Spirit of the links

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THE SPIRIT OF THE LINKS
are associated with playing some kind of childish
golf, and aping their elders in every possible way.
It is to the fact of their having done so that they
attribute most of their success in their after life at the
game. As children they developed a free, easy,
natural swing that has stood them in good stead ever
since, and it has become so rooted into their system
that they are far less liable than other golfers who
began much later, to be constantly going off their
game and dropping out of their proper swing. Harry
Vardon, James Braid, J. H. Taylor, Alexander Herd,
Willie Park, Jack White, and all the rest of them
played golf as the very smallest children. The two
.last-named both declare that they developed their
extraordinary putting faculties when they were mere
babies. Park, a king of putters, it is certain, gained
his extraordinary delicacy of touch, and fine discrim-
ination in selecting the line to the hole, through
practising as a very small boy with marbles on the
stone or brick floor of his father's workshop at Mussel-
burgh, a slight hollow in the floor being regarded
as the hole. He got a passion for such putting
practice, and at nights would surreptitiously borrow
the key to the shop and hie there with some other
boys for putting practice. He says that he has never
had such hard putting to do since, and that when in
due course he went out on the links to play the real
game, putting seemed very easy to him. The first
clubs that Alexander Herd ever used were glued
together for him by his mother, and his first golf was
obtained in the streets of St. Andrews. It was much
the same with several of the best amateurs, though
from the evidence that one can obtain they do not
appear to have been such keen golfers when babies as