Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman, in his best selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, includes the following formula:  Success = Talent + Luck. In golf, the player contributes the talent, but what about luck?

These days luck, good or bad, is often attributed to “the golf gods.” These gods go nameless and as far as I can tell influence the success of all golfers regardless of talent level. In a few cases, lapses in talent are also attributed to the golf gods: for example, from Golf.com in June 2011 — “[Tiger’s] latest setback seems like the golf gods kicking a guy when he’s down.”

During earlier times, at least in Scotland, luck was the province of golf goddesses, not gods. We know this from the poetry of the time. From the first book solely about golf, The Goff, published first in 1743, the author, Thomas Mathison, pleads,

‘O thou GOLFINIA, Goddess of these plains,
Great Patroness of GOFF, indulge my strains;

A second goddess, Golfina, appears in John Kerr’s book, The Golf-Book of East Lothian (1896),

“Then, clad in white, and wearing a gutta-percha crown, tipped with golden balls, her sceptre a long spoon, entered the fair Golfina, Goddess of the Royal and Ancient Game, . . .”

The goddess Golfina is also the subject of a poem by Robert K. Risk that appeared in his book, Songs of the Links published in 1919.

       TO GOLFINA

A New Year Ode
Above the clubhouse portal
Crowned with green turf she stands,
Who gathers all men mortal
In sacrificial bands;
.        Her iron face is sweeter
.        Than Love’s, who fears to meet her,
.        To men who daily greet her
With supplicating hands.

She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born,
Who straight forget their mother,
Their sins, their wives forlorn;
.        Their food they swiftly swallow,
.        Take wing for her and follow
.        O’er hedge, and hill, and hollow,
Till eve from early morn.

Forgetting loves that wither,
Desks, Pulpits, Stocks, and Rings,
Forgetting bores who blither,
And all disastrous things;
.        We may have done some task illk
.        Been cheated by a rascal,
.        But let us tee a Haskell,
And debts and duns take wings.

Golfina may send sorrow—
Six down and five to play—
But we will win to-morrow,
Which is another day;
.        Though we have lost a fiver,
.        Or broken our pet driver
.        Golfina bates no stiver
The homage we must pay.

From enervated putting,
From topping on the tee,
Perpetual tut-tutting
At things which should not be,
.        Miscalculated pitches
.        That land us deep in ditches,
.        New golf-books that bewitch us,
Golfina, set us free!

I have not been able to determine the relationship between Golfinia and Golfina. Any ideas?

If you search this blog, using “Wife” as the search term, you will find five Posts that one way or another characterize the golfer’s wife of about 100 years ago. In these early days when golf was becoming popular and affordable the men played and for the most part their wives did not. A popular description of such wives was (and still is) “golf widows.” Yesterday, while searching through a Google book called Humours of the Fray by Charles L. Graves (published in London in 1907) I found yet another poem with the subject as its title, “The Golfer’s Wife.”

As is often true in these poems, the golfer himself is subject to the poet’s ridicule, while the wife though suffering is clearly the “hero.”

THE  GOLFER’S WIFE

OF  perfect stamina possessed,
From centenarians descended,
Jones spends his lifetime in the quest
Of health-although his health is splendid.
Last year he throve upon a fare
Which  now he views with utter loathing,
And monthly he elects to wear
New hygienic underclothing.

His doctors order exercise,
Fresh air and healthy recreation;
And Jones assiduously tries
To combat physical stagnation.
Llandrindod welcomes him to-day,
To-morrow Droitwich  lures him brinewards;
Next week ’tis Bath, or Alum Bay,
Or  Bournemouth,  and he hurries pinewards.

At scholarship inclined to scoft,
Yet  fond of neither dogs nor horses,
Upon his diet and his golf
Jones focusses his mental forces ;
Unmoved by mountain  peaks sublime,
Or  ‘mid the most enchanting  greenery,
Because he’s musing all the time
On  his inside, and not the scenery.

To travel with this fearsome freak,
This  valetudinarian* loafer,  (*unhealthy)
I should decline, though for one week
He gave me all the gold of Ophir.
Yet  his self-sacrificing spouse,
All normal interests resigning,
Beneath her lifelong burden bows
Without  the semblance of repining.

With  him she trots from links to links,
Wearing  a smile of saintly meekness ;
With  him eternal cocoa drinks
Though  China tea’s her special weakness.
Nor  is her sympathy profound
Relaxed at luncheon or at dinner,
When  Jones reconstitutes each round,
And turns the tables on the winner.

Fine weather keeps him out of doors,
But when it rains or even drizzles
The  slightest moisture he abhors
Her fate is worse than patient Grizel’s*. (* A reference to the wife of Marc Antony)
For Jones exacts attentive  heed
To his malingering recital,
And poses as an invalid
When  Mrs. Jones deserves the title.

No chance of respite or reward
To her the future seems to offer,
Unless some random rubber-cored
Despatches this dyspeptic golfer.
Already shrunken  to a shred
By her devotion self-denying,
She perseveres, and when she’s dead
He’ll  blame her selfishness in dying.

Divines are wont  to disagree
Acutely in regard to Heaven,
Some doctors holding it to be
A single sphere, and others seven ;
But Jones’s consort entertains
No doubt about one crucial question ;
There will, upon the heav’nly plains,
Be neither golf nor indigestion.

Mr. Graves lived from 1856 to 1944. He was a prolific writer and poet. Among his books were a four volume set called Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England. Though I searched widely, I could find no other connections between Graves and golf beyond his poetry.