You immediately think of the wide-eyed stares of the village elders the next morning as they took in what had been wrought upon their sacred village lawn.

If you took thirty-four modern golfers and tape-recorded their early memories of how they became involved with golf, you would have substantially different scenarios.  Gone would be the experimental approach.  The old golfers, in some fashion or another had to find or make their own clubs and either find balls or use substitutes (large marbles, round pieces of wood, etc.). 

James Robb (p.23) and his friend only had one ball between them

James Robb, Winner of Golf Amateur Championship, 1906

and played a game in which the y alternated shots in some privately invented manner.  This, he explains, in a marvel of understatement, "tended to produce rather strained relations".  The game in the old days had to be learned by imitation or trial and error. 

"Of course, there was not such thing as golf tuition for us, and I was never taught", wrote Tom Vardon (p. 246), "but, like most other professional golfers, learned my game by watching others play it. 

"Bobby Jones learned how to swing by watching the East Lake Professional, Stewart Maiden, who like to many Scots had emigrated to the U.S. looking for work.  He was said to have had a Carnoustie swing.  The swing that developed at St. Andrews, only forty miles south of Carnoustie, was different, as was the swing that developed on the west coast of Scotland at Prestwick.  That was known as a 'west coast' swing. 

Watts Gunn shakes with Bobby Jones at 1925 U.S. Amateur (Stewart "Kiltie" Maiden stands right behind Jones)

Scots could tell at a glance what area of the country you were from by the shape of your swing.  Today the swing is pretty much the same around the world.  Herbert Warren Wind maintained that, with the advent of the Hogan and Nelson instruction books, the dynamics of the modern golf swing was understood for the first time and could be taught to everyone.

Today, as we all know, golf is as much an investment as it is a sport.  While many of us play the game for sheer fun of it, others hope to have career in golf or to enhance business or social prospects by playing the game.  When young, we are given clubs, the opportunity to play at private or public courses, there are golf teams in the high school level, and there is a sophisticated instruction all along. 

The young go to golf camps in the summer, and most large communities have junior golf programs.  Golfers begin to compete as children.  Most have enough money not to need to caddie or help out the greenskeeper or find odd jobs, as did nearly all of the golfers in "Great Golfers in the Making".  Clubs are bought not made in the professional's shop.  The smell of varnish and glue that Darwin and others loved so much is gone from the game.  Yet, the old timers loved the game no more than many of us do now or worried about it less.  We, like they, still wake up in the middle of the night covered in cold sweat because of a missed putt in a match. 

Bernard Darwin claimed that the golfers of old were more united than we are today "because we were conscious of being an elect and almost persecuted body, assembling in secret places to practice obscure nonconformist rites".

Reading "Great Golfers in the Making" makes one think of the bonds that unite golfers today, while different of course, are just as numerous and strong as they were for the golfers of one hundred years earlier.

We no longer arrive at a course by train, a most romantic journey.  We fly instead and rent a car, but the thrill of stepping out on the first tee is just as intense as before.  The emotional core of the game has largely survived - so far.

"Great Golfers in the Making" (1907) is part of the Classics of Golf 69-book Library and is available for only $35 (click here). 

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