Little ball, big deal

A history of distance and debate

Little golf ball, year by year

Gaining yards of distance clear

–Edgar A. Guest

The late poet wrote those words years ago, when 250 yards was a big poke, but they seem very much on point now. A recent Eureka Earth image showed the newly constructed tee on the par-5 13th hole at Augusta National Golf Club, a chute through the pines, the latest example of architectural Pilates as a defense against distance. That picture appeared on social media not long after the conclusion of the 2021-22 PGA Tour season, where the Driving Distance numbers buttress the work of bulldozers at one of the world’s most famous courses.

Ninety-nine players averaged at least 300 yards, the most—by a lot—in history as the tour average (299.8 yards) creeped within a fraction of a number that used to be a zip code populated only by power hitters of a special breed. Twenty years ago, just John Daly averaged more than three American football fields off the tee. In 1992, no one did.

This year’s average PGA Tour driving distance is more than 10 yards longer than a decade ago. Of course, factors beyond the ball contribute to the distance bonanza at the top of the men’s game: larger, livelier, forgiving driver heads; lighter shafts; advanced technology to fit equipment to golfer; greater, golf-specific fitness by more players; on many courses, firmer fairways that foster more roll.  

As ever, though, the “little golf ball” is a big part of the story.   

If France is in the same paragraph with golf, you can usually find Arnaud Massy and Jean van de Velde there too, the former because he won The Open Championship in 1907, the latter because he lost it, spectacularly, in 1999. Another Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, otherwise unaffiliated with the game, ought to be with them.

Karr was a 19th century Parisian writer and editor who could go long (about a dozen novels) or short (epigrams). One of his famous sayings, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme, “the more it changes, the more the same,” often is translated as “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Regardless of the exact words after traveling from one language to another, the meaning is clear. And when it comes to the evolution of golf balls, Karr’s phrase has been apt since he wrote it.  

The pursuit of a longer ball is centuries old. In his 1953 book Sixty Years of Golf, Robert Harris, a three-time British Walker Cup captain and winner of The Amateur Championship in 1925, described golfers as being vulnerable to the “dope of distance” sold by manufacturers. The reality is that before any equipment concern first boasted about its offerings, there was a desire to see a ball fly farther.

Those who played golf-like games with a wooden ball found that it went farther if slightly egg-shaped instead of perfectly round. The “hairy,” with cow hair inside a sewn leather cover and likely the type of ball first used in Scotland, flew much better than wooden models. When the breast feathers of geese and chicken started to be used instead of the bovine material, the flight of a ball was better still.

Karr’s famous epigram was published in 1849, soon after Rev. Robert Paterson of St. Andrews first formed a ball from gutta-percha—a rigid latex produced from the dried gum of trees in southeast Asia—to vie with balls made of boiled feathers stuffed inside a leather covering.

Allan Robertson, a St. Andrews professional and Scotland’s best golfer in the years leading up to the first Open in 1860, made a nice living from his featheries and was none too happy with the arrival of a product that not only was more lively but cheaper and more durable. Robertson split with fellow clubmaker and professional Tom Morris Sr. when he caught him playing with a gutty, and he destroyed  a bunch of the rubber balls in an attempt to limit their popularity. “The burning question of guttie v. feather [in] St. Andrews was vastly more intriguing than a general election,” John Ressick wrote many years later. “Feeling ran high in the Auld Grey Toon and knowing the pugnacious character of the Fifer it would not be astonishing, especially in those hard-drinking days, to learn that attempts were frequently made to settle the dispute through ‘Ordeal by Battle.’”

Realizing his was a futile quest, Robertson started making gutties and, in 1858, using one, became the first to break 80 on the Old Course. Bernard Darwin later called it the “usurping gutty” for the way it eventually displaced the feathery, yet within the solid rubber ball’s lifetime there were changes as roughed-up exteriors were found to be more aerodynamic than smooth surfaces. At first, they were hand hammered and later formed in machine moldings. Other tricks were tried to enhance how the gutty soared. During an exhibition in Tuxedo, New York, on a hot summer day in 1894, Willie Park Jr., was seen getting a chilled ball from his caddie every couple of holes.

The ball has always gone too far to suit some. This certainly has been the case since the invention of the Haskell ball, constructed of rubber thread wound tightly around a solid rubber core with a gutta-percha cover. Coburn Haskell, employed by  Bertram Work at the B.F. Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio, was a golfer frustrated by his lack of power and motivated to do something about it.

“By the time I appeared, the golf ball story was that he was the poorest player in his foursome,” Haskell’s daughter, Gertrude Haskell Britton, told a reporter in 1973. “He thought how nice it would be if he could invent a ball that would sail out beyond everyone else’s drive at the first tee—to amaze them—so he did that, with Bert Work’s help and connivance.”

The idea of utilizing elastic windings in a golf ball wasn’t new. Someone in England had received a British patent for such a thing—without a rubber core but with a gutta-percha cover—in 1860, but it never came to market although British children played with wound toy balls in the last part of the 19th century.

Haskell and Work received a U.S. patent for their creation on April 11, 1899, and it was a revolutionary development bringing instant and almost unbelievable increased distance. Work recalled an early experience with the Haskell involving Joe Mitchell, pro at Lake Shore Country Club in Cleveland.

“Out across the fairway of the first hole was a bunker which had never been carried by anybody,” Work wrote. “It was so far from the tee that only an occasional tremendous poke with the old ‘gutty’ would send the ball rolling into it, in dry weather. And it was right over the middle of that bunker that Joe’s drive with the new ball sailed, high in the air, landing yards beyond. Joe Mitchell stood watching the ball with eyes and mouth wide open. Then he let out a yell and began a sort of dance. Then he began to implore Mr. Haskell to tell him if he was dreaming and if not, what was in that ball.”It was almost as if a child of the 1970s replaced a Nerf ball with a Super Ball. But Mitchell’s euphoric reaction was far from universal, and so began a cycle of creativity and complaint that exists today. Across the pond, a reader of Golf Illustrated called the Haskell “a good ball for a tired man.”  The magazine’s editor, John D. Low, wrote in a Nov. 1, 1901 edition: “I am all for progress, but it is impossible to view without apprehension the advent of a ball that will drive even 50 yards further than the present. It would make nonsense of all our best courses, and the necessary alterations would involve an enormous outlay. It might be necessary to prohibit the importation and use of the new balls, as James VI did with the Dutch ones in 1618, and so the matter might become a test question at election times, or precipitate a parliamentary crisis, and lead to a change of ministers. But we will hope for the best …”

According to a recollection by his son, Laurie, in John Martin’s The Curious History of the Golf Ball, 1893 Open champion Willie Auchterlonie said, “Americans have spoiled the game. That devilish rubber ball just goes too far. The game will never be right until they come back to the solid ball.”

They never did, of course. Willie’s brother, Laurie, played with a Haskell ball to win the 1902 U.S. Open at Garden City Golf Club, becoming the first in championship history to record four sub-80 rounds as he broke the scoring record by six strokes. With no standards in place, manufacturers experimented with sizes, weights and substances to try to satiate the lust for more yardage. (In 1916, Spalding offered balls in five sizes, five compressions and eight weights, including the “Wizard,” “Witch” and “Black Domino.”)

The Worthington company in 1910 blended particles of radium into its rubber cores. In pursuit of improved performance, solid centers in balls gave way to those containing different types of liquid: honey, wine, castor, mercury, soap and acid. “Burn of Eyes From Content of Golf-Ball Cores,” was the headline of a paper written by a Boston doctor in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1913 that detailed serious injuries, primarily to the eyes, sustained by curious children cutting into centers that contained caustic liquids.

Golf’s governing bodies began to fret about what the unregulated ball was doing to the game. In 1920 the United States Golf Association and Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews decided to enforce specifications the following year limiting a ball to weighing no more than 1.62 ounces and being no smaller than 1.62 inches in diameter. By late 1922, however, USGA president J. Frederic Byers already was lamenting the landscape.

“We look with alarm upon the increasing power and carrying distance of the ball,” Byers said. “While we legislated two years ago on the weight and size of the ball, the inventor and the manufacturer have developed a ball today which goes a great deal farther than the ball which we hoped we had standardized; and we feel that unless this distance can be controlled, your association, in cooperation with the committee abroad, must take very drastic steps to control the length of ball.”

The decade could have been called the Soaring Twenties, as complaints about distance—and threats to do something about it—continued. A Tampa sportswriter opined in 1928 that “it must be some atom of liveliness contained in the innards of the pill, the golfing fathers have decided, and a move is understood to be on foot to yank the atom out and reduce the golf ball to its normal range and speed of an ordinary bullet.” United Press reported a year later that the USGA wished “to shorten the game of the experts and bring back the brassie and the No. 1 iron.”

In mandating a ball of 1.55 ounces and 1.68 inches in diameter for 1931, the USGA tried to do that, but there was much discontent about the “balloon ball” from average golfers. The lighter specs lasted only a year, yielding to lingering concern about how far the ball was going despite the contention of Spalding president Julian Curtiss in 1935 that “golf balls have reached their limit, so far as distance is concerned …”

Opining about the matter in Golf Between Two Wars, published in 1944, Darwin could have been speaking today, given the similarity of his critique to those from some quarters about 21st century designs with multi-layer solid cores and urethane covers.

“… I shall assume it as axiomatic that the modern ball goes too far for the good of the game, the more so as there is some devil within it which disproportionately favours the very strong, hard hitter,” Darwin wrote. “… This much is certain however, that courses have had to be stretched and stretched again, if really strong players are to play anything but a series of drive-and-pitch holes. This had made the best golf a comparatively monotonous affair and reduced to a minimum many beautiful strokes. Much more important to the general run of golfers, it has called for more land and so more money …”

Darwin made the further argument, also put forth these days, “that the pleasure consists in hitting the ball as hard and as clean as possible and that it is not diminished by the fact that a rather less resilient ball does not go so far; that there was just the same satisfaction in hitting the gutty 180 yards as there is in hitting a rubber-core 250; that in short such pleasure is relative and not positive.”

English amateur star and two-time Open champion Harold Hilton, whose career bridged the gutty and Haskell periods, had preached the same gospel in 1924. “What difference can it make to a mighty swatter,” Hilton said, “if the ball is of such character that he can only hit it, say 220 yards instead of 250 yards, provided that his opponents are suffering from a similar disability?”

Five decades since Darwin’s sound reasoning, Frank Thomas, the USGA’s longtime technical director who had been at the helm in 1976 when an Overall Distance Standard was established, told Sports Illustrated that “the ball is not going to go any farther than it is right now.”

But in just a handful of years it was, with increasingly sophisticated manufacturers figuring out how to maximize length while maintaining spin to an acceptable level for highly skilled golfers, a game changer in the vein of the Haskell ball.  A century after Willie Auchterlonie lamented what others saw as progress, Jack Nicklaus, speaking at the 2001 Masters, told reporters, “It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to allow the golf ball to do what it’s doing.”

Those with a cursory knowledge of Nicklaus’ career know that he carries a money clip he got for winning a long drive contest the week of the 1963 PGA Championship in Dallas. Swinging all out with a steel-shafted, persimmon-headed driver at a wound, balata-covered ball, a fury he didn’t unleash often in competition given the penalty for a misfire with such equipment, Nicklaus smashed a 341-yard drive. It was the longest shot the contest had seen in some time, 19 yards farther than runner-up Ben Lula’s effort. Raymond Floyd finished third at 317 yards.

Nicklaus’ clout of yesteryear was special enough that it remains a pleasant memento for an octogenarian whose muscles and method of youth gave up nothing to today’s crop. PGA Tour statistics from last season show that 481 drives traveled 380 yards or longer, more than twice as many as the previous year. Edgar Guest would have plenty of material.