The Joy of Reader Responses

One of the joys of ONLY FRIENDS is the variety of reader responses I receive. Warm thanks to Tom Greeves who wrote last week that “Golf isn’t one of my sports, and yet you are drawing me in very adeptly!”. He cites precedents from javelin throwing and baseball to show that action to limit the use of new equipment can be wholly beneficial.

Apparently moving the javelin’s centre of gravity forward by four centimetres stopped it from being thrown well over 100 metres and therefore in danger of skewering other athletes. It also made it less likely to land flat and therefore easier to determine exactly how far it had been thrown.

Mr Greeve points out that Major League Baseball players are not permitted to use aluminium bats which are popular in college and amateur baseball. Elite batters would routinely score home runs with aluminium bats and make the game boring. Banning their use sounds like a smarter solution than building bigger baseball stadiums.

Anyway, guess what? Forcing top professionals to use inferior equipment didn’t kill off interest in baseball. It isn’t precisely the solution which the USGA and the R&A are adopting to limit further increases in how far golf balls are hit because eventually all classes of golf will use the same balls but it destroys the arguments advanced by their opponents, nearly all of whom have big financial interests they want to protect.

I was rightly taken to task by my old friend Newcomb Cole III for suggesting that holding the AIG Women’s Open at Royal St George’s in 2027 will prevent the Open from being played there the following year. It does nothing of the sort. My vision of the 2028 Open being branded The Walter Hagen Centenary Open lives on. Surely that’s preferable to it being at Turnberry and going down in history as Donald Trump’s Open?

Incidentally Hagen won his eleven majors before the Masters had even been dreamed of. It’s likely that he would have picked up another three or four if it had been inaugurated while he was still in his prime. That, coupled with the way he raised the status of professional golfers, justifies special recognition of his achievements.

On a lighter note, another reader mentioned Scott Lindbergh’s blue Porsche (see A Star is Born in Donegal ONLY FRIENDS August 2nd). Scott once took me to play at Gog Magog near Cambridge, a journey that reminded me of Henry Longhurst’s description of being driven twenty miles to Worlington in nineteen minutes by Billy Fisk in a supercharged 4 1/2 litre Bentley which reached 120 mph.

At the time Fisk was world record holder on the Cresta Run and he won gold medals at the 1928 and 1932 Winter Olympics as driver for the US bobsleigh team. Apparently he found it hard to hole five foot putts on the first nine holes after getting out of his car.

In World War II he volunteered to join Britain’s Royal Air Force (posing as Canadian because of America’s neutrality) and took part in the Battle of Britain. On 16 August 1940, having bravely landed his damaged plane safely, he had to be extracted from it just before it exploded and tragically died from surgical shock shortly afterwards. His statue in the US Embassy in London was unveiled last year.

Back to golf. Neither Scott nor I were regular golfers in those days so we needed rented clubs but Scott is left handed and none were available for him. Having got thus far he wasn’t to be denied and said “In that case do you have any for sale?” The assistant in the shop looked surprised but produced a brand new half set.. After a cursory inspection, which didn’t involve swinging a club, these were purchased and we went for a coffee.

News of the presence of an eccentric, though clearly solvent, American undergraduate spread fast. By the time we reached the first tee a dozen members and staff had gathered to watch from a discreet distance. Never having played in front of a gallery before I was relieved when my five iron became briefly airborne before bouncing into the rough a hundred yards away.

Scott strode on to the tee and waggled one of his new irons a couple of times rather impressively before selecting the driver. He took a huge, quick swing which sent the ball off sideways at a sharp angle. It hit some sort of obstruction and cannoned off before landing nearby on a closely mown grass surface.

Decades have passed since this drama unfolded and I do not precisely recall the geography around the tee. In any case it may have changed over time. My vague memory is that Scott’s ball came to rest on the edge of a practice green or conceivably of the eighteenth green itself.

Carefully avoiding eye contact with the gallery I bent down to tighten my shoe laces. When I looked up Scott had walked over to his ball, pitching wedge in hand and was preparing to hit his ball as it lay, risking taking a large divot in the process. I saw one of the gallery approaching. He is a courteous man and would never consciously breach the etiquette anywhere. There was just time for me to intervene before words were spoken.

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Next weekend I hope to meet some ONLY FRIENDS subscribers at the Walker Cup. A decade ago half a dozen golfers from my side of the pond enjoyed a tour of California. We started strongly with Bel-Air, Riviera, LACC and Valley Club of Montecito on the first four days before heading north.

After a pleasant, if less memorable, interlude near Pebble Beach we reached Cypress Point on day six. It was our penultimate stop and the weather was better than for either of my two previous rounds there with the sun bringing out the colours of the ocean and the scenery beautifully. After playing, we lingered over lunch and had the Clubhouse almost to ourselves.

Our plan had been to play one more time en route south to catch our flight home from LAX. At dinner that evening, however, we decided that we’d already had the perfect climax to a very successful week. Rather like retaining the taste of a fine wine as long as possible none of us wanted to relinquish the memory of what we’d experienced at Cypress.

Whatever the result of the Walker Cup, and inevitably the US start as strong favourites, it’s certain the match will be played in an exemplary manner. Amateur match play competitions are the most fun to watch because the galleries are knowledgeable, the crowds small and everyone has freedom to roam over the fairways.

It will be followed only three weeks later by the Ryder Cup. Here the atmosphere will be different. The fact that the teams are more than usually closely balanced means there’s a possibility of a rare away win.

In this context US team captain Keegan Bradley handled the question of whether to be the first since Arnold Palmer to be a playing captain very deftly this week. He allowed intense speculation to rage for months before finally revealing he’d long abandoned any possibility of the dual role. That’s certainly the right decision for his side.

Passions among the fans in a likely hothouse atmosphere in New York are likely to run very high. Hopefully that will not extend to the teams, beyond a proper and intense desire to win. Professional golf does not need a repeat of the green invasion at The Country Club in 1999.

A Cypress story to end with. In October 1960 Jack Kennedy was neck and neck with Richard Nixon in the polls for the Presidential election. Outgoing President Eisenhower was famous for the large amount of time he spent golfing, much of it at Augusta.

Less well known was Kennedy’s partiality for the game. Stealing an afternoon off at Cypress not long before polling day he and his playing partner reached the short fifteenth, accompanied only by caddies and security guards. Kennedy hit a perfect shot straight at the flag.

As the ball got close to the hole Kennedy yelled frantically “Don’t go in, Don’t go in!”. The ball stopped inches short of the cup.

“Why were you shouting that?”his friend asked.

“If I’d aced that, then one of these guys”, he replied gesturing at the security men, “would be sure to leak it to the press. Tomorrow the papers would run stories about Kennedy’s as bad as Ike. He’ll be slipping off to golf all the time.”

ENDS