IT’S EASY ENOUGH to blame America for the six-hour round, the infernal plumb-bob, the blimp-size driver, the island green, and “Get in the hole!”—son of “You da man!”—but ask yourself this: What would the game be like without the gimme, the mulligan, improving the lie, and a chili dog at the turn?
There are, of course, purists among us who eat grated persimmon for breakfast and would take us back to the square-dimple ball, the rut iron, the stymie, no sprinkler systems, and play it down everywhere, even during appendicitis attacks.
Here’s the thing: America has been very good for golf, even though we may have overcooked the game, which is to say overadvanced it, and maybe overcorrected what we’ve overcooked.
If America hadn’t become interested in the game, we might still be swinging at the ball in tweed coats, neckties, and plus-fours, and talking like Lord Crawley, the Earl of Grantham.
But do we really need a golf ball today that can puncture the side of a 68.7-ton Abrams tank when hit by an anemic fourteen-year-old girl? This is the same golf ball that can be launched from London in a high slice, correct itself over Paris, and land safely in Milan.
Which begs another question: Do we really need a 900-yard par-5 hole in our lives? The only person who might is the real estate developer who will surround it with town houses on roads named for famous courses he has never seen and therefore misspells … Interlacking Drive … Baltusroof Avenue … Bel-Ear Circle.
America didn’t originate the gated community—I think you have to give that to Buckingham Palace—but we popularized it and contributed the windshield decal.
The golf community should be grateful for America’s invention of central air-conditioning. Without it, whole sections of the world might never have been heard of, like Florida and South Carolina.
It was fine with me if a man named Stimp wanted to invent a meter. His name was actually Edward Stimpson. Lived up in Massachusetts. But I could have saved him the trouble by pointing out that putts are faster going downhill and slower going uphill, and everything in between is guesswork.
You may not know that America invented the wooden tee. Dr. William Lowell of South Orange, New Jersey, evidently a hypochondriac, was concerned about chapping his skin from forming tees out of wet sand or dirt—the preferred method dating back to Mungo Park at Musselburgh, if not before.
One day while dwelling on the dangers of sand and dirt, Dr. Lowell began whittling wooden tees out of a leg on his dining room table. He whittled them down to two inches long. Thus came the Reddy Tee, which was happily painted red by his neighbor, a fan of Cézanne, and began to be marketed in 1922.
America gave us the Tour, as you know. Once there were only the Big Ones. The U.S. Open, British Open, Western Open, North-South Open, PGA, Metropolitan Open, U.S. Amateur, and British Amateur. There were more majors than you could shake a Grand Slam at. But we added things like the Texas Open, Catalina Open, Los Angeles Open, and Miami-Biltmore Four Ball, the first corporate event.
The Four Ball was dreamed up to promote the Miami-Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, which may have become best known for its Al Capone Suite.
America gave us Ben Hogan, too, don’t forget. Then Ben Hogan gave us practice.
What was the first corporate logo on the Tour? I know exactly what it was. I was there. The Amana hat.
We of the press in the 1960s were compelled to divide competitors on the Tour into two categories. One category consisted of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and two or three others. Everybody else was an Amana hat.
Amana was this appliance company in Newton, Iowa, a division of Maytag. Suddenly, some pros were wooed into wearing the Amana hat on the Tour for $50 a week. Julius Boros, I think, may have been the first to wear it, but he was hastily followed by Miller Barber, Dave Stockton, Lon Hinkle, Lou Graham, and several others known simply in pressrooms as “the Amana hats.”
Today, as you may have observed, a Tour pro’s shirt is covered with so many logos, he’s in danger of being mistaken for a corridor in a shopping mall.
Research tells us that a man in Edinburgh, Scotland, named William Currie Jr. received a British patent for a metal wood back in the day of gutta-percha golf balls. He had designed a driver with a heavy brass clubhead. It never caught on. The trouble was, it worked better as a doorstop.
It’s safe to say that the first workable metal wood came from the brain of Gary Adams at TaylorMade. It was a twelve-degree driver of cast stainless steel with a head about the size of a seven-wood. It made its debut at the PGA Merchandise Show in 1979.
One wonders what might have happened to this weird invention if it hadn’t provided aid and comfort to Curtis Strange when he went about winning the U.S. Open in 1988 at The Country Club in Boston.
Before there was a steel clubhead there was a steel shaft. Rules makers in America approved the steel shaft in 1924. Macdonald Smith and some others of the period fiddled with it, but it didn’t catch on until Billy Burke won the 1931 U.S. Open at Inverness in Toledo using steel shafts.
A man has to remind himself that Bobby Jones won all his majors and the Grand Slam swinging hickory, and without the modern sand wedge that Gene Sarazen invented in 1932.
You can thank America for the fact that you don’t have so many clubs in the bag, it plants your caddie into the ground like a potato. It was our USGA that put the fourteen-club limit into effect in 1938 after a two-year argument that was called a discussion. At the time there were caddies lugging more than thirty clubs in a golfer’s bag. It happens that Harry Cooper’s bag contained twenty-six clubs when he won the Western Open in 1934.
We have been given the credit for numbering clubs. Prior to this, irons were known as a niblick, mashie, spade-mashie, mashie-niblick, mid-mashie-niblick, and something similar to a mid-mashie-niblick-scooper-lifter.
For better or worse, there are many other things America has contributed to the game. Just off the top of my Hogan cap, I can think of the $2 Nassau, the gangsome, cartpaths, square grooves, Softspikes, Tour caddies, Tour gurus, courtesy cars, hospitality tents, Babe and the LPGA, college golf, autograph hounds, the $500 green fee, the handicap thief, seven hundred ways to cure the slice, and the Tour Wife, which comes in two flavors today: blond and naturally blond.
Of course there will always be things to criticize about our contributions, but we’ll do the criticizing, thank you. In fact, I’ll start. For example, take the sports agent. Please.