Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/221

182 easy always to judge by the eye whether a green is faster or slower than its immediate predecessor. One spiky blade of grass may make all the difference in laying a ball dead or holing it, and the eye cannot always be depended on to see such things. To get the strength of every green fixed in your mind is difficult for any man, for a nervous man well-nigh impossible.

There is another reason why golf is a greater test of nerve than billiards, and that is the variety of weapons that you must have for different strokes. You play with the same cue at billiards, with the same bat at cricket, with the same mallet at croquet, with the same racquet at tennis, lawn-tennis, and racquets; golf is the only game in the world, as far as I know, where it is absolutely necessary to have a minimum number of five or six clubs to play a game with. Now it is only the best players who are masters equally of five or six clubs, and I doubt if this can be said truly even of them. To the huge majority of players there are one or more clubs in which they cannot affect to feel much confidence. I do not pretend to say that an average player is always "off" with this or that club, but as every golfer