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In 1993, an editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine who had no idea that I knew nothing about golf asked if I’d like to profile Fred Couples. I said sure. For reasons that had nothing to do with Freddie, this turned out to be a pretty good decision on my part.
The truth is that I did know a few things about golf—like what an exercise in self-mortification it can be to play, especially when I’m the one who’s playing. I even knew a few things about Couples. What I really didn’t know was enough about either to feel comfortable writing about them with authority. I began asking friends more up on their golf than I was for the name of the best golf writer they’d ever read; I wanted to pick his prose. The answer was unanimous: Herbert Warren Wind.
At my local bookstore, I found a single copy, sadly overlooked in the six or seven years it had been sitting there, of Wind’s magnificent collection of New Yorker magazine golf pieces, Following Through. The front cover was creased. Several pages were bent. The back cover had a small tear. I bought it anyway.
On page 153, I bumped into Bernard Darwin.
Wind had marked the 1976 centenary of Darwin’s birth with a lovely encomium—part ode, part profile—to the man and his work. Though I had no idea yet who Darwin was, I’d been getting to know Wind pretty well, and if he thought the guy was worth writing about, I assumed he’d be the gold standard.
I can quote the first sentence of “Bernard Darwin” by heart: “There is little disagreement that the best golf writer of all time was an Englishman named Bernard Richard Meirion Darwin.” When the best writer you know of on a subject tells you there’s someone better still, it’s prudent to pay attention. By the end of the piece, I was fully prepared to jump into the relationship that’s now gratefully entering its second decade.
But as relationships go this one hasn’t always hasn’t been easy sailing. Darwin—and I can’t really blame him for this—played hard-to-get from the start. It was virtually impossible to find his work. He wasn’t on the shelves in the library, nor was he listed in Books in Print. I began scouring used-book stores. I’d write friends in England. One by one, volumes dawdled my direction, each a little testament to perseverance and a lot of luck. Golf essays. Biographies. A children’s book. Golf histories. A study of Dickens. Non-golf essays. More golf essays. Elegies to the leathery British club and the exclusive British public school. Memoirs. Anthologies he’d assembled. And more golf essays still. Some thirty hard-covered treasures in all. He’d left quite a legacy.
Still, how did this guy in particular wind up writing about golf so beautifully?
II
Though no one needs a Charles Darwin to suggest we golfers are a species unto our own, the origin of the sub-species of human being whose function on this earth would be to dissect, explore, ruminate over, and explain why we golfers are who we are and do what we do indeed shimmied down a limb of that selfsame family tree. Bernard Darwin was the Great Man’s grandson.
Understandably, given the world that he was born into, Bernard Darwin didn’t set out to write about golf—or any other sport for that matter. He himself proposed that chronicling sports was a job “into which men drift, since no properly constituted parent would agree to his son starting his career in that way. Having tried something else which bores them they take to this thing which is lightly esteemed by the outside world but which satisfies them in some possibly childish but certainly romantic feeling.” Given his lineage, “drift” might be less fitting a verb than “evolve.”
His evolution began early. His mother died giving birth to him, and his father, one of Charles’s five accomplished sons moved himself and Bernard back into his parents’ house in Kent. While Charles Darwin was a constant and apparently kindly presence, Bernard’s memories of the man who changed the way we look at our humanity and its beginnings are hazy, though this much is clear: Bernard called his grandfather Babba, and recalls holding his hand when they walked. When Charles himself died in 1882—Bernard was almost six—Bernard and his father moved again, this time to Cambridge.
He wasn’t sure quite when he began to play golf, but his best guess was that he was 8. “I only know that there was a time when I did not play golf,” Darwin recounted in midlife in Green Memories, his first volume of memoirs, “and then after a blurred interval came the time when I played it with a fire of enthusiasm not yet extinguished.”
It was a fire that his family stoked. As a lad, Bernard joined his father on the links, and, in time, both became regulars at Aberdovey, a course in Wales conceived and constructed by Bernard’s uncles on his mother’s side. Throughout his life, Aberdovey would have a particular hold over Bernard’s golfing imagination; though, in time, he’d be welcome anywhere, even ascending to the captaincy of the Royal and Ancient at St. Andrews, Aberdovey was the one course to which he’d return annually to play for sheer joy.
At Cambridge, he captained an excellent university golf team, and kept his skills honed enough over the next decades to represent England in several international team competitions, including the first Walker Cup match. Twice he reached the semi-finals of the British Amateur, each time losing to the eventual champion. Bernardo—as friends called him—had game.
Yet, when he set off to make his way in the world, the idea of earning a living through this game he so loved was out of the question. Professional golfers were considered an unseemly lot; it would be decades before they were allowed entry into clubhouses and grillrooms on either side of the ocean. And the job description of “Golf Writer”—at least the way it would (that word again) “evolve” through Darwin’s pen—had yet to be imagined. So Darwin took the prudent path. He became a lawyer.
And didn’t like it. As a solicitor, he found the paperwork boring. He trained further as a barrister, and was duly admitted to the bar, but as much as he reveled in the drama and brio surrounding murder trials, he didn’t much like arguing cases. In 1907, a friend who’d been weighing in on golf for London’s Evening Standard moved to another paper, recommending Darwin as an apt replacement. Now 30, this was was the life mulligan Bernardo was waiting for, and he was savvy enough to use his shot well. A year later, he hung his wig up for good.
That was the year that he left the Standard for The Times, to write the weekly golf column—“Tee Shots”—that would appear on Saturdays until his retirement from the paper forty-seven years later. At the same time, he also began to pen a weekly golf column for Country Life magazine. Golfers on the western shore of the Atlantic would have to wait more than a decade for Darwin’s prose to reach the U.S. with any regularity, though. He became a fixture in The American Golfer from 1922 until the monthly’s demise in the late ’30s.
III
The tremendous passion, competitive spirit, and quest for perfection that fueled Darwin on the course propelled him to ever-higher achievement off it, though, not surprisingly, these passions manifested themselves in different ways in each arena.
As a player, he was not immune to the twin plagues—tantrum and disgust—that seep into most of our games following particularly egregious flubs and foozles, and those he played with deemed him a world-class mutterer with a biting and not always temperate wit. His eruptions could be volcanic, and though they embarrassed him to no end, his unwavering sense of perfection made them as much a part of what he brought to the course as his mashie and his spoon.
How different he comes across in print!
On the page, he was every hacker’s doting uncle—kind, welcoming, inclusive, funny, self-effacing, ever the gentleman, and really a quite charming and generous story-teller. By all accounts, the personality that greets us in the writing was very much the disposition of the man when his fingers weren’t wrapped around a niblick with the pressure of a few bob on the line.
Darwin, the all-embracing golfer, understood golf from inside the inside, and it was from that innermost sanctum that he sought to think about the game and set down his thoughts. He had an epic grasp of golf history and a hail-fellow intimacy with its great characters and true heroes. Consider his sweep: He grew up in the days of the gutty ball and Old Tom Morris and lived long enough to witness Palmer, Nicklaus, and Hogan slug it out down the stretch at Cherry Hills. He knew Vardon, Braid, and Taylor well, and wrote with gusto and appreciation about Ray, Ouimet, Jones, Sarazen, and Hogan, as well as the best women players of his day.
And he had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time when legends were forming down the fairway. Look no further than the 1913 U.S. Open. Not only was Darwin on hand to see young Francis Ouimet’s unlikely victory, he was integral to the proceedings. To his great surprise—and personal delight—officials tapped him to serve as Ouimet’s official scorer in the play-off round against Vardon and Ray. Thus, his signature is forever fixed on the scorecard marking one of the most magical moments in the annals of the game.
All of which is why we golfers should be reading him, but there’s something else about his work that makes it impossible to stop reading him once we’ve started, and it’s this: Bernard Darwin had an amazing gift for wringing enduring, uncontestable truths about golf and human nature out of the small and seemingly irrelevant. Like a cigarette. His dog playing with a ball. A crossword puzzle. Whether it’s best to clean your irons after every round or let them darken. Even his own bed sheets—as in “The Links of Eiderdown.” They all wove their way into memorable newspaper and magazine columns; their permanence has earned them the right to be called essays. Without question, reading them will make you a better golfer. It might not show up on your scorecard, but I promise that you’ll feel it in your heart.
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