Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/164

Rh the game. A man with a phlegmatic, stolid, Teutonic sort of temperament will address himself to the teed ball at the sea-side, and by repressing the small amount of imagination there is in him, forget the bunker, the ditch, and the beach, all ready to receive the badly-hit ball, and hit the ball well and accurately. There are others who find it impossible to do this. With them the imagination is ever active and ever ready to dwell on the dangerous side of things. The result is, they are so overwhelmed by the presence of danger, that they forget to keep their eye on the ball, and as a consequence the ball is topped or foozled. The nervous player is terribly conscious that the faculty of forgetting—a most useful faculty in other things besides golf—is impossible for him. At a particular hole on one day he sliced the drive, which disappeared comfortably into a bunker. What this unfortunate man should do is to forget this fact and banish it from his mind; but he cannot do this, and as a consequence next day, when again he is on the same tee, it comes vividly before his mind, and being afraid of doing the