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During the 1960s when I was an RS at AU, Waltair, time was hanging heavily on my hands. My experimental work on NQR was not progressing at all and I was marking time looking for the earliest opportunity to quit. There was decent enough pocket money, so I used to take a bus from my University to the very limits of Waltair, called Waltair Uplands, get down, and walk to the Lawson's Bay... like Wordsworth in the Lake District:
Those days it was a long and lovely walk to the sea beach....all greenery, shrubs, tall casurina trees with practically no population. The last time I revisited in 1997, it was a jungle alright but of concrete. During my long walks in the 1960s, I used to see a flag fluttering in the wind on top of a pole a few feet high at the center of a circular patch of man-made greenery. I used to avoid it thinking it was private property, and push along:
And then I joined IIT KGP, and once again during my long walks to Gole Bazaar I saw this spectacle but was too shy to ask anyone what it was. And one day, the youthful son of the DM of Railways whom (son, not his pappa) I was asked to 'help' for his JEE by HNB, offered to teach me what he called: 'golf'. I politely declined out of shyness again, since I never heard of golf before.
And then I started buying and reading all available Penguins of PGW. And there were dozens of golf stories and whole books on golf. I didn't know what golf was but it didn't seem to matter at all. Because most of his golf stories had a desperate love angle and that was enough:
And by and by understood what the green circle with that fluttering flag was all about. And mastered the entire vocabulary of golf...niblicks, putters, eagles, birdies and bogies. And a couple of decades later when I watched golf played on TV, it was a revelation of sorts.
The trouble with golf is that too many folks have to share the same course and it is the retired folks who have enough money and more spare time that act as spoilsports. Listen to PGW's description of what he calls the Wrecking Crew, some of whose old goons have the charming nicknames:
Old Father Time, The Man With The Hoe, Consul..the Almost Human...
Here is a passage showing how they wreck:
...Poskitt (The First Grave Digger), the d'Artagnan of the links, was a man who brought to the tee the tactics which in his youth had won him such fame as a hammer thrower. His plan was to clench his teeth, shut his eyes, whirl the club round his head and bring it down with sickening violence in the general direction of the sphere. Usually, the only result would be a ball topped along the ground or...as had been known to happen when he used his niblick, cut in half. But there would be times when by some mysterious dispensation of Providence he managed to connect in which event the gallery would be stunned by the spectacle of a three-hundred-yarder down the middle. The whole thing as he himself has recognized, was a clean, sporting venture. He just let go and hoped for the best.
In direct antithesis to these methods were those of Wadsworth Hemmingway (Palsied Percy). It was his practice before playing a shot to stand over the ball for an appreciable time, shaking gently every limb and eyeing it closely as if it were some difficult point of law. When eventually he began his back swing, it was with a slowness which reminded those who had travelled in Switzerland of moving glaciers. A cautious pause at the top, and the clubhead would descend to strike the ball squarely and dispatch it fifty yards down the course in a perfect straight line.
The contest, in short, between a man who - on, say, the long fifteenth - oscillated between a three and a forty-two and the one who on the same hole always got his twelve - never more, never less. The Salt of Golf, as you might say...
...Posted by Ishani
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During the 1960s when I was an RS at AU, Waltair, time was hanging heavily on my hands. My experimental work on NQR was not progressing at all and I was marking time looking for the earliest opportunity to quit. There was decent enough pocket money, so I used to take a bus from my University to the very limits of Waltair, called Waltair Uplands, get down, and walk to the Lawson's Bay... like Wordsworth in the Lake District:
And then I started buying and reading all available Penguins of PGW. And there were dozens of golf stories and whole books on golf. I didn't know what golf was but it didn't seem to matter at all. Because most of his golf stories had a desperate love angle and that was enough:
And by and by understood what the green circle with that fluttering flag was all about. And mastered the entire vocabulary of golf...niblicks, putters, eagles, birdies and bogies. And a couple of decades later when I watched golf played on TV, it was a revelation of sorts.
The trouble with golf is that too many folks have to share the same course and it is the retired folks who have enough money and more spare time that act as spoilsports. Listen to PGW's description of what he calls the Wrecking Crew, some of whose old goons have the charming nicknames:
Old Father Time, The Man With The Hoe, Consul..the Almost Human...
Here is a passage showing how they wreck:
...Poskitt (The First Grave Digger), the d'Artagnan of the links, was a man who brought to the tee the tactics which in his youth had won him such fame as a hammer thrower. His plan was to clench his teeth, shut his eyes, whirl the club round his head and bring it down with sickening violence in the general direction of the sphere. Usually, the only result would be a ball topped along the ground or...as had been known to happen when he used his niblick, cut in half. But there would be times when by some mysterious dispensation of Providence he managed to connect in which event the gallery would be stunned by the spectacle of a three-hundred-yarder down the middle. The whole thing as he himself has recognized, was a clean, sporting venture. He just let go and hoped for the best.
In direct antithesis to these methods were those of Wadsworth Hemmingway (Palsied Percy). It was his practice before playing a shot to stand over the ball for an appreciable time, shaking gently every limb and eyeing it closely as if it were some difficult point of law. When eventually he began his back swing, it was with a slowness which reminded those who had travelled in Switzerland of moving glaciers. A cautious pause at the top, and the clubhead would descend to strike the ball squarely and dispatch it fifty yards down the course in a perfect straight line.
The contest, in short, between a man who - on, say, the long fifteenth - oscillated between a three and a forty-two and the one who on the same hole always got his twelve - never more, never less. The Salt of Golf, as you might say...
...Posted by Ishani
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