Willie Park has already been quoted for his feat of endurance in putting four hours a day. He made himself the best putter in the world. Jack White has practised till his back ached. Mr. Walter Travis and Mr. Jerome Travers are two other mighty putters and mighty practisers. Personally I put Mr. Travers first among all the putters that I have watched, and in his early days he used to putt for hours together. Of course to be a great putter a man must have a natural gift and a delicate touch, but here at any rate are some good examples to show that practice can make perfect.

I remember very well something that happened at Hoylake in 1898, at the time of the Amateur Championship, the first Championship I ever saw. It was just before lunch, and in the afternoon there was to be played what all the world considered the match of the Championship, the meeting in the fourth round between the late Mr. F. G. Tait and Mr. Hilton. Freddy Tait was practising assiduously on the miniature putting course inside the white railings of the Hoylake club-house, and I stood gazing at him with hero-worshipping eyes. A friend came by and asked how he was playing. 'All right,'he answered with a cheerful grin, 'except this part of the game, and this '11 be all right by the afternoon.'

And it was, for he putted very well and incidentally gave the then open champion a dreadful beating on his own course. I can see him now holing a very long one on the 'Briars 'green and, just as the ball went in, thrusting forward his right foot in a characteristic movement.

This is a digression, but I cannot help describing that little scene, because it is still so vivid and impressed me so much at the time. This was only an instance of a golfer, who was habitually a magnificent putter, feeling himself temporarily a little out of form. Most of us do not putt habitually well, and often very ill. Moreover, we are like men living on the brink of a volcano : we never know when and how suddenly destruction may overtake us. No precaution avails against Vesuvius, but we can practise putting. We can never be sure that our method will not go all to pieces under the strain of a hard match ; but the sounder the method, the less likely and the less complete will be the disaster.

It is a good general rule to have one method of putting and stick to it through good and evil days, but it is necessary first of all to know that the method is a tolerably sound one. How few golfers can say so much for their methods ! How few balls are hit quite truly, when near the hole ! I believe that when an eminent billiard player begins to practise after a rest, he does not trouble his head so much about the strokes as about getting his cue arm to move smoothly and truly. In the case of the average golfer, his putter moves smoothly and truly in only a very small number of his putts. And so in practising he should not think too much about results : he must not be satisfied with a ball uncleanly struck that dribbles in at the back door. If he is conscious that his club is not going back straight, he may be pretty sure that though the ball may be going in now, it will not when it comes to a match : so he had better go on practising.

The player who is as a rule a steady putter, and has a definite method, will try only minor experiments. He will wriggle his feet a little this way and that, hold his club rather shorter or longer, stand up a little straighter or (though this is dangerous) crouch a little closer. In short, he will try to regain confidence by trying to feel comfortable. He will pay attention to the everyday rules, 'Keep your eye on the ball 'and 'Keep your body still,' and perhaps to some little private law of his own ; but he will attempt no drastic change.

He is a fortunate man : most people have what they are pleased to think half a dozen different methods, though to be sure the same fault runs through all and, when their bad day comes, the state of their mind quickly becomes chaotic. For such there is a wide field open for their experiments. In their practice they should, as I said before, take long views. Precisely where they put their feet is not of much account. They have, if they can, to find the real root of their recurrent trouble and then find a way to rid their golfing systems of it.

It seems to me that for the man who knows his method to be faulty, and is conscious of untrue hitting, the short putts are the ones to practise: those of a 'nasty 'length, from three to six feet let us say. He who could hole all these would be much the best putter in the world; yet as regards any individual one of them, there is more annoyance in the missing than glory in the holing of it. That is what makes them so nasty, and so at this range are played most of the cramped, frightened, 'jumpy' shots. To practise long putts is valuable for getting the strength of the greens, but the difficulty of hitting truly is here far smaller. The most besotted of us do not pinch the putter inwards round our legs, or push it wavering outwards in the twiddles of a pig's tail, when we are a dozen yards from the hole. It is the short ones that will best help us to analyse our faults.

It is common to see a player practising putts with several balls, but one, or two at most, is better: at least for those who have not a great gift of concentration. With several the player is apt to putt quickly and carelessly. There is more labour and stooping involved in picking the one ball out of the hole, but this practice has got to be laborious and the player's back will ache in any case. Some slight variety may be introduced in the form of a sliding scale of distances. In order to improve his shooting Mr. Winkle proposed to 'put a stuffed partridge on the top of a post and practise at it, beginning at a short distance, and lengthening it by degrees.'

Similarly we may begin by holing the ball at a foot and move further away by degrees, seeing how far we can get before we miss. We must be careful, however, lest the competitive spirit-even though we only compete against ourselves-does not oust the studious and analytical.

One of the snares against which we must be on our guard is that of trying too hard to make ourselves into putting machines. Certainly our method should be founded on sound mechanical principles, but a man cannot putt by principle alone. We may force every one of our limbs to behave as we want it, take the club back with infinite care in the prescribed way, and bring it back to the ball with its face precisely square to the line-and yet the unscientific beast of a ball will not go in. 'The ball maun be hit,' and muscles tautened and overstrained with too much hard thinking refuse to hit it. So when we have struck on a method that we believe to be sound and the ball begins to ring against the back of the tin with delightful frequency, we must not go on thinking harder and harder about the details of method. The body will have adapted itself to it to some extent: it will need the less and not the more compulsion-and we can afford to forget details for the moment and devote our minds singly to the main issue. And remember that though it is possible to be too limp, relaxed muscles will hit the ball far more freely and truly than taut ones. It is easier to relax the muscles in practice than in a game. Witness the many balls which in a critical match are pushed out to the right of the hole with a wooden intractable wrist. The weakness that has periodically attacked Harry Vardon in recent years of giving the ball a 'short sharp shock 'upon the green appears to come from a sudden refusal of his wrists to do their owner's behests. However, the more we try to keep the muscles from growing too taut in practice, the better our chance of doing so in a match.

It is unwise to do all our putting at the same hole. All putts are not dead straight and a few borrowing putts make a pleasant change, but while we are devoting our whole attention to taking the club back straight and hitting the ball truly, a fairly flat green is the best. Goodness knows that, with those two ends in view, we have enough to think about without the added complexities of borrowing. If we have our own private putting green in a garden it is a good plan to have the holes a little smaller than the regulation size. Mr. Macfie used to do this and so, as he tells us in his book, did Willie Park. Park's holes were three and a half inches in diameter instead of four and a quarter, and he says that they made the orthodox hole look as large as a wash-tub. How heavenly and comforting a sensation!

The putt is the one stroke in golf that can be practised with some degree of verisimilitude indoors. Admittedly it is not wholly a satisfactory business, for a carpet is very different from a green and the leg of a chair is not a hole. A carpet has nearly always little runs in it which cannot be seen with the naked eye, and this makes borrowing, unless we know the course very well, a matter of chance. It is much faster than a putting green : so fast that there is a temptation to think nothing of running yards past the mark. Thus we hit too hard, and if we only hit hard enough, a table leg is fairly easy to hit. There was, and perhaps still is, a device to simulate a hole for indoor putting. It was made of metal something in the shape of a horseshoe. Across the opening between the two points of it was stretched an indiarubber band. The player putted at the opening. If his strength and direction were correct, the ball ambled gently over the indiarubber band and stayed inside the horseshoe. If he was weak the ball refused to surmount the band; if he was strong it jumped over both band and horseshoe. It was rather amusing but it was not the real thing, as indeed no indoor putting can be, though since writing that sentence I have been given another ingenious device. But we can practise on the carpet the art of hitting truly. Mr. Hutchinson has pointed out in the 'Badminton 'that the lines in the pattern can be used to prove whether or not the club is going back straight. Sometimes they will reveal a horrid and unsuspected degree of iniquity. Strength we cannot learn indoors. The question of persistent shortness, so dreadfully important on the links, does not arise. The best we can do is to be as honest with ourselves as possible and not 'bolt'our putts too outrageously.

I have assumed that it is impossible to cut a hole in the floor. The Englishman's home is seldom sufficiently his castle for that. A friend in America told me that he putted all through one winter in New York on the floor of a cellar which was covered, if I remember rightly, with sand welded together by some hardening process. Whatever was the precise substance, he cut a hole in it and putted nightly into it, and when spring took him back to the links he was a far better putter than ever before.

Nobody can say he did not deserve his success. I am afraid few will be found to follow so thoroughgoing an example, but I trust that many will practise if not subterraneously. And may they all attain to the ideal laid down by one of the best of all putters, Mr. John Low, that of 'hitting the ball with freedom, grace, and accuracy in the middle of the club.'