The Style of Harry Vardon
BY BERNARD DARWIN
A Sketch of One of Golf's Greatest
From American Golfer 1929
Wikipedia Entry:
Harry Vardon (May 9, 1870 – March 20, 1937) was an English champion golfer.
Harry Vardon was born in Grouville, Jersey, Channel Islands. As a child growing up on the island of Jersey, Harry Vardon did not play much golf. Inspired by his older brother, Tom, he eventually took up the game in his teens and by age 20 he was so good that he turned professional. Vardon was the first professional golfer to play in knickers -- the "proper" Englishman dressed in an uncomfortable shirt and tie with a buttoned jacket. Nonetheless, within a few years he became golf's first superstar.
In 1896, Harry Vardon won the first of his record six Open Championships (a record that still stands today). In 1900, he became golf's first international celebrity when he toured the United States playing in more than 80 matches and capping it off with a victory in the U.S. Open. Twenty years later, at the age of 50, Vardon was the runner-up at the 1920 U.S. Open.
During his career, Harry Vardon won 62 golf tournaments. He popularized the grip that bears his name, one still used by over 90 percent of golfers. In his later years, Vardon became a golf course architect, designing several courses in Britain. Following a bout with tuberculosis, he struggled with health problems for years but turned to coaching and writing golf instruction and inspirational books. Harry Vardon died in 1937 in Totteridge, Hertfordshire, England. After his death, the PGA of America created the Vardon Trophy. It is awarded annually to the player on the PGA Tour with the year's lowest adjusted scoring average.
In 1974 Harry Vardon was chosen as one of the initial group of inductees into the World Golf Hall of Fame. His most prestigious medals, including those from his six British Open Championships, are on display in a tribute to him at the Jersey Museum. In the annals of golf, Harry Vardon is considered one of the greats of the game.
Harry Vardon was a private and modest individual. A biography of Harry Vardon, published in 1991 and authored by his daughter-in-law, Audrey Howell, provides much intimate detail about the life of this champion.
AT MUIRFIELD LAST MAY WHEN THE GREAT body of onlookers went surging after the victorious Hagen, there were a few, liking art for art's sake, apart from victory, and disliking a crowd, who went elsewhere. This little band of connoisseurs, at once so modest and so select, was to be seen following Macdonald Smith and Harry Vardon. The one might well have won, but had had a bad time and was out of the hunt; the other, born in 1870, could not hope to win at this time of day. So they were to be watched purely because they were two of the most graceful and beautiful of all golfers.
Till they got to the greens there was nothing in it between them; the older man was fully holding his own in the power of his long game, in the crispness and accuracy of his iron shots. Only when it came to the putting, Vardon's old enemy beset him; he moved his body, he stabbed at the short ones, he went off "at half cock." Otherwise the years might have rolled away and here was still a great master and we might almost have been looking at the invincible player who had dominated golf at the beginning of the century. I am not going to argue as to whether or not Vardon is the greatest golfer that ever lived. These comparisons are futile. It is enough that he was the golfer of his time. He won the British Open Championship in 1896, 1898, 1899, 1903, 1911 and 1914; he won the American Championship in 1900. He was probably at his very best in 1898 and 1899, before his visit to America. In point of health and strength he was not quite the same man afterwards and he himself has said that he thinks he left a little of his game there. It was not till some little time later that his actual and very serious illness developed and he won two more championships after he was well again, but never again did he show the same utterly crushing superiority, which caused Andrew Kirkaldy to say that he would break the heart of an iron ox.
Of the "triumvirate"-Vardon, Braid and Taylor--Taylor is actually the youngest by a few months, but he was the first to make his name. He leaped into fame in 1893 when he began knocking down the big men like ninepins and in both 1894 and 1895 he was champion. Very few people had heard of Harry Vardon then, nobody perhaps save a few golfers in the north of England who had backed him in a home-to-home match against Sandy Herd and seen him badly beaten. In the winter of 1895-96 half a dozen leading professionals were asked to go out to play at Pau, France; someone of discerning judgment made Vardon one of the party and the rest of the world asked "who is this fellow Vardon?"
Then in the spring of 1896 Taylor, twice the champion, played Vardon on his home course at Canton in Yorkshire and came away beaten by a pocketful of holes and declared that here was the man that he feared most in the coming championship. It was a sound piece of prophecy, for the two tied at Muirfield and Vardon won on playing off. In the next year the new star waned a little and then in 1898 blazed out in full glory.
For the next two years, if Vardon was in the field no one looked any further for the winner; he crushed everyone. He once beat Taylor at Newcastle in Ireland by twelve and eleven and Taylor was playing his game. In 1900 he went to America and after that he was, right up till the war, one of the two or three unquestioned best, but he was never again, as he had been, in a completely different class from all the other golfers.
I remember very well the first time I saw him play. It was in the late summer of 1896 and he had won his first championship in the spring. I went over to Canton, where he was then professional, for a day's golf and there by good luck was the great man driving off. He hit just the sort of drive that he always did dead straight and rather high, the ball seeming to float with a particularly lazy flight through the air. The shot was obviously a perfect one and yet I was not quite so much impressed as I had expected to be. The style was so different from what I had been taught to admire; the club seemed to be taken up in so outrageously upright a manner, with something of a lift. No doubt I was stupid and uneducated. So at least were other people who ought to have known much better than I, and the general impression at first could be summed up in the learned words of someone, "These Vardons are not pretty players." Moreover, I think his style did change a little and become both more elegant and more sound. At any rate one of his most distinguished contemporaries has told me so, adding that when Vardon first appeared he used to let his right elbow fly out a little at the top of his swing and he certainly never did that afterwards. However that may be, all the world soon became converted and by 1898 his swing was recognized not only as one of genius but also as one of surpassing ease and grace.
Well now, what were the characteristics both of his method and its results which made him so devastating a conqueror? Results are easier to tackle and I will take them first. Vardon was first of all a magnificent driver. He was with a guttie ball uncommonly long, especially down the wind, and he was very straight. Taylor had been regarded as inhumanly accurate and so he was. Now here came Vardon, who rivalled his accuracy and added to it a little something more of freedom and power. He had a gift of hitting long carrying shots and, because of his upright swing, the ball would sit down with but little run where it pitched. This gift was of enormous value through the green. The brassie was not atrophied then, there were lots of wooden club shots to be played up to the pin, and Vardon, who often played them with his driver, could and did put the ball nearer the hole than other men could with their mashies. It was his most overpowering stroke and, even if he had been a bad putter then (which he was not), it left him little putting to do.
Then, he was superb with all iron clubs. He could command great length, if he needed it, and had in particular at one time a driving mashie which was as a driver in his hand. He was beautifully accurate in all pitching shots. Taylor had got there first and acquired the reputation of the greatest mashie player in the world, but I think Vardon was just as good. He was a good approach putter and at any rate an adequate holer out, though without the touch and delicacy of the really outstanding putter.
He had a calm and cheerful temperament, the game seemed to take very little out of him and he could fight, if need be, without appearing to be fighting at all. All these were valuable qualities, but, if one thing is to be picked out that made him supreme, it was that unique power of hitting long, soaring wooden club shots up to the hole side. "Two-shot" holes could be worthy of their name then, and given a course that had a number of them, Vardon was invincible. Other men might be scrambling on to the verge of the green and getting a certain number of fours, but he was putting for threes.
As to his style, photographs of him are probably familiar to the reader and give at any rate some impression. One thing noticeable in those pictures is that by comparison with the modern school, Vardon certainly made no fetish of the stiff left arm. Another thing is the uniform beauty of the follow-through. Time after time he would come right through, drawn to his full height, the club right round over his left shoulder, the hands well up, the left elbow tolerably high. It was the ideal copybook follow-through and he did it every time with an almost monotonous perfection.
Neither photograph, however-the top of the swing nor the finish of it-gives any real notion of how he took the club up and his method is very unlike anybody else's. First of all, he was a conspicuous example of the doctrine of "hands leading." In his day the books used to tell us that the head of the club should go back first and the wrists begin at once to turn away. In fact, I do not believe that any of the good players did anything of that kind, but they thought and taught that they did and the human eye was not quick enough to detect the fallacy. In Vardon's case, however, it was clear that he did none of these things; one could actually see the hands leading and the clubhead going back for some distance in a straight line before he slung it to the top of the swing. Neither does any photograph convey the small but still perceptible touch of lift in the upswing nor the little touch of sway.
His was essentially an upright swing in the days when orthodox swings were flat and was the more noticeable accordingly. He took the club up very straight, "too straight" as any selfrespecting caddie would have said in instructing his master. Then by way of natural compensation he flung the clubbead well out behind him and brought it down on to the ball with a big sweep. It was a beautifully free movement of one having a natural gift for opening his shoulders and hitting clean. And, of course, like the movements of all really great golfers, it was instinct with that mysterious thing called rhythm. No golfer in the world, not even Bobby himself, was ever more perfectly rhythmic than Harry Vardon.
One of the most notable features of Vardon's iron play was its beautiful cleanness. He just shaved the roots of the grass and made no gaping wound in the turf, and that was so, even in the shot singularly ill-named the "push-shot," about which industrious journalists wrote columns when Vardon was devastating the country. Down came the club hitting the ball first and going on to graze the turf, and away flew the ball starting low and then rising gradually to fall very dead from the undercut put on it. He played this shot often with a cleek and he played it with his iron; he had not a whole series of irons to play it with as his successors have today.
In re-reading what I have written I find I have said nothing about the Vardon grip. Well, Vardon certainly discovered it for himself and made it popular; but Taylor at Westward Ho! had also discovered it for himself while Vardon was doing the same in Jersey and Mr. Johnny Laidlay had discovered it long before either of them, at North Berwick, while those two were tiny boys. Still it is a convenient name and I hope the day will never come when some young golfer who has just learned it asks "Who was Vardon?"