Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/186

Rh to the drive of the middle-aged. Experience is a great thing in all games, but in none more than in golf. The older player frequently finds that it is possible to improve with the irons and putter if he deteriorates with the driver and brassey. Nothing appears to me to be more true than that to win a match the short game must be good. I have watched several great matches and read about them also, and in nine cases out of ten the man who putts well is the man who wins. I do not say that this is always the case. Vardon, for instance, who must be the first player the world has ever seen, seems to me to be no better than several others in putting and lifting shots, but he wins his matches by his steady long drive, and by the still more tremendous length of his second shot through the green, and the consequence is that Vardon is always playing the like on the putting-green. But the histories of matches are very much the same. A was short in his approach putt, and took three to hole out; B on the contrary laid a long putt dead and won the hole. It seems to me that the compensation an older player gets from his younger rival is in the fact that the older man plays with greater steadiness