricks" were not very good for his straightforward golf. However that may be, he was always a threat but never a threat quite fulfilled.
Macdonald Smith was a golfer of a very different and a higher class, one who deserves serious consideration for the depressing honour of being the best player who never won a championship. Like Jock Hutchison he was a born Scot and had learnt his golf at Carnoustie where he was a member of a great golfing family. Before he was 20 he had gone to the United States and in i g i o had tied for the Open Championship there and lost on the play-off. It was the nearest he was ever destined to get to it. For some little time afterwards he rather mysteriously vanished from golf and I believe worked in a shipyard. At any rate when he came back to golf he soon made his presence felt and in the course of a long career won many big tournaments and doubtless many dollars, won almost everything except his heart's desire. I am always a little frightened of Scottish adjectives, being unable to distinguish clearly between "snell" and "caller", but I should be inclined to call Macdonald Smith a douce man, pleasant, quiet, shrewd, careful, knowing his business thoroughly and sticking to it. Perhaps he was not quite so unmoved as he looked, for somehow or other when the end drew near the prize always eluded his grasp.
Heaven knows he was a good enough player to win, and this was obvious to those who saw him for the first time at Troon. He had a fine, round, slow, smooth swing which seemed, perhaps because one knew he came from Carnoustie, to have in it something of the swing which Bobby Jones had learnt as a child from Stewart Maiden, another product of the Forfarshire school.
He was a supremely elegant player. He seemed, as it were, to do it all by kindness; everything he did suggested ease rather than strength, and his putting, with a notably long pause at the end of the take-back of the club, was wonderfully smooth. One might without reflection have fancied him playing with rather light clubs and it was a shock to handle them and find them in the nature of "barge poles", very stiff and thick in the shaft and decidedly heavy. He must have had plenty of strength at once to use them and to stop them from running away with him. Mac Smith-was very careful in everything he did, in coming over early to get well acclimatised and learn the course, in taking a preliminary swing before the shot, in planting his feet with the greatest nicety. Even though the heart grew sick at the cup going steadily back across the Atlantic, he was one of the invaders that one would have liked to see win. He had his chances, and especially one great chance to which I shall come presently. There is only one Championship every year and Fortune does not like having her favours flouted.