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Updated: May 18, 2025
Nearly every foursome had a gallery following it and no one spoke above a whisper after he entered the club grounds, so eager were the members to respect the proprieties of golf. Men who had but lately scoffed at the little white ball now talked of stymies and lies and devits as if they had known them all their lives.
At this crisis, also, he should be particularly careful that he never commits the unpardonable sin of laying himself, or rather his partner, a stymie. Of all the stymies in the world, that which has been laid you by your own partner in a foursome is the most exasperating.
The fact which must be driven home is that some stymies are negotiable and others are not not by any player or by any method.
There are times, even when the hole is only a yard away, when it might pay best to ask for the mashie instead of the instrument which the caddie will offer. Upon the very difficult and annoying question of stymies there are few hints that I can offer which will not suggest themselves to the player of a very little experience.
When the ball that stymies you dead is lying on the lip of the hole and half covering it, and your own is some distance away, the case is, to all intents and purposes, hopeless, but if you have only got this one stroke left for the half, you feel that an effort of some kind must be made, however hopeless it may be.
All depends on how near the other ball is to the hole, and how far the balls are apart. If the ball that stymies you is on the lip and your own is three yards away, it is obvious that you cannot pitch over it. From such a distance your own ball could not be made to clear the other one and drop again in time to fall into the tin.
Problems on undulating greens The value of practice Difficulties of calculation The cut stroke with the putter How to make it When it is useful Putting against a sideways slope A straighter line for the hole Putting down a hill Applying drag to the ball The use of the mashie on the putting green Stymies When they are negotiable and when not The wisdom of playing for a half Lofting over the stymie Running through the stymie How to play the stroke, and its advantages Fast greens for fancy strokes On gauging the speed of a green.
When the tree or thicket that stymies you is only twenty or thirty yards away, the short sliced shot is not only the best but perhaps the only one to play, that is to say, if it is first-class golf that is being practised and there is an opponent who is fighting hard. Take a case for exemplification one which is of the commonest occurrence.
There is one other way of attacking a stymie, and that is by the application of the run-through method, when the ball in front of you is on the edge of the hole and your own is very close to it only just outside the six inches limit that makes the stymie. If the balls are much more than a foot apart, the "follow-through method" of playing stymies is almost certain to fail.
In playing what we may call an ordinary putt, that is to say, one presenting no difficulties in the way of stymies, slopes of the green, or anything of that kind, I think it pays best in the long run to make a point of always hitting the ball with the middle of the face of the club, although, I believe, Willie Park, one of the greatest of putters, always hits the ball off the toe of the club and comes in to the hole from the right-hand side of it.
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