Never was more absurdly untrue suggestion made against this game than that it is not like others where men play directly against each other and foil each other's shots, that it is a game in which each man plays his own ball independent of the other. Each stroke we make has effect on the stroke made by the opponent. That effect may be discounted by the opponent's own strength and resource, but yet it is produced. In no other game does a man play right and hard on to his opponent as in match-play golf, for it is a game in which the whole temperamental strength of one side is hurled against the strength of the other, and the two human natures are pressing bitterly and relentlessly against each other from the first moment of the game to the last. It is the whole man, mind and body. That is the meaning of the temperamental factor in golf, and that is why a great match at golf is great indeed.

Yes, it is a cruel game, one in which the primitive instincts of man are given full play, and the difference between golf and fisticuffs is that in the one the pain is of the mind and in the other it is of the body.

A climax in our wonderment has been reached, and though a volume could be written on the romance of the rubber-cored ball, the seventh of the wonders of the game and the most modern, the story after all is known. Golf would have gained on its old degree of popularity if there had been no such invention and men had continued to play with gutties; but that the golf boom as we know it would have been created, that the game would have risen to be the enormous thing it is, giving pleasure to hundreds of thousands of people all the world over, there is much reason to doubt. One night in the early summer of 1898 Mr. Coburn Haskell sat at dinner with a magnate of the American rubber industry, at the house of the latter in Cleveland, Ohio. They were both golfers, and naturally they talked golf during their meal. They agreed that a kindlier ball than the harsh and severe gutty was needed, and they thought that surely it might come through rubber. Eventually they settled on the idea of rubber thread wound under tension to give the necessary hardness, and an experimental ball was made accordingly. With the very first shot that was made with that first of rubber-cored balls a professional player to whom it had been given to try carried a bunker that had never been carried before! From that moment the great revolution was begun, the most extraordinary that has ever taken place in any game. There were set-backs, it was a little slow in starting, but its success was sure. In 1902, when Sandy Herd won an Open Championship with the new ball, after prejudice had held it back in Britain previously, the gutty was done for, and it quickly disappeared from the links.

And oh, the ravings and the riotings of argument there have been about that ball since then! And the hundreds of thousands of pounds that have had to be spent on courses to make them suit it! Never was there such a giant commotion nor such a costly one caused in any sport before. We need not argue any more whether it has improved the game or spoiled it. These discussions are for the schools. It has anyhow made the game in the modern popular sense, and now we are informed that of this little white ball, that was first invented at the dinner-table on those Ohio summer nights, half a million are used on British courses in one week in a busy season, and a million pounds' worth are bought and consumed by golfers in a year. Then you may be sure that more than a million dollars' worth are driven and putted on the courses of the United States. Marvellous little ball! Indeed you are the seventh wonder of your game.