Judge — August 5, 1916 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Y golfer or near-golfer who has ached or passed that hopeful nine-hole score be- low 50 as a special favor of compassionate gods can imagine the sense of injury and outrage that over- came me a few days ago when I opened a letter to find this query staring at me in large, black type: ““WHY DO YOU PLAY GOLF It was not only impolite, but impudent. Why shouldn't 1 play golf? I am free white (except for being married), of sound body and reasonably sound mind, and moderately able to sup- port a club membership on the installment plan. What right, I asked myself in a surge of hectic fury, had any impertinent wretch to demand of me an excuse for playing golf? 1 looked for his name, with red visions of swords at fifteen paces. When I found it, my feclings underwent a wholesome re: vision upward. My inquisitor was only seeking information. after all. And nobody loves to give information about g more ardently than I. Indeed, there are envious persons in our club who insist that I have given away so much information about golf during the half-season I have played that I haven't any left for my own use. But here was an enterprising and discriminating sporting editor anxious to inform a waiting world why I (among a care- fully selected list of two-score other notables) honored the game of golf with my personal attention. It’s something of a bore, of course, this thing of being called on at frequent intervals to make or mar, with a stroke of the pen, a sport, or a fad, or a play or a new form of Art, but—noblesse oblige! If the good name of golf, and the potential pleasure of thousands of human souls, hang upon my answer to this bald query, who was I to refuse a kindly, enlightening word? I resolved to tell the man why I played golf. I would tell him succinctly, but courteously, with properly restrained enthu siasm. At the same time I would keep away from common- places. Something seemed to tell me that all the other thirty- nine notables would have something about “taking you out in the open air.” I couldn't descend to that, because any fool knows that you can get twice as much open air in an automo- bile. “It makes you walk”—No; my wife would fall on me with the same old insistence about walking down to work. MANWELL Ah! * Mental relaxation’ —But no; | WHY I PLAY GOLF T that was Tillotson's excuse. for bi f stage in which he no longer regards a | By W. KEL liards—and my wife's defense for bridg. I wouldn’t be an imitator. It was beginning to grow irritating, the way all the good excuses were pre-empted by other games. Certainly there were plenty of good reasons why a fellow | golf in preference to checkers, or tangoing, or running a lawn mower—plenty of them, but I was too hurried about listing them. Sure! Whittlesy played golf fo get thin?’ Why hadn't 1 thought— But I was already thin, confound i Then young Spindler played to get fat; and I wouldn’t get fat for a thousand dollars a pound, dressed “Sociability,” by Jove! Uh-hum .. . Well, not exactly that, either, come to think—not when it’s a penitentiary ofiense to talk while your opponent is making a stroke, and you're yards apart on the fair greens. Penny ante, I had to admit, had golf beaten a block for sociability; and a cigar and a gargle or two now and then don’t cut in on your score so Wife—Here's a bill for ten dollars from the garage. Have you any idea what it's for? Hubby—I can’t imagine, unless it’s for celling me as I passed the other day, that it was fine weather for motoring. comicbooks.com