Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/36

Rh nerves affect players, and to analyse and explain it is difficult. It is easy to understand that to play the top of your game all that is necessary is to put your opponent out of your mind altogether, and just go on and play as if you were playing against an ordinary player. As I have said before, this is a counsel of perfection, and few can obey it. A man is somehow apt to feel that it is no good playing a good stroke, the probability being that his rival will bring off one equally good or better. The fact is overlooked that even a grand player fails occasionally, and that everybody finds it very hard to beat a very steady player, who can profit so much by one of his opponent's mistakes. Somehow or other a blight is on you; try how you will, you cannot forget or put out of your mind the prowess of the great player who is opposing you; he strikes a terror. This is one characteristic of golf, and it is one which golf shares with billiards.

One great attraction of golf, however, is that which appeals to the older of us, with whom work is a disgusting necessity and holidays the joy of the year. The middle-aged professional man with a substantial figure—"a fine chest that had slipped