Now consider the other circumstances, that the proper meaning and significance of the result may be understood, and that neither too much merit shall be awarded, nor too much blame. There were about a hundred and sixty competitors, and I would call the field a strong one, but of course not nearly so strong as the field for our Open Championship. Such men as two of the triumvirate were missing, and a highly respectable company of past champions, while there were no such English amateurs in the list as Mr. Graham, Mr. Lassen, and Mr. Michael Scott to make an occasional disturbance. But there were other amateurs. Compared to a British open championship field it was weak at the top and weak in the middle. Everybody who goes to our open championships knows that there, for three parts of the trial, there are comparative nobodies bobbing up from nowhere and creating all kinds of excitement by breaking the records of the courses, and fixing themselves up elegantly at the top of the list. There they sit like civilians on an imperial dais, but always they topple off before the end. Not one of them has ever remained to the finish, so that if the American entry was weak in this respect, Americans might argue that it did not matter anyhow since this middle part was not the one to count. Yet it always has its effect. But then the Americans may also point out that they too had their middle men who came to the front and created disturbances, only quitting the heights in time to make room for the winner and his attendants. There was young M'Donald Smith, and there were Barnes and Hagin, who had come up out of the wild west - and one of them, saying it respectfully to his splendid golf, looked a cowboy too - and were distinct menaces until the last rounds came to be played. Then in estimating the strength of this American field remember that M'Dermott, who is undoubtedly high class, and was in the prize list at the Open Championship at Hoylake, was not nearly a winner here, and remember also that imported players of the high quality of Tom Vardon and Robert Andrew were not in it either. Altogether it is my judgment that the field was stronger than imagined in England, yet not nearly so strong as ours. Following a favourite American practice of reducing to percentages every estimate, however necessarily indefinite, such as even the comparative charms of wives and sweethearts, I would give the strength of a British field the hundred, and I would give sixty-five to this of America. I knew that I should fall to that percentage system some time, and now I have. For its strong variety, and for its flavour of cosmopolitanism, it was an interesting entry. The professionals all over the States - and the amateurs, too, for that matter - came up to Brookline from north, south, east and west, for what they felt was a great occasion, and over the border from Canada they came as well. Up from Mexico came Willie Smith, the Willie who was teethed in golf at his Carnoustie home, and whom we never shall forget as he who broke the record - and holds it with George Duncan still - for the old course at St. Andrews in the very last round that was played at the beginning of an Open Championship meeting there a few years ago. It was really a wonderful field, and its units presented a wealth of material for study and contemplation in matters of style and method during the first day or two. And yet for all the variety of players I doubt whether there was so much difference in ways as we see in a big championship at home. The American golfing system is a little plainer, I think. Of course it was by far the largest entry that had ever been received for the American open event, and this fact necessitated a departure to some extent from established American custom, and one which we of Britain with unenviable experience of many processes in qualifying competitions could not congratulate the Americans on having to make. However, the numbers were not so large as to cause such trouble, even with a qualifying competition, as we experience in England and Scotland, and consequently a two-days' affair worked it smoothly through, the field being divided into two sections, and each man playing his two rounds off in one day and getting done with it. It was settled that the top thirty players in each section, and those who tied for the thirtieth place, should pass into the competition proper for the championship, which, as here and elsewhere, consists of four rounds of stroke play, two on each of two successive days.

The United States Golf Association always manages its championships very well indeed with no more red tape than is necessary, but with an exactness of method which might serve as a fine lesson to some other great golfing countries that I have in mind. In this present case Mr. Robert Watson, President for the year of the U.S.G.A., after all his splendid work as secretary of the Association, was in charge of all the arrangements and as administrator-in-chiet was the most energetic man during the whole of the week at Brookline. It was fitting that in his year of presidency, so well deserved, there should be this ever memorable happening to mark the season out from all others. Mr. Herbert Jacques, Mr. G. Herbert Windeler, and Mr. John Reid, the new secretary of the U.S.G.A., were in the nature also of generals of the headquarters staff, and they laboured constantly in an upper room late at night working out the details of business when other persons on whom responsibility was more lightly cast, with cocktails to help, might be pondering over the tense problem as to what was going to happen next. The general idea of the system was much the same as we have it in Britain, as there is hardly much scope for variety in matters of this kind.

Now - Ouimet. It is easy for the Americans and others to compose anthems about him now, but little enough did they know or think of this Massachusetts boy until they saw that he was really winning, and then the remark that I heard of an ex-American champion to him in the dressing-room shortly after it was all over, "Well done, Francis, and there are lots more in the country like you!" was not only lacking in compliment and taste, but was not true. America is by no means full of Ouimets, and never will be. I had met him at Chicago in 1912, and heard of him next in a letter that I received just before starting for America in the following summer, which gave me particulars of what happened in the match in the closing stages of the Massachusetts State Championship between my old friend, Mr. John G. Anderson, and Mr. Ouimet, in which it was stated that Mr. Ouimet had done the last nine holes in that match as follows - yards first and figures after: 260 yards (4), 497 yards (3), 337 yards (4), 150 yards (2), 394 yards (3), 224 yards (3), 250 yards (3), 320 yards (3), 264 yards (3). So he did the last six holes in 17 strokes, and no wonder that poor John remarked, " I have never played in any match in my life where I did the last six holes in three over 3's and lost four of them, as I did on this occasion!" Of course Mr. Ouimet became State champion, and I determined to have a good look at him as soon as I got on the other side of the Atlantic. On the day after my arrival in New York I was down at the Garden City Club, the Amateur Championship taking place there the following week, and at lunch time Mr. Anderson, who was at another table with Ouimet, called me over. "Well, Mr. Ouimet, I suppose you have a big championship in your bag this season," was just the proper thing to say, and he answered something about doing his best, but feeling he might be better at stroke play. "Then," said I, "there is the Open Championship to take place in your own golfing country," and with that we tackled the chicken. He is a nice, open-hearted, modest, sporting golfer, and was only twenty years old in the May of his great championship year. Tall, lithe and somewhat athletic in figure and movement, he takes excellent care of himself in a semi-training sort of way. He abstains from alcohol entirely, and though he smokes a few cigarettes when "off duty" he rarely does so while playing, having the belief that the use of tobacco has a temporary effect on the eyesight, such as is not conducive to accuracy of play. He agreed entirely with a suggestion I put to him, in conversation, that most golfers make the mistake of playing too much and lose keenness in consequence, and he thinks that the American players in general are by no means at such a disadvantage as is sometimes imagined. The winter rest gives them extra keenness in the spring and summer, and that is everything. He does not play at all from November to April, but keeps himself fit with skating and ice hockey, while during the season he only plays one round three times a week, and two full rounds on Sundays. Business considerations - he is engaged at a Boston athletic store - have something to do with this system, no doubt, but he thinks it sound. I looked at his bag of clubs; there are no freaks in it. It comprises ten items, an ivory-faced driver, a brassey, six irons including a jigger and mashie niblick, and two putters, one being of the ordinary aluminium kind and the other a wry-neck implement, the latter being most used. As to his style of golf, its outstanding characteristics are three: it is plain, like the style of most American golfers, and free from any striking individuality; it is straight; and it is marvellously steady and accurate. A marked feature of most of the American players is that their swing is very round and flat, and that they get a pronounced hook on their ball. Mr. Ouimet's swing is rather more upright than that of most of the others, he keeps an exceedingly straight line and has full length - as much as Vardon. I said he had no peculiarities, but there is just this one, that he grips his club with what is called the interlocking grip. This is a way of grasping the club that some professionals employed during the early period of general transition from the plain grip to the overlapping. Mr. Ouimet's little finger of the right hand just goes between the first and second of the left hand, while the left thumb goes round the shaft instead of into the palm of the right hand. Such a grip may suit a man who uses it, but it can hardly have any advantages. I note as a further peculiarity that the right forefinger is crooked up away from the shaft, so that the tip of the finger only comes to the leather at the side. This has to some considerable extent the effect of throwing that finger out of action, and as a means of reducing the right hand's power for evil is not to be condemned. Many other players have sought some such method of crippling the very dangerous hand.