Now let us come back to the professionals again, beginning with George Duncan, and I shall not let him see what I have said about him till it is safely in print. Having first of all read his chapters in this book, you will realise that he is an enthusiast for the subtle points of the game and a wonderfully close observer of other people's shots, who will go into fine shades with Mr. Hilton himself. Perhaps, however, his modesty has a little prevented your finding out what an introspective player he is as regards his own methods. I never met any one who combined his astonishing dash, rapidity, and naturalness with an acute consciousness of what he is doing. It amuses him to play a sort of game of pretending with himself in which he impersonates for the day some other great player, much as a child crawls beneath a table with a toy gun under the blissful impression that he is a Red Indian. It is said that once Duncan, having played some particularly good shot in a match, exclaimed joyfully, 'Didn't I play that exactly like Massy? 'Perhaps the story is not true, but I like it so much that I am taking care not to ask him. This much is certainly true, that Duncan in talking about a match played some time ago will recall precisely what was his scheme of wooden club play or iron play or both on that particular day: how he was driving 'with the hands leading a little,' and playing his pitches 'back here on the right foot like Taylor 'or 'forward like Mr. Hilton.'

George Duncan

A good many golfers indulge in this amusement to some extent, but in their case it generally does more harm than good. They exaggerate, they grow laborious, their minds become so full of their various impersonations that they have to go on waggling and waggling while they say to themselves, 'What the devil am I supposed to be doing this time? 'Whatever Duncan may be thinking or pretending to himself, he always plays like a flash of greased lightning. True, he is just a little slower than he used to be. With all his speed there is to-day a certain air of deliberateness about him that used not to be there, and with it has come his greater steadiness: but nothing in the world can make him hang over the shot as if his mind were not quite made up.

The most brilliant golf that I ever saw Duncan -or any one else-play was in the Daily Mail Tournament at Westward Ho! last summer, when he had four rounds of that terrific course at full stretch in 291 - three over an average of fours. It was at the end of the second or third round, and on the way to the seventeenth hole, that he appeared deep in thought and trying some experimental little waggles with his brassy as he walked. Suddenly he declared that he knew there was something a little wrong with his timing (his round was a 73 or so), and happy in this new discovery he dashed on to the eighteenth tee and hit a most prodigious tee shot to prove his point to himself. A golfer who indulges in these pleasant little vagaries of imagination in the middle of a strenuous conflict clearly has the artistic temperament fully developed. It has helped to make Duncan the player he is and, since such a temperament has the defects of its qualities, it also for a long time prevented him from doing himself full justice. To the golfer who is almost too much of an artist a bad shot is not merely a regrettable incident that loses a hole or a stroke: it appears a horrid blot that spoils the whole beauty of his work of art. Duncan had a hard row to hoe before he at length developed in himself the right measure of philosophy which takes things as they come. That he has now done so he has shown many times, but particularly on two occasions last summer. The first was at Westward Ho! when he bore with equanimity a winning lead that seemed for one brief but difficult moment to be fading away. The second was at Deal in the Open Championship, when after a most disappointing first day which had apparently thrown him out of the running, he came again with a long-sustained spurt on the second.

The name of Abe Mitchell goes naturally with that of Duncan to-day. A less imaginative player, and one with less power and wish to tell what he imagines, he is much more sphinx-like than Duncan, but he is not altogether, as some people might think, a 'sphinx without a secret.' Mitchell has a remarkable natural gift for playing golf, but he would never have improved as he has done merely by turning from amateur to professional unless he had thought hard and observed closely. The nature of any individual golfer's game depends a good deal as a rule on the course where he was bred. Mitchell was always a deft player of short pitches because he had plenty of pitching to do on Ashdown Forest. He was originally not a good player of the longer iron shots, because he had so few of them to play there. But the rule breaks down badly over his driving. Ash-down is not a long course, and at many holes there are belts of heather across the fairway, which a driver of very ordinary powers will often reach from the tee. As to Mitchell, he was of course constantly reaching them, and this might, as one would have imagined, have had some shortening effect on his tee shots. But the natural genius for hitting appallingly hard was so strong in him that it could not and would not be cramped. He is a much more accurate hitter now, but he drove quite as far in his amateur days at Ashdown as ever he has done since.

There is something about Mitchell's holing of short putts that always seems to me indicative of strong character. Most of us at a certain short range from the hole say to ourselves that we are 'dead,'but we do not act as if we thought so. We talk glibly about the back of the tin, but the ball dribbles in, if at all, at the nearest edge of the hole. Now Mitchell really does give the ball what the Private Secretary called 'a good hard knock': and he very, very seldom fails to do so, even when he has an off-day on the green. This is not only a valuable power in itself, but it implies a fine determined spirit in playing the game.