Memories of Freddie Tait
by Bernard Darwin
What Would We Not Give to Hear His Pipes Again?
First Published American Golfer 1933
Wikipedia entry: Frederick Guthrie Tait (January 11, 1870 - February 7, 1900) was a Scottish soldier and amateur golfer.
Born in Edinburgh, the third son of eminent physicist and fanatical amateur golfer Peter Guthrie Tait, Frederick was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and Sedbergh School. He entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst at the second attempt and is credited with introducing golf there. Tait joined the 2nd battalion, the Leinster regiment (109th foot) and then the 2nd battalion, the Black Watch.
Tait was an extremely powerful and long hitter of the ball. At The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews on January 11, 1893, he hit the ball 250 yards, the ball then rolling on frozen ground and coming to rest 341 yards from the tee, thereby refuting his father's calculation that 190 yards was the maximum possible flight. Tait won the The Amateur Championship twice (1896 and 1898), finished third in The Open Championship twice (1896 and 1897) and was leading amateur in the same competition on six occasions.
Tait was killed in action at Koodoosberg during the Second Boer War.
IT IS PLEASANT TO BE ASKED TO WRITE SOME memories of Freddie Tait, because he fell in the South African war now over thirty-two years ago, and one naturally begins to be afraid lest he be forgotten. To be sure, his name remains among that of the ancient and unquestioned heroes, but to most of the golfers of today he can be no more than a name. Let me try then to set down what manner of man and golfer he was, and try to explain the secret of his extraordinary fame.
In his day and in his own Scotland he was a national hero. I do not think I have ever seen any other golfer so adored by the crowd-no, not Harry Vardon or Bobby Jones in their primes. It was a tremendous and to his adversaries an almost terrifying popularity. He was only thirty when he was killed; a brave young man, like many others who were killed, a very good specimen of the plucky, cheerful, openairish regular soldier; a thoroughly friendly creature, who made friends with all sorts and conditions of men, but not in any way possessed of an outstanding mind and character.
He was just a thoroughly good fellow who played a game very skilfully and in a cheery and chivalrous spirit. Yet, when he died, it is hardly too much to say that Scotland went into mourning, and his old friend John Low wrote a full-sized biography of him that was widely read. This is a remarkable state of things, and there was some remarkable quality about this otherwise ordinary man which, in the language of the theatres, "got across," so that he had only to step onto the links for everyone to follow him.
There was one thing about him that appealed intensely to the Scots, namely, that Freddie was above everything else a Scottish golfer. Discussion simply ceased for him when any other course was compared with St. Andrews. He stood by the old course and in the old ways. He liked the thrust and parry ol match play and regarded score play as nc more of a game than rifle shooting. He lovec' in particular the foursome, and, when he played in one, was always most particular tc consult his partner on any possible point ol tactics. Moreover he had, as it seems to us that almost parochial sort of patriotism whicl wants above everything else to see the Eng lishman beaten. These were some of the things in his charac ter that made the crowd love him, but then was further something in his manner of play ing that drew them to him as a magnet. Hehad beyond question a wonderfully gay and gallant way with him, when playing a big match, a cheerful and brave and confident, though never a swaggering, way. Attraction is always apt to be mutual and perhaps the crowd loved Freddie because he loved the crowd. He never "played to the gallery," for there was no touch of self-consciousness, and he did not show by the movement of an eyelid that he knew the crowd was there. But he liked the tramp of the feet behind him and the squeezing his way through the serried ranks around the putting green. He liked the feeling of being in the ring because it inspired him to fight his hardest and best.
His actual shots, too, made a great appeal, because his game combined two qualities not always found together. He seemed to be hitting the ball almost gently, at any rate not nearly as hard as he could, to be playing "well within himself." At the same time he could, if need be, pull out a colossal shot and some of his recoveries were historic. To talk overmuch of a golfer's recoveries is often to give to those, who have never seen him, a false impression. Many people, I fancy, think of Tait as a wild and terrific hitter, with an exaggerated "St. Andrews swing," who was constantly off the course and as constantly saving himself. This was not so. Though a St. Andrews golfer he had not the typical slashing style of Fife; his swing was not noticeably long; the club was taken back slowly, under very obvious control, and he seemed to be steering it to the very end of the follow-through. Now and again he could, it is true, play a surprisingly crooked shot, and, in that regard, it must be remembered that he often had leave from his regiment only a day or two before a championship, and was apt to be rather short of practice. When he did play that wild shot he could and did make noble amends, but in his best game there were no recoveries because none was needed.
As quite a young man, Freddie had a great reputation as a driver, and he made one vast drive on frosty ground at St. Andrews which was said to have disproved the theories of his father, an eminent professor of physics, as to how far a ball could go. Later he kept these mighty swipes for emergencies and made accuracy his aim from the tee. I ought to add here that he had no truck with any such innovations as the overlapping or Vardon grip and held his club in the old-fashioned way with the right hand noticeably underneath the shaft.
In my recollection the most interesting parts of his game were his iron play and his putting. He was a thorough master of all iron clubs, but, as befitted one brought up among the banks and bracs of St. Andrews, he liked best the pitch and run and could play it in every conceivable form, varying with the nicest artistry the height of the pitch and the length of the run. He must have been very strong in the forearms (incidentally, he was a fine gymnast), for he could send the ball very far with very little apparent effort. Mr. John Low says of him that he "hardly ever used the half or threequarter swing at all; every iron shot was a development of the forearm stroke and his whole approach play a glorification of the so-called wrist shot."
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| Lt. Freddie Tait in formal uniform. This picture was made just before his untimely death during the Boer War. |
His putting was done with a decidedly lofted cleek, so that the ball, when he struck it, leaped perceptibly in the air. He perhaps counteracted this loft a little by standing somewhat in front of the ball, but it was a very free style, and never was there a putter who so regularly obeyed the maxim "never up, never in." He was always going for the hole and his reputation as a lucky player was, I think, due to this persistent boldness. Fortune favors the brave at golf, and there never was a timid putter yet who got the name of being lucky. How clearly I can see him now thrusting out his right foot in a most characteristic gesture as the ball hits the back of the tin and drops at the end of a long putt.
Freddie never won the Open Championship though he was several times near the top of the list. I doubt if he ever had the mechanical accuracy quite to keep up for four rounds against the best professionals-and Vardon, Braid and Taylor were his contemporaries. He had it in him to beat any man in a match and his two chief triumphs were his victories in the Amateur Championship of 1896 and 1898. They were won in his two distinct manners, the first by absolutely faultless golf, the second by a series of heroic recoveries following on wild shots.
I was not at Sandwich in 1896 but I did see him win at Hoylake two years later and never shall I forget his beating John Low in the semifinal at the twenty-second hole. I was a partisan of John Low that day and it certainly did seem to me that he was fighting not against a mortal man but against the devil that was in his jerkin. Two vast wooden club shots did Freddie lay so near the hole, if not positively dead, that he holed the putt. One was at the sixteenth over the cross bunker. One, even more crucial at the twenty-first, and in each case his wretched adversary had played faultlessly, whereas Freddie had made some mistakes that deserved to be fatal.
Moreover, at the twentieth he holed a great racing putt over a ridge and furrow green. That putt really was lucky, I believe, for Freddie looked a beaten man. Over those brassie shots he took plenty of pains, addressing the ball very deliberately, but he just went up to the ball and hit that putt as if in despair. His two chief rivals were the two giants of Hoylake, Harold Hilton and John Ball. Hilton was nearly always beaten. That great little man simply could not play against him, and Freddie took perhaps some unchristian pleasure in crushing him. I remember particularly the Amateur Championship of 1898-the first I ever saw. Hilton was Open Champion, in great form and on his own Hoylake. He had to meet Freddie Tait in the fourth round and all Liverpool was coming out to see the match. At lunch time I saw Freddie assiduously practicing putting in front of the clubhouse. "Is it going well?" someone asked him, and he answered with a victorious ring in his voice, "It will be this afternoon." It did; so much so that he won by six and five and the poor Open Champion crumpled sadly beneath the attack.
The other Hoylake champion, John Ball, had something the best of Freddie. He could and did generally beat him and only the most perfervid of Scots-I am English-will deny that John Ball was the greater golfer. Their most historic match was at Prestwick in 1899Freddie's last championship before he sailed for South Africa. He was at one time in the morning five up but he pulled down to three at luncheon and was finally beaten after a desperate struggle by John's driving a three at the thirty-seventh hole.
One must be allowed to be a little obstinate about the heroes of one's youth and I shall always maintain that this was the greatest golf match I ever saw, not by any means the most perfect in play, but the most nearly divine in point of god-like thrusts by either side. The Hoylake supporters in a body retired to the clubhouse after the thirty-sixth hole. They could endure no more and waited, with their heads presumably buried in cushions, till someone came to tell them what had happened.
It was in that match-at the thirty-fifth hole -that two much quoted shots followed one another from the big Alps bunker, Freddie playing the ball out of a deep puddle on to the green and John Ball following with an equally great shot from hard, wet sand close under the face of the black wooden sleepers. I can still see Freddie's ball rocking on the little waves that he made in the puddle as he waded in. I can hear a Scottish friend next to me crying out in an agony, "Wait until it settles, Freddie, wait till it settles." I don't think he had the least notion that he was speaking above a whisper. Yes, that was a day of heroic emotions.
The ball that floated was of course a guttie and Freddie never played with or heard of another kind. He was dead and buried before the Haskell caught on. As far as it is possible to form a judgment he would have been exactly suited to the rubber-cored ball, even though his sturdy, conservative soul would have hated it. It would have responded to the full to his restrained and almost persuasive stroke. How he might have fared against the champions of today is a futile inquiry, but he was a very great golfer with a certain exciting quality in his game that has never been surpassed. If he had lived he would have been sixty-two today, no longer a champion but still, if I mistake not, a formidable player and a great partner in a foursome around St. Andrews.
Let me end with the late Mr. Andrew Lang's words about him. "I never heard a word said against him except a solitary complaint that, in the lightness of his heart, he played pibrochs round the drowsy town at the midnight hour. What would we not give to hear his pipes again?"