Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/215

176 nervous before he goes in to bat at cricket, but his nervousness goes when he has scored twenty runs, and been in half-an-hour. If you get out, well you have no further opportunity of getting nervous till your second innings comes round, and under no circumstances ought a bowler to be nervous, as one bad ball may always be redeemed by a wicket next ball. But putting has to be gone through every hole, and no golfer exists who does not know that putting is more than half a matter of nerve and nerve only. "I've faced battle and tigers," an elderly major is reported to have said, "with equanimity, but this putt of a yard and half fills me with dread unspeakable."

I have mentioned golf and billiards together as the two games that give the hardest test of nerve, and the reason is this, that in both games strength is the all-important matter: strokes that require calculation of strength want nerve, but frequently are played without it. In cricket you either hit a ball as hard as you like or you merely stop; that at any rate is the case when you first go in, and when you are nervous. In football you run your hardest and