quote

Describing in the club, at lunch-time, with great accuracy of detail, how, after a terrifically long but slightly erratic tee shot, you had the misfortune to lose your ball in the whins, and immediately having the same ball, with your initials stamped on it, returned to you by one of your audience, who had found it exactly in the line you indicated with such precision- but some fifty or sixty yards nearer the tee.

- Horace G. Hutchinson

"The Miseries of Golf" from the book "Hints on the Game of Golf"

1886

The good golfer loves his clubs and takes a great and justifiable pride in them. He has many reasons for doing so. Golf clubs are not like most other implements that are used in sport. A man may go to a shop and pick out a cricket bat or a billiard cue with which he may be tolerably certain he will be able to play something approaching to his best game when he is in the mood for playing it. The acquaintance which is begun in the shop is complete a few days later.