Hilton of Hoylake
BY BERNARD DARWIN
The Only Englishman to Win the United States Amateur Championship
From American Golfer 1933
Harold Hilton (1869-1942) was an English golfer. In 1892, he won The Open Championship at Muirfield, becoming the second amateur to do so. He won again in 1897 at his home club, Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Hoylake. The only other amateurs who have won the Open Championship are John Ball Jnr. and Bobby Jones.
Hilton also won British Amateur Championship on four occasions, including 1911, when he became the only British player to win the British and U.S. Amateur Championships in the same year.
THIS YEAR'S AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP AT HOYlake will be the first Championship there for eight and forty years to lack both the two great Hoylake golfers, John Ball and Harold Hilton. That is in some sort a memento mori, a rather sad and solemn thought if we are allowed -- and I suppose we are not -- to take games and its heroes either sadly or solemnly. And they were heroes, those two.
Just before I got a letter asking me to write something about Mr. Hilton, I had had the pleasure of seeing him again. I went down for one night and a round of golf to Cooden Beach in Sussex, where he now lives, and we had long talks together. It made me feel rather old because we talked mostly of golfers who to the others in the room were little more than names.
When Mr. Hilton got out of his chair in describing how Johnny Laidlay had played a particularly long stealing run up at a particular hole, held an imaginary club in a delicate, caressing grip, threw himself into an attitude and said, "You know how he played them," I did know and I could in my mind's eye see the whole scene. The rest listened full of interest as people always will listen to Mr. Hilton when he talks about golf, but they could see nothing: for them he might as well have been talking of the now legendary Allan Robertson.
It must not be thought from this that Mr. Hilton lives in the past of golf. He is not very strong nowadays, though he is but sixty-four, and save for a little putting he plays no more, but he is as eager, as keen and interested in all the young golfers (and no man was ever kinder to youngsters) as he ever was; he can see as quickly as ever he did what they do wrong, and what they do right, and is as ready as ever to demonstrate it with that backhand movement of his left hand, a movement so characteristic that I think the mere mention of it must recall him to any who ever met him.
This is not a statistical article: it is rather, in a very humble way, a personal sketch. Still, as the years go ruthlessly on and make dim the brightest records, I had better set out Mr. Hilton's victories. He won two British Open Championships, at Muirfield in 1892 and at Hoylake in 1897; and he was within a painful inch (it hurts me to think about it) of winning two more. He won four British Amateur Championships -- 1900 at Sandwich, 1901 at St. Andrews, 1911 at Prestwick, 1913 at St. Andrews-and he was thrice also beaten in the final. He won one American Amateur Cham-pionship; namely, at Apawamis in 1911.
The number of his lesser victories, especially in score play, is as that of the sands of the sea. Till Bobby Jones appeared, it might safely be said of him that Mr. Hilton was the greatest of all amateur score players. Even now I would say that no golfer, amateur or professional, that ever lived has known golf as he has. To me he stands unrivalled in his power of observation and inference, in his understanding of how certain results follow from certain causes. Assuredly, too, because he is a highly strung man with the temperament of an artist, nobody has seen more deeply into the golfer's heart nor better understood his mental as well as his physical difficulties. In one of our talks the other day at Cooden, we were discussing the fighting qualities of various golfers and somebody said to him, "You could fight pretty well too, couldn't you?" His answer was one worth remembering, "Sometimes-when I could see the humor of it all." That was a general truth, for we could all of us fight better, I suppose, if we could see the fun of taking three putts from a few yards or plumping a short pitch into a bunker in playing the one off two.
It was certainly a personal truth because Mr. Hilton, like all highly strung players, could suffer acutely enough over his golf. The particular instance he gave was of his match at St. Andrews in 1913 against Heinrich Schmidt, the young American who flashed into our golf that year like a meteor and nearly frightened us out of our wits. I don't know whether "meteor" is exactly the right word, because Mr. Schmidt took longer over the game that summer than anyone I ever saw, but I will let it stand: at any rate there is no doubt about the fright he caused. The two had a dour match and going to the seventeenth, the famous Road Hole of many and sinister memories, they were all even. Mr. Hilton had the best of the hole; he was nearly on the green in two and had to play a short run up. He played it with his putter, played a trifle too gently and too near the Road bunker and behold! the ball took a malignant curve to
the left (it is an ancient booby-trap at that bole) and swung right into the bunker!
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| One of the world's truly great amateurs-Harold Hilton, of England. He won four British Amateurs, one British Open, and one United States Amateur Championship. |
Now to putt into a bunker is not in a sense an amusing thing to do, but, just as Mr. Hilton was feeling rather miserable, he heard a Scotsman in the gallery exclaim "Good God" in tones of solemn anguish. That made him laugh; he played a fine bold shot out of the bunker, got his half, won the match by holing a long putt at the nineteenth and ultimately won the championship. The solemn Scot and his own sense of humor changed between them perhaps the course of golfing history.
That was an example of Mr. Hilton's fighting powers in match play, but his general reputation has always been that of a supreme score player, who was apt to fade away a little in a match. I do not think that reputation is at all fair to him. It comes from just one fact which is undeniable, namely that he could never do himself justice against his great rival and contemporary, Freddie Tait. In an Open Championship there was only one in it, Hilton; in a single combat between the pair, there was only one in it, Tait. Freddie had what I suppose would be called today the "Indian Sign" on Hilton. He thought he could beat him and he went out-perhaps a little truculently-to do it.
I remember one battle between them at Hoylake in 1898, when Hilton was the holder of the Open Championship and was playing the best golf he had ever played in his life. The whole of Liverpool came out to see it and they saw a sad debacle. Their own man got a good start, too; he was one up, I think, at the second hole; then he began to make slips and Tait began to hole long putts with a light of victory in his eye. In less than no time it was all over. That was a collapse; as a rule the matches were close enough, but Tait won them; he won them so steadily that Hilton never won an Amateur Championship till Tait had gone with his regiment to the South African War in which he was killed. Yet apart from that one insuperable weakness, I always will maintain that Harold Hilton was a good match player, who could spurt and cling on and recover from disaster as well as any other man. Did he not lose a whole winning lead of five holes to John Low in 1901 and then come away with two such full wooden club shots up to the pin at the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth holes respectively as could never be surpassed?
Still he was greatest with a card and pencil, perhaps because his astonishing accuracy with wooden clubs seemed to make as nearly as might be impossible any of those major disasters that wreck a card. By the irony of fate, he would, humanly speaking, have won one more Open Championship, if, for a single shot, he had stuck to his wooden club. That was at Prestwick in 1898, when Harry Vardon was at his prime.
In the second round Hilton came to the short fifth over the Himalayas with a fine score. He could easily have played the shot with his trusty spoon - there never has been a better spoon player - but some imp of fate induced him to take a long-iron that he did not know well. He pulled the ball around into a horrible place in the face of the big sandhills and took eight to the hole. Eight to a simple par three hole, and yet, in the end, he was just - and only just-beaten by Harry Vardon and Willie Park. Probably he learned a lesson as to trusting to his spoon, but at a cruel cost.
He was the most accurate of all the wooden club players of his day and yet a first sight of him would hardly have conveyed it. Imagine a short man (be is five feet six inches in height) with a long club placing his feet with meticulous care in regard to the line and then rather sitting down to the ball. The waggle is careful and restrained; then suddenly all is changed; he seems almost to jump on to his toes in the upswing and fairly to fling himself at the ball.
There is no doubt at all that he is on his toes at the moment of hitting and the follow through of body, head, arms and all is of unrestrained and glorious freedom. In old days when caps were smaller, his cap always fell off as the club came through. Here is a swing of fascinating vigor and dash, hardly at first sight one which would tend to deadly accuracy. Yet the fact remains that it did, and not merely to accuracy but to accurate jugglery. He could play all manner of antics with the ball, and, when one sees Kirkwood's amazing tricks, one thinks that there was once an amateur who could fully have equalled them.
I have said little about his iron play, although it was very fine, especially in any stroke which called for much backspin. This is because his mastery of wooden clubs was so intensely interesting. It was with them, I think, that he had spent the greater number of those happy solitary hours of practice at Hoylake. He began his golfing life with a slight natural "fade" on his wooden club shots. Then finding that he wanted more length he acquired the "draw," and given a wind on his right shoulder, could hit an extra long ball with plenty of run.
Yet he never quite forgot his old shot. In 1911 at Prestwick, the ground was like a brick and the rough at the sides of the course very thick. Playing in the international match before the championship, he found that his d'rives with a draw on them were all finishing in the rough. Instantly he changed over and began to recultivate his fading stroke which he had not played for years. He had just about one day in which to make the change and he won that championship by means of keeping his necessarily rather shorter drives religiously on the fairway. That is surely an instance of real mastery of the game.
A master of the game-that is what Harold Hilton is. He has a natural quick and logical mind and remarkable powers of observation; and he might have devoted them to plenty of other things, but he chose to devote them to golf, and if any man can be said to "comprehend its mystery" he is the man. But I am suddenly afraid I may have made him out too serious or priggish about his game. That would be utterly and absurdly wrong, for he chuckles and bubbles over the ridiculous side of it and is altogether the friendliest and most companionable of creatures. I said before that he was very kind to young golfers. Well, we were all young once, and I shall never forget his friendliness to one juvenile golfer, who first set reverent eyes on him at Hoylake thirty-five years ago.
A swing series and analysis of Hilton's drive can be seen in the 'Master Classes' pages at http://www.hickorygolfers.com/swings/haroldhilton/hhdrive.htm