PUTTING.

I cannot believe that my new friend is going to play me false. Such is the effect of confidence; the quality which, I know full well, has a way of coming and going without giving any reason.

The choice of grip, like that of club, must be a matter of individual preference. It is desirable to have the two hands overlapping, or at least touching; for the rest, the player is well advised in holding the club in the manner that he fancies. Do not, however, allow the hands to be even a sixteenth of an inch apart on the shaft; the issue of such separation is nearly certain to be fatal. Since I saw Mr W. J. Travis play at Sandwich in 1904, I have always regarded his grip as theoretically the best one. So far as I can remember, what he does is to overlap with the first and second fingers of the left hand. He places those fingers over the third and little fingers of the right hand. It might be sufficient merely to put the forefinger of the left hand over the little finger of the right. I have tried this kind of hold, and done exceedingly well with it during periods of respite from the agony of watching for that wretched jump. If the reader will experiment with it, he will find that it very greatly reduces the danger of pushing the club away from the feet during the backward swing. It is one of the perils of putting, dependent as it is on the action of the arms and wrists that the right hand, which is essentially and naturally the putting hand, is apt to urge the club out in front instead of bringing it back in such a manner that it comes in a trifle towards the player. Mr Travis's grip seems to keep the right hand just sufficiently under control, and deter it from pursuing a wayward course. It may not suit all golfers, but in conception it is excellent.

The old maxim, " Never up, never in," is, I think, as valuable as ever. It is very easy to be too bold with the modern ball; but the man who is lacking in courage does not often win on the green. Nearly all good putters hit the ball with the utmost firmness. Watch, for instance, Tom Ball. He gives the ball a hearty (although none the less rhythmic) clout, and does not often fail. There are players who like to cut their putts. Jack White is, however, the only consistently good putter I know who invariably adopts this principle. The great mass of evidence suggests that the best spin is that imparted by the pull, which is produced by turning the right hand over in a very slight degree at the moment of impact. Willie Park, one of the finest putters I have ever seen, always pulls; so does Arnaud Massy, another deadly man on the green. Personally, I try to hit the ball without either cut or pull.

One cannot justifiably be dogmatic where putting is concerned, except in regard to the few points on which I have insisted. So many men, so many methods - that is the whole of the subject. J. H. Taylor, who is a most accurate putter and a rare man for holing the ball at a pinch, seems to me to have improved since he adopted his own particular style of sticking out his left elbow so that it points almost straight towards the hole as he makes the address and plays the stroke. His hands are well in front of the ball all the while. James Braid, who seldom misses anything that is holeable, has a way of stopping for quite a long while at the top of the putting swing. He takes the club back, and there he pauses for an appreciable period, as though he were coolly determining not to be guilty of a snatched shot. And the better he is putting, the longer he waits at the top of his swing. Every good putter possesses individualism.

Personally, I do not believe in studying the line from its two ends. The player who examines the situation first from the ball and then from the hole is likely to see two lines. He finds himself filled with philosophic fears and speculative doubts. The harvest that he reaps is so rich that he is distracted by it. He borrows a bit from one line and a bit from the other, and finishes where Fortune and a baffling complexity of slopes may take him. As I have said previously, there is a lot of imagination in seeing a line. In fact, it is nearly all imagination. If we take our " nightcap" in the form of ten minutes' putting in the dusk, we shall hole out with ease. We shall not see alarming undulations, which, the more we study them, the more they seem to demand infinitesimal estimation. We shall simply inspect the hole and the ball, and bring them close together. I sometimes think that with putts of a yard or four feet, it would be best if, without more than a cursory look at the line, we were to walk up to the ball and unaffectedly knock it into the hole. That is a counsel of perfection; it is just the system of George Duncan, and other wise appreciators of the difficulties of the short putt.

But when all has been said, the fact remains that the work on the green is governed by the mood of the player. Once I hit upon the idea of trying a putter about a foot long. I took it over to La Boulie to use in the French open championship, and did very well with it for two rounds. So far as I can recollect, I was leading very comfortably at the end of thirty-six holes. Early in the third round I was presented with a putt of no more than six inches. My right hand jumped; I went about two feet past the hole, and my partner, who was a Frenchman, gave vent to a very deliberate and wholesomely English - "Good Heavens!" I finished that round putting with an iron, and with a good deal of iron in my soul.

Putting is so much a matter of confidence that I sometimes think that the average player ought to be better at it than the champion. I say this with the knowledge that it looks remarkably like an excuse in pickle, but I believe that, when a man has a reputation to defend, the task of getting the ball into the hole from a comparatively short distance is more difficult than anything else in the game. In this connection I remember an incident that occurred at St Andrews a few years ago, when a tournament open to amateurs and professionals was decided. In the semi-final, Alexander Herd met an amateur, who holed putts from all parts of the green. The amateur generally had the worst of the play up to the green; then he would get down a long putt, and leave Herd struggling for a half. The match was even at the seventeenth hole. At the eighteenth Herd won. Then he turned on his pertinacious rival. "Look here," he said, "you wouldn't hole the putts you've been holing to-day if you had to do it for your living." There was a lot of truth in that remark. Putting ought to be easy to amateurs; it is necessarily much more difficult to professionals, because their reputations are apt to depend upon it. Keep your head still, swing pendulum-fashion with the arms and wrists, follow-through, and don't look up as you do it. These hints - and a recognition of the presumed fact that you are going to hole the ball - are the guides to happiness on the green.