Excerpts from


Lifemanship


Stephen Potter



LEFT-HAND-RIGHT-HAND-PLAY

I believe it was O. Sitwell who devised this simple rule for play against left-handers. If (as so often happens) your opponent, though left-handed in games generally, yet plays golf with ordinary right-hand clubs, it is a good thing, during the first hole after the fifth which he plays badly, to say:

SELF: Do you mind if I say something?

L.H.: No. What?

SELF: Have you ever had the feeling that you are playing against the grain?

L.H.: No – how do you mean?

SELF: Well, you’re really left-handed, aren’t you?

L.H.: I certainly am – except for golf.

SELF: Have you ever been tempted to make the big change?

L.H.: How do you mean?

SELF: Play golf left-handed as well. Chuck those clubs away. Fling them into the bonfire. Damn the expense – and get a brand-new set of left-handed clubs.

L.H.: Yes, but–

SELF: You know that is your natural game. Be extravagant.

L.H.: It isn’t the expense–

SELF: Money doesn’t mean anything nowadays, anyhow.

L.H.: I mean–

SELF: Everybody’s income’s the same, really.

The fact that your opponent has been advised to play right-handedly by the best professional in the country will make him specially anxious to prove by his play that you are in the wrong. The usual results follow. If he is not only a left-hander but plays with left-handed clubs as well, the same conversation will do, substituting the word right for left where necessary.




Stephen Potter, Lifemanship, 1950




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