The Sounds of Golf - Bernard Darwin

In golf, as in everything else, there are certain characteristic sounds with which our ears grow familiar.

We know them so well that we hardly realize their existence until we hear them again after an absence from the links or until, owing to some change in the game, we come to miss them. To these old familiar golfing sounds a new one has been added in the course of the last few years. It is the metallic clank caused by one steel shaft touching another as the caddie takes a club out of the bag. Perhaps clank is not quite the right word, for there is also something of purring in the sound. At any rate, though my vocabulary is vague and inadequate, the sound is perfectly distinct, and we shall soon know it so well that we shall hardly notice it any more than we do the roar of an airplane which once set us staring at the heavens.

For myself I first noticed it while playing in a foursome, all four members of which had gone worshipping after the strange new gods of steel. It set me trying to enumerate the other sounds characteristic of our game. Steel may fairly be said, I think, to have added another new one in the unmistakable "swish" of the shaft through the air. I have already grown accustomed to it, but when I first bought a particularly engaging little spoon, its music seemed infinitely exciting and romantic. Old Tom Morris used to talk of the music of a shaft, meaning the spring or whip in it. It was a charming and poetical thought which has now come to be a comparatively prosaic and everyday fact. It is comforting that the modern game should bring some pleasant sound with it, because the old game had beautiful ones that are not gone forever. Some melody went out of golf when the rubber-core replaced the gutty. The ring of a gutty struck quite cleanly with an iron club was a twofold joy; it was cheerful and pretty in itself and spoke of a stroke perfectly made. It is only when we play a shot with a gutty and hear it again that we realize what we have lost. The gutty rang even off an iron putter. I have a feeling-no doubt quite fantastic and due to ancient hero worship-that the ball struck by that lofted putting cleek of Freddie Tait's sang a clearer, louder song than anyone else's. I am sure that one did know instantly and certainly whether a putt had been struck or not, and on rare red-letter days one felt sure the ball was doing down merely from the click with which it left one's club.