I have absolutely no interest in golf, but P. G. Wodehouse is such a great writer, that i find this book surprisingly enjoyable. It consists of a series of short stories set in a golf club, where "The Oldest Member" explains the facts of life (or the facts of golf, which is more or less the same thing) to whatever young'un happens to be within earshot.
Quotes:
"No novelists any good except me. Sovietski--yah! Nastikoff--bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me."
that is how it goes in this world. You get a following as a celebrity, and then you run up against another bigger celebrity and your admirers desert you. One could moralize on this at considerable length, but better not, perhaps
"And so," (concluded the Oldest Member), "you see that golf can be of the greatest practical assistance to a man in Life's struggle.
Love (says the Oldest Member) is an emotion which your true golfer should always treat with suspicion.
Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the game.
They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.
Fate is a dramatist who gets his best effects with a small cast
All over the links, happy, laughing groups of children had broken out like a rash.
Golf, like measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.
Talking of danger, the time when things really did look a little nasty was when the wounded gongo cornered me in a narrow tongo and I only had a pocket-knife with everything in it broken except the corkscrew and the thing for taking stones out of horses' hoofs.
A lifetime of observing my fellow-creatures has convinced me that Nature intended us all to be golfers.
Their friendship ripened rapidly, as friendships do in the South of France. In that favoured clime, you find the girl and Nature does the rest.
Mary, will you be mine? Shall we go round together? Will you fix up a match with me on the links of life which shall end only when the Grim Reaper lays us both a stymie?
It was a pathetic, a tragic letter, the letter of a woman endeavouring to express all the anguish of a torn heart with one of those fountain-pens which suspend the flow of ink about twice in every three words.
From now on, we start level, two hearts that beat as one, two drivers that drive as one.
The ideal golfer never loses his temper. When I played, I never lost my temper. Sometimes, it is true, I may, after missing a shot, have broken my club across my knees; but I did it in a calm and judicial spirit, because the club was obviously no good and I was going to get another one anyway.
He had a great gift of language, and he used it unsparingly.
in one or two other matters, like the choice of a putter (so much more important than the choice of a wife), I had been of assistance to him.
"Keep the head still--slow back--don't press," I said, gravely. There is no better rule for a happy and successful life.
"The only way," I said to Alexander, "of really finding out a man's true character is to play golf with him. In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself. I employed a lawyer for years, until one day I saw him kick his ball out of a heel-mark. I removed my business from his charge next morning. He has not yet run off with any trust-funds, but there is a nasty gleam in his eye, and I am convinced that it is only a question of time. Golf, my dear fellow, is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well. The man who can smile bravely when his putt is diverted by one of those beastly wormcasts is pure gold right through. But the man who is hasty, unbalanced, and violent on the links will display the same qualities in the wider field of everyday life.
Rules are rules, my boy, and must be kept.
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.
"Breakfast," said Rupert, firmly. "If you don't know what it is, I can teach you in half a minute. You play it with a pot of coffee, a knife and fork, and about a hundred-weight of scrambled eggs. Try it. It's a pastime that grows on you."
He was one of those men who marry early and often.
"What I want to know is what a fellow does when he plays golf. Tell me in as few words as you can just what it's all about." "You hit a ball with a stick till it falls into a hole."
The main difference, we are told, between the amateur and the professional golfer is the fact that the latter is always aiming at the pin, while the former has in his mind a vague picture of getting somewhere reasonably near it.
A young woman of singular beauty and rather statuesque appearance came out of the club-house carrying a baby swaddled in flannel. As she drew near the table she said to the baby: "Chicketty wicketty wicketty wipsey pop!" In other respects her intelligence appeared to be above the ordinary.
Golf humanizes women, humbles their haughty natures, tends, in short, to knock out of their systems a certain modicum of that superciliousness, that swank, which makes wooing a tough proposition for the diffident male.
Yes, in his twenty-ninth year, Ramsden Waters had sunk to the depth of becoming a secret golfer.
She did not speak at all apologetically, but rather as a goddess might have spoken to a swineherd.
Why, the very instant that Eunice appeared in the place, every eligible bachelor for miles around her tossed his head with a loud, snorting sound, and galloped madly in her direction.
women are women, and I doubt if any of them really take up golf in that holy, quest-of-the-grail spirit which animates men. I have known girls to become golfers as an excuse for wearing pink jumpers, and one at least who did it because she had read in the beauty hints in the evening paper that it made you lissome. Girls will be girls.
The mind of a man in love works in strange ways.
Men are as a rule idealists, and wish to keep their illusions regarding women intact, and it is difficult for the most broad-minded man to preserve a chivalrous veneration for the sex after a woman has repeatedly sliced into the rough and left him a difficult recovery. Women, too--I am not speaking of the occasional champions, but of the average woman, the one with the handicap of 33, who plays in high-heeled shoes--are apt to giggle when they foozle out of a perfect lie, and this makes for misogyny.
Their eyes met. Hers were glittering with the fury of a woman scorned. His were cold and hard. And, suddenly, as she looked at his awful, pale, set golf face, something seemed to snap in Eunice. A strange sensation of weakness and humility swept over her. So might the cave woman have felt when, with her back against a cliff and unable to dodge, she watched her suitor take his club in the interlocking grip, and, after a preliminary waggle, start his back swing.
Even as her driver rose above her shoulder she was acutely aware that she was making eighteen out of the twenty-three errors which complicate the drive at golf.
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