Writing About the World's Greatest Golf-Writer

Bernard Richard Meirion Darwin was indisputably the greatest golf writer of all time. Reading Darwin, one is transported into the magical pageantry of a bygone era: the enfant terrible Bobby Jones dominated the game and the former caddy Walter Hagen with his thick-skinned eyelids and brillantined hair was lauded as "Sir Walter" by reverential galleries.

This year marks the centennial, or as the British say, centenary, of Darwin's birth in Downe, Kent where young Bernard saw much of his famous grandfather, Charles Darwin, who died when he was six.

Peter Ryde, who succeeded Darwin as golf correspondent for The London Times, has written a recently relseased book entitled Mostly Golf to commemorate the man who some may feel may have been the greatest sportswriter of all time.

This book would undoubtably be well received this Christmas by the golfer or sports fan in your family or for that matter anyone appreciative of great literature as only a cursory glance at Darwin's essays reveals their univeral appeal.

Darwin was described by the great American golf writer Herbert Warren Wind as "a man of exceptional ability and enormous personal charm." In fact, the enduring sobriquets Darwin lent to his contemporaries and the anecdotes that surround his own career would alone be enough to fill a volume.

He wrote of his boyhood hero, a Scottish professional by the name of Willie Fernie, with a typical admixture of verve, literary allusions, and Ring Lardneresque sarcasm:

He had in my eyes rather a fierce, buccaneering air, and fear mingled with my worship. I did not dare to go into the shop, unless my father was with me. It was a paradise of glue and pitch, of files and a vise, and heads in the rough, with a smell that still comes gratefully back to me. "God bless me," as Mr. Borthrup Trumbull (in "Middlemarch") remarked of the ham, "what an aroma!"

The passage evokes a certain naivete when golf was still the game of a small clique, played by amateurs on seaside links. Darwin was truly a figure out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse who engaged in quoting contests to see who knew Pickwick Papers best while at Eton and for whom the golden age of golf was when the gutta percha ball was in circulation and the renowned British "Triumvirate" of J.H. Taylor, Harry Vardon and James Braid reigned supreme.

Wind recounts how "at the Commonwealth Tournament, at St. Andrews, in 1955, for example, his aesthetic sense was appalled by a sweater with a repeating pattern of loud, clashing yellow, pink, black green and violet vertical stripes, which one of the Canadian players wore. Darwin kept himself well under control for a while, but finally went up to the Canadian and asked, 'I say, are those your old school colors or your own unfortunate choice?'"

Darwin, a man of great erudition, also had eclectic tastes. He wrote children's books, two works on Dickens, a guide to the historic landmarks of London, and biographies of the cricketeer W.G. Grace and the bare-fisted pugilist John Gully, who went on to be an M.P. He is, however, universally and rightly recognized as the doyen of golf writers.

His breathless narrative of Walter Hagen's closing charge in the 1924 British Open at Holyoke to catch Ernest Whitcombe jumps off of the page. Hagen was facing a long putt on the tenth hole after a shaky front nine when Darwin begins:

With that putt began as fine a stern chase as could be imagined. It divides itself in my mind into two distinct periods: the first a brave scramble, the second a triumphant march. He had made a mistake at the Alps, at the Hilbre, at the Rushes, yet his net loss from those four errors was just one shot, so indomitable were his recoveries...

Bang, bang, went his long wooden club shots, as straight as arrows, to the Field, the Lake, and the Dun. Now he wanted two 4's to win, and who that saw it will forget that wholehearted long iron shot smashed right up to the Royal green, with the road on one side and the bunker creeping in on the other?...

That spurt was one for all the golfing ages. Whitcombe's spurt was as fine a one, but there is this difference between the two, as there is so often between Hagen and the other man. Hagen just won and the other man just didn't.

That spurt was one for all the golfing ages. Whitcombe's spurt was a fine a one, but there is this difference between the two, as there is so often between Hagen and the other man. Hagen just won and the other man just didn't.

Here is Darwin's searing still-life portrait of Bobby Jones playing out the eighteenth hole of St. Andrews in 1927:

His second to the last hole was a little cautious and ended in the Valley of Sin. Thence he ran it up dead and as he scaled the bank the crowd stormed up after him and lined the edge of the green, barely restraining themselves. He holed his short one and the next instant there was no green visible, only a dark seething mass, in the midst of which was Bobby hoisted on fervent shoulders and holding his putter, "Calamity Jane," at arm's length over his head lest she crushed to death.

Darwin, in spite of his Victorian-era swing, was a leading amateur himself. He played in the 1921 British amateur in a field which included a contingent of eight Americans, one of whom was Bobby Jones. The British, who still dominated the game, were afraid one of the fine, young American golfers would snatch the AMateur crown.

All the Americans were eventually eliminated except Paul Hunter and Freddy Wright. It was left up to Darwin to defeat Hunter in the fifth round and Wright in the sixth. The night after knocking out Wright, Darwin was accosted on the street by a stranger who had been staring at him from a distance. The stranger in an emotion-choked voice thundered, "Sir, I would like to thank you for the way in which you saved your country."