BUT how different a game is golf. At golf it is the bad player who gets the most strokes. He need have no fears that his new driver will not be employed. He will have as many swings with it as the scratch man;* more, if he misses the ball altogether upon one or two tees. If he buys a new niblick he is certain to get fun out of it on the very first day.*
And, above all, there is this to be said for golfing mediocrity — the bad player can make the strokes of the good player. It is not his fate to have to sit in the club smoking-room after his second round and listen to the wonderful deeds of others. He can join in too. He can say with perfect truth, “I once carried the ditch at the fourth with my second,” or even “I did a three at the eleventh this afternoon” — bogey being five.* But if the bad cricketer says “I remember when I took a century in forty minutes off Lockwood and Richardson,” he is nothing but a liar.*
abridged
In the days of hickory-shafted golf clubs, a ‘niblick’ was a lofted club roughly equivalent to today’s nine-iron. Less lofted were the mashie-niblick (7-iron) and pitching niblick (8-iron).
That is, a player whose handicap is zero. When golfers of differing levels of ability play each other, it is customary for the less good player to be allowed extra shots, and the number he is allowed is his ‘handicap’. That is the theory at any rate; in practice, handicapping rules vary from country to country and can get quite complicated. The Royal and Ancient now promotes a new scheme called the World Handicap System.
At this time, bogey meant the same as par; today, it means one over par.
William Henry Lockwood (1868-1932) and Tom Richardson (1870-1912), a pair of Surrey fast bowlers who struck fear into the batsmen of their day. Milne is not comparing like with like: no bad golfer could honestly claim to have beaten Ian Poulter by six and five, and even a bad batsman occasionally creams a long-hop through cover for four like he was Jos Buttler.