Hit for six
Practice rounds can be terribly slow, and none slower than the occasion when I was playing in the Open Championship one year with Peter Alliss at St Andrews. We hit putt after putt on the 5th green while waiting for the 6th fairway to clear, until at last I was able to call him from the side of the green that it was time to move on. He picked up my ball and bowled it to me overarm. Responding to this cricketing motif I swung my putter and by the most amazing fluke caught the ball absolutely flush. The ball flew like a bullet and almost decapitated someone on the 12th green.
Having established that nobody had in fact been injured we played on, but when we finished I was given the dreaded news that the R&A secretary required my presence in his office. Forthwith. The formidable Brigadier Brickman duly gave me a thorough and well-deserved dressing down. I expressed my sincere regrets and that was that.
He was a man of great charm and, having done his duty, he switched the conversation to more congenial topics. We soon discovered a mutual and abiding interest in fishing and cricket and so begun a firm friendship which strengthened and endured until the day he died.
NB. In May 2004 Peter and I were granted honorary life membership of the R&A. We were both so thrilled. What a wonderful journey it’s been since that Open Championship at St Andrews so many years ago.
A discreet silence
On the eve of the final against Gary Player in the South African Matchplay Championship we received word that my wife’s father had died. Rita took the morning’s flight back to London. She was sitting next to three air crew from South African Airways and as the plane approached Nairobi one of them went forward to the flight deck and returned with the dire news: ‘That roineck is one up on Gary!’ Rita said not a word.
At Athens another enquiry was made of the radio reports and came back with the stupefying news: ‘That roineck has beaten Gary on the last green!’
Only now did their travelling companion permit herself the immense pleasure of announcing: ‘I am Mrs John Jacobs, the wife of that roineck.’
Physician heal thyself? Not at my age!
When I retired from competitive golf I lost my enthusiasm for my own game and hardly played for many years. I had a living to make and in this was greatly helped by a man who was to become one of the great influences in my life. Laddie Lucas, the left-handed Walker Cup player, was a member at my club, Sandy Lodge in Hertfordshire, and also, of course, a much decorated fighter ace from the war. I had also served in the RAF so we had two strong interests in common, but it was the fact that we got on so well on a personal level that led us into a business partnership.
From that sprang the pioneering idea of formally structured golf centres and the ones we built in Britain and Ireland remain the models for golf centres and schools all over the world. Add writing books and magazine articles, coaching the national teams of ten countries, doing television commentaries, making films and videos, giving private lessons around the world, group instruction, setting up the PGA European Tour and teaching the teachers for the John Jacobs Golf Centres in America – all intensely golf-related activities – and you can see how I became over-golfed without even playing the game.
For relaxation I preferred fly fishing. But in the last five years or so, as I’ve eased off on my working schedule, I have rediscovered the joys of playing the game. I must confess that in my capacity as a professional golf analyst I cannot give myself high marks for style or performance these days. I experiment and do things I tell others not to do. But I do enjoy it, and that, after all, is the purpose of golf.
Hopeless cases
The only people whose golf cannot be improved are those who won’t listen!
In 1986 Gary Player was asked, looking back with all the experience he had gathered in the interim, how he would assess John Jacobs’s mark that he has made upon the world game. Player paused for a moment, those big round and strikingly brown eyes staring out in front of him. When he spoke he gave the impression that he wanted his answer to seem important and that he was in earnest about it.
‘Plenty of us,’ he said, measuring his words, ‘enjoy playing golf. It’s a wonderful game. It brings lifelong friendships and it takes us to beautiful places. All that is for ourselves. But there are very few in the game who can actually say that they give others enjoyment. John is one of the few. He is a contributor to people’s golfing enjoyment – through his teaching, his instructional books, but also his companionship and humour, by his television work and the interest he takes in others, in their golf and in their lives. His input into the game, over all the years I have known him, has been, frankly, exceptional; and he has said very little about it.
‘I have seen John in so many roles and circumstances. He has beaten me in competition, and I have beaten him. He has helped me at times with my game when I was in need of a fresh view on my action. And I believe that, now and then in his playing days, maybe I lent him a hand with his. But in all this time, it is really as a contributor – putting more in than ever he could take out for himself – that I mainly remember him. And he always seemed to give the impression of being enthusiastic about it – of wanting to do it and not because he had to.’
Player paused again. ‘I suppose, when you weigh it all up, the thing with John is that he has put the game and people’s enjoyment of it first. That way, he has given them enjoyment – and earned a lot of success for himself.’
Take it easy
You should always practise the full swing with a relatively easy club. I used to wear out 6-irons on the practice ground.
A television director who had just taken up golf asked if I would take a look at his swing. I agreed and when I met him on the practice ground he had a collection of the oldest balls you ever saw and a 2-iron. Obviously he did not hit that 2-iron very well. None of us plays his best golf with a 2-iron.
Later that day while I was doing my television commentary, Brian Barnes fluffed a bunker shot and the ball moved about two feet. I remarked: ‘That reminds me of our director’s 2-iron.’
A voice in my headphones came back immediately: ‘You’re fired!’
Booed at St Andrews
The 1955 Open Championship was blessed with balmy sunshine. The Old Course at St Andrews was playing hard and fast, the way a links course should. I had started 70, 71 and, so far as John Jacobs was concerned, God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. I was not so naive as to start anticipating events, but I was doing all right and knew that if I could just keep it going, well … who knows what might happen?
My second shot to the 17th green finished on a slight downslope just short of the Road Hole bunker. I surveyed the situation carefully, noting the flag position and scanning how much green I had to work with, assessing the chances of recovery if my ball went over the green on to the road (cobbled in those days, as opposed to the effete Tarmac of today). I allowed myself a quick glance at the sea of hard-eyed, calculating faces of the spectators crowded behind the wall.
The Scots have a well-deserved reputation for being the most discerning golf watchers in the world, and applause sounds much sweeter when it comes from people who can recognise and appreciate the distinction between a standard shot and a good shot. But at times like this, those knowing Scottish galleries can take on the aura of a jury at a murder trial. I knew well enough that if this had been a quiet Saturday evening and I were playing for half a crown with a friend, I could nip the ball right up to the flag. The spectators understood as much, too. But this was the Open Championship and I needed to finish 4, 4 to go into the last round in second place, right in contention, challenging for the Open title.
There was a low, guttural murmuring of disapproval as I set myself to chip in a direction well wide of the line to the flag. The gallery’s derisive mumbling at my faint-hearted decision, or what I would prefer to call endorsement of the notion that discretion is the better part of valour, degenerated into outright booing as I clipped the ball up to the front of the green.
I now faced an enormous putt with a deceptively severe right-to-left swing, presenting a risk of putting into the Road Hole bunker. I holed that huge putt – and a detonation of applause from behind the ball signalled the rehabilitation of John Jacobs in the estimation of the world’s most knowledgeable crowd.
Eventually there was to be no happy ending. As usual, I came a cropper in the final round, taking seven at the 14th.
Hole in one, just as intended!
The relative exclusiveness of the game of golf in Pakistan in the 1960s was shown by a revealing incident which occurred towards the end of Jacobs’s second stay in the country. He had already designed the front nine holes of one of the Peshawar courses on his previous visit. Now he had returned to complete the second half. To help get the feel of it, he was playing holes with the Commander in Chief of the Air Force and two other officers.
Jacobs and his party were about to play their tee shots to the 180-yard 11th hole. Before the gaze of five or six hundred uninitiated spectators, an Englishman, playing with the local professional, shouted across that his pro had just holed the 16th in one. Before hitting his tee shot to the 11th, Jacobs called back: ‘If you watch carefully, you will see how it’s done.’ The 3-iron went straight into the hole! ‘The amusing thing,’ recalls Jacobs, ‘was that most of the spectators who saw the shot, not being golfers, thought that it was intended!’
That same evening, Jacobs was flown by helicopter to Lahore to dine with Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s president. It made a good story over dinner. The president, himself a keen golfer, was well aware that 3-irons cannot be made like that to order.
… and a couple more aces, to boot
Holes in one have an attraction for Jacobs. Maybe it is because his own ‘aces’ have occurred in unusual circumstances. There are two more to set beside the strange affair in Pehsawar.
Soon after the Ryder Cup team returned from Palm Springs, Frank Pennink, a highly competent British amateur before the war and, after it, a distinguished golf course architect, rang up Jacobs at Sandy Lodge. Pennink was the writing a weekly golf column for the Sunday Express and hit on the idea of playing a round with each member of the team, picking out the particular club with which the player was identified. He asked Jacobs what he might do with him, which was different from the rest:
‘I didn’t hesitate. There was a very strong wind blowing that day so I said to Frank, “why don’t you feature long-iron play into the wind?”’
The two got round to the 15th, a good one-shotter straight into the eye of the wind. ‘Here’s one to test us today,’ commented Jacobs as he prepared to drive a 2-iron at the green, low under the wind. Drilled navel high, straight at the stick, the ball pitched once just short of the flag and rolled slowly into the cup.
But, of all his strange ‘aces’, perhaps the most bizarre occurred at the short 17th on the New Course at Sunningdale. It was midwinter and Jacobs was playing with the local assistant against two Hunt brothers, Bernard and Geoffrey. The golf, as he remembers it, was exceptionally good:
‘There were birdies galore. Pars were of little use. 3s and 2s were the order. My partner and I were beaten 3&2 on the 16th green. I had originally talked Bernard into playing for a fiver, so I said to him on the 17th tee, “come on, £10 or nothing on the bye.”’
Hunt accepted the challenge with just a hint of misgiving. ‘All right Jacobs,’ he countered, ‘but with a nose and a name like yours, you’ll probably get a one.’
A few moments later, they were picking Jacobs’s 6-iron out of the cup!
Command performances
Before the restoration of the Spanish monarchy, King Juan Carlos occasionally dropped in on my teaching sessions and hit balls. He could smash them miles and obviously had the inherent talent to become an accomplished player, but he never took up the game.
Both King Leopold of the Belgians and his son, Prince Baudouin, sent for me to give them lessons, and they would have been automatic choices if the crowned heads of Europe had decided to form a golf team.
I am not so sure about Leopold’s wife, Princess Lilian. She had the strongest grip I ever saw and I told her: ‘You may be a princess but if you hold the club like that you will always be a hooker.’ I could have bitten my tongue, as the saying goes, when I realised my gaffe. Fortunately, she was unfamiliar with the expression. Either that or she displayed self-control and forbearance of truly regal proportions.
Golf axiom: in mixed foursomes all husbands become golf professionals. During one tournament I could stand the hectoring and bullying no longer and enquired of the lady how on earth she could put up with being addressed in such terms by her husband. ‘Oh, he’s not my husband,’ she assured me, ‘he’s my lover.’
An obvious champion
I was working in Cairo when Peter Thomson broke his journey there on his first trip to Britain. The flight from Australia took two days in the lumbering Constellations and, even as a lithe 18-year old, he was extremely stiff when he disembarked. He was travelling with Norman von Nida and they had to go straight to the golf course to play an exhibition match against me and Hassan Hassanein.
Thomson’s game immediately caught my attention because of his touch with the short shots. His stiff back meant that his long game was wayward but he scrambled to telling effect, getting the ball up and down so regularly that he reached the turn in par-36. By now the hot sun and the exercise had done their remedial work on his back and he turned on a dazzling display of shot making. If it had been possible to buy shares in that teenager I would have invested every penny I could scrape together.
The spirit of golf
If you were to ask me to recall an incident which sums up the spirit of golf, and professional golf in particular, my mind would instantly go back to a French Open Championship at La Boulie when the South African Harold Henning needed to finish with two fours to share second place
On the 17th hole he pushed his drive slightly and the ball ran in among some leaves. He identified the ball by brand name and number, played to the green and holed out. When he retrieved the ball from the hole he looked carefully and announced: ‘This isn’t my ball.’ It was indeed the right make, Slazenger B51, and the right number, 3, but he was sure it was not his ball. So he effectively disqualified himself and later went back and found his own ball under the leaves.
Harold’s honesty meant that the rest of us all moved up a place in the prize list. On the bus taking the players to the airport, we had a whip round and collected virtually the full amount of the second prize and gave it to Harold.
I suppose the amateur equivalent of this incident would be when Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself for an infringement which nobody saw but him. When someone started to compliment him on his action, Jones brusquely cut him short by saying it was like praising a man for not robbing a bank.
Quite so. I might add that in the French Open incident we were not rewarding Harold from refraining from robbing a bank; we simply felt guilty at profiting from his honesty.
Small World
One of the participants in the 1994 Apollo Tour school for new PGA European Tour cardholders, Jonathan Lomas, a very promising young professional, called me to say that he had been going through his grandfather’s deed box and had come across a letter from my mother.
The subject matter of that letter took me back to my youth, during the early days of the war. I used to help out on the neighbouring farm and the grateful farmer gave me two gilt pigs. Since the fairways were cut by horse-drawn mowers, we were able to build a pigsty adjoining the stable.
The Lindrick clubhouse was converted into a maternity home during the war and my mother did the catering. She kept the golfers going at weekends by providing snacks in the professional’s shop and fed the pigs on the scraps from both establishments. Those two pigs had several litters and so, in the food shortages of wartime, pig breeding became a useful and thriving little sideline.
That letter concerned the sale of the last of the pigs to Jonathan Lomas’s grandfather, the local butcher.
You bounder, sir; you’ve defiled my lady wife!
I feel sure it is true of all golf coaches that teaching is more, much more, than just a way of making a living. The rewards of having former pupils come up to you and say how their golf, and their lives, were transformed by the help you gave them many years before is, literally, beyond price. The satisfaction of giving someone the source of one of life’s great pleasures is the stimulus which keeps me teaching long after I should have retired to the river bank with my trout rod.
Very often, however, the ex-pupil who has poured out his gratitude for giving him a lifetime of happiness on the links then hits one with the whammy of a codicil: ‘But you have absolutely ruined my wife’s swing.’
That, I must say, is hard to take since never in my entire life have I even met the lady in question. What has happened in almost all cases, of course, is that in teaching the man and explaining in patient detail how the swing operates, you create the monster of a self-appointed golf professional who goes home and gives his wife lessons. He may have come to me as a tilter with an unduly upright swing arc which, in due course, I have put right. But you can imagine the havoc he would create if he applied my swing-faulter remedy to a wife whose swing was already excessively flat.
To the best of my knowledge Alexander Pope did not spend a lot of time on the practice ground curing the slices of 17th century golfing tyros but he certainly said it for all golf teachers when he wrote: ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing …’
1981, Walton Heath: Ryder Cup selection shenanigans
A strange and testing golf course played the second time round sometimes seems more difficult than it did ‘blind’. A similar experience awaited John Jacobs in his second captaincy of Great Britain and Europe in the Ryder Cup match at Walton Heath, Surrey, in September 1981. He had been over the ground before, but now some fiend had slipped in unseen an extra hazard or two where before there had been none.
The United States had selected ‘a corker of a side’. A team which, at the start of the 1980s, opened with Nicklaus, Watson, Floyd, Irwin, Trevino, Nelson and Kite, to say nothing of Miller, Crenshaw and the rest, was clearly going to take some beating. But the European Tour managed to shoot itself in the instep before a ball had been struck.
The difficulties for the home side – and for Jacobs in particular – began with the selection. Looking back now, it was a tragic business. There had been one change in the committee from the body which had picked the last two places in 1979; the German Bernhard Langer, leader now of the order of merit, replacing Ballesteros.
At the time, Ballesteros was at odds with the tournament committee over the payment of appearance money on the tour. As a member of this select community, he was expected to toe the line and refuse any inducements to compete in sponsored events. Yet he had already won the British Open and had triumphed in the US Masters at Augusta in the previous year. He was now in the world league and was well able to command large slices of the sponsors’ cash to appear. What irked him – and, as a proud Spaniard, his chagrin was wholly comprehensible – was that his American counterparts at the time, Trevino, Weiskopf and others, were receiving substantial sums to fly over and enter the British tournaments.
Jacobs’s position, which he represented in vain to the tournament committee, was unequivocal. ‘No appearance money’ was acceptable as a rule – provided there were no exceptions. What certainly wasn’t right in his judgement was to expect a player of Ballesteros’s stature to be denied the chance of getting the cash if leading Americans were able to come over and grab it. He was strongly supported in this stance by Tony Jacklin.
When the selection committee met at Fulford, Yorkshire, at the end of the Benson & Hedges tournament in August 1981 to fill the last two places in the British and European team, there was a marked difference from the position which had obtained in 1979. Neil Coles, from the chair, did not say to Jacobs as he had done two years before ‘Come on John, tell us who you want.’ He knew quite well who would be the captain’s first choice. Jacobs, therefore, put the obvious question to his two colleagues: ‘How do you two feel about Seve?’
Coles’s answer was an emphatic negative; the Spaniard was in dispute with the tour, he had played little on it that summer and he should not be considered a starter. Langer, having tested the players’ opinions and, in a sense, being their representative on the committee, concurred with Coles. His playing colleagues felt that, because Severiano had stayed away from the tour so much with his dispute going on, he should not be selected. Jacobs had himself talked to them and found similar opposition.
The thrust of the conversation was not, as has been suggested, to encourage Ballesteros to settle his differences with the European Tour; psychologically, that would have been a bad move. Rather it was to persuade Severiano to come over and play in two tournaments – Carrolls’ Irish Open at Portmarnock and the Benson & Hedges at York. If he would do that, the captain explained, his chances of selection, which Jacobs was so anxious to promote, would at once be enhanced: ‘I want you in the team, Seve, but there’s little chance of me achieving this unless you are prepared to come over and play in these two events.’
It had been a relatively poor season for Ballesteros. By his exceptional standards, he hadn’t been playing well, and spending so much time in the United States in these circumstances had made him depressed. Although the Spaniard said he would think about it, Jacobs was not hopeful. In the event, Ballesteros failed to show up for either competition. His exclusion from the team thus became inevitable. For the captain, it was like having to drive a powerful car across the continent without the use of top gear.
Did you see it?
Watching Arnold Palmer in his heyday was the most compelling of sights. There was nothing scientific about his swing – it relied on one thing … power, and lots of it! Arnold was built like a middleweight boxer and gave the ball a fearful crunch. The earth practically shook when he hit the ball.
I’ll never forget a great story from when Arnold was playing in the final round of the 1964 Masters with Dave Marr, a witty and charming man who sadly died in 1998. Arnold torpedoed one of his awesome long-iron shots towards the water-guarded 15th green, shooting straight into a low sun. Blinded by the light, he looked to Marr and enquired: ‘Did it get over?’ to which Marr memorably replied: ‘Hell Arnold, your divot got over!’ Laying up was never Arnie’s style.
An enjoyable and special relationship
The start of my enduring love affair with the United States was in 1955 when I went over to play the American circuit, the highlight of which was a fortuitous pairing with Byron Nelson at Thunderbird in Palm Springs where we were to have the Ryder Cup match. In that match I acquitted myself well enough, two points from two matches, to earn invitations for the Masters for the next two years. Can you believe that I declined each time, with regrets that my lesson book was too full?
In 1972 I heard from an old friend, Ken Bowden, co-editor of my book, Practical Golf, and then editor of Golf Digest magazine. He invited me to preside over the magazine’s first golf school in Phoenix, Arizona. A number of American professionals came along as observers. Afterwards Bert Beuhler, Shelby Futch, Craig and Scott Bunker and the English Pro Donald (Doon) Crawley joined me in the creation of the first John Jacobs Practical Golf Schools. We all worked like mad, but we still had fun.
It was exciting and exacting work building up the 24 locations for the John Jacobs Golf Schools (in 1995 more than 1,000 classes took place). When the toil and travel became too taxing for me, Shelby, to my great good fortune, stepped in and took over the reins as my partner and later as the owner of the company. I am extremely proud of all those guys who worked so hard helping me build up the business. I owe so much to them, and to America.
By Royal command
I was preparing for one of my regular coaching sessions with the German teams when I received word that, since the February weather in Spain, where we customarily held our sessions, had been disappointing in recent years, they had switched to Morocco. I flew out a day early and when I reported to the Royal Dar Es Salaam club at Rabat I was immediately invited to join the sister of King Hussain II for a game of golf.
The next day I was busy with my tutorial duties on the practice ground when a senior government official approached and informed me that I must make myself available every afternoon to play golf with His Majesty. My expression must have conveyed some hint of my unspoken thoughts, because the official made it eminently clear that Morocco’s continued welcome to myself and the German teams was dependent upon my embracing this signal honour without demur.
Arrangements were quickly made for the German teams to be suitably looked after during my enforced afternoon absences. My services were not required every day but when we did play, on the King’s private nine-hole course within the grounds of his royal palace – one of several such courses around the country, I might add – the experience was quite fantastic, using that overworked word in its literal sense of dreamlike fantasy.
His Majesty started by entering a small tent and making his choice from a selection of some 30 pairs of golf shoes on display. A truck containing 20 sets of golf clubs followed our progress around the course.
The King is a great enthusiast for the game and a fair striker of the ball, but it is difficult to assess his handicap level. His golfing companions perforce are drawn from the ranks of ministers, diplomats and high government officials, all men with an acute appreciation of which side their bread is buttered and, accordingly, most generous in ideas of what constitutes a royal ‘gimme.’ There is, in short, no such thing for the King as a second putt in this school.
The King is a wizard out of the rough, a fact not entirely unconnected with the retinue of some 50 or 60 solicitous attendants: security men, flunkeys, functionaries, forecaddies and the like. They made sure his ball was always nicely teed up. I am sure that the King does not command such favourable consideration. He would surely get more genuine satisfaction from his golf if he played in a hard-nosed fourball which insisted on seeing every putt into the hole and no hanky panky in the rough. But being who he is, his is the only form of golf available to him.
Urgent affairs of State dictated how many holes the King played. When the game stopped and the King departed, we all adjourned to a large marquee in the grounds. Here were served mountains of couscous, whole roasted sheep, barons of beef, pigeon pies, a profusion of fruits, and steaming hot mint tea served from silver pitchers.
One corner of the tent was set aside especially for the visiting English professeur de golf. I had to make do with caviar and Veuve Cliquot!
Fighting for the Big Ball
John Jacobs had concluded early in the 1950s that the Americans’ generally superior, and altogether firmer, striking was the product of their adoption of the large 1.68-inch ball two decades before. He had repeated his opinion both in the press and in talks at golfing gatherings throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. With Henry Cotton, Leonard Crawley, the British amateur and golf correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and Field, and a few other contemporaries in the United Kingdom, he never missed an opportunity of urging upon the authorities the adoption of the large version in the tournaments. He had summed up his arguments in his first book. The words formed the basis of an article which was first published in the magazine Golfing in 1959:
‘I am convinced that it is high time we came into line with our American friends and conceded that theirs is the better-sized ball to play with … The real point is that if the large ball is not quite ‘middled’ it flies considerably less far than the small one from the same sort of stroke … This is a good thing. It may be the reason why the best American players use an action which keeps the club blade squared for longer in the hitting area as opposed to the more common method in this country in which the wrist-flick and roll have been overemphasised.
‘This type of ‘blade square for longer through the ball’ we call ‘driving the ball’ … I am absolutely certain … that to drive the ball is by far the sounder method … Generalising then, we flick the ball; they drive the ball … To get results, the US large-size ball has to be driven; and, therefore, right from the start, it encourages a sounder method. I very much believe the weekend golfer would eventually find it an easier ball to play with and one which would sooner or later automatically improve his game.’
The great Sam Snead once made a telling aside to Henry Cotton when he was playing at Wentworth. Snead was then well past his prime and the British ‘bullet’ was still in use in the professional tournaments. ‘You know, Henry,’ he said, ‘I like playing golf over here in my old age. I can miss this small ball of yours and still get away with it.’
For the tournament player, the large US ball required more exacting control; yet, for the average golfer, it had undoubted benefits – which is why the Americans adopted it in the first place. Market research at Athlon’s centres confirmed that the patrons preferred it.
Predictably, all through the controversy, the British manufacturers kept up a barrage of opposition to suggestions for a change. While they made the 1.62 bullet well, they were fully aware that the 1.68-inch ball made in small quantities in Britain fell far short of the first-class American product. It would be expensive and take a long time to close the gap.
In the end, spurred on by Cotton, Jacobs, Dai Rees, Tommy Horton and others in this country, and overseas by the likes of Tommy Armour, the old silver fox, who had seen it all in the States, Palmer, Nicklaus and Player, the British PGA rejected the soft option and, in the mid-1960s, plumped irrevocably for the 1.68-inch ball in its tournaments.
As is explained below, for the first time, the whole hullabaloo need never have happened.
One evening in 1966, Roger Wethered and his wife were dining at my home in London. The arguments and counter-arguments about the ball were still at their height. The PGA had only then just taken its decision in favour of the 1.68-inch size and given the lead which others would later follow. With Cyril Tolley, Wethered had formed half the pair in what, in the Golden Age of amateur golf after World War I, had become know as the ‘Tolley-Wethered era’. Historically, it matched the ‘Jones era’ the United States. Roger could play golf, and behind a winning modesty, there lay a deep knowledge of the game. When he did talk about it seriously – which was seldom – it was generally always in private.
Wethered had tied with Jock Hutchinson for the 1921 Open Championship at St Andrews. He lost the 18-hole replay the next day – and, with it, a promised day’s cricket in the south. He won the Amateur Championship at Deal two years later and stayed in Moore-Brabazon’s (later Lord Brabazon) house at Sandwich Bay for it. The chambermaid called him with a pot of tea at 7.30 on the morning of the final, ensuring that the curtains in the bedroom were fully drawn back before she closed the door. An hour later, his host went up to find out why his eminent guest hadn’t come down to breakfast. The tea beside the bed was untouched and cold. Wethered was still doggo.
After his victory, he was twice runner-up in the championship, the second time to Bobby Jones at St Andrews in 1930, Jones’s Grand Slam year. In his prime Wethered was as good an iron player as there was in the game, amateur or professional. Had Jacobs been about in those days, he might well have fixed up Roger’s somewhat wayward driving, and then he would have been well-nigh invincible, for he had a sensitive short game, a silken putting stroke and just the right, unflappable temperament for a champion.
The point is that Wethered knew about golf at first hand – an authoritative hand at that. He did not talk openly about the ball for he was not much enamoured of controversy, but he was an incorrigible protagonist of the larger version. He was well aware that I was active in its support.
As the diners left the table, he put a hand on my arm. ‘If we could sit down for five minutes,’ he said, ‘I could tell you privately about the ball.’ He then recounted his depressing story. A note which I made the next day and then locked away serves as an aide memoire.
Soon after the Second World War, Wethered had been made chairman of a small working party at St Andrews, set up, as he put it, ‘to look into the question of the ball’. In particular, it was to examine the difficulty which arose from the United States using one size of ball and the United Kingdom, and its followers, another. The outcome of the study was still quite fresh in Wethered’s mind.
‘We did our work quickly. It was obvious that, if there was to be a change, then, in fairness to the manufacturers, notice should be given as soon as possible. Their factories were turning over from wartime to peacetime production and getting ready to meet the demand for golf balls, which were then in short supply.
‘My group came up with one principal recommendation – that we should adopt the American specification for the ball which the USGA had decided upon in the early 1930s, 1.68 inches in diameter and 1.62 ounces in weight. It wasn’t difficult to get agreement and I’m quite sure we were right. I was convinced of it myself. It wasn’t that we were blindly following the Americans; there were playing advantages with the 1.68-inch ball which were denied with the smaller one.’
It was now well into 1946: ‘One day, Monty Pease (JW Beaumont Pease, an England and Oxford player, then Chairman of Lloyds Bank), who was the chairman of the general committee of the R&A, saw me in the City of London. (Wethered had stockbroking and finance interests in the City of London.) He explained that, as the Walker Cup match was being played at St Andrews the following spring and representatives of the USGA would be coming over for talks with the R&A, it would be courteous to them to defer a decision on the ball. It would be right to talk things over with them first. They wanted to carry the Americans with us, the aim of the two governing bodies always being to try to march in step.
‘I said I thought this was quite wrong on timing. A different situation would arise by then with the manufacturers. They had to get on and meet the demand for balls, and once they were geared up to produce the small ball in large numbers, they would never want to change over to something else. It would cost them money. I said that if it was really felt necessary to consult the Americans then surely someone could go over there and talk to them. I was fairly sure the arguments about the larger ball weren’t understood and its importance was mostly missed.
‘In the end, I allowed Monty to talk me out of it. I should never have done so. Although I say it, I feel certain I would have got the backing to carry the thing had I dug in my heels. But I didn’t want to go against the general committee and make difficulties. I am afraid, looking back, it was a terrible mistake. The opportunity had been lost. Now we’d get all this row …’
It is easy to see now why Wethered was so certain that a fundamental misjudgement had been made. He knew that the use of the bigger ball promoted better, more solid striking and greater accuracy close to the green. By comparison with the advance of United States golf during the subsequent 30 years or so, the mistake put us at a disadvantage. Beyond that, it compelled Jacobs and a few of his enlightened followers to mount and win a campaign in the 1960s which need never have been fought. But the effects of that victory were far reaching.
It is only in the last few years that the results of the adoption of the big ball in European golf have truly begun to work through. There has been an all round improvement in the first-class game. A new generation of players has grown up with the ball since childhood and thereby enjoyed an advantage which its predecessors never knew – and should never have been denied.
Winston Churchill once described the Second World War as the ‘unnecessary war’. Roger Wethered could well have said the same of the conflict which bedevilled the British game in the third quarter of the 20th century.*