The evolution of golf writing, from Darwin to Wodehouse

When the Canada Cup was staged at Portmarnock in 1960, Bernard Darwin had reached the grand old age of 84 and had long since retired as golf correspondent of the London Times - in fact he would be dead a year later. Yet his writing retained much of the vibrancy which made him a highly-respected, even legendary figure in the game.

In the programme for the event, Darwin wrote: "I think it is now 54 years since I first saw Portmarnock - it was in many respects a different course from that of today but it still possesses the same charming qualities, the lovely turf, the wildness and the solitude, the obvious golfing mixture, the sandhills and the sea.

"In those days, one did not drive round by the good road to get there, one sailed there across a stretch of water, and I remember making the voyage in a high wind and a snowstorm and being a poor sailor, rejoicing when I was safely over."

Darwin, known affectionately as Bernardo to his friends and colleagues, was the first president of the Association of Golf Writers, from 1938 to 1948. And he contributed handsomely to what is widely acknowledged as the finest literature of any sport.

The principal reason for this happy situation is thought to be the fact that golf is the only game played on natural terrain or on land moulded so as to adopt the characteristics of the great Scottish links courses. As a consequence, it is invested with an entirely different dimension from games which are played on fields or courts conforming to fairly uniform specifications.

If Darwin has an American counterpart, it has to be Herbert Warren Wind, whose articles for the New Yorker magazine have become a veritable treasury of golf's great happenings. And among his outstanding books is An Introduction to the Literature of Golf in which he identifies Horace G Hutchinson as the first Englishman to become an important figure in the game.

Apart from capturing the British Amateur championships of 1886 and 1887, Hutchinson wrote Hints on the Game of Golf, which was first published in 1886.

It is often said that despite the much-publicised skills of people such as David Leadbetter and Butch Harmon, there is nothing new to be taught about hitting a golf ball. In that context, the introduction to Hutchinson's book of 114 years ago is quite enlightening.

It reads: "Now, the great secret of all strokes at golf. . . . is to make the club travel as long as possible in the direction in which you wish the ball to go consistently, with the application of sufficient speed - that is with sufficient speed of impact. . . . The proper line of motion can only be given to the club-head by grasping lightly with the right hand, keeping the right shoulder down and its muscles loose." Most coaches would concede that it would be difficult to improve on these basic concepts.

The next great work of golfwriting is particularly apposite at this time, given the venue for the Millennium British Open. It is Reminiscences of Golf on St Andrews Links, written by James Balfour and published in Edinburgh in 1887. It is interesting to note his observation that in the early 1840s, when he first got to know the Old Course, the only people who played it were "a few resident gentlemen" and "some occasional strangers."

Another milestone in golfwriting occurred in 1908 with the publication of The Mystery of Golf by Arnold Haultain, a Canadian. In it, he articulates the amazing stranglehold which the game exerts over body and soul, as in the extract:

"At dinner the talk was - of golf. Yet the talkers were neither idiots, fools or monomaniacs. On the contrary, many of them were grave men of the world. At all events the most monomaniacal of the lot was a prosperous man of affairs, worth I do not know how many thousands, which thousands he had made by the same mental faculties by which this evening he was trying to probe or to elucidate the profundities and complexities of this so-called `game'. Will someone tell us wherein lies its mystery?"

Someone with a wonderful awareness of golf's mysteries was Pelham Grenville Wodehouse who was born in Guildford Surrey in 1881 and died 93 years later in Remsenburg, Long Island. From the incomparable Clicking of Cuthbert to The Salvation of George Mackintosh and Rodney Fails to Qualify he has left us with a collection of golfing short stories that are without rival.

In his story Ordeal by Golf, Wodehouse observes sagely: "Statisticians estimate that the average crime among good golfers is lower than in any class of the community except possibly bishops. Since Willie Park won the first championship at Prestwick in the year 1860, there has, I believe, been no instance of an Open Champion spending a day in prison."

Wodehouse was a moderate golfer, playing off 17 handicap as a member of Le Touquet and the Great Neck club on Long Island. Yet his understanding of the game was comparable to that of Darwin, who won a Walker Cup match as a stand-in in 1922 and later, as a 57-year-old, partnered Joyce Wethered to victory in the Worplesdon Foursomes.

Which is a source of some encouragement to the rest of us scribes.