The High Hole

“Pardon the Meanness of My Ambitions”

Threaded through the St Andrews correspondence, across three years and several different correspondents, is a recurring note of characteristic self-deprecation. Not about the writing — Crockett had a clear sense of his own worth there — but about golf. Specifically, about one hole. 

The seventh on the Old Course, known as the High Hole, appears in letters from 1896 to 1898 as a kind of counterpoint to everything else Crockett was achieving. In October 1896, he told "MY ambitions are to do the High Hole in 4 and make Willie Aughterlonie give me six strokes.” A few weeks earlier, writing to Mr Lawrie at T. Fisher Unwin, he had put it more ruefully: “I am as stupid as an owl. I’ve not got an idea save how to do the long hole in 4.” 

By June 1898, the tone was unchanged. Writing to Major Pond about The Red Axe and declining yet another American offer, he added: “My chief desire at present is to do the high hole in four! Pardon the meanness of my ambitions.” 

The joke — and it is partly a joke — is in the contrast. Against public triumphs, a single hole. The self-deprecation is deliberate and characteristic; Crockett knew exactly what he was doing when he placed it alongside news of forty-five thousand copies. Whether he ever achieved it, the letters do not record.