thought. It is only when he takes to the game in earnest that he
becomes self-conscious and anxious, and tops his shots even as you and
I. A man who could retain through his golfing career the almost
scornful confidence of the non-player would be unbeatable. Fortunately
such an attitude of mind is beyond the scope of human nature.
It was not, however, beyond the scope of Vincent Jopp, the superman.
Vincent Jopp, was, I am inclined to think, the only golfer who ever
approached the game in a spirit of Pure Reason. I have read of men who,
never having swum in their lives, studied a text-book on their way down
to the swimming bath, mastered its contents, and dived in and won the
big race. In just such a spirit did Vincent Jopp start to play golf. He
committed McHoots's hints to memory, and then went out on the links and
put them into practice. He came to the tee with a clear picture in his
mind of what he had to do, and he did it. He was not intimidated, like
the average novice, by the thought that if he pulled in his hands he
would slice, or if he gripped too tightly with the right he would pull.
Pulling in the hands was an error, so he did not pull in his hands.
Gripping too tightly was a defect, so he did not grip too tightly. With
that weird concentration which had served him so well in business he
did precisely what he had set out to do--no less and no more. Golf with
Vincent Jopp was an exact science.
The annals of the game are studded with the names of those who have
made rapid progress in their first season. Colonel Quill, we read in
our Vardon, took up golf at the age of fifty-six, and by devising an
ingenious machine consisting of a fishing-line and a sawn-down bedpost
was enabled to keep his head so still that he became a scratch player
before the end of the year. But no one, I imagine, except Vincent Jopp,
has ever achieved scratch on his first morning on the links.
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. Vincent Jopp invariably went for the pin.
He tried to hole out from anywhere inside two hundred and twenty yards.
The only occasion on which I ever heard him express any chagrin or
disappointment was during the afternoon round on his first day out,
when from the tee on the two hundred and eighty yard seventh he laid
his ball within six inches of the hole.
'A marvellous shot!' I cried, genuinely stirred.
'Too much to the right,' said Vincent Jopp, frowning.
He went on from triumph to triumph. He won the monthly medal in May,
June, July, August, and September. Towards the end of May he was heard
to complain that Wissahicky Glen was not a sporting course. The Greens
Committee sat up night after night trying to adjust his handicap so as
to give other members an outside chance against him. The golf experts
of the daily papers wrote columns about his play. And it was pretty
generally considered throughout the country that it would be a pure
formality for anyone else to enter against him in the Amateur
Championship--an opinion which was borne out when he got through into
the final without losing a hole. A safe man to have betted on, you
