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Foreword by Gary Wiren, Ph.D.
Chapter I Well, Look at Us Now
Chapter II The Featherie Changes the Game
Chapter III Golf Gets Organized
Chapter IV The Bounding Billy Revolutionizes Golf
Chapter V The Era of Spalding and Dimples Begins
Chapter VI The Americans Break Through
Chapter VII Bringing Order Out of Chaos
Chapter VIII The USGA Breaks Away
Chapter IX Titleist Takes Over
Chapter X The (One and) Two-Piece Revolution
Chapter XI The Dimple Race Begins
Chapter XII A Ball for You and Me and Everybody Else
Chapter XIII The Golf Ball Rules
SAMPLE CHAPTER
Chapter 2
The Featherie changes the game
For almost 300 years after its beginnings, golf grew on an informal basis. There were no courses as we know them today; any suitable and available ground would suffice, and absent any rabbits, holes were dug in the ground with knives, diameter and depth depending on the day. The number of holes would vary with the site. Matches were played for wagers — a custom we’ve not managed to shake — but there were no codified rules until the middle of the 18th century, although there certainly must have been agreement in the various locales on the way the game was to be played.
It was, during most of this period, a game for all classes, at least in Scotland. Nobility and gentry mixed with tradesmen and apprentices on the playing fields, sharing ideas and techniques about the game they had all come to love. This often resulted in curious scenarios, because the garb of golf as seen in the paintings of the time appears to have been the clothing of the day — jackets, ties, caps and trousers or plus-twos for the upper class, less formal but still bulky attire for the working class. It was a dress code that lasted well into the 20th century, although it fortunately was relaxed before most of us came along. Even Tiger Woods couldn’t hit it 300 yards dressed like that.
James IV banned the sport again in 1491, but by 1502 he had negotiated a precarious peace with England and had fallen in love with the game himself. Thereafter, most Scottish kings played the game. James IV was killed in the 1513 battle of Flodden when Scotland and England again went briefly to war. But James V had his own private links in East Lothian. His daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, learned the game early and, in 1567, was castigated for playing golf shortly after the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. And when James VI, also an avid player, ascended to the throne of England in 1603 as James I, the game came into favor there and has remained so ever since.
That 1502 peace treaty, by the way, along with the advent of gunpowder, had a curious effect on the game of golf. The men who had made the bows and arrows for archery, the primary system of war at the time, now transferred their tools and their skills at turning wood and forging iron to the manufacture of golf clubs. As Peter Dobereiner points out, “…golf’s debt to archery has never been properly appreciated and acknowledged. If golf had relied on the rude agricultural implements used for kolven the game would surely never have achieved such popularity. By later standards, when clubmaking became a highly developed art, the early clubs may have seemed crude but at least they proved effective.”
The design and manufacture of clubs almost always was reactive to changes in the golf ball, especially through the 19th century but even now. The featherie was the first to have such an influence. The featherie ball period is considered, by those who consider such things, to be from 1440 to 1848. It may have been around at that early date — indeed, its construction was the same as the ball used in circa 100 B.C. to play paganica. But, perhaps because of the skill and expense required to produce it, the featherie really didn’t become popular until the early 1600s. At that point, we see how seriously those folks took the game.… or the business of the game — and is it any different today? By some accounts, the featheries made by the Dutch were preferred over those made by the Scots, even in Scotland. So, in 1618, a ballmaker at St. Andrews named James Melvill petitioned King James to prohibit the importation of foreign featheries to protect Melvill “and other puir people who now for lack of calling wants maintenance.” The king did just that, giving Melvill and his assigns a 21-year monopoly and declaring any balls not bearing their bench marks subject to seizure.
However, historian Robert Browning offers a detailed argument that Scotland was not importing golf balls from Holland or anywhere else and that the king sold the monopoly to Melvill. It was one of many unpopular monopolies James had dispensed to raise money for the royal treasury (those for the granting of licenses for alehouses were particularly reviled). Further, Browning points out, Melvill was not a ball-maker but merely the purchaser of the monopoly. He already had an arrangement with a firm of ball-makers named William Berwick & Co., and any others who wanted to manufacture balls had to do so under his license. If this had been in the U.S. at a later time, the Justice Department would have broken Melvill into seven Baby Balls.