But if each of the triumvirate is a phenomenon and collectively they are super-phenomena, in what terms then are we to describe Mr. John Ball, and how shall we account for his eight amazing championships? Mr. Harold Hilton, as all the world understands very well, is a great master of the game, a magnificent golfer who knows it through and through, and a tremendous fighting man. There has hardly been anything in all golf's history so splendid as his coming again and winning two more Amateur Championships when he had seemed almost done for ever, and very nearly winning an Open Championship as well. But if after considering the professionals at their stroke game, we are now to think of the amateurs in their match-play championship, it is John Ball who is the wonder man. The luck of the game that was emphasised in the consideration of score play is surely greater in the match. At all events, the professionals themselves to a man declare that the score play makes the better test, and therefore is the fairer. If that is so, there is, inferentially, more luck to be conquered by a good man in the amateur event, and Mr. Ball has eight times beaten his fields and beaten all the luck against him. Twenty-four years after winning his first Amateur Championship at Prestwick he wins his eighth at Westward Ho! and, for all the great players that the game has yielded, no other man has gained more than half those wins, and only Hilton has done that. Surely it is a mystery very profound as to how he has won so often. And yet it is less of mystery if we accept the proposition that he who plays golf for the sake of golf and fears not to be beaten is the most dangerous of opponents. Mr. Ball's early championships were won by his own skill and his perfect temperament; undoubtedly some of the later ones, which through increasing numbers of opponents have or should have been harder to win, have been gained because he cared little whether he won or not, and because his opponents feared to lose, and feared the more as they felt their impending fate when they had the master of Hoylake laid against them. To a little extent they have beaten themselves, and Mr. Ball has done all the rest. Has there been more than one of his championships in recent times that he has keenly desired to win, that being the one he gained at St. Andrews in 1907, because he wished to be victor at the headquarters where he lost long years before, after a tie with Mr. Balfour Melville? At eight o'clock on the morning after he won his seventh at Hoylake I saw him in the garden at the back of his house giving his chickens their morning meal. It was as if nothing had happened. How many other men would have been feeding chickens so early in the morning after winning an Amateur Championship? Has he finished winning, I wonder? There is a cause to suggest that he has not. He won for his seventh the only championship ever played in Devonshire, and he has won the event on all the regular amateur championship courses on which it is played but one, and that is Muirfield, which has been something of a _bête noire_ among courses so far as he is concerned. Once there he suffered one of the biggest defeats of his career, in the international match, and then in the championship he went down in a surprising way to a youngster of Dornoch. Shall he not add Muirfield to his list?