Mr. Ball must come first. Through the mists of golfing history he will always loom, a towering and colossal figure round which legends will cluster. Those who were his contemporaries and had to fight him in the early days of the Championship tell us, who are younger, that we have never seen the greatest John Ball of all, who could suddenly, at a supreme crisis, strike a blow that nothing could ward off. Probably they are right. To us of a younger generation Mr. Ball stands for flawlessness rather than overwhelming brilliance, for the perfection of grace rather than crushing power. We think of him as a master who will very likely only show his supreme mastery if he is stung into doing so. We have often seen him play the game of cat and mouse with an opponent, not out of the cruelty of a cat, but rather from a tolerant kindliness towards the mouse. He seems to enjoy, certainly not to dislike, ending a match very near home. It must be admitted that it is very hard to tell, for not only has he in the highest degree the art which conceals his art, but he has also a stoical and impenetrable way with him that conceals all emotion, except perhaps from those who know him very well indeed.

It is odd to reflect nowadays that when the Amateur Championship first began Mr. Ball could not do himself justice on the big occasion, to the despair of all Hoylake. Since those days he has gained so great a name as a fighter, which implies a certain number of mistakes to be recovered from, that it has more than equalled his name as a golfer pure and simple. We have seen him get out of tight corners so wonderfully, that we a little forget all the occasions when he has gone on his way down the exact centre of the course rejoicing, and the only tight corner has been that in which the opponent found himself without getting out of it. Just as a great fast bowler frightens out some of his victims purely by his fame, so Mr. Ball's reputation as a die-hard has, I suspect, made some of his adversaries collapse out of sheer terror when they found themselves with a lead. I shall always remember a match that he played against Mr. Bond, a very sturdy player, at Westward Ho! in 1912. Mr. Bond was, I think, five up with seven to play. He lost a couple of holes, but still he was three up with three to play. How he must have longed for some other pursuer on his track and some other hole to play just at that moment! That short sixteenth is always a nasty hole whereat to follow a shot that has reached the green, and it was a hole made for Mr. Ball who at such a crisis was certain to be on the green. Of course he was on it-close to the hole. How rocklike he looked on his feet and how the ball flew straight as an arrow from the bow! Mr. Bond was bunkered, and after that it seemed certain that Mr. Ball would win the match. It is no disrespect to Mr. Bond to say so, for one would have felt the same at that moment about almost any other golfer. Mr. Ball did win the next two holes and he won the nineteenth hole, all three played with absolute and faultless steadiness, and in the end he won the Championship. I have described elsewhere one or two of his far more famous matches, but none of them have ever impressed me more than this now half-forgotten one.

Dogged does not somehow seem the right epithet to apply to a golfer who has the most beautifully easy swing in the world, for it implies some sort of effort. Mr. Ball's style is effortless, and yet dogged I must call him. There are many good golfers who can bear the strain of a hard finish, but I can think of none quite so well able to grin and bear it. He seems to me like some gallant old fighter in the days of Boxiana, who wrenches out a loosened tooth, and then leaps off his second's knee for the next round, smiling with cracked and bleeding lips.

Mr. Ball is so interesting to watch as a match-player that one forgets to watch him purely as a player of strokes. At least of all the great golfers I have watched I think I find it hardest to arrive at any conclusion as to 'how he does it.' With that wonderfully smooth swing, all his different strokes seem to melt imperceptibly into one another, and as he passes on before my mind's eye, silent, with head bent forward, he seems to me something of a great mystery as well as a very great golfer.

I quoted at the beginning of this chapter the saying that if one was allowed to delegate the holing of a short putt at a crisis to somebody else, Mr. Mure Fergusson was the man to send for. I think that in similar circumstances one of my own very first choices would be that of Mr. Horace Hutchinson. Like everybody else, I suppose, he had his off-days on the green, but he holed a vast number of putts, and hit the ball so boldly with that tap of his and kept his wrists so loose and free ; no mental strain could tighten them too much. Moreover he could, when in the mood for it, play a match in what I hope he will forgive me for calling a sort of cold anger. It made him a great fighter at a pinch. I suppose, however, he will chiefly go down to posterity, apart of course from his delightful writing, as the golfer who could play the most incredible shots out of the most incredible places. For a ball down a drain or on a roof or in the branches of a tree, there has been nobody quite like him. Braid can do wonderful things : he could no doubt remove more of the tree, but Mr. Hutchinson would probably play the ball out without ruffling a branch or disturbing a bird on its nest. With that very loose style of his he appeared to be able to swing the club at will in any plane or direction. His style was not superficially an easy one: it was rather complicated and did not apparently make the game an easy one, but it was endlessly adaptable. Who else could, as he did, take to a driver some six inches longer than he had used before and straightway drive far and sure with it? Mr. Hutchinson did this after he had been rather badly beaten by Mr. Maxwell in the final at Muirfield in 1903, when he came to the conclusion that the younger man was driving inconveniently far. So Jack Rowe made him this mighty club, some forty-six inches from the heel to the top of the shaft, and his swing looked more lissome and juvenile than ever. Who else again at the dreaded little 'Island 'hole at Ashdown would let the mashie play quite loosely about in his right hand, now in the fingers and now in the web of the thumb, and stop the ball by the hole as if it had a string tied to it? It was a feat, to use one of his own phrases, of 'young, insolent fearlessness.' On that same Ashdown he would take his brassy or a curious spoon of aluminium to a ball in the heather, that cried aloud for the niblick, and witch it away. There have been better players, though there would have been fewer had not Mr. Hutchinson been a rather sick man, but there have been none, to me, more thrilling or more clearly endowed with magic. Once he passed by the 'Paradise 'Green at Eastbourne and god-like looked down to praise a pitch played by a young person of fourteen who has been his slave ever since.