Pick him up a twelvemonth later, and I'll wager that you find Rubber filling versus gutty still and solely on his mind.
Bunkers that were once quite deep in the old days of the gutty are in too many cases shallow and useless under the new conditions.
Never have I driven so well as I did with the old gutty in America in that year.
Fish downed him for a morsel of food he had grabbed; and when the team had been over the spot on which he fell, there simply was no Gutty left.
The fatally unwise Gutty was the first to succumb.
Result--exit the putty ball towards the end of the eighties, and the gutty holding the market until the Americans sent us what at first were called Haskells; which is another and more modern story.
The ability to hit the ball absolutely exactly has not the same value now as in the days of the solid gutty ball; nor does forceful hitting count for as much.
Still, it appeared that it was not there; it almost seemed as if the ordinary operations of Nature's laws had been suspended and the solid gutty had been dissolved into thin air in mid flight.
Now to reach that second hole in those days, when the ground was not so keen and it was a gutty ball that had to be dealt with, with an iron club, at all was no easy matter; but Johnny's shot looked a beauty.
But the quality, which perhaps was its highest virtue, was that it did not go off the line nearly as much as the gutty when pulled or sliced.
We put a 27 of yours in one side of the balance and we had to put a 28 gutty and the coal-scuttle in the other, to make it level.
They agreed that a kindlier ball than the harsh and severe gutty was needed, and they thought that surely it might come through rubber.
This was good work for a lady, especially as I rather fancy she must have been using the gutty ball at that time.
In 1902, when Sandy Herd won an Open Championship with the new ball, after prejudice had held it back in Britain previously, the gutty was done for, and it quickly disappeared from the links.
There is the primeval, the prehistoric, the most royal and ancient, the early Scottish, and the late gutty periods.
Tradition and romance cluster thickly around Prestwick, for it was here that old Tom Morris came in 1851--a little while after he and Allan Robertson had had a difference of opinion about Tom having played with the gutty ball.
There was, as far as I can remember, nothing amiss with the weather, and even making every allowance for gutty balls, it does seem extraordinary that so many people should play so supremely ill.
Certainly the score with which the championship was won was phenomenally low for those days of gutty balls.
It was laid out in what proved to be the last days of the gutty ball, though there was then no whisper of the revolution that was coming to us across the Atlantic.
In respect to this hole, golfing history gives rather an interesting example of the difference between the gutty and the rubber-core.
With a gutty ball it was really a fine long, slashing carry, and to play short was sometimes the better part of valour.
