Air-Dried Persimmon Woods
Traditional Golf Clubs
Early golf clubs were somewhat like other tools from the 12th century, primitive and crude. Nobody knows for sure what the first golf club looked like because the earliest known document regarding golf dated from the year 1360 resides in a Brussels museum. That’s a long time ago. Early forms of golf—derived from the Dutch word kolf—had been in progress in the Netherlands for some time prior to 1360. The first golf clubs were likely to have been scavenged tree branches with limbs shooting off at the desired angle.
Golf clubs, and the game itself, are believed to have migrated to the east coast of Scotland as Dutch sailors transported provisions to the Scots while bringing back mutton and wool. The Dutch sailors often got stranded on Scotland’s east coast, due to the unforgiving unpredictability of weather conditions on the North Sea and a lack of knowledge at that time for sailing in unfavorable winds, tides, and swells.
The Dutch sailors began bringing their clubs along to amuse themselves during the down time while stranded on Scotland’s links land along the North Sea. Eventually the game caught on with the Scots but golf remained on Scotland’s east coast where the Dutch planted it until the end of the 16th century before spreading inland.
History has shown that golf clubs and the game of golf that were given birth by the Dutch as their biological father owe their development and popularity to their Scotsmen foster fathers.
A Book of Hours below from the 15th century shows how early Dutch golfers used to putt from a kneeling position.
Antique golf clubs and images from old texts such as a Flemish Book of Hours indicate that early golf clubs tended to bear a slight resemblance to hockey sticks and appeared to accommodate flat swing planes owing to their flat lie angles. It appears that the early Dutch played with a split grip technique, another resemblance to hockey.
All the early golf clubs were made by hand using only hand tools, a keen eye, and experience based on trial and error without benefit of engineering data or procedures.
Golf club makers were professionally respected artisans, each with his own coterie of ardent devotees espousing the brand playability virtues much like dojo faithful following their sensei.
This example to the left comes from the mid-to-late 1800s and uses a style of whipping where the wooden shaft penetrates into the neck of the wooden club head. This style of whipping, or winding, of cord-like thread serves to keep the neck of the club head from splitting during impact and remains today as the method for providing strength to the necks of wooden club heads.
Golf in America
Golf arrived in North America and by the late 1800s the first club, Royal Montreal, was formed and golf migrated south into New York and spread to Rhode Island, Chicago and points beyond. In those days, wherever golf went Scotsmen golf professionals were in demand and Scots played a significant role in the evolution of golf in North America.
The industrial revolution that began in the United Kingdom and energized North America beginning in the 19th century introduced mechanized manufacturing and brought a tenfold increase in USA per capita income and higher living standards that went with it.
The manufacturing of forged-steel golf club heads for irons became more precise and consistent. Hickory golf shafts began to be manufactured to much finer tolerances, although the inherent variables of wood grain and density plagued even the most conscientious builders and users of golf clubs, as evidenced by Bobby Jones’ frequent complaints about his 8 iron. Later inspection with contemporary technology confirmed retrospectively that Jones was correct in his empirical evaluation; something in the wood itself caused his 8 iron to perform differently from the rest of his set.
Golf clubs like the ones pictured to the right were in use into the first half of the 20th century despite
the advent of steel shafted clubs in the 1920s. Club makers had experimented with steel shafts as early as the turn of the century but it took a couple of decades to make them work satisfactorily in a golf club.
Steel provided a much more dependable material than hickory in that it is not affected by use, weather, or humidity. Steel can be manufactured to tight tolerances of weight, wall thickness, and taper patterns for consistent production results and playability.
In spite of the advantages of steel, it might never have found its way into golf shafts because traditional golf called for wood shafts and hickory filled the bill. But hickory was not an infinite resource and there were concerns about the availability of hickory in the future.
Thus, steel shafts were not perpetrated as an improvement in playability so much as a solution to a depleting resource and a way to enhance quality control. In fact, Bobby Jones Signature irons marketed by Spalding in 1930 had steel shafts painted tan to simulate hickory.
The Modern Era
This brings us to the modern era of traditional golf in the early 1980s. Forged-steel muscle-back
blades like the ones pictured right were the iron styles of choice and persimmon and laminated drivers and fairway woods like the ones shown below are what everybody played. Club makers could tweak and adjust these golf clubs to suit the preferences of individual players much like a tailor alters a jacket and pants to fit a specific person.
Major brand manufacturers, as divisions of larger corporations, began to face pressures to deliver big numbers and mass production got more streamlined and less hands-on. Taper tip shafts—originally designed before high strength epoxies were available because they could be wedged into a tapered hosel and pinned for a secure fit—continued to be used regardless of the fact that more precise flex fitting and production consistency can be achieved using parallel tip shafts.
Parallel tip shafts are a constant diameter from the first step in the shaft to the tip, whereas, taper tip shafts taper with a decreasing diameter from the first step to the tip. The distance from the first step in a shaft to the heel of the club head determines shaft flex. Taper tip shaft flex is prefabricated by manufacturing different wall thicknesses and varying step patterns. The taper tip shaft cannot be trimmed at the tip to adjust the flex. A shaft factory manufactures taper tip shafts in bulk at lengths prescribed for each iron in a set. The big brand club manufacturer then takes what the shaft factory delivers to them and sticks them in heads delivered by yet another manufacturer with little or no control over discrepancies.
There are no standards in the golf industry for what constitutes a stiff or a regular shaft. The flex of a shaft is arbitrarily assigned by the shaft manufacturer. To say that you want a stiff shaft is like saying you want a soft drink. Whose stiff shaft do you want?
Parallel tip shafts, being of constant diameter from the first step to the tip, allow a club maker to fine tune every shaft to each individual club head for almost infinite control over flex and consistency. The tip may be trimmed to an exact distance from the heel of the club head to the first step and therein lies the control.
Taper tip shafts lower a factory’s bottom line because they require one cut instead of two. One cut versus two is a 50% reduction in exposure to worker’s compensation claims, a 50% reduction in the number of saw blades used, a 50% reduction in cutting errors and resultant waste, and a 50% reduction in cutting or trimming time. With a market of 24 million golfers spending $8 billion annually on golf in the 1980s and each set having 14 clubs, the 50% reductions were significant.
Parallel tip shafts are trimmed at the tip and the butt, allowing a club maker infinite control over penetration into a parallel hosel bore to achieve maximum consistency and flex performance, whereas taper tip shafts are trimmed only at the butt. If you trimmed the tip of a tapered shaft it would not fit into a tapered hosel.
Thomas & Hannigan Leave USGA
The first graphite shaft was developed in 1969 by Frank Thomas, who later resigned from the USGA some 30 years later after 26 years as technical director because of the USGA’s soft stance in allowing compensating golf club liberties taken by major brand golf club companies. The proverbial last straw was when the USGA acquiesced on spring-like driver faces.
Thomas became quite vocal and refused to relent about trampoline driver faces violating the principles and spirit of golf and urged the USGA Executive Committee leading up to 1998 to rule retroactively and classify product already on the market as nonconforming. Instead, the executive committee hired a public relations consultant and according to a Frank Hannigan article claimed that, “what had happened so far on spring-like effect didn’t really matter, an assertion that resulted in a dramatic growth of noses in Far Hills, N.J.” Far Hills is home to the USGA.
Hannigan, a former executive director of the USGA from 1983 to 1989, asserts that Thomas was made a scapegoat after the R&A refused to adopt a weak new USGA standard going forward and instead capitulated completely away from any restraints at all governing the COR face issue—resulting in a major rift between golf’s governing bodies. A perfect example of how two wrongs do not make a right.
Hannigan’s contention is that it was clumsy diplomacy by the USGA Executive Committee and the R&A General Committee, not Thomas that caused the ensuing cold war between golf’s ivory towers.
Graphite shafts became available in the 1970s but didn’t really get traction until the mid 1980s when metal heads became available. Even then, the only certainty that could be said about composite shafts is that they dampen vibration from radiating back into a golfer’s body. This was especially helpful, and still is, for persons with arthritic and elbow conditions.
The big problem with graphite shafts has always been inconsistency. That is why you nearly never see tour players with graphite in their irons. Those early shafts were sheet-wrapped layer by layer on a table around a mandrel. Sometimes the layer seams coincided and created a relative hard spot in a shaft. Such inconsistencies are not without problems.
Graphite Shafts
Inconsistencies in materials and workmanship led most graphite shafts to experience flex anomalies that resulted in inherently unpredictable reactions to inertia. In practice, this is most obvious by placing a shaft in a frequency machine and plucking the shaft to set it in motion in order to identify its frequency.
As the club head end of the shaft begins oscillating up and down, the head should follow a straight vertical path up and down. What often happens with graphite, especially the cheaper shafts, is that the club head oscillation path begins to wander from its straight up and down vertical orientation to a random ovular path, then nearly circular changing to horizontally ovular before ending in a straight horizontal path. Well, this is not good.
Inertia happens at five points in a golf swing and three of them can mean trouble for such a shaft. The inertia of the take-away and the finish do not influence the shaft to misbehave, but the inertia of changing direction at the top, of releasing at the moment of inertia, and of impact can be problems with such a shaft.
Filament wound shafts, where the carbon fiber is threaded around a mandrel, like fishing line on a reel, typically provide very consistent flexing properties without the dreaded orbiting in reaction to inertia.
In the early days, graphite shaft tips tended to break easily, especially when not installed properly with a 30 degree camphor inside the top of the hosel bore to eliminate a right angle of hosel steel against the shaft surface. One manufacturer resorted to adding boron to their shaft tips to resolve a breakage pattern and charged a lot of money for the shafts, and soon thereafter other manufacturers were advertising their own boron-graphite shafts at increased prices even though the amount of boron equaled about as much salt as you might put on one kernel of popcorn.
There is no standard in golf for what constitutes a stiff or a regular shaft. Each manufacturer individually assigns their own label arbitrarily associated with a club head speed, which is more for marketing purposes than for any reliable fitting purpose.
Another shaft that appeared at this time was the titanium shaft but its cost and its tendency to bend out of shape easily made it less popular after a few years on the market.
Factories Don’t Build Sets
Factories do not really build sets of clubs. They build 5 irons and put them in a barrel, 7 irons and put them in a barrel and so on; then take an iron from each barrel to package what they call a set. This obfuscates quality control but is quite efficient for mass production.
Golf club factories typically hired non-golfer line workers, often from minimum wage minority groups, because they are cheaper to employ and less likely to steal the merchandise since they have no contact with golf outside the factory; no way to quietly fence stolen goods.
Another reason non-golfers get hired for the production lines is that their isolation from golf serves to prevent word of production issues and product irregularities from leaking to the street—preemptive damage control—because these line-workers have no idea what the interrelationship of the specs means to the playability of the clubs. And there is little supervision, with more emphasis on preventing waste than in keeping tight tolerances. The workers tend to push product through rather than get called on the carpet for scrapping materials and components just because they measured or cut something a little wrong.
Manufacturers tacitly condoned the lax quality control because they all knew, and still know, that golfers always blame themselves, not the equipment. This arrogant attitude of the big brand manufacturers was further evident in their warranty policies of routinely turning away claims for repair and replacement.
Club makers saw an influx of damaged and what should have been warranty replaced golf clubs streaming into their shops during the 1980s and 90s with golfers looking for help after being ignored or rebuffed by the manufacturers of their mass-produced clubs.
Golfers increasingly called upon local club makers to rectify or repair their major brand golf clubs and learned in the process that their major brand swing weights, lie angles, loft angles, flex frequencies, and club lengths were all over the place. They learned that major brand golf club companies never published their specs so they would never have to live up to them.
They learned that famous name golf brands as seen on TV tournament broadcasts are collectively and individually not synonymous with their perceived quality. Some brands were worse than others but none of the mass produced brands; zero, zilch, nada; were at all consistent in quality. This is why there have always been major brand vans at tour stops; to make certain that sponsored players are not using off the shelf clubs. Ostensibly that is their purpose but they haven’t always lived up to it.
Calvin Peete, right, Ryder Cup player and regular winner on Tour was called, by Johnny Miller, one of
the two best players in America in the early 1980s. Curtis Strange was the other. One year at the Los Angeles Open, Calvin Peete came to see Lew Gibson parked alongside the Riviera driving range.
In spite of all the major brand equipment vans at Tour stops, the busiest and most trusted club maker was independent Lew Gibson, God rest his soul. Tour players would march right past their sponsor vans to Lew’s trailer to avail themselves of his expertise.
Calvin Peete, gentleman that he is, politely handed his set of irons to Lew Gibson after missing the cut with the understatement that there must be something wrong with the irons. Peete should know. He led the Tour in drivng accuracy for ten years from 1981 to 1991. Later, when he appeared on the Senior Tour he held the driving accuracy record with 80.9% driving accuracy.
Mr. Accuracy was right, there was something wrong with those irons. Two of them, the six and seven irons were the same length instead of ½ inch different. This made his six iron come up shorter than it should. The lofts and lies looked as though they had never been calibrated, completely random, and there were four full swing weight points difference throughout his set.
On a bad day, a Monday morning with a hangover, a club maker might be off ¼ of a swing weight point across a set of irons. Peete’s irons were so bad that before they were fixed he was asked if he wanted to take them to his player relations rep and ask for $8,000 because that is what those patchwork irons cost him for missing the cut.
Club makers provided the quality and service golfers expected from the major brands and created a loyalty shift away from the well-known mass-produced clubs. Golf corporations felt the impact and aggressively liberalized their warranty policies in an effort to keep golfers out of club maker shops. It was, for the major brand manufacturers, their smartest ever disservice to America’s golfers.
Compensating Equipment
Game improvement in the form of compensating equipment began in earnest during 1959 in a garage in Redwood City, CA. There had been earlier equipment compensation efforts, most notably during the 1920s with a sand wedge patented by Edward K. McLain that featured a concave face, later ruled nonconforming to the rules of golf. And a late 1920s plane ride with Howard Hughes sparked Gene Sarazen’s imagination as he watched the flaps control the attitude of the plane, resulting in the widened deepened soles still used to provide bounce on wedges today. Bounce causes a wedge to travel more forward, rather than dig deeper, upon contact with earth or sand, and is measured in the degrees of difference that the sole’s trailing edge is lower than its leading edge.
Wilson put Sarazen’s wedge design into production in the early 1930s and its success led other companies to develop similar wedges based on Sarazen’s concept. Wedge design today remains essentially true to the Sarazen and Wilson origins.
What developed in that Redwood City garage back in ’59 took a GE engineer out of the corporate
milieu and down to Arizona where his name and brand became a legend. Karsten Solheim’s Ping 1A putter became a seminal moment for engineering weight distribution in club heads to incorporate heel-toe and perimeter weighting compensations for increasing stability when hit off-center.
Solheim started building irons and more putters based on the same principles of weight distribution and the significant highlights were the 1966 Anser putter, shown right, and the 1982 Ping Eye2 irons.
Karsten’s clear objective was to make golf easier. His motive was less altruistic and more marketing driven. By engineering his designs to address the most prevalent faults the average golfer faces, getting the ball in the air and keeping it from going right, he targeted the overwhelming majority share of the market.
Other notable compensating equipment moments in golf history include the Stan Thompson Ginty designs of the 1970s, like the one shown left featuring a V-shaped sole that functions much like the keel of a sailboat;
the 1979 Pittsburgh Persimmon metal woods from Taylor Made, pictured right, that allowed weight redistribution in driver and fairway heads; the 1984 Pelz Three-Ball putter that was ruled to be nonconforming because its head was deeper than it was wide; the 1985 Matzie Slim Jim 46” putter; and the 1987 introduction of Eddie Langert’s (Langert was co-founder of Taylor Made) flat rather than round hosel designs that delivered additional club head speed aerodynamically by 
reducing the turbulent drag created by a conventional round hosel and a club head.
The list above is by no means meant to be complete, even with the addition of the clunky 1980s Power Pod, shown left. It’s only intended to identify a few pronounced departures from traditional golf equipment. There is no need to continue the discussion further astray from the past departures to the more recent trampoline COR, coefficient of restitution for measuring club face spring, and other rulings since there is little value in discussing where you do not wish to go, opting instead to remain focused on the mission at hand of preserving traditional golf in a modern world.
Square Grooves
No other topic has caused more discussion in the world of golf equipment than the square grooves question. Square grooves have a 90 degree square bottom inside the groove and U grooves are U-shaped inside the bottom of the groove. Traditional V grooves are V-shaped. But the bottoms of the grooves are of minimal concern. The attention has been at the top where the groove cavity walls meet the club face surface.
Originally, Ping molds left a right angle interface where the groove walls meet the club face surface. Even the toughest most durable golf balls were becoming frayed and scuffed by the sharp right angles and golfers were complaining. Karsten came up with the simple solution of rounding the sharp angles and voila, problem solved. It was such a simple solution that he neglected to submit the modified design to the USGA for a compliance ruling. Or was it simple?
Well, the devil is in the details as they say and rounding the sharp edges caused a controversy on how the distance between the grooves should be measured.
Looking at the graphic to the right, if you measure between vertical lines marking the groove walls, as Karsten did, there was no change in the approved design.
The USGA however took the position correctly that by rounding the sharp edges Ping had reduced the club face surface between the grooves as measured 45 degrees from the apex of the arc created during rounding. This dropped the distance between Ping’s grooves to less than three times the width of the grooves and made their clubs nonconforming.
Why would grown men representing esteemed organizations argue over such minutia? Could it be ego for one thing?
Here’s a guy so full of success that he allocates who can buy how many sets of his irons, with customers out there waiting that can’t get his product; a guy whose marketing strategy—selling only to green grass pro shops when all other brands were selling to big box warehouse stores that were advertising product cheaper than the green grass pros could buy it from the other brand reps—elevated Solheim to savior status among green grass golf pros.
Golf is based on self enforcement of the rules and penalties and any questioning of this guy’s actions as playing out of bounds cast aspersions in his mind upon his character, when in fact it was his arrogant assumption that he could make design changes without following the prescribed protocol for every manufacturer of submitting product to the USGA for approval.
If it looks like an end run, it probably is an end run. Then again, it could be a quarterback sneak. It wouldn’t be the only instance of ethical tip-toeing by the popular giant.
Ping reps are said to have showed preferred buyers how to beat the company’s allocation system of limited numbers of lie angle models based on color coded dots on the iron heads; use a Sharpie pen to change the red, white, blue, and orange dots to black. Black represented Ping’s standard lie angle and became the most sought after and least available model.
Thus, pro shops could increase their inventory and revenue by dispensing Sharpie black dots as authentic black dots. Buyers from overseas, especially in the Pacific Rim, were calling American pro shops long distance trying to buy quantities of product and a lot of the Sharpie lies went abroad.
And the FTC was contacted about Ping’s advertising claim that, “First we custom build Ping golf clubs, then we custom fit you.” That would be like saying first we custom cook Dunkin’ Donuts, then we custom serve you. Custom is comprised of the first six letters in customer. It defies credibility and truth in advertising for inventory that has been mass-produced in advance, without knowing the customer, to be advertised as being custom built.
Ping vs USGA
Ping’s deep pockets had already intimidated the USGA into rolling over for the Solheim dynasty. It is believed by some that the USGA would have won a full frontal legal challenge on the issue of groove specifications, but their financial resources were not up to the task and the USGA did not wish to risk alienating its power base of PGA professionals across the land that had a firm allegiance to Ping in return for the marketing loyalty Karsten showed them. So Far Hills rolled over and settled in a way that exonerated the dynasty.
The FTC said it appeared at face value that a case could be made for inaccurate advertising claims on the “custom built” statement but it would be an expensive case to pursue and that the FTC would only participate in supporting an action on behalf of a plaintiff and that the funding for the case would have to come from the private sector. It was a bit like picking a fight with Muhammad Ali and the first punch was never thrown.
Tests seem to indicate that club face grooves are less significant in imparting backspin to a golf ball than once assumed, all things being equal. But when moisture such as dew or pulverized grass gets between the ball and the club face, the lubricating effect of the liquid properties reduces friction—reduces spin—all things being equal. However, if you compare square or U grooves with traditional V grooves when club face moisture is introduced, the square and U grooves provide more spin than the traditional V grooves, all things being equal, because the square and U grooves, as shown in the illustration above, provide greater channeling capacity to evacuate moisture.
It’s Not the Arrow
Golfers hear the expression “It’s not the arrow, it’s the Indian,” regarding golf clubs. But, apart from any offense that Native Americans may take at this adage, it is factually incorrect in principle.
An arrow isn’t much good without a bow. And you need the right kind of arrow and the right kind of bow to launch the arrow. If you are shooting birds like Native North Americans have traditionally done you would want blunt-tipped arrows for that purpose with extra fetching so the arrows slow down dramatically after 30 yards and are easier to retrieve. The arrow is quite important.
In golf, the club is the bow and the golf ball is the arrow. The liberties taken with golf club designs as referenced above are easy to identify and that is no accident.
Major brand manufacturers learned three decades ago from Ralph Lauren and General Motors that product life cycle management is critical to market-share and profitability. It is hard to sell product to somebody that already has what you are selling. New styles and models date last year’s lineup and before you knew it, there were new golf club models being touted every year.
What has been less obvious to rank and file golfers is the engineering of the golf ball from being a white sphere with dimples to being a fairway-seeking rocket.
Actually, before it was a white sphere with dimples it was a sphere with dimples and before that it was a sphere with various molded textures such as cross-hatching; and before that it was a sphere with hand-hammered patterns; before that a smooth sphere; and before that it wasn’t even a sphere, being that it was a sewn leather pouch stuffed with enough feathers to fill a top hat.
Balata
From early last century until the 1980s, balata golf balls were the balls of choice on professional tours. They were easy to spin for shaping shots, and would check up on even the shortest pitches and chip shots. But they were fragile. A thin miss-hit with a wedge would usually leave a gash in the cover, sometimes clear through to the rubber band winding inside. Tour pros used to say with double entendre, “Hit thin to win and hit fat to miss the cut.”
Tour pros were more concerned about knocking the balata balls out of round than with cutting them because they never had to pay for balls and manufacturers even made custom compression balls for their players. Every tour caddy carried a roundness gauge and tested his player’s balata for roundness before putting and on the tee boxes.
Balata balls were made of costly raw material and the production cycle required thirty days. Expensive balls that damaged easily were fine for the tour pro that could go through eight or ten balls per round since his balls were furnished free of charge, but what about the average golfer?
Surlyn and other synthetic covers were practically indestructible and didn’t spin like the balata—meaning they flew straighter for the average player. They were an instant success welcomed by average golfers.
High speed imaging and other scientific methodologies led golf ball manufacturers to expand research and development to an ongoing process in the competitive world of supplying golf’s most expendable commodity. Durability became a given in the 1980s and all attention was on distance at first, with increasing attention being given to a full complement of performance data like launch angle, spin rate, and deformation. But the ultimate test was playability on and around the greens.
Two-Piece Balls
There is no greater illustration of the influence of golf ball engineering to improve performance than in the cases of Nick Price and two good friends, Mark O’Meara and Tiger Woods.
Bridgestone Sports was aggressively pioneering two-piece ball technology during the early 1990s while Titleist and other manufacturers plodded along in status quo mode. Bridgestone enlisted Nick Price to help develop their new Precept EV Extra Spin ball and the result was that after sixteen attempts at the British Open, Price finally won in 1994 using the Bridgestone ball. And a month later with the same ball he won the PGA Championship.
Like Price, Mark O’Meara had his own winless record for the most starts without a win at the Master’s, until, after switching to a three-part solid-core ball in 1996 and moving from the back of the pack to 10th place that year while being ranked second in the world for greens in regulation, he went on impressively to win a coveted green jacket in 1998.
O’Meara’s ball was from the unlikely factory that produced what may be the most durable and hardest ball ever made, the Spalding Top Flite—dubbed Rock Flight by better golfers—and the ball from Spalding that breathed new life into the aging O’Meara is the Spalding Strata.
What O’Meara Taught Woods
Friend that he was, O’Meara introduced Tiger to solid-core three-layer technology and TW’s game picked up a notch and caused him to announce at a Nike sales meeting that he would no longer play Titleist balls and two weeks later he teed up a Nike Tour Accuracy at the 2000 U.S. Open in Pebble Beach for one of the most decisive wins in history, twelve under par for a fifteen stroke victory against a championship field that failed to see even one other player in red numbers. And it’s a little known detail that Tiger’s Nike Tour Accuracy was private labeled, as Bridgestone just did it for Nike.
Changing balls brought Tiger Woods not only the historic U.S. Open victory, it also won him the next three consecutive majors; the British at nineteen under, the PGA at eighteen under, and the Master’s at sixteen under.
Titleist had some 60% of PGA Tour players under agreement at that time who were contractually obliged to continue playing the company products while the company emerged from a complacent slumber to find ball technology passing them by.
One departure from traditional golf ball engineering that bears highlighting for its opposite goal of delivering shorter distance by about half, is the Cayman Ball introduced by Jack Nicklaus in 1985. Faced with a design and construction contract to build Britannia Golf Course on too little land on Grand Cayman, Nicklaus developed the Cayman Ball that instead of concave dimples had protruding dimples that created resistance and flew half the distance.
Jack Nicklaus and Pete Dye are two of the authoritative voices that called for reason in the 1980s, warning that unfettered liberties being taken with the engineering of golf balls and golf clubs was rendering venerable and historic golf courses obsolete while demeaning the accomplishments of past champions.
What Were They Thinking?
The 1980s is the pivotal decade when golf’s major equipment brands began flexing their muscles to intimidate golf’s governing bodies into yielding to their perceived demands of commerce under the mantra of saving the game by making it more popular.
What could the governing bodies have been thinking? Hadn’t they noticed that golf was already more popular in the 1980s than it had ever been? The number of golfers skyrocketed by 80% from 1960 to 1990 and over the two decades since 1990 the growth has essentially flattened and declined. Interestingly, this decline in popularity over the past 20 years coincides with the governing bodies compromising on the introduction of compensating golf equipment.
The Participation Rate Change graph below shows the plummeting decrease in golf participation from its high popularity in the 1980s to negative and zero percent in all but the junior and senior age groups in the 1990s. This decline is coincidental with the governing bodies yielding to the compensating golf club agendas of big brand golf club companies.
Golf dominated weekend television during the 1980s and there were nearly 25 million participants in the USA. Five million people annually were trying golf for the first time with one million of them continuing to participate. The demand curve was driving record new course development and industry forecasts targeted one new course opening per day as the goal necessary to satisfy the demand trend.
Reasonable minds and research concurred that golf was indeed popular as it was only superseded in popularity by fishing and bowling for recreation participation. Perhaps something got lost in the major brands’ commerce mantra translation between popularity and profitability.
The disturbing fact is that the number of golfers has been slowly declining since 2000; clear evidence that the decision to compromise on compensating equipment and rules proliferation by golf’s governing bodies at the behest of golf club manufacturers was an ineffective and nonproductive decision. Golf has become less popular so the decisions of the governing bodies to acquiesce haven’t worked and may have had the undesired opposite effect.
The 1980s saw 7.5 million new golfers join the game. Following the acquiescence of golf’s governing bodies in compromising on compensating golf clubs and rules proliferation, the 1990s saw a 42% decrease in new participants to 4.4 million new golfers—further evidence that the decisions of the USGA and R&A may have served the interests of major brand golf club manufacturers but at best did nothing to help the game of golf, and at worst may have contributed to the decline because the decision to compromise has seen a steady escalation in the prices of golf equipment.
The graph above illustrates that during the height of compromise by golf’s governing bodies in yielding to major brand equipment companies and collaborating with them to market compensating golf clubs, the wholesale price of a golf club skyrocketed by 100% from 1986 through 1998. And the number of units increased likewise by 100%, which proves that the acquiescence by the governing bodies did in fact cater to the interests and profits of major brand golf club companies. But remember, the popularity of the game declined during this period with 42% fewer new participants in the 1990s compared to the 1980s.
This further evidentiary data shows that the yielding of the governing bodies to major brand golf club company promises to save the popularity of golf has been wrong and has not worked. Still, the governing bodies have continued letting the big brand club companies push the costly compensating envelope down their throats. This brings to mind when Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
It also brings to mind Quaker Oats and how they have preserved the traditional popularity of their product in a modern world by adhering to the principle, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Golf most assuredly was not broke in the 1980s as illustrated and detailed above. You can say that hindsight is 20/20 and the response to that is, why didn’t the governing bodies use their hindsight and discover the obvious popularity golf already had? And why have they doubled down over and over again on decisions that clearly have seen the opposite effect manifest repeatedly? Are they expecting different results?
Real estate costs, environmental impact mitigation, and water availability have all contributed to increases in the cost of playing golf and cannot be discounted as factors that can affect the number of rounds played and discourage new golfers from coming into the game. However the economy may not be a factor since the economic downturns of the mid-1980s and early 1970s appear to have had little or no negative effect on the popularity of golf when it was still traditional.
So this leaves us with the option to do something or just sit and watch. TGS is of the opinion that reasonable minded golfers have watched for too long in lieu of a valid “do something” option.
Traditional Golf Society is your “do something” option to support the effort; to hit the reset button on golf and preserve golf at the modern level it attained in the early 1980s. What will it cost? That’s your call.
Donations are graciously accepted and a Passive Membership requires only that you register. Passive Membership gives you access to all common areas of the site and allows you to interact with comments and blog posts throughout the TGS community.
Active Membership entails an annual membership fee that includes a handicapping portal, a voice in policy development, TGS bag tag, TGS cap, and a TGS Membership Card for discounts at participating sponsors.
Going Forward
It is reassuring to see golf’s governing bodies take a first step in our direction to exercise good judgment going forward on the grooves issue. Nothing would make us happier than to see them catch up fully to the TGS position so that Traditional Golf Society could become irrelevant and would be relieved of the responsibility of carrying the mantle to preserve traditional golf in a modern world.
According to the USGA, effective January 1, 2010, professional golfers on one of the top tours, or those attempting to qualify for one of the three Open Championships, need to be utilizing conforming wedges (those without square grooves). Moreover, those who plan to qualify for any other USGA championship need conforming wedges by 2014. In addition, this regulation might include amateur events as well. Casual golfers may use square groove wedges (and clubs) until at least 2024. The ruling applies to any club with a loft greater than 24 degrees.
Maybe the governing bodies are finally yielding to facts and hindsight instead of catering to big brand golf club interests. Then again, maybe not. A “condition of competition” clause gives individual events an escape clause for business as usual avoidance of the new rules. This appears to be a clever tactic by the USGA, often used in at least one Southeast Asian country, to go through the motions of taking a stand on behalf of constituents while passing the buck of responsibility to key constituents for implementing the rules—or not.
TGS Conformance
While the USGA and R&A reserve the right to compromise the traditional values of golf in favor of an evolving agenda of compensating golf equipment and rules proliferation, Traditional Golf Society (TGS) adheres to the established and time-tested traditions, rules, and specifications that governed golf from its inception through its modern era into the 1980s.
Traditional Golf Society sanctioned events require all participants to use only the specified golf ball during the event and participants must adhere to TGS Equipment Conformance Standards as outlined below.
Equipment violations shall be one stroke penalty per hole played per club.
- A player may not carry more than 16 clubs.
- A player must carry at least two wooden-headed clubs.
- A player may not carry more than one putter.
- No club shall exceed 44 inches in length.
- No club shall exceed a loft of 56 degrees.
- No club shall have a static weight of less than 13 ounces.
- Shafts of golf clubs must be made of wood, steel, or aluminum, and exhibit the patterns of traditional stepping. Only shafts made of wood may exhibit a non-stepped property.
- Driving clubs must be made of wood, pear-shaped, as in the tradition of the game.
- The Driving club face or hitting area of a wooden driver may not measure more than 3 inches wide and 2 inches in height.
- Driving clubs shall have a static weight minimum 13 ounces.
- No Driving club shall exceed 44 inches in length.
- Iron Clubs must be within the game’s tradition of forged metal (blades), and must not exhibit the presence of any perimeter weighting in an attempt to enlarge the sweet spot of the club head.
- Iron Clubs may not have milled or textured faces other than V grooves within the fine tradition of the game. Box-shaped, square or U grooves are not allowed.
- Iron Clubs shall have a static weight minimum of 14.5 ounces.
- An Iron Club must have a hosel where the shaft is affixed to the club head.
- Iron Club heads must not exceed 3 inches in width from the apex of the toe curve to the outside of the hosel unless the club was in production and generally available prior to 1950 (“grandfather clause”), in which case the toe to hosel measurement maximum is 3.5 inches.
- Iron Club face height may not exceed 2.5 inches.
- Putters shall not exceed 38 inches in length.
- A Putter club face shall not exceed 4.5 inches in width, two inches in depth, and 1.5 inches in height.
