On The Intelligent Golf Ball

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Title:     On The Intelligent Golf Ball
Author: A. G. Gardiner [More Titles by Gardiner]

I read the other day an article by my colleague "Arcturus" which I thought was a little boastful. It referred to a bull-dog. Now I cannot tell what there is about a bull-dog that makes people haughty, but it is certain that I have never known a case in which the companionship of that animal has not had this effect. The man who keeps a bull-dog becomes after a time only fit for the company of a bull-dog. He catches the august pride of the animal, seems to think like a bulldog, to talk in the brief, scornful tones of a bulldog, and even to look fat and formidable like a bull-dog. That, however, is not an uncommon phenomenon among those who live with animals. Go to a fat stock show and look at the men around the cattle pens. Or recall the pork butchers you have known and tell me----. But possibly you, sir, who read these lines, are a pork butcher and resent the implication. Sir, your resentment is just. You are the exception, sir--a most notable exception.

But my object here is not merely to warn "Arcturus" of the perilous company he is keeping. I refer to his bull-dog panegyric also to justify me in enlarging on my own private vanity. If he is permitted to write to the extent of a column on a bull-dog, I can at least claim the same latitude in regard to a sensible subject like golf. And I have this advantage over him, that I have a real message. I have a hint to offer that will mean money in pocket to you.

And first let me say that I have nothing to teach you in the way of play. I am in that stage of the novitiate that seems sheer imbecility. When I get a good stroke I stare after it as stout Cortez stared at the Pacific, "with a wild surmise." But it is because I am a bad player that I feel I can be useful to you. For most of my time on the links is spent in looking for lost balls. Now, I do not object to looking for balls. I rather enjoy it. It is a healthy, open-air occupation that keeps the body exercised and the mind fallow. There are some people who think the spectacle of a grown-up man (with a family) looking in an open field for a ball that isn't there is ridiculous. They are mistaken. It is really, seen from the philosophic angle, a very noble spectacle. It is the symbol of deathless hope. It is part of the great discipline of the game. It is that part of the game at which I do best. There is not a spinney over the whole course that I do not know by heart. There is not a bit of gorse that I have not probed and been probed by. I must have spent hours in the ditches, and I have upon me the scars left by every hedgerow. And the result is that, while I am worthless as a golfer, I think I may claim to be quite in the first class at finding lost balls.

Now all discoveries hinge upon some sudden illumination. I had up to a certain point been a sad failure in recovering balls. I watched them fall with the utmost care and was so sure of them that I felt that I could walk blindfold and pick them up. But when I came to the spot the ball was not there. This experience became so common that at last the conclusion forced itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it, it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it works like a charm.

The method is quite simple. You lose the ball, of course, to begin with. That is easy enough. Then you search for it, and the longer you search the deeper grows the mystery of its vanishing. Your companions come and help you to poke the hedge and stir up the ditch, and you all agree that you have never known such a perfectly ridiculous thing before. And having clearly proved that the ball isn't anywhere in the neighbourhood, you take another out of the bag, and proceed with the game.

So far everything is quite ordinary. The game is over, the ball is lost, and you prepare to go. But you decide to go home by a rather roundabout way that brings you by the spot that you have scoured in vain. You are not going to search for the ball. That would simply put the creature up to some new artifice. No, you are just walking round that way accidentally. What so natural as that you should have your eyes on the ground? And there, sure enough, lies the ball, taken completely unaware. It is so ridiculously obvious that to say that it was lying there when you were looking for it so industriously is absurd. It simply couldn't have been there. You suspect that if after your search, instead of going on with the play you had hidden behind the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature come out from its hole.

I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball has an intelligence accepted. The mystery is explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the "fresh eye." You look for a thing so hard that you seem to lose the faculty of vision. Then you forget all about it and find it. The experience applies to all the operations of the mind. If I get "stuck" in writing an article I go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or merely walk round the garden, and the current flows again. Or you have a knotty problem to decide. You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly undecided the longer you think. Then you go to bed, and you wake in the morning with your mind made up. Hence the phrase, "I will sleep on it." It is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of passive illumination, that Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote:

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

And yet I cannot quite get rid of my fancy that the golf ball does enjoy the game.

[The end]
A. G. Gardiner's essay: On The Intelligent Golf Ball

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