No review of wooden club play would to-day be complete without some mention of the spoon, which, after being buried for a while in comparative oblivion, has now become exceedingly fashionable and popular. There are many spoons: some have short squat heads, when they rejoice in the name of 'pug' or ' bull-dog '; some of them have long heads and a few have heads of aluminium; some are shod with brass and some are not; but their general characteristic is that of a stiff-shafted club decidedly shorter than a brassey, and having a face considerably lofted.

As there are spoons and spoons, so there are spoon-players and spoon-players. There are some that are celebrated as such: Mr. Hilton, for instance, who can do the most wonderful things, and get an incredible amount of stop upon the ball, with the old cut-down driver that he has wielded for years past numbering. Duncan is another beautiful spoon-player, and to see him play a shot right up to the hole with a great deal of slice is among the most attractive sights in golf. Mr. John Low has a stroke with a spoon which is, as far as I know, unique - a kind of wrist-shot that is wonderfully effective; and the editor of this book can perform remarkable feats alike off grass and out of deep heather with a club having a long, rather springy shaft and an aluminium head.

Now these accomplished golfers are spoon-players proper; they play shots with the spoon which are different and differently played from their shots with other clubs. But of these jugglers there are but few. For the hundreds and thousands of other golfers who carry a spoon in their bag the club is just a short, much lofted brassey and nothing more. They can do nothing out of the common with it; they play a perfectly ordinary simple shot, which is not quite so long as a brassey shot, and is possibly a little longer than a cleek shot.

All this is not to say that the club is not a very good one, and a useful one to carry as an alternative to a cleek, because the latter is a very fickle club. Taylor, for instance, is usually a magnificent cleek player, but at the time he won his fourth championship at Deal in 1909, his cleek had so utterly forsaken him that he used throughout a little stumpy-headed, lofted brassey that he called his Toby, and extraordinarily fine shots he played with it too. What I do say is that for ninety-nine out of every hundred golfers there is no particular magic in the club. I have heard golfers of very mediocre attainments allege that they can with a spoon do wonderful feats in the way of cutting the ball up into a stiff wind, stopping the ball dead on a glassy green, and so on. I have heard others talk as if they believed they would be able to do all these things if they only had a spoon. As far as I know, they both deceive themselves very grossly. A spoon will be useful to them when they want to hit rather a shorter distance than they would with their brassey, or when the lie is hardly good enough for a brassey shot, and to those uses of it they had much better confine themselves. It is unwise to attempt anything more subtle in the early stages of a golfing education: the time will, I think, be better spent in mastering simpler shots with iron clubs.

Of the more recondite uses of the spoon, Mr. Hilton is certainly the past master. He can, if he likes, hit the ball a long way with it, but more often than not he uses it for comparatively short distances, when a player of no extraordinary power would often use no club longer than a fairly straight-faced iron. His power of making the ball fall dead with practically no run is truly remarkable, and he is too extraordinarily skilful in holding the ball up against a wind that blows from right to left. In this last respect the spoon is, I fancy, particularly useful, because there is always a slight tendency to hook with iron clubs, and it is particularly hard to hold the ball into this kind of cross wind with an iron or cleek. Mr. Hilton's method seems to consist of keeping the body rather stiff - he certainly does not use it to anything like the same extent that he does in driving - and to trust chiefly to the arms, alike in the back swing and the follow-through. This is what he says himself: 'It certainly does not seem correct to say: Keep taut on the upward swing, and then relax on the downward sweep, but it is the way I play the stroke with a spoon.' That therefore must be the way to play the best spoon shots in the world, but to relax in the downward stroke is too dangerous an experiment for most of us. Our already imperfect follow-through would be likely to vanish altogether. This kind of spoon shot is advanced golf if ever there was such a thing.