The Necessary Equipment part 1

The game of golf would never have struggled out of its infancy, if the implements with which to play it had not been carefully developed to cope with the increasing demands of the sport and its exponents.

Of all the equipment necessary for playing golf, the ball has had the single greatest effect on the direction of the game, from club design to financial accessibility.

The earliest balls were made from wood, generally beech, but by the sixteenth century these had been replaced by the feathery. Despite being expensive to buy, easily damaged and difficult to make, these balls remained popular until the middle of the nineteenth century. They were handmade from leather and stuffed with boiled feathers, and even the most experienced ball-maker could only make four a day. This added greatly to the price, with balls costing up to five shillings each or a pound a dozen - much more than a week's wages for many enthusiastic golfers. Among the best renowned of the early makers of featheries were the Gourlay family of Leith and Musselburgh and Allan Robertson of St Andrews.

Apart from the obvious drawback of cost, there were other problems with the feathery; it was impossible to get a perfectly round ball, and the balls were soon knocked out of shape by wooden clubs or split in wet weather. Despite this, the balls were used exclusively until 1848 and the arrival of gutta percha.

Gutta percha was a black, rubber-like substance obtained by tapping certain tropical trees in India and the Far East. It was found to be soft and pliable when boiled in water and was easily pressed into the shape of a ball. It also kept its shape and hardened when cool, and if broken could be remoulded on heating. The guttie was the ideal candidate to replace the feathery; it was considerably cheaper, longer lasting and could be made more quickly and in much larger quantities.

The balls could also be more easily standardised and makers stamped the weight, between 26 and 31 pennyweights, along with their name on each ball. The best known balls of the time carried the brands of Old Tom Morris, Robert Forgan and the Auchterlonies. Gutties were also the first ball to feature the distinctive striations, late developed as dimples on the modern golf ball. The guttie was king of balls until the turn of the century when, like the feathery before it, it fell victim to progress and was made obsolete by Haskell's revolutionary rubber ball.

Coburn Haskell was a wealthy American amateur golfer who was certain that a livelier ball than the guttie could be produced. In collaboration with Bertram G. Work of the Goodrich Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio he developed a ball made from winding rubber thread under tension around a solid rubber core. The new rubber balls were placed on the market in 1899, but they were not an immediate hit. Whilst they travelled farther off the tee, they were lively and hard to control on the greens, earning them their nickname of "bounding billies".

However, the creation of an automatic winding machine coupled with the use of a pattern of bramble markings improved the flight of the balls. The final seal of approval came in 1901, when Walter J. Travis won the US Amateur Championship using a Haskell. All doubts about the new ball's liveliness on the greens were sensationally silenced and it went into mass production.

We know a lot more about aerodynamics today than our ancestors did a century ago, and as a result the surface patterns of the 1900s have been replaced by the distinctive dimples which accentuate the effects of lift and minimise the amount of drag on the ball. Modern technology has also made balls consistently cheaper and of a uniform size. In 1921 the United States Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient agreed that all balls should be 1.62in (4cm) in diameter, but a decade later the USGA increased the size to 1.68in (4.2cm). Finally, in 1987, this measurement was also accepted by the R&A and the American size is now the standard.

The quest for the perfect golf ball may have taken centuries, but the development of the perfect club is as old as the game itself. The earliest golf clubs, dating back to the fifteenth century, were fairly rudimentary, just a solid wooden shaft, a weighted head and a padded handle bound with animal hide. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that metal headed clubs made an appearance.

click here for part 2.

From the Appletree Press title: A Little History of Golf.
Also from Appletree: Emerald Greens - Holiday Golf in Ireland.