A confrère faced a daunting task last week. As golfing correspondent of the Times, it fell to John Hopkins to do the honours with the speech of acclaim at the induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in Florida of his fabled predecessor Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), whom many consider the father of sportswriting. In view of the prim pretensions of US sport when on its best starched-bib parade, the occasion was aeons away from the British Lions’ tours John and I covered in rugby’s relishable old amateur days.
In his address, Hoppy quoted the antique aphorism that the quality of writing about games improves as the size of the ball used becomes smaller. Thus those best served by Eng-Lit were cricket and golf, which leaves Darwin the first monarch. This grandson of Charles once described the origin of the sportswriter species: ‘A trade into which men drift, since no properly constituted parent would agree to his son starting a career in that way.’ Still spot-on, I fancy. Darwin’s first piece in the Times appeared in 1907, two dense, unbroken columns lugubriously headlined ‘Golf and the Championship’, but notable because previously newspapers had included only a jumble of downpage numbers, decipherable only to cricket or horserace folk, under the single strap ‘Sporting Intelligence’.
Darwin himself was a good amateur player. In my own hacker’s days, often would I sheepishly quote his ‘law of nature that everybody plays a hole badly when playing through’. Darwin revelled in the great triumvirate, Vardon, Braid and Taylor — and, of course, Jones, as well as Cotton and Hogan, too. Obviously, the crude epithet had not been invented, but Darwin twigged the superstar: ‘The steady-going will often beat the more eager champion and they will get very near the top, but there, I think, they will stop.
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