aces better than belts--Shoes better
than boots--How the soles should be nailed--On counting your
strokes--Insisting on the rules--Play in frosty weather--Chalked faces
for wet days--Against gloves--Concerning clubs--When confidence in a
club is lost--Make up your mind about your shot--The golfer's
lunch--Keeping the eye on the ball--The life of a rubber-core--A clean
ball--The caddie's advice--Forebodings of failure--Experiments at the
wrong time--One kind of golf at a time--Bogey beaten, but how?--Tips for
tee shots--As to pressing--The short approach and the wayward
eye--Swinging too much--For those with defective sight--Your opponent's
caddie--Making holes in the bunkers--The golfer's first duty--Swinging
on the putting-greens--Practise difficult shots and not easy ones, etc.

CHAPTER XVI

COMPETITION PLAY 177

Its difficulties--Nerves are fatal--The philosophic spirit--Experience
and steadiness--The torn card--Too much hurry to give up--A story and a
moral--Indifference to your opponent's brilliance--Never slacken when
up--The best test of golf--If golf were always easy--Cautious play in
medal rounds--Risks to be taken--The bold game in match play--Studying
the course--Risks that are foolishly taken--New clubs in
competitions--On giving them a trial--No training necessary--As to the
pipe and glass--How to be at one's best and keenest--On playing in the
morning--In case of a late draw--Watch your opponents.

CHAPTER XVII

ON FOURSOMES 188

The four-ball foursome--Its inferiority to the old-fashioned game--The
case of the long-handicap man--Confusion on the greens--The man who
drives last--The old-fashioned two-ball foursome--Against too many
foursomes--Partners and each other--Fitting in their different
games--The man to oblige--The policy of the long-handicap man--How he
drove and missed in the good old days--On laying your partner a
stymie--A preliminary consideration of the round--Handicapping in
foursomes--A too delicate reckoning of strokes given and received--A
good foursome and the excitement thereof--A caddie killed and a hole
lost--A compliment to a golfer.

CHAPTER XVIII

GOLF FOR LADIES 198

As to its being a ladies' game--A sport of freedom--The lady on the
links--The American lady golfer--English ladies are improving--Where
they fail,