We now leave the iron and come to the mashie, with which the shorter and more delicate part of approaching is to be done. It may be well to begin with a general word of caution, and that is, there should be no semblance of forcing with the mashie. Distance is no object at all, and if there is any real doubt about getting up with a mashie, then a man should stick to his iron. There is a temptation to force with this club because it looks, and is, easier to get the ball into the air with the mashie, but no club more quickly or vindictively resents being used outside its own proper sphere. There is, too, this to be remembered: as somebody has well said, you cannot hit the ball cleaner than clean. Take a club outside its proper distance; then fail, as you often will fail, to hit the ball quite cleanly, and you must inevitably be very short. In any case, nine out of every ten approach shots are short; so where there is a doubt the more powerful of two clubs almost must be the right one.

For practical purposes it may be laid down that a full shot should not be played with a mashie at all. We may begin with the half-shot as previously described, and that shot may be made the foundation of the learner's mashie play. If he has a considerable distance to cover, and there is no bunker close in front of the green, so that the ball may be allowed to run fairly freely after pitching, he cannot better the shot which has just been inculcated with regard to the iron. But he will very often want to pitch the ball well up to the green, so that it shall not run very far on alighting. He has not yet reached the point when a very abrupt loft or a very dead fall are required: he is at a kind of halfway-house shot. How is he to differentiate it from his fundamental half-shot?

Perhaps the answer that I am going to give may seem unorthodox; it is almost certainly contrary to the generally sound doctrine that the back swing is the important thing. Nevertheless, I should say that on this occasion he is to concentrate his mind on what is going to happen to his club after the ball is struck. The ball has to be picked up rather abruptly, and to that end the club is to be picked just a little abruptly too, after the ball has been hit. At the finish of the stroke the club ought to be pointing more or less straight up in the air in a perpendicular position, and, which is important, it is to be guided into this position with a firm wrist. The requisite finish is not to be attained, although there is some temptation to do so, by playing with a loose and ' floppy' wrist; in short, by trying to execute the stroke with the wrists and with nothing else. This perpendicular finish will ensure the ball getting well up into the air, and so dropping comparatively dead.

Now, if the player can concentrate his mind on the ending of this stroke, there will probably not be much amiss with his back swing. The fact of having to pick up the club at the finish will naturally make him pick it up rather more abruptly than usual in the back swing. 'Why in the world,' some one may ask, ' did you not begin by telling us to take it back in this way? It would have saved much talking.' The answer is that I have observed that when people are told to take the club back in a rather more upright manner than usual, they pick it up as if they were going to hammer something into the ground, and deliver a quite ineffectual chopping blow upon the turf. It will, of course, never do to be afraid of taking turf with this shot, for it is the natural result of the more upright swing, but the original sin of an upright back swing wants no direct encouragement, and so it is well for this once to proceed indirectly, make a point of the finish and let the back swing adapt itself automatically.

ORDINARY MASHIE SHOT WITHOUT CUT TOP OF THE STROKE

ORDINARY MASHIE SHOT WITHOUT CUT TOP OF THE STROKE.

[To face p. 94.

FINISH OF ORDINARY MASHIE SHOT

FINISH OF ORDINARY MASHIE SHOT.

[To face p. 95.

So much for the general principles of the shot. As to details, the stance may be still a little more open, the attitude have just a suspicion more of crouching about it. Nothing has been said lately on the matter of grip, the player having been left to settle that for himself. If he has adopted the overlapping or Vardon grip, so much the simpler; he will be able to grip the club in the same way for all his shots. If, on the contrary, he grips rather with the palms of his hands, it may be suggested to him that in these more delicate shots it is wiser to have a more delicate grip, and to hold as much as possible with the fingers. The club has now to be more continuously guided than in the free slash of the full swing, and if the player have a mind to hold not only his left but also his right thumb down the shaft, in order to obtain more guiding power, he need have no scruple in doing so.

I keep to the end a warning which Braid believes to be the most important that can be given in regard to pitching. 'By far the commonest fault in pitching,' so he says, ' is the raising of the body when the club is being raised in the finishing of the shot.' Certainly I know the feeling of lifting up the body only too well, and so no doubt do many other people. So let us avoid it as we would the very devil.

Now, there is the third and last case in which a very steep loft, if it may so be called, and a very dead fall are required, and here the player comes to something like a parting of the ways. He may take a niblick, or a very much lofted mashie, and play with it the straightforward shot just described, trusting to the loft on the club to do the work for him. That is, in a sense, the course of a coward, though it may possibly be also that of a wise man who knows his own limitations. On the other hand he may, with reckless bravery, plunge into the intricacies of the most fascinating and delicate, and perhaps also most difficult shot in golf, the approach played with cut.

There was a time when the way out by means of a niblick or a much lofted mashie was regarded with more suspicion than it is now; it was thought almost disgraceful. To-day an enormous number of golfers, some of them very good golfers, avail themselves of it, and never tackle the cutting shot at all.

My own impression is that for the middle-aged and rotund person of limited possibilities and ambitions, it is well to leave the cutting shot alone and learn, as far as may be, to hit cleanly and truly with the niblick, leaving the rest to heaven and the club itself. On the other hand, the man who professes or hopes to be a good golfer has a weak joint in his harness if he is not more or less a master of the cutting stroke. The professionals are one and all masters of it; not so many amateurs who are rated as scratch or better. The young player of to-day is apt to pursue the line of least resistance and take to his big, saucer-faced niblick. Often he is very good with it, but I do not observe that he is so sound a pitcher as, let us say, Mr. Ball, Mr. Laidlay, Mr. Hilton or Mr. Hutchinson, who learned their golf in a sterner school. When the ground is hard and baked and the ball will not grip the turf, he is a very great deal worse. Niblick or no niblick, his ball bounds gaily away over the hard ground, and - I speak with the most sincere fellow-feeling - he has not the means of making it stop. Wherefore let him go out and watch the professionals, and learn to play the shot with cut against the day when it may be necessary. It is a stroke that hardly comes under the head of quite elementary instruction, but it assuredly cannot be passed over.

There are in golf certain catchwords, familiar expressions on the links - call them what you will - which are sometimes more illuminating than pages of laboured description. We sometimes hear a man after playing an approach shot explain that he has 'cut the legs clean from under it'; it, in this case, being the ball. When he says that, he is certainly not directly praising himself, because he means that his ball has fallen far short of the mark, but he is perhaps obliquely lauding the tremendous cut he succeeded in imparting to the ball. At any rate, that expression gives rather a good word-picture of the cut shot; it enables the learner to visualise the stroke. To me at least it conveys the impression of the club head cutting right underneath the ball with a 'slithering' sidelong motion. That is what has got to happen; the club face - and I presuppose the club to be a mashie - has got to hit a glancing blow across the ball, and it has got to get well beneath it. So the club has got to be taken out somewhat to the right on the way back, and is then to return a little across the line of flight and finish to the left.

This is an action which can very easily be exaggerated. If the club is taken far out to the right, the arms go too far away from the body; they thus lose the necessary support of the body, and the whole performance becomes disjointed and uncertain. To obviate this let the player stand still more open, so that he is to a considerable extent facing in the direction in which the ball is to be hit, and let him further turn the face of his mashie slightly out to the right. Then let him lift the club up in his natural manner for a short mashie shot. He will find that his attitude naturally causes him to take the club out somewhat to the right, as if to play across the ball, and that this cross-cutting action needs very little, if any, artificial aid. Similarly the club will come inwards and finish rather to the left of the body on its return journey. The swing is still, of course, to be of a distinctly upright character, and the club is to be picked up rather quickly after the ball is struck.

Such, as far as I can explain them, are the elements of the shot, but it is essentially one that can best be learned by watching a good professional play it. If we observe a professional playing this stroke, there is one thing in particular that we notice: just before the club reaches the ball he seems, as it were, to increase the speed at which the club head is travelling, and to draw it quickly across towards his left foot. I should like to say that he did it with a quick little flick, if such an expression did not give the idea of jerkiness. There must not be a jerk, but at the same time the shot must be played with great firmness and crispness; the ball must be hit comparatively hard, not stroked in a tender, half-hearted sort of way.

MASHIE SHOT WITH CUT: TOP OF THE STROKE

MASHIE SHOT WITH CUT: TOP OF THE STROKE.

[To face p. 98.

FINISH OF MASHIE SHOT WITH CUT

FINISH OF MASHIE SHOT WITH CUT.

[To face p. 99.

In the Badminton volume Mr. Hutchinson indicated an alternative method in which the right hand is held quite loose, and the club is allowed to turn on the web at the base of the thumb. It is possible thus to get an extraordinarily vertical swing, and Mr. Hutchinson can use the shot, not only with deadly effect, but with certainty. I do not know, however, of any other good players who play the shot quite in this way, and for ordinary people I am nearly sure it is altogether too difficult. Its most distinguished exponent himself admits that it is 'only, if ever, to be attempted when in great straits.'