The Supreme Match Player
by Bernard Darwin
The Man Who Won Eight British Amateurs
First Published in American Golfer 1934
Editors Note:John Ball (December 24, 1861-1940) was a prominent English amateur golfer of the late 19th and early 20th century.
After winning the British Amateur in 1888, Ball became the first English-born player to win The Open Championship in 1890, and in the same year won his second Amateur, the first to win both titles in the same year. Ball subsequently won the 1892, 1894, 1899, 1907, 1910, and 1912 Amateurs, a record eight titles in all in addition to two runner-up finishes. Ball was also runner-up in the 1892 Open.
Ball was extremely modest and never talked up his golfing achievements - they largely spoke for themselves. He was an outstanding golfer both in terms of victories and the longevity of his career. Perhaps, his memory is over-shadowed by Bobby Jones, but he will be remembered as one of the finest British golfers ever.
CHRISTMAS DAY OF LAST YEAR WAS THE SEVentieth birthday of that very great golfer who was first known as Mr. John Ball tertius, then Mr. John Ball junr. and is now Mr. John Ball. It is almost superfluous to add that he was born at Hoylake in Cheshire, for he was a very small boy when that famous course was first laid out and the names of the links and its supreme hero have been inescapably intertwined ever since.
Mr. Ball's chief victories (his minor ones are innumerable) may be baldly set down. He won the Open Championship once-in 1890being the first amateur ever to do so; he won the Amateur Championship eight times, in 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1899, 1907, 1910, 1912, that is to say five times with the guttie ball and three times with the rubber core. That is a remarkable record, but it does no more than bare justice to Mr. Ball's powers and certainly cannot convey-I fear no words of mine can do so-the almost idolatrous hero-worship with which he is regarded.
It is one of the consolations of growing old that one has seen some things which younger people never can see, and for my part I am profoundly sorry for those who never watched Mr. Ball playing a big match before a big crowd at Hoylake. The hero himself, always with a boutonniere presented by some admirer; the bodyguard of rosetted stewards; the fishermen in their blue jerseys carrying the rope with the air of men performing a sacred rite; the tramp of the prayerful crowd behind that rope; the very errand boys on the road neglecting their work to hear how "John" was getting on-I have seen many scenes of enthusiasm in my wanderings over many links but never one like that. It possessed some quality of its own-touching, exciting, bringing a lump to the throat-which no words can depict, and we shall never see its like again.
A few great players of games have above all others this faculty of inspiring hero-worship, and it is characteristic of them that they become legends in their lifetime. They may not say much-and indeed Mr. Ball is a man of few words-but about what they do say there is something characteristic, so that their sayings pass into oft-recounted stories. What a number of stories there are at Hoylake about Mr. Ball! One of the most characteristic is of a medal competition years ago now, played when the wind at Hoylake was blowing as it can blow there. His score was strokes and strokes lower than anyone else's and his explanation of this was that "he happened to be hitting just the right sort of ball for the day."
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| The incomparable British Amateur, Mr. John Ball of Hoylake, who has won eight British Amateur Championships. |
Another, which I always like, is of a match which he played against a young golfer who was clearly overawed by the importance of the occasion. Mr. Ball soon had a lead of three or four holes and then he turned to a friend and said "I think we'll finish it at the Dun." The Dun is the sixteenth hole, quite near the clubhouse, and sure enough the young gentleman was allowed to get a hole or two back. Then, when it came to the Dun, Mr. Ball hit a great brassie shot right home over the cross bunker and finished the match by 3 and 2. It was in that same match that, at the third hole (the "Long"), his adversary put his tee shot into a bunker. "He's in the bunker," said one of the Hoylake supporters. "You didn't see, did you?" "No," answered Mr. Ball. "Why should I? It's my business to get a five."
There are other legends dealing with his invincible and almost obstinate modesty. On one occasion when he had won a Championship, tremendous preparations were made by the Hoylake crowd to receive him at the station. The crowd waited and waited and no hero ever arrived. Mr. Ball, with an instinctive knowledge of the terrors awaiting him, had got out at an earlier station and walked home unperceived across country.
On the occasion of another victory the Royal Liverpool Golf Club had his portrait painted and hung, where it still hangs, upon the stairs. It is alleged that for several years Mr. Ball steadily refused to pass it, and confined his visits to the clubhouse entirely to the ground floor.
Those little legends may give perhaps some notion of the man, silent, retiring, shrewd, resolute, a dour and a bonny fighter. It is curious to know that for the first year or two after the founding of the Amateur Championship, Mr. Ball was the despair of his Hoylake friends because he seemed never to be able to do himself justice in a big match. Then he came into his kingdom and from that moment he was known as the man for an apparently lost cause, who would emerge incredibly victorious from the most forlorn of hopes.
He was a supreme match player and it is worth noticing, from one of the small stories I told, that he did it by playing, as we now say, "against par." It was his business to go faultlessly down the middle and let the other man make the mistakes, and the more intense the crisis the more closely he stuck to business. He was, I think, rather a lazy starter, inclined not to bother himself over much, but there never was a fiercer finisher, and there was something about that relentless concentration that seemed to paralyze the enemy.
As he grew older he won his matches chiefly by lethal accuracy, but, when he had been younger and longer and stronger, it was not so much this mechanical precision that was feared as his power of putting in some irresistible thrust. Mr. Horace Hutchinson used to tell me pityingly that I was too young to have seen the real and greatest John Ball, who was always likely to let loose a knock-out blow at a critical moment.
I sometimes think that players with unsound methods are unjustly criticized for lack of nerve and conversely that those with a sound method are too loudly praised for indomitable courage. Undoubtedly a smooth swing that will continue to function, despite the player's agitation, is a very present help in trouble. Mr. Ball had a splendid nerve and he also had a swing travelling in so smooth and well-oiled a groove that nothing apparently could disturb it. Thus he was twice armed, and almost invincible.
The comparative beauty of different players' styles must always be a matter of opinion. I can only say that everybody is agreed that Mr. Ball's was a beautiful swing, and to me it was the most beautiful of all. Personally I should get more aesthetic ecstasy from watching him than from Bobby Jones and Harry Vardon put together, and it is hardly possible to say more than that. It is not possible to put the rhythm of a lovely movement into words and Mr. Ball's swing had a quality which, as the reviewers say of a book that puzzles them, "defies analysis." If one tries to take it to pieces, it may appear both unorthodox and unlovely.
He held his club with what is now rather disparagingly called a "palm grip"; but this was deceptive, for though the right hand seemed far under the club, yet the grip was really a light one with the fingers playing a far greater part than appeared. The feet were noticeably wide apart and the legs stiff; that sounds unattractive but it was not; it merely suggested the firmness of a rock.
The ball, especially in Mr. Ball's younger days, was very far back, almost by his right toe, but his pivot was so big and free and supple that there was not the faintest look of strain or effort as there might have been with another. As he grew older and just a little stiffer, he had his feet closer together, and the ball more forward, but it was in his earlier style that he hit his most fascinating shot, the ball starting very low, then rising gradually and finally falling almost dead. It was, I think, a peculiarly "guttie ball" shot and no one had it in greater perfection.
Mr. Ball was always a fine driver and in his youth a very long one, but it was his cleek and iron play that was his strongest point. It has often been said that it was J. H. Taylor who, when he first burst on the world, showed golfers a new standard of accurate iron play up till then believed unattainable. No doubt he had a great effect, but I believe Mr. Hilton to be right in saying that it was Mr. Ball, a few years earlier, who had first opened men's eyes to the possibilities of long and accurate iron play right up to the flag. At any rate he was superbly accurate, and he seemed to have an almost unique power of stopping his backswing at any point he desired and so had a wonderful control over every sort of "halfshot."
One extraordinary quality he undoubtedly possessed, namely that of playing high lofting shots with very little lofted clubs. If he could, he preferred to pitch just over a bunker and let the ball run, but he could loft as high and stop as dead as any man. Yet he hardly ever used a really lofted club; indeed, he once lost the final of a championship at St. Andrews by pitching into the burn at the nineteenth hole, because he used a mashie to which he was unaccustomed. A medium iron was his normal pitching club, and it was only in dire straits that he used a niblick in a bunker. Yet no one could get out of any horrid place better, and it is one of his complaints against modern greenkeepers that, with their raking and trimming, they make the bunkers far too easy. One comparatively weak joint there was in his harness; he was not entirely trustworthy over the short putts. Great players are easy targets for criticism on the green, and it was sometimes unfairly said of him, as of Harry Vardon, that he "could not putt." He was tomy mind a very good approach putter (so was Vardon ) and his only failing was that he had occasional bad days at the quite short ones.
I remember watching perhaps the most celebrated of all his matches, the final at Prestwick in 1899, when, having been at one time five down to Freddie Tait, he won at the thirty-seventh hole. That was one of his bad putting days and on every green his caddie produced for him a choice of three weapons, a swan-necked iron putter, a driving cleek and some sort of iron. It was, I think, with the iron that he holed the winning putt for a three at the thirty-seventh.
As I said just now, Mr. Ball is a good conservative and does not like some new ways. He likes bunkers that make you, in his own words, "scratch your head" and I have heard him call the modern ones "geranium beds." He does not profess to understand (I don't think he tries very bard) the whole numbered series of today's irons; I heard him chuckle with unchristian malice last year when a young gentleman took an eight-iron to play a simple running shot and left the ball halfway to the hole.
When he comes to Hoylake (as he still does sometimes, though he now lives in Wales) to play a foursome, it is with a limited and oldfashioned armory that he goes out to fight. He does not come as often as his friends would like, but when he does it is a very great occasion. Last year he watched the Amateur Championship there on one or two days. On one of these days I met a young man who was helping to marshal the crowd; he was pale and agitated and was clearly recovering from a shock. "0 Heavens," he exclaimed, "I've nearly done the most ghastly thing I ever did in my life. I saw an old gentleman where I thought he ought not to be; I was just going to shoo him away when I saw it was John Ball."
Poor young man! He was indeed saved just in time from a dreadful act of profanity, for if there is a golfing shrine upon earth, it is Hoylake and its deity is John Ball.