The watching of golf is unlike the watching of any other game. We cannot do it by sitting at our ease on a covered stand or on the top of a pavilion, even if those of us who have to do it professionally attain a certain indolent cunning in seeing a great deal from the top of a single sandhill. If we are to be conscientious onlookers we must walk with the players, and sometimes we must even run, though here again watching is something of an art, and an experienced spectator can see all the exciting essentials without losing his dignity or his breath.

So far golf does not seem nearly so good a game to watch as cricket or football or lawn-tennis. But the watcher of golf, if he gives himself the trouble, can see a great deal more than the watcher of these other games. He is close to the players, he can see, if he has eyes, how they make their strokes and how they fail. And for studying the psychology of the combatants there is no game like golf. We can see almost every twitch of a nerve-racked muscle. We can see the men's faces. We can hear what they say. A hard-fought match at golf is often rather a cruel spectacle. If we have any imagination and can picture to ourselves what is passing in the players' minds, we feel as if we were going to watch a bull-fight or to see a man hanged. If we do not care greatly which side wins, it is horribly, ghoulishly amusing: we may feel very sorry for both parties, but we cannot restrain a malicious grin now and again. I remember very well a match in which both parties threw the last hole backwards and forwards at one another like a shuttlecock. There were some who laughed and I do not wonder, but an American friend of mine reproved them. 'Remember,' he protested, 'what our admiral said to his men when the Spanish ship was going down: "Don't cheer, boys: they 're dying." 'He was perhaps asking too much; and, even when the golf is not ridiculous but sublime, you may hear a sort of hysterical giggle pass through the crowd. In the tensest moment at a theatre there is often a laugh, and so there are some people who see something irresistibly humorous in a long putt going down or an approach laid dead at the hole side.

As to a match in which we care very much who wins, I am sure we can feel quite as pitiably sick and nervous as ever the protagonists can. Especially is this so when the players are both making mistakes. It is worst of all perhaps when one of them, and that our favourite, has had the match safely 'in his pocket' and then begins to throw his lead away. I suppose there never was greater agony endured by a crowd than in watching the last five holes of the final at Muirfield between Mr. Tolley and Mr. Gardner, when Mr. Tolley stood three up with four to play, ought to have won the match by four up and three to play, and then had to do his gallant and historic two at the thirty-seventh hole to win at all. Almost equally exciting, and by contrast not in the least distressing (except to the players), was the final at Mairfield in 1909 between Mr. Maxwell and Major Cecil Hutchison. The play went so smoothly and evenly, there were so few mistakes or hurling away of chances or big ups and downs, that there was no anguish and only enjoyment in the watching. There was for the most part a mechanical precision about the golf hole after hole, or so it seems now to me in recollecting it. It was more like a professional than an amateur match; and just because professionals are not liable to such palpable breakdowns and do not make such big mistakes at critical moments, except indeed sometimes upon the green, I think it is the matches in the Amateur Championship that produce the most poignant sensations in the watchers' breasts.

It is rather in score play perhaps that the professionals give us the thrills which we feel in the pits of our stomachs. The culminating round of the Open Championship is like nothing else. We are then watching only one man instead of two, or perhaps we have to be in three places at once and watching three men. The element of the duel to the death is absent, but we feel the strain of the single man's struggle against his own nerves and against the forces of nature with painful acuteness. Sometimes the last round resolves itself into a triumphant procession for one player. Only some overwhelming catastrophe can stop him winning, but the catastrophe is always possible. We can never feel quite easy, for instance, till he has left the sixteenth and seventeenth holes at St. Andrews behind him. Then, when he has only the burn to cross and can afford six or so for the last hole, the worst of the tension is over; but there remains the most dramatic moment of all in which the conquering hero comes breaking his way through the crowd, to hole his last putt with the great black ring of people all round him.

Each one of us remembers with peculiar vividness a different match or a different moment or stroke in the same match. We each have our own personal point of view which colours the incidents that we see. This chapter does not profess to contain detailed and impartial records of the greatest rounds or the greatest matches, but consists rather of my own impressions of some of them which have stuck most firmly in my head. If some of these do not agree with those of other people who were also present, I can only point in extenuation to the fact that no two people who saw Cobden's famous over in the University match of 1870 can ever agree as to what exactly happened. That was much longer ago to be sure than any golf matches I can describe, but memory is quickly blurred and human evidence very fallible.

I think that the two amateur golfers who as match players will be longest and most clearly remembered by every one who watched them, are Mr. John Ball and the late Mr. F. G. Tait. The image of Mr. Hilton we recall rather in connection with some of his triumphs in score play. I hope we may yet see Mr. Ball in a big fight again, but if we do not we can always conjure up his figure in the mind's eye, the bent knee (beloved of the caricaturist), the body leaning forward, the rose in his button-hole (if it is the final of a Championship), the air of placid doggedness that takes the rough with the smooth and seems to say that everything -bunkers and long putts holed and short ones missed-is all in the day's work. Mr. Tait gave an extraordinary impression of quiet and yet buoyant confidence. There is a celebrated cricketer to whom the remark used to be attributed, 'No man living can get me out to-day.' A friend quoted it to me again the other day as applicable to Mr. Tait's outlook in a golf match. It does convey something of it, for I think he had the blessed faculty of never envisaging defeat. But it might also give an impression of some arrogance of demeanour. That would be an absolutely false one. Mr. Low in his biography has told us that Tait loved a crowd and he rose to the occasion before one, but no one ever seemed less conscious of its being there or had less disposition to play to the gallery.