Our friend came out of the club-house and stood for a few minutes with the professional watching our work. But the presence of a "gallery" did not disturb us. We were beyond all that. We had Colonel Bogey down and were thumping the life out of him. When we had finally and reluctantly finished--it was time to go in and get something to eat--our friend told us that the professional had said: "That man has the makings of a real golfer in him."
It may seem to the reader that it was very nice of our friend to pass this compliment on to us--especially after the exhibition of golf he himself had given. But it wasn't nice. It was the refinement of cruelty. Then and there our doom was sealed. The mid-iron was in our soul. That glorious first drive had done it. A few days later we went out with another friend and played our first game. But that is quite another story.
In a previous article we have told of picking up a friend's golf-club in a spirit of gay nonchalance and making a glorious drive--our first. How our friend artfully left us alone with his bag of tools, how we drew a club out of it, how we carelessly set a quivering little white ball on a neat little pyramid of sand, how we swung the deadly weapon with serene insouciance, and how that doomed spheroid tore a shrieking gash in the atmosphere and lit on a hillside in the next county--all that we detailed to our friends with a frankness untempered by any feeling of personal modesty. We were not modest about it. We saw no reason to be modest. On the contrary, we felt we had every reason to be proud of ourself, and we were at the time.
Naturally, we were not satisfied to let things go at that. If we had stopped then and there, if we had refused firmly and with cuss-words ever to touch a club again, we might to-day be able to go about with the pleasant conviction that we were a champion in possibility. When people talked of young Ouimet, as they still do occasionally--it is a great man who is famous for more than a few months in these bustling times--we could smile in a thoughtful way and ask casually if we had ever told them of that time when we had picked up that club and placed that ball, etc., etc.
Of course, they would probably be bored by the recital--especially after we had told it a few dozen times--but think of the satisfaction it would be to us to know that if we turned our giant intellect and steel muscles to the subject of golf, we would have Ouimet wishing that his parents had apprenticed him to a grocer or a plumber instead of making him a little caddy.