OF all the clubs used in the game, the wooden clubs are those which in almost every case receive the first consideration. This is a natural order, but probably there are many American readers who do not realize the enomous strides that have been made in recent years in this department of the game, both in the form of the clubs and in their use.

I can well remember a time when length with wooden clubs was not considered of any very great importance, and we were told as youngsters, when laboriously climbing up the rungs of the ladder, to keep straight at any cost, and not to worry about length. Perhaps at the period there was a good deal of wisdom in this advice, but in the light of latter day experience I have never been able to quite fathom exactly where the wisdom arrived on the scene, as the farther one can hit the ball the easier it is sure to make the playing of the rest of the game up to the hole. Our friends of old, old days must have had some reason for their repeated advice not to hit hard. Perhaps it lay in the fact that the wooden clubs then used did not lend themselves to hard, crisp hitting and were only built for the art of gentle persuasion, and hard hitting meant of a surety erratic driving.

The majority of American players have probably no acquaintance with those wooden clubs of the seventies and eighties of the last century. Only the other day I was looking at a set which must have first seen the light of day between the years 1878 and 1885, and although I was playing golf at that time and must have used clubs of a similar pattern (perhaps the very clubs I was looking at, as the set is a family heirloom), still I could not believe that I ever played with clubs of that prehistoric mold. Furthermore I did not wonder that players in the old days did not attempt to hit a golf ball really hard. In the first place, I do not think that the club would have stood the strain, and in the second, the result must have been a colossal slice, as the shafts were thin and as supple as a piece of chewed string. The head was about five inches long and little if any over an inch across, and the lead must have been perilously near the face of the club.

In comparison with the modern day workman-like weapon, those old clubs represented almost the limit of impossibility. I cannot imagine anything in the shape and form of wooden clubs which could appear less adapted to the task of hitting a golf ball really hard than those old-fashioned clubs. The remarkable thing is that had I been casually shown one of those clubs and been told that I once used clubs made in that model, I would have said, "Rubbish; those clubs were made before I ever played golf." But they were not, and I have the family records to prove it. I must have once used clubs of that stamp, and I can now readily realize how it is that I originally learned the game on the principle that accuracy was everything and hard hitting not advisable.

Nowadays, it is admitted on all hands, that length with wooden clubs is a great consideration in the game, and a player cannot hope to attain a very great measure of success unless he can hit a comparatively long ball. To my mind length in driving is becoming more essential year after year, and in connection with golf in our country, the example of the advantage of length was never so marked as in the championships of 1912. It is true that the winner of our Amateur Championship, the veteran, Mr. John Ball, is not a prodigious driver, but the man he so narrowly defeated, the artizan player, Mr. Abe Mitchell, almost entirely owed his position to his prodigious driving; if he had exhibited even an average degree of control over his iron clubs, he could not have lost.

On the other hand, in the Open Championship contest, the first four men to finish were four of the longest drivers in the field, and the man who won, Edward Ray, absolutely the very longest. One of the reasons why the value of long driving is year by year becoming greater is the gradual lengthening of the courses and the added difficulties of the approaches. Nowadays putting greens are hemmed in with small hazards in order to add difficulties to the course, and they are difficult to the man who has to play a long approach up to the hole. But much of this difficulty disappears when the approach to be played is a comparatively short one and the length obtained by the long driver helps to give him easy approaches.

The present principle in connection with golf course architecture is all in favor of the long smiter. He can drive so far that many of the hazards set to catch a pulled or sliced tee shot do not exist for him; his wildest shots career away over them, as with Mr. Mitchell at Westward Ho [1912]. It may be that the experiences of American golf do not coincide with these views and there is always Mr. Walter Travis as an example of a player who, notwithstanding certain limitations as regards length of tee shot, proved himself to be the best amateur exponent of the game in two countries. But that was nine years ago, and since that time the character of links in the construction thereof has sufficiently changed to make a material difference in the advantages gained by different methods of play. Whereas in the earlier years of this century, the comparatively short driving scientific golfer could hold his own with his longer smiting brother, that day seems to have gone by, and in the highest form of golf as represented by the leading professionals, a man must learn to hit the ball a long way, and to do that he must learn to hit it crisply.

This advice may appear somewhat strange in that it comes from a player who has never made long driving a fetish, invariably plays all his shots well within his powers of physique, and who is apt to preach against the cult of indiscriminate hard hitting from the tee, but there is a difference between haphazard slogging from the tee and the art of being able to hit the ball sharply and crisply. Many young players are apt to confuse the two. It is not necessary to hit every tee shot just about as hard as nature will allow one. So many young players do this and when they are driving all over the course, dismiss the matter with the remark that they are off their wooden club play on that day.