Spirit of the links

COMPARING PLAYERS
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are turning to beautiful golds and browns and
crimsons, and with a little rain the turf begins to
yield more to the foot and the club, and play is
pleasanter than it was in the dog days. We would
have no sorrows to mar the pleasure of such a day;
but the golfer need only be braced to skill and
worthiness by the reminder that this date has a little
black edge round it in his calendar, for on that day
there died one who was certainly one of the greatest
golfers who ever lived. That was Allan Robertson.
It will always be a difficult matter to compare the
golfers of a living generation with those of a dead
one, or to estimate the relative quality of the golfers
of two different generations, both of them of the long
distant past. We have no standards that are carried
on from decade to decade and century to century,
and while men do not change, their implements do,
and the courses on which they play, while, what with
the alterations in implements and courses, the methods
are much changed, so that it is quite the same game
no longer. Therefore it is impossible and futile
to make any comparison between the man we have
to-day and whom we like to think is the greatest
golfer who ever handled a club, and some of the
great heroes of the past. That is a question that
can never be settled. What we do know, and we
can think it for our modern satisfaction, is that there
are of necessity many more fine players in these
days than ever there were before, and there are dozens
for every one that there was in the days of Allan
Robertson and young Tom Morris. Therefore it
must be much harder to assert supremacy in these
days than formerly, and all the greater is the feat of
doing it not once, but many times. If some of the
t:r