By Bernard Darwin

Willie Park has lately revealed to the world that he used to practise putting at six holes with six balls for four hours a day. A good many readers will wonder why his back did not break and his very reason totter under the strain, but here at any rate we have a high ideal with which to begin a chapter on practising.

Golfers vary very much in their views on practising, and always must vary according to their different temperaments. Some practise a great deal, and of them again there may be made a subdivision into those who practise wisely and those who practise foolishly. Some do not practise at all. They say that it bores them and does them no good. Probably it does not do them much good just because it bores them. Some of them are fine players with naturally sound methods, generally learned in boyhood, which do not often 'let them down.' They would almost certainly be finer players still, if they could have made themselves take pleasure and interest in practising. I write as a compound of these various classes of players (excepting only the adjective 'fine'). I have practised a great deal, but I am afraid it has often been foolishly. It has never bored me, though it has sometimes made me tired and unhappy, but I have left a big balance of interest and pleasure. I believe most other people would do so if they would give themselves the chance. Some of the pleasantest recollections in a golfing life should be those of solitary rambles over the course with a single club on a summer evening, of wrestling with a new iron or a new stroke, of coming dimly to discern cause and effect, of glorious daydreams of the secret at last discovered. There may be a horrid awakening on the morrow, but its bitterness cannot take away all the sweets of that dreaming. 'Youth's a season made for joy'; it is also a season made for practising. As we grow older, and our game more set and more unlikely to improve, we come almost inevitably to practise less. We cannot go on unless we are hopeful. But golf is mercifully a hopeful game, and golfing text-books are not written for those who have grown cynical.

Practice is. roughly speaking, of two kinds. There is one in which we go out to struggle with a particular stroke that we are temporarily playing badly : let us say, to take a too common example, that we want to exorcise the demon of slicing tee shots or, still more desperate, that of socketing mashie shots. There is another case in which we are suffering at the moment from no definite golfing disease, but are trying to get over some weakness of which, well or ill, we are always conscious. Every golfer, if he is honest with himself, knows that there are certain strokes that he never approaches with confidence, strokes from which he prays to be delivered at a critical moment in a match. It may be a running-up shot, or one of those most difficult iron shots that are betwixt and between, neither the common pitch nor the full bang. It may be only an inability to hold the ball up into a particular wind. When we go out, as we ought, to try to overcome these weaknesses we are taking long views. We are not thinking of to-morrow's round and the half-crown that Jones will win from us if we can't get rid of that slice. We are thinking generally of our golfing future. According to these two sets of circumstances we have different objects and different frames of mind.

Whichever be our object, however, there are one or two preliminary considerations equally applicable to either case. We must decide whether to be alone or take a caddie with us, and whether to stay more or less in one spot or to range over the course. It may seem an economy of energy to stay in one place and have a beast of burden, but I don't think it is so. We often see a player tee eight or ten balls in a row and hit them to a caddie stationed in the long field. The caddie retrieves them and brings them back and the player goes through the same performance. In one way he conserves his energy, but in another he dissipates it prodigally.

To hit half a dozen balls off one after the other is hard work. There is no walk between the shots, as in a game, to rest the muscles. Try it, and see how hot you get and how sore your hands. I have personally hands that are fairly proof. They practically never get sore in a game, but I can still pinch and blister them sadly by too uncontrolled practising.

What is still more to the point, the eye and the mind tire as well as the body : it is difficult to go on trying, while practice without bending the mind to it is futile. There is another point that may not appeal to the blessedly unimaginative. To many golfers the presence of anybody other than a casual passerby is prohibitive of useful practising. Even a caddie in the distance produces a horrid self-consciousness. When we are practising we ought not to mind for a second how ridiculous we may look. We want if need be to try the absurdest attitudes, to exaggerate this or that movement grotesquely in the search after truth. And then, suppose we do find the truth and hit a series of shots that have the old, right 'feel 'in them, we ought to be free, if such be our mood, to plunge hurraying after the ball, waving our club and chanting songs of victory. With a stolid small boy in the offing, I defy the least self-conscious to do that. Archimedes could never have shouted 'Eureka !'if he had had a caddie watching him.

The question of staying in one place or of roaming depends a good deal on what kind of shot we are playing. If we have a driver or brassy it is perhaps easiest to hit up and down one stretch of turf. But we may grow weary more quickly from the sameness of the scenery, and in any case before we go home we had better test our new discovery on a fresh bit of ground. If we are practising iron shots it is certainly better to move about in order to get a greater variety of shot with different stances to play from, different marks to aim at, and different hazards to frighten us. Even in driving it is well to aim at some sort of mark. In iron shots where the whole object is to arrive at a definite point, it is almost essential. To have always the same mark is dull and, since we come to know this one distance very well, may make us think that we are playing better than we really are. To acquire confidence is enormously valuable, but we do not want a spurious confidence. So if there is plenty of room I am all in favour of making practice a movable feast.