By Bion H Butler
I can’t play golf any more than a rattlesnake can, but I have friends who are victims of the game, and they sit by my fire and tell me the romances and the tragedies and the various other phases of the malady, until I get a lot of information concerning it. Being a newspaper man, accustomed to observing anything, I get more or less of an understanding of the working drawings and specifications of the mental factors of golf, and I see readily and clearly that it is a highly contagious and persisting affliction, or acquisition or acquirement, or whatever a learned man might call it. I don’t try to classify the mental or physiological action which brings about the golf condition, not to say whether it is a disturbed functional integrity of the system, nor to in any other way commend on the interesting hold which golf is gaining over my old time friends. I merely say that I see the progress the game is making, and it looks like that we hear so much about lately, which is 100 per cent.
This tergiversation, or perhaps lack of understanding of the complication in the mental attitude that has led golf to sweep the country, is brought out to me by the sorrow of a Pennsylvania town which confesses that Brookville is without a country club. Clarion, DuBois, Punxsutaney, Chinglecamooch, and the neighbor towns have their country clubs and their golf grounds and are cultivating this refined accomplishment, but Brookville has only reached the point where a club is see to be needed. But there is balm in Gilead for a county club has been under discussion, and the signs are that it will be established, for a large number of golfers are in the town, and they are determined that they will be just as progressive as anybody else, and maybe more, and that they will have comforts and enjoyments of life, and the privileges and adjuncts that go with enjoyments.
I know Brookville. It is a fine town there on the high knobs of the Western slopes of the Allegheny plateau, and it has all the natural advantages and tribulations required for a right perfect golf course. In fact it has already builty the course although it has not yet built a country club house. It has the players and the enthusiasts, and it means to go the full length of the road. And as far as I can see it is not Brookville alone that is taking this step. In a recent overland voyage through the hill country of Western Pennsylvania and New York I noticed that any place that boasts of its American hundred percentedness has a golf course and the men wear knee trousers and they walk with that toe-in-left foot that tells what has been going on in acquiring the proper stance at the tee. All over this great and glorious nation men and women and young men and maidens are signing on with the imported American game that came across from St. Andrews with Andrew Carnegie and thousands of other braw Scots and Ulster Scots who bled wi’ Wallace and counted the horns of the moon with Bobbie Burns on the Cumnock hills by Wilie’s mill to see whether she had three or four, and “couldna tell.”
Everywhere the virus of golf is in the American blood, and what interests me is that all this expanding enthusiasm is not affected by winter gales and snow and mud except in one way. When “November chill blaws loud wi’ angry sugh” golf takes a day off in most of the North. It is not a game adapted to the mud and the snow and the rough inclemency of winter weather. But the fever in the blood does not lessen when the greens up there are snowed in and the grounds are too soft to play. Then the enthusiastic devote of the game gathers up his clubs and half a peck of balls and his knickerbocker trousers and money for caddy fees and a few other small expenses, and hits down toward that marvelous golf stream that wings around the eastern shore of North Carolina and warms this section so that it is habitable all the year. That marvelous golf stream. (Dear compositor don’t make the mistake of spelling it Gulf stream as some folks do who know better.) Golf stream—for whether it may have at one time been regarded as Gulf street that is so long ago, and it is so certainly golf stream now that no mistakes are excusable. They come down here where the golf stream is making the climate a golf climate all the year round, where the greens are fit for play every day in the year, where the fairways are covered with soft Bermuda grass, and where they can carry on as long as they want to stay, and where every prospect pleases.
First stop on the golf stream belt is the North Carolina Sandhill country, and with its six 18-hole courses and more in the process of construction there is no reason to inquire where the next stop is, for there is nowhere such another one as this. So the pilgrims come in droves and pairs and singles, and the preparatory institutions like Brookville and Carlkon and DuBois and Franklin and Oil City and Bradford, (I see them from all of those towns,) are devoting themselves to the great American game from Scotland, and they are contributing their undergraduates and acolytes to this finishing school and Mecca of the faithful.
And what is the future? Why, that all over the country is growing up a patronage for the Sandhill golf courses that will contribute an increasing multitude which will demand the multiplication of courses so that in the winter season when they are shut out from playing on the home grounds they can run down to Pinehurst, gratify their desire for their favorite game and go back home again without great loss of time or outlay of money. Pinehurst and the rest of this community is the perfection of golf throughout the season when it is impossible farther north. The soil surface here makes a firm ground that is ready for play practically every day of the year. The solid sand-clay base and the Bermuda grass top cannot be improved on in the qualities that make a satisfactory green and fairway. The golf stream of the ancient days, long before old King Tut was trailing around, made this sandy porous soil, and the golf stream of today makes the perfect climate. So Pinehurst is the promised land for the myriads who are playing golf on the home grounds of every village of the North, and as the fever spreads the patients much in the days ahead come for Pinehurst. We need not be surprised to see in the next few years fifty 18-hole courses, for the American citizen and citizeness [meaning female citizen] has just commenced to play golf and to find out that Pinehurst is the Valhalla to which the faithful will come in their reincarnation. Presently the golf stream will be the human stream of golfers headed for the Pinehurst golf belt.
From page 4 of The Pinehurst Outlook, May 8, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068725/1926-05-08/ed-1/seq-4/
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