“…the more they stay the same.” You’ve heard that saying
before, I’m sure. Basically it means that, while circumstances may change,
people’s reactions to them remain fairly predictable.
You may remember a book review I did a few weeks back for
Trials
and Triumphs of Golf’s Greatest Champions by Lyle Slovick. He dropped me an
email to thank me for the review and, since he is, among other things, a
consultant to the USGA and a historian, I told him about my classic swing
studies and asked if he had any advice about where I might find more info. So
much of what I’m looking for is over a century old, it’s not easy to find
copies of the magazines and such.
I guess he gets that kind of question a lot. With a little
direction from him, I’ve gotten access to some old magazines from the early
1900s. For now I’ve been focusing on
The American Golfer, which began in
1908, and I’ve been surprised at many of the things I’ve found. I’ll share some
of them in some future posts, because it’s just so fascinating.
For example, no less than the legendary O.B. Keeler - you know,
the guy who chronicled the career of Bobby Jones - wrote a series of articles
called
Why These Fads and Fancies? that dealt with problems facing
golfers of the day. They were done with some obvious humor, but the articles
clearly explain why these problems were a concern. And in the
21 December 1921
issue I found one of those articles that dealt with the problem of golf balls
that were too long.
Yes, you read that correctly.
By 1921 there was already a
feeling among some of the big names that golf balls were flying too far. So
the USGA and the R&A set some standards for weight and size that year (although
the exact size remained a bit of an issue until 1990, with a slight difference
of .06 inches between the two groups). To quote Keeler:
It seems we were tending toward a pellet about the size
of an old-fashioned quinine pill, with a soupcon of radium in it, or something to
give it a range that would result in the scrapping of all our standard golf
courses and making them over on the Great Plains of the Middle West or the
Desert of Sahara, or somewhere where there was more room.
Sound familiar? And lest you think that’s just a
coincidence, listen to the numbers he gives as he continues:
So the golf courses are saved, it seems; and we
moderate players won't have to battle our way with a drive and five screaming
brassies to get in range of the eight hundred and nine hundred and
thousand-yard holes, predicted not so long ago by the more excitable pessimists
as the logical outgrowth of the smaller and heavier and higher-powered
projectiles turned out year by year.
That was 95 years ago, in the days of hickory shafts and
hard-cored rubber balls - equipment that we now consider ‘primitive’ - and there
were already predictions that holes would reach 800+ yards using THAT
technology. Amazing, isn’t it?
The new 1921 standards set a minimum size and maximum
weight because, as Keeler notes, smaller and heavier balls traveled farther
than larger and lighter ones. (He also talks about the wake caused by dimples
that stabilizes a ball in flight. Yes, modern reader, golf ball aerodynamics
WERE known back then!) He then goes on to give a brief history of golf ball
evolution and why distance increased along the way. At the time, players could
still buy larger and lighter balls (Keeler calls them
floaters), which he
said several of the top players still recommended as being better for weekend
golfers.
Keeler laments that the weekend golfers of his day continued
to choose the balls that their favorite pros used, even though, as he says:
To extract the long flight tightly wound up in a
high-powered golf ball, it must be hit firmly and truly and with a distinct and
decisive kick; in a word, correctly and hard.
And while the psychology of today’s players hasn’t changed
- they want to play what the big boys play, and expect to get the same results -
it appears the approach of today’s manufacturers hasn’t changed either:
The fascination of the new ballistics was by no means
restricted to players of golf. The manufacturers, after catching their breath,
started out on an orgy of experimental production. They put nearly everything inside
the rubber strands to serve as a core—everything from soft-soap and plain
cooking water to some kind of acid that ruined the eyes of inquisitive children
who cut into the missiles or bit them open. They made the balls smaller and
wound the strands tighter, and Ted Ray and Abe Mitchell and others hit them
farther and farther, until finally the legislative powers took hold of the
situation to save the golf courses from further stretching, and for other
purposes, as the conventional legislative bills recite.
Of course, a century later, we have some different choices
available to us. While we can’t buy balls that are different sizes or weights,
manufacturers have figured out how to “tune” golf balls to various types of
swings and they try to get players to use the correct ball for their game. We
have all sorts of regulations that those manufacturers have to meet, and those
regs control aspects of the golf ball (and the clubs themselves, for the same
distance control reasons) that many of us didn’t even know existed.
Nevertheless, many of the big names in the game continue
to worry about the same things they did a century ago. I was amazed by that.
You would think that such thinking would have evolved along with the golf ball,
as courses didn’t become obsolete despite the ball’s ever-lengthening nature.
And even in our time, the problem may not be so much that courses are too short
as that we
expect them to be too short. Who said that par HAS to be 71 or
72 strokes, and that 14 of those strokes MUST be made with the driver?
I do think that limiting the golf ball might be valuable because
then we could reduce the size of golf courses, making them more economically
and environmentally desirable in a number of ways. Shorter courses would require
less land, less water, less upkeep, perhaps fewer clubs and hopefully less time
to play. All of that could make golf more pocketbook-friendly - a necessity if
we really want to “grow the game.”
But I digress…
Keeler ended his article this way:
A few more yards on the drive, maybe even fifteen or
twenty, is what the expert gets out of the heavy, highpowered ball now known as
the standard. The duffer and I believe the average player get little except aggravation
of the spirit and an occasional long wallop, when he happens accidentally to
catch it just right.
It may be out of the province of ballistics to say so,
but I believe that a vast majority of golfers would play better golf with a
larger, lighter, and more durable ball than the new standard.
That last paragraph, taken in context of the entire
article, could be seen as a plea to weekend golfers not to be (if you’ll pardon
the pun) so driven to hit the ball longer. Perhaps if Keeler were writing
today, his article would have focused on our ever-present obsession with
distance, the length of the golf ball merely being a result of that obsession.
But if he had, we probably wouldn’t listen. After all, it’s
been 95 years.
And the more things change…
