Out-door Games: Cricket and Golf/Chapter Q0

Now I'm in for paying his infernal bill besides. Now we want to predict where the balls go, and we’ll say that the prediction fails when a ball leaves a collision 90 degrees from where we predicted - it’s obvious that after that point we can’t usefully predict anything. Some players will purchase spot stickers and use them to mark out where the colored balls should go. But the ridiculous exhibition of temper and sulkiness that a great many players show habitually, only begins to be humorous when the game is over and the opponent of the irascible one is telling a congenial friend after dinner about it, and the offender is not present. There are other players who have a fit if, when they have the honour, they find their opponent's ball teed up before their caddie has put their own on the tee. The companions you'll find! A golfer by practice may improve his play with a club, but he very likely will find that, during the time he has occupied himself with this club, another has mysteriously failed him; and in any case the terrible ordeal of putting has to be gone through, and it is the painful experience of bad putters that practice does by no means perfect, but only causes new terrors to appear.

Experience is nothing in putting; it is everything for the rest in the game. It is a trifling blot on a great game that putting, relatively to the rest of the game, is far too important. Don't let a youth suppose that, because a golfer of great skill is a victim to one or more of these fads, it is necessary that he should be so also. In one sense it was refreshing for an ordinary mortal to see great men fail in the way they did, for we could all flatter ourselves we could quote this instance as a proof of how hard putting was, when we failed ourselves. If you get out, well you have no further opportunity of getting nervous till your second innings comes round, and under no circumstances ought a bowler to be nervous, as one bad ball may always be redeemed by a wicket next ball.

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveller passes. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. And well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the window bolt as it shook in the breeze. I heard the palanquins dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. Then came the ratub-a curious meal, half native and half English in composition-with the old man babbling behind my chair about dead and gone masters and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. A minute afterwards, there was another whirr and I got into bed.

Sometimes there was a double click and a whirr and another click. But even if this is true of clubs, there is yet another aspect of the question, and that is, the question of distance. Why is it more of a trial to nerves than billiards, which is wholly a question of strength with a reasonable amount of accuracy? The man of thirty in a few years will very likely develop into a really bad putter, not because he has not the skill-for he proved his skill when a beginner-but because he has learnt the terrors of putting, what is billiards and his skill is overpowered by his nerves. I never knew a man enter a billiard-room that he wasn't lost for ever. And that's what you call a man who leaves his wife-a 'lucky fellow'? Will you call at my shop at seven this evening about the pants you ordered? It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived. A hyæna would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead-the worst sort of Dead. Lots of interesting developments would follow, as, for instance, the institution of sort of silly-point-short-mid-on in the centre of the triangle.