Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/205

brilliancy, while the other encourages both safety and brilliancy: and in my humble opinion, the increase of medals necessary because of the increase of clubs and players is not a development towards improvement, but the reverse. Golfers now seem to take not enough interest in the healthy match play, but to be endlessly keen about score. Even in a match you find your opponent has a little book where his score is put down after every hole, and there is a tendency to subordinate everything to score, and considerable pressure to have the rules altered in order to meet the wishes of score players. It is one of the rules of medal play that your opponent's ball should not interfere with yours; stymies therefore are unknown. The medal players, or at any rate many of them, are urging that stymies should be abolished. I do not deny that a great deal may be said in favour of this; it is unlucky to be stymied, and it is a fluke, but on the other hand, it is a rule of the game, and in the long run no one player can say that he has not gained so much as he has lost by the stymie; if it has been against him one day, it has operated in his favour on another. But there