I JUST woke up the next day, and went out to look at the course over which I was to be butchered by the favourite. (Golf at Rosses Point began about 11 - i.e. when some of the competitors could see again.) You start with an unfair slog uphill for a hard four; the second, is even more steeply uphill; the third is downhill; and the fourth is a short hole, which comes as a blow between your half-closed eyes. (My picture of this golf course is coloured by circumstance.)
This short hole breaks your feebly beating heart. Between tee and green there is a chasm. You must pitch on, and the fiery green slopes violently from left to right. The wind was blowing from left to right. My golf ball flew from left to right, kicked from left to right, and I walked after it from left to right; and then from right to left. I hit the pitch, if anything, on the side of the ball nearest the hole. This impetus carried it through a patch of elephant grass to within one inch of the pin. I nearly missed my three.
After these first four holes the fun really begins, and it is fun, too. In front of the sixth tee there is a cliff approximately 40 feet high, dropping to the fairway below. If you top at least the ball will disappear from sight, so here is the place to seize the stick like a flail and go for distance. The course then is level for a hit, with all the opportunity in the world to try your Vardon fade or Mitchell draw. You can be sure of a good lie at the seventh one quarter mile off the line. I needed it.
Next there is a lot of tricky, and, if possible, dishonest work among hills of bewildering shape and size till you return to the plain below the cliff, and here I found one of the finest holes I have ever seen the 15th.
The green is invisible, round a corner to the right, and you drive between two hills. Cunningly I played well out to the left, and then found a bunker skirting the entire left-hand side of the green. During the course of the week I never got an open belt at the green. Your tee shots must be at least 230 yards long, and it must also be cut so that at the very end it swings in on the far side of the hill on the right. Cecil Ewing can do it. So could I if I ran up a small bungalow on the tee, and lived there for three weeks with 5,000 golf balls.
Finally, there is the 17th, a purely diabolical invention. It is sharply doglegged to the left, and the green lies in the side of a mountain. Two hundred and ten yards from the tee a ridge runs out into the fairway, so that if you don't pass it off the tee it hides your view of the green. Two hundred and twenty yards from the tee the fairway degenerates into a kind of volcanic eruption. What to do with your tee shot is a problem, and how to carry on after you have got it there is another.
I have given this elaborate - and I should surmise futile - description of the golf course, because I find it extremely difficult to picture with the necessary degree of delicacy the non-golfing hours. Some, and among them the young couple staying in the hotel, will say they were rough and rude; while others, more vividly, will liken them to the last days of the Roman Empire. Objectors and supporters alike, however, will admit that there was plenty doing.
The weather, in the first place, had that seductive warmth that is said to be the ruin of the Indian hill stations. It was summer, and a holiday, and we're here because we're here because we're here, and all that: and, if occasionally hoarse bellowing sounds crashed through the night, figures were seen creeping with painful care across the putting green, motor cars arrived at one hundred miles an hour, and sleep was impossible before five in the morning, at least there is only one West of Ireland meeting in the year. It's lucky, too.
Particularly I remember one evening the night before I played John Burke in the third round. Impelled by who knows what lunatic impulse, I had it in mind to beat him, and I went to bed at half-past nine. Downstairs, and immediately below me, numerous competitors were playing nap, pontoon or rummy. By ten o'clock I realised they were going to cheer at the conclusion of each hand, and in the interim, at the achievement of each coup. I tried reading for a bit.
At 11.15 they began to sing. It started quite nicely. Someone had a pleasant and, above all else, soft baritone, and he obliged, as I judged, shyly, with The Hills of Donegal I turned out the light and arranged myself for sleep. At the end of The Hills of Donegal, another voice, a slightly brassy tenor, gave his attention to The Rose of Tralee. I began to get an inkling of what I was in for; and when a third, and awful, voice began on Drinking. I definitely abandoned all thought of rest.
Within 20 minutes they had tired of listening in silence to individual members of the troupe and all sang more or less simultaneously. We passed through Daisy, Pack Up Your Troubles, Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the Sea, Rolling Home, My Little Grey Home in the West, and approximately every other song ever written. One ambitious artist began to harmonise, and another noise - not a voice - joined in; unable to restrain itself any longer, though clearly uncertain of its capabilities. As the last notes died away a faint green light was appearing in the East. It resembled closely the colour of my own face.
The match was due to begin at 10.15 a.m., and out of deference to my maimed nervous system I made careful provision to arrive on the tee at 10.14. Something went wrong, as it always does, and I was flapping around with the driver well before 10 o'clock. The gallery began to appear. It included several of the song-birds of the night before. They looked pleasantly robust, and issued many a courteous "H'ya, Jem, to friends and total strangers around them. It would have been impossible to tell from their appearance that they had been in violent activity but a few hours earlier.
My left knee began to shake slightly, and I defy anybody to give a wholly confident "H'ya, Jem," on the first tee of an early morning, when there is a stiff breeze blowing up the course the drive is uphill; your opponent is certain to hit it 270 yards straight, and anything up to 40 friends are gathered to make inadequate attempts to smother their laughter as you hit one off the heel that jars you to the spine. I tried a practice swing, which blasted several feet of thick rich earth into the face of a lady on a shooting stick. "Jem" said 40 friends, reproachfully.
I stood quietly among them after that. It was 10.05 and both knees were shaking. I waggled the club a bit, just to get the feel of the "thing." I saw ten thick bananas wound insensitively around the handle. "Jem," said a cunning voice. I looked up with glazed eyes. The owner of the voice jerked his thumb towards the door of the refreshment room. "Come on Jem," I said, purposefully - and then "John Burke and said the starter. The hunt was up, and in a few more seconds I would be called up to hit a tiny golf ball with a monstrously long golf club some way into the air, so that the golf ball would travel over 200-yards in the direction of an indistinguishable hole in the ground two and a half miles away. I stepped up on to the tee. "Watch Jem," said a voice, already trembling on the edges of wild, mad laughter.
The ball fill off the peg twice. "Did you see Jem?" In a convulsive ripple it ran around the circle of watchers. The breeze rose with inexplicable rapidity to a kind of moderate equinoxial gale. A burst of clapping sounded in my ear from the match ahead. I hoisted up the tram standard they had given me in place of a golf club, supported it riskily above my head for a moment, and flung the farther end of it at the marble on the tee, which I estimated to be the golf ball. There was an instantaneous whiplash crack and the ball whined off straight up the course, nice and low to allow for the wind, and a bit of draw on the end to get the run. "Nice work, Jem," said the 40 friends, moving off to watch a better match.
