Unless one party be very grasping or the other very conceited, two friends can make their own matches far better than any one else can do it for them.

Besides the orthodox method of handicapping by strokes there are various others, the giving of bisques and holes up, and in three-ball matches there is the better and also the worse ball match. There are also all manner of what may be called 'freak' handicaps. Of the matches made under freak handicaps it may be said that they are good fun to talk about and poor fun to play. More generally they are talked about and not played. I remember a lawn-tennis match that was projected between the late Mr. 'Laurie'

Doherty and a certain plump and dignified friend of his and mine. The articles of agreement provided that Mr. Doherty could only win a point by causing the ball to strike his opponent's person. The match was much chuckled over in advance and then wisely abandoned. It had served its purpose, and would have proved a disappointment. The golf match in which Alfred Toogood played blindfolded against a scratch player at Sunningdale created great interest beforehand and was the very dullest I ever watched in my life. The classic match in which one party was allowed three sudden 'Boos' in his opponent's ear and won without using any of them, was probably, if ever played at all, ineffably gloomy and tiresome after the first hole.

There is a form of match sometimes played in which the two players start level. As soon as the stronger player becomes one up he gives a stroke at the next hole, and continues to give a stroke a hole as long as he is up. This may sound exciting. It does provide a close match but also a dull one, for the better man has no great incentive to bestir himself, since by doing so he only hangs a load of debt in the shape of strokes round his neck. The match usually comes to the last hole and there is some small scope for manoeuvring, but it too much resembles an unpaced bicycle race in which the riders crawl round lap after lap, waiting for one frenzied burst in the last.

There is something a little freakish about bisques. They are perhaps 'no gowf at a', just monkey tricks,' but they often produce excellent matches and give scope for generalship. The receiver of bisques must study his adversary's temper and his own. To crowd on all sail and take bisques freely at the beginning of a match may be very good tactics against a player who is easily cowed, but it is of little avail against a dour man who plays better when he is down. We shall then very likely find ourselves stranded high and dry in the middle of the match with no bisques left, a horrid feeling of loneliness, and a strong probability that we shall have that hardest of tasks in all golf, namely, to play up against a decreasing lead. Against the average opponent it is best if possible to hold a bisque or two, like so many swords of Damocles, over his head. Not only does this give him an unpleasant consciousness of outstanding liabilities but, if he is very imaginative, it keeps him guessing at every hole. Of course it is possible to cling too firmly to a bisque, and to be left with it unused at the end of the round can be as irritating as to be left with a too carefully treasured ace at bridge. I remember a match I once played at Aber-dovey the thought of which even now sets me chortling joyfully. My opponent was two up with four holes to play and he had two bisques in hand. He could almost have had me beaten by that time: certainly he could have been dormy, but he enjoyed the refinement of cruelty of keeping me on tenterhooks, or perhaps he had vain visions of winning with a bisque or two unused. Now the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth at Aberdovey are holes of no great length. They have two features-trouble which may be calamitous, and greens in dells where a lucky approach shot may end very near the hole. The enemy found the trouble; he took six each to those three holes: I had the lucky approach shots and got three threes, and so he had to stand by impotent, his two bisques being no good to him till I became dormy one. He duly halved the match with them at the last hole, but could aught atone ? My friend Christopher, if you chance to read this chapter, I am sure you will not have forgotten that match. I trust that something of bitterness, though not enough to endanger our friendship, may still rise at the remembrance.

Holes make rather an unsatisfactory handicap because they tend to a runaway match one way or the other. The man who gets first off the mark is too apt to win easily. If the receiver of holes adds to his lead in the first two or three, his pursuer grows faint-hearted. If, on the other hand, he loses his lead at the beginning, he feels that he is caught in a trap from which there is no escape. If we were all perfectly level-headed and undaunted these things would not happen, but we are not and they do happen. Moreover, if the difference between the two players is considerable, it is rather a depressing game for the weaker. He may or may not win with his six holes of a start, but he feels that each hole is a match that he has to play on level terms and his hopes centre too exclusively round the other man's mistakes. True, we nearly always win by the enemy's mistakes. 'He didn't beat me - I beat myself, sir, I beat myself,'I remember hearing Taylor say once with formidable emphasis and fierce shaking of his head. All the same when we win, it is pleasanter to think that we have something to do with it.

Our handicaps are given us by handicapping committees, and the members of those committees are among the many virtuous and hard-working creatures in the world who get more kicks than halfpence for their pains. They have two classes of discontented people to deal with-those who think they have not enough strokes and those who think they have too many. On the whole our vanity is greater than our greed, and I am disposed to think that the second class is the larger of the two. At any rate it is the more difficult to deal with, for it contains a certain number of persons with whom some natural sympathy is felt. They are getting older and shorter and not so good as they were, and in conversation or even in match making they are not above acknowledging the fact, but they do not like to be publicly-branded on the handicapping list. Those are often particularly susceptible who have after much pains and labour arrived at the scratch mark. Scratch is very far from meaning what it does in America or in the Ladies' Golf Union, but still it implies a certain honourable status. To be kicked upstairs from it is an unpleasant shock, and golfers who have once been scratch seem, like those 'in reduced circumstances,' to wear a certain air of faded gentility and 'murmur a little sadly 'of their past splendours. To have once been 'one 'is not the same thing at all.

Towards this very human infirmity committees as a rule exhibit considerable tenderness, for they argue very naturally, 'If old So-and-so likes to lose his half-crowns, it's his own look-out. Why should we hurt his feelings?' Really there seems no reason why they should, unless they are impelled to it by a sense of duty, and an excessive sense of duty is one of the least attractive of human characteristics.

I should rather have said that there was no reason why they should. Now that the question of limiting the entries to the Championship by handicaps has become an urgent one, there is a good reason for showing neither fear nor favour. At the present time the Championship committee is proposing to tackle the handicapping problem by trying to set up some kind of standard. It is a hard task, but if the thing can be well done it is worth doing.

It is, I think, admitted that the foundation must be the 'par' score of the course for which the handicap is framed. It is not a perfect standard, because the par of St. Andrews and the par of a course where most of the holes can be reached with a drive and a pitch may be approximately the same; yet it takes a champion to accomplish the one and a very ordinary mortal on his 'day out' to do the other. Still, in estimating the par it may be possible to make some allowance for difficulties besides considering merely the length of the holes, and the par score, if estimated by those who know their business, is as near a constant standard as we can get. On this par score it is proposed to found a scratch score which a scratch player, playing well, should be able to accomplish.

The real difficulty seems to me the question • whether there must be a national handicap as well as the individual club handicap. At first sight it would seem a very cumbrous business and to some extent it is so, but without both handicaps there appears no way of dealing with the man who, playing nearly all his golf on one course, naturally plays his best game there and perhaps persists in winning the monthly medal. These small triumphs hardly affect his general position as a golfer. When he comes to play in good company on other courses he takes his normal and proper place. But on the dunghill of which he is the cock he is a formidable person, and his handicap must be reduced if his competitors are to have a fair chance, whether in match or medal play. It may be said that his handicap should not be reduced unless his performances justify it when judged by the scratch score; but if he continues to annex mustard-pots and half-crowns something has got to be done or there will be a revolution. The proper course, I suppose, would be to put up the handicaps of everybody else, but this is a laborious and unpopular course which would not work well in practice. Therefore I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that, if anything be done at all, there ought to be two handicaps, a national and a club handicap, and without them I am afraid a general scheme would fail.

The Ladies' Golf Union is often and rightly held up to men as a model of business-like organisation, but even the ladies cannot altogether get on without two handicaps, and the L.G.U. handicap and the club handicap of one and the same player seem sometimes to differ very considerably. I doubt if men will ever come to having their handicaps quite so well regulated as those of the L.G.U., for men are either more lazy or less docile and will not constantly go to the trouble of returning a certain number of cards. At least I do not think they will, nor personally do I want them to, for after all handicaps were made for man and not man for his handicap.