Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/216

kick your hardest, and few spectators are much the wiser; and a nervous man can always hit hard at golf off the tee and through the green, for as he has not got to think of strength, he is less likely to fidget and foozle the ball. But when you are fifty yards from the hole, and a bunker yawning between you and it, or when you have to lay an approach putt of twenty yards more or less dead to win or halve a hole, then the question of nerve becomes everything, because strength is everything. The lofted fifty yards shot is perhaps the most difficult shot in golf, and what does the nervous golfer do in most cases? He either cuts it too fine and is very short in the attempt to lay it dead, or else, frightened of the bunker that lies so dangerously near to him, he determines to get over at all risks and overruns the green by forty or fifty yards. If you watch an amateur billiard-player in a handicap before a crowd, you will soon see whether he is nervous by the way he judges the strength. The most common failing of such players is that they hit too hard; an easy stroke is one which will be succeeded by another easy stroke if the proper strength is applied, but the