Not
since the day in 1963 when I slinked out of the Pearl River Public Library with
an illicit copy of The Tropic of Cancer have I been shocked by anything I’ve
read in a book. Not, that is, until I dipped into a chapter of Robert Browning’s
A History of Golf.You see, I’d always believed that golf, since time
immemorial, has been a game in which each competitor plays his own ball, without
interference by the opposition. Then I read the following passage, describing a
rule in force at St.
Andrews precisely a century and a half ago:
“When the ball lies in
a hole or in any place that the player considers is not playable, he shall, with
the consent of his adversary, lift the ball, drop it in the hazard and lose a
stroke. Should the adversary say, however, that he thinks the ball playable, he
(the adversary) plays the ball; if he makes the ball playable in two strokes,
the two strokes count as if the player had played the ball. The player then
plays the ball as if he himself had played it out. But if the adversary does not
get the ball out at the two strokes then, as stated above, it is lifted and
dropped, a stroke being lost.”
Can you imagine? Fergus and Sandy are standing
beside a deep, boggy ditch on the fourth hole. Fergus looks haplessly at his
ball and says, “Auch, ah canna git it oot,” to which Sandy replies, “Aye, but
ah can—joost you watch me!” He swaggers in with his niblick, takes a couple of
agricultural swipes, and when the muddy gutty emerges from its grave, Fergus
gets tagged with two strokes!
The spirit behind this was laudable—play the ball
as it lies, or else your opponent may—but the rule had a couple of obvious
flaws. To begin with, it favored the player who was more skilled or at least
more powerful (or at the very least, more dimwitted—willing to wade into all
manner of peril for the sake of gaining a one-stroke edge). After all, a lie
that I deem patently unplayable may, to Tiger Woods, be nothing more than a
spirited swish with an 8-iron.
On top of that, it gave the adversary a free
whack at his opponent’s ball. If he failed, his opponent still got a one-stroke
penalty; if he succeeded, his opponent got two strokes; and if the “recovery”
shot were played with a sufficient combination of deftness, cunning and malice,
the resulting lie might be only marginally better—behind a bush perhaps, or in
the same deep boggy ditch, only a foot removed from its original position but
now hittable.
I suppose it’s little wonder this rule lasted only five years
(1852-1856) before sanity returned to the Royal & Ancient. Still, there was
something darkly appealing about it. I think, in fact, the rule might have been
saved—and golf changed immeasurably—with the introduction of one little wrinkle:
Any adversary inclined to give his opponent’s ball a couple of swipes would do
so at his own risk; if he failed to extricate the ball, two strokes would be
added to his own score. The opponent would still get a one-stroke penalty but he
would thereby gain a stroke on his brash adversary rather than losing one (or
two). Now that would have put some color in the game!
If such a deliciously
vindictive rule were part of the game today, I suspect I’d enjoy golf even more
than I do. Indeed, had I been around 600 years ago, when all those alleged
progenitors of golf—kolf, kolven, jeu de mail, pall mall, etc.—were afoot, I’m
convinced I would have lobbied passionately for global adoption of a game called
chole.
Thought to have originated in Belgium and northern France, chole was a
team affair played cross-country, with an exuberant nastiness for which the
French seem to have a particular genius. The two teams selected a distant
target—say, a church door in the next town—then proceeded to bid for the chance
to play toward it. “We can get there in 52 turns,” the first team would say, after which the other team would huddle for a bit and reply (in the manner of
“Name That Tune”), “We can get there in 48.” The bidding would continue until
one team said, “OK, it’s yours at 43 turns—bon chance, mes amis!”
The
bid-winning team then played one turn, consisting of three shots, after which
the opposing team was allowed one shot, called a déchole, the object of which
was to deposit the ball into the worst imaginable lie. The offense got another
three advancing blows, followed by another thwart by the defense, and so on
until the church door either was reached in the predicted number of turns or
not.
References to chole date to the 14th century, and the evidence is that it
was played for at least 200 years. A display case in the Royal & Ancient
Golf Club shows the weaponry: egg-shaped beechwood balls and hefty wood-shafted
clubs with two hitting faces—a flat part for driving the ball and a curved,
concave side for those pesky extrications.
Sadly, the game never caught on.
Maybe they lost all the balls. Maybe no one survived the mid-match brawls.
Whatever the reason, it’s a great personal disappointment. Chole, I think, would
have suited me far better than golf.
I guess it’s in the public interest,
therefore, that I often play as a single.
