GOLF is a disease. It mocks the aff licted and discomfits the sceptic.
It is a game of stick and ball that can have a deleterious effect on the apparently healthy.
The afflicted are stoic in their suffering. They know they have been infected with something that remains impervious to normal remedies.
The disease seems to be seaborne. Golf thrives on the patches of land that border water. Links golf, as it is called, has spread its charms like a hyperactive mosquito.
One of the greatest carriers of this contagion was Willie Park Jr. The dapper golfer from Musselburgh was a Scottish missionary with a message that did not come from the Bible. Willie believed in golf and the rest of the world followed.
His story is told by Walter Stephen in a book that is as quirky, idiosyncratic, frustrating and ultimately as fascinating as the game itself. The frustration comes from Stephen's disregard for any sort of chronological narrative. This is a story that the author himself describes as a "ramble" and wander it does, with a plethora of exclamation marks disfiguring the text like so many divots.
This aside, though, it is easy to become enamoured of the story.
After all, Park's life is brief ly summarised in the appendix and the tale may stray but it does so down some pretty lanes.
Park, for the record, was born in Musselburgh on February 4, 1865.
He won the Open twice, at Prestwick in 1867 and at Musselburgh in 1889. He was a professional golfer and a professional clubmaker. But his enduring significance is in his role as a designer and builder of courses.
It is both hard to overstate the importance of golf to America and the inf luence of Scots in building and nurturing the game there. The most famous Scottish course architect may be the celebrated Alister Mackenzie but Willie Park was an earlier and thus more vital contributor to the game's growth in North America.
Park built courses in Vienna, Belgium, England (Sunningdale, perhaps the most famous) and Canada. However, it was the courses in America that cemented his burgeoning reputation and provided him with a living.
But life was always precarious, it seems, for Park. He lived in an era where financial depressions could wipe out the most viable business.
Park, an ingenious clubmaker and driven businessman, suffered in the capricious winds of the financial jungle.
Stephen is excellent at recreating the world in which the great Scotsman lived. The Musselburgh links that produced five Open champions is lovingly reconstructed. The customs and way of life of the late-eighteenth century are fastidiously pieced together by use of census records and other original research.
There are weird but entertaining wanders along the lanes of golf in literature, the horrors of slow play, and the philosophy of the game.
The best section concerns Stephen's pilgrimages to Park's courses where the personality of author and subject are gently brought into the light.
The book is illuminated, too, by a cast of singular characters. My favourite is Arnaud Massey, the first golfer outside the British Isles to become Open champion. He led a life that was hardly boring, being wounded at Verdun in the First World War and eventually gaining employment as professional golfer to the Pasha of Marrakech in Morocco.
Parks is perhaps more quietly intriguing, but he is a man of substance. Stephen, quite properly, never makes claims about his subject's character that he cannot verify by hard fact.
The reader is thus left to form an impression through hints, suggestions and recorded statements.
Park seems to have been a Scotsman of a "certain type". P G Wodehouse, that most perceptive of golf writers, once remarked that there was little difficulty in distinguishing between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.
Park seems to have been of that melancholic disposition.
His recorded thoughts are almost exclusively about golf.
One coincides with the experience of all players: "It is a curious fact that golfers very frequently drive into a hazard they are doing their utmost to avoid."
But Park remains very much a mystery. After a lifetime devoted to the business of golf, he suffered a nervous breakdown in America and his younger brother, Mungo, brought him back to Scotland and took him to hospital in Musselburgh. A year later he died there. He was 61.
Golf is a disease. It infected Willie Park, bringing him the delirium of great success and the depression of occasional failure. It brought pressure, too, perhaps fatally so.
Willie Park Junior: The Man Who Took Golf to the World, Walter Stephen, Luath Press, GBP25.
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