Wooden club play through the green is not, it must be sorrowfully admitted, what it once was. The glory has in a measure departed from it, not because golfers are less skilful, but because they have far fewer opportunities of showing their skill. Golf-balls are made to fly further and further every year, and the utmost fierceness of golfing architects cannot keep pace with the ingenuity of ball-makers. Not only does the modern ball fly an unconscionable distance, but it flies particularly far when struck with an iron club. The result of this is that when there is any grave doubt about the goodness of a lie through the green, it is possible to take an iron club and lose comparatively little distance; the loss is so small as to be more than compensated for by additional ease and certainty in making the shot. Therefore the art of tearing the ball away from an unpromising lie with a wooden club - and this used to be one of the most magnificent and satisfactory of all golfing shots - is not nearly so valuable as it used to be. The Badminton volume devotes considerable space to explaining how the ball should be jerked away with a brassey out of a cuppy lie. The shot was very well worth the learning and playing then, because invaluable distance was gained by daring greatly with wood. Now the ignoble, pusillanimous iron will do very nearly as well.

However, though long drivers have to-day but little use for their brassies, the club is not wholly atrophied. Many people are not long drivers; the rudimentary golfer is not likely to be at first, so he will have this consolation that the poorer is his driving the greater his opportunity for playing the jolliest shot at golf, the full bang through the green with a wooden club.

For this purpose he will have to buy a brassey, unless, which is no bad plan, he began to learn his driving with a brassey rather than a driver. Even so, he had better get another brassey with which to play through the green. For his tee-shots he will not desire a very much lofted club, as soon as he has passed through the most elementary of all stages, but through the green he had much better adhere for some while to a club with a good deal of loft. I cannot help thinking that there are hundreds and hundreds of golfers wailing and wondering quite unnecessarily as to why they cannot hit a wooden club shot unless the ball be teed. A touch or two with a file would often make them, comparatively speaking, happy for life.

As to the shaft of the brassey, it should certainly be rather stiff, and I am disposed to add that it should be of the same length as that of the driver. It is the orthodox thing to have the brassey the shorter of the two, but unless a player has a fancy for an abnormally long club from the tee, a quite needless complication seems to be involved. The simplest and best thing to do is to play the shot through the green, when the lie is normally good, exactly as it would be played from the tee, and this is made more difficult by having clubs of different length. I observe in Miss Cecil Leitch's book that she goes so far as to have her brassey the longer of the two, her reason being that through the green the player may have to stand above the ball and reach far down to it. Perhaps, however, on the whole we shall go far enough if we have the two clubs of the same length.

About the straightforward brassey shot, with a good lie and an even stance, there are just two things to be said. In general, the player is to swing his club exactly as he did for a teed ball; in particular, he is not to be afraid of the ground and is to put full confidence in his club. The ball seems to be lying horribly close to the ground, it looks as if something beyond the ordinary swing were needed in order to hoist it into the air. That something, in the case of the beginner, nearly always takes one disastrous form. He drops his right shoulder and tries, as it were, to dig the ball by main force out of the ground. Most often the ball utterly refuses to be dug out, and if it yields at all it makes but a sulky little flight with, as a rule, a pronounced curve to the right.

Now this digging with the right shoulder is a thing to be avoided like the plague. Persisted in for any length of time it may become an almost ineradicable bad habit. It dislocates the swing: it throws the head up into the air: it leads to much and excessive bending of the knees: it is altogether vile. It were far better for the beginner that he should top ball after ball to begin with than that, at the very outset of his career, he should hang this millstone of a vice round his neck. He must believe that the loft on the club face will do all that is necessary, if only he can swing that club truly. Doubtless the ball will for a while show a desire to trundle along the ground: it is a way that a ball has when it is hit by a beginner. It is not so much that he is swinging wrongly: it is only the ball, taking advantage of his youth and innocence, trying to tempt him to dig. So he is to go on swinging easily, aiming carefully, looking at the ball with a fixed stern eye, declining to be tempted into digging with the shoulder. The ball will soon quail before his intrepid glance and do as it is bid.

Thus far the straightforward shot. Next we must deal with four unpleasant predicaments that can be divided into two groups. The player's feet may be on the flat and the ball may be either above or below him: that is two. Ball and player may both be on a down-slope or they may be on an up-slope: that is two more. As to all four of these predicaments, the best general piece of advice is to take it very easy and not to try to do too much. Indeed, when the difficulty is too acute, it will be wise to take an iron club. For the purpose of argument, however, we assume that a wooden club is justified.

As to the first group, the ball below the player is decidedly more unpleasant than the one above him. It tends to tumbling forward, which is a vice more easily yielded to than falling back; and it tends to slicing, which is worse than pulling. There is not much to be said, save that the player must jamb his heels into the ground and must not fall forward, and he may well make some slight allowance for the slice. The ball above the player is, in strict moderation, not wholly unpleasant. For one thing it leads to hooking, and to hit a reasonably hooked ball is great fun. Then it inclines the player to swing the club low round his shoulder rather than over it, and since he is probably disposed through original sin to too upright a swing, this may in moderation do him more good than harm. But he must not let himself be carried away; he must swing very easily, and even so he will do well to make some allowance for the hook. If the ball is at all far above him, he will also do well to take a grip of his club lower down on the leather.

As to the uphill shot when the player's left foot is higher than his right and the ball lies upon an up-slope, there is again some temptation to hook, but there is a still greater temptation to top. The eye is apt to look up to the top of the hill far sooner than it ought. A similarly disastrous result is often produced in a different way through the player coming down with his hands too far in front and so 'smothering' the ball. This is caused by a fear lest the uphill lie will make the ball go too high in the air, and the resulting determination to keep it down. The best precaution against taking the eye off is clearly to keep it on; in the second case there is not much to do save bow to the inevitable and allow the ball to go as high as it pleases, concentrating the mind solely on hitting it cleanly.

Fourthly and lastly comes the down-slope, the hated hanging lie. The exact degree of unpleasantness will here depend not only on the steepness of the hanging lie, but also on the nature of the ground immediately in front of it. Whether the ground in front continues to slope away from the player or bobs up again in the form of a nasty obtrusive little hillock may make all the difference in the club and the tactics to be employed. Whatever the conditions, however, and whatever the club, there is one golden rule, namely, to accommodate the swing to the lie of the ground. In one of the old bound volumes of Punch there is a delightful picture of Charles Keene's in which a bootmaker, with a deprecating manner, is suggesting to a testy old gentleman that it would be easier to make boots for him if he were to cut his corns, to which the old gentleman replies, 'Cut my corns, sir! I ask you to fit me a pair o' boots to my feet, sir! I 'm not going to plane my feet down to fit your boots.'

Now the attitude of that old gentleman is the attitude of the hanging lie. It is no manner of use to be like the bootmaker, and swing the club to suit the ground as you would like it to be. You must accommodate yourself to circumstances and swing down the hill. It is another case in which the club must be trusted to do its work properly. And there must be no digging with the right shoulder. The swing should be particularly easy and smooth, and the ball should be perhaps a little more nearly opposite the left foot than usual. If the ball is at all far back, there will be an inevitable tendency to come down rather on the top of the ball, which will be particularly fatal. For the same reason the body must be kept well back, and its inclination to tumble forward down the slope is to be sternly repressed. When the slope is particularly steep, or there is rising ground in front which has to be cleared, nature can be assisted by artifice, in the form of a shot intentionally sliced. The player may stand rather more open, and then, turning the face of his club rather out to the right, swing across the ball. This shot, if properly played, will cause the ball to rise perceptibly quicker, but elementary persons are so far more likely to play it improperly that perhaps they had better take with due humility to their irons.

PICKING THE BALL UP FROM A HANGING LIE.

Tofacep. 72.