Fried Egg Stories: The Ball, Part 2 - Wound

This episode of Fried Egg Stories is brought to you by our friends at b Draddy. Okay, the b Dratty Liampolo, I've talked about it before. It's magical. It's everything you want in a polo. And can I just say Peruvian pima cotton a couple of times Peruvian pima cotton. That's what the classic b drotty liampolo is made of. And it is comfortable, good looking, breatheable, all the things you

The fried egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so they'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto.

The green Here's it's a playing out of a buried lion of Bunker is completely different than playing out of a night and clean lion of greenside Buker.

You need to be aggressive on it's sitting cleanly or it's Frida Egg. Well, we've all faithd it the dreaded fried egg and not to be cleared, though it's actually a pretty easy shock to hit.

It was eighteen ninety eight. Joe Mitchell was the professional at a golf club in the Cleveland, Ohio area. One day, a member named Coburn Haskell arrived and he handed Joe a golf ball. According to an account in the BEF Goodrich Company Archives, here's what happened next.

Hit this ball for me, mister Haskell, requested of Joe. The ball looked exactly like the usual ball, the cover having been pressed in the same mold, and Joe took his stance and walloped it, with never a thought that he was assisting at the making of history. Out across the fairway of the first hole was a bunker which never had been carried by anybody. It was so far from the tea that only an occasional tremendous poke with the old gutty would send the ball rolling into it

What was in it was basically rubber. Here's how the story usually goes. Coburn Haskell was visiting a friend at the good Rich rubber factory in Akron. There, Haskell picked up some elastic rubber thread, wound it around and around itself, and the resulting ball bounced like a grasshopper. Haskell, who was an avid golfer, had an idea. He asked the factory workers to encase the ball in a layer of gutter percha, and that's how in eighteen ninety eight he

If you know something about the history, the debate today sometimes lapses into verbatim verbatim sentences. I mean it literally, it's the same sentence.

That's Robert Crosby, a golf historian. And in this episode, Bob is my guide through the post Haskell moment, a moment that in many ways created the golf world as we know it now, and at the center of it all was an Englishman named John Lowe.

John Lowe was a remarkably precocious, remarkably brass, self confident Avid golfer.

By the mid eighteen nineties, Lowe had regular bylines in golf magazines, and when the governing body of British golf, the RNA, formed a rules committee in eighteen ninety seven, he was a member. Just a few years before that he had been a student at Cambridge. I didn't realize that he was so young when all of this was happening.

He was a kid.

He's not just another letter in the letter box that you would find reproduced and say golf illustrated. He's leading the debate. He's a remarkably outgoing, very bright, incredibly articulate and extraordinarily self confident for somebody his age.

So in nineteen oh one, John Lowe was already a prominent figure in the game. In nineteen oh one was the year that the Haskell ball made its debut in Britain.

A couple of balls appeared and they were given to Horace Hutchinson, who then gave a couple of the balls to John Lowe and others of his friends, and they played with it at Saint Andrew's.

Right away low saw that this ball was different.

Lowe writes about he took one of the balls and dropped it on the floor and I guess the RNA clubhouse, and the ball bounced over his head. It was clear from the get go that it was a longer.

Ball, Yet neither Low nor his friends took the Haskell all that seriously.

At first, they thought it was just a novelty.

Because the ball was so lively, they assumed it would be harder to put and chip with.

It turned out that you could adjusted that pretty easily.

And the Haskell, already popular in America, caught on like wildfire in England and Scotland, so.

That by nineteen oh two it was played everywhere.

By then, John Low knew a couple of things about this ball. First, it went much farther than the gutty.

The estimate varied from twenty yards to four yards farther, But it was a ball that clearly left the club face at a higher rate of speed than any gutty could ever hope to do.

Second, and this is the most important thing, it introduced a whole new method of designing a golf ball. The gutty had just been a solid hunk of hardened gum. Aside from experimenting with dimples, there wasn't much an inventor could do with it.

The gutty was the gutty. It just was a technology at a dead end.

But it soon became clear that the wound ball design had opened up a new set of possibilities for the manufacturers.

The leap forward with the Haskell was that it had a core, sometimes made of something solid, sometimes made of something liquid, surrounded by a wound bands of rubber at a certain tension level, and then covered by some sort of rubber covering. It was a whole new kind of ball, but it introduced a whole concept that there would be better and better balls coming along on a fairly regular basis that would be yet longer, yet more durable.

And that was why John Lowe became worried, so much.

So that low goes to the RNA Autumn meeting in nineteen o two and says, guys, who got this something about this bomb? This is going to render obsolete the best golf courses we know. The RNA responds by saying, and Low thought hopefully that yeah, we'll address it at the spring meeting in the nineteen oh three spring meeting. In the meantime, let's do some checking and look look into it and see exactly how much farther it flies,

Low felt that this decision at its root was self serving.

It wasn't just that they thought the ball was okay. They didn't. They agreed it was a bad thing for the game, But they made and this is what angered Love so much. They made a decision not to ban it because of its popularity, and that in turn, was based I think, on fears that if they did do so, no one would pay attention to them anymore.

So the Haskell in effect became the new standard ball. John Low was pissed, and we've already established that he wasn't exactly shy, so he started firing off letters to magazine editors, and in his book Concerning Golf, he said his colleagues in the RNA were quote, neither prompt nor brave enough to carry out their own convictions.

He was the bete noir of so many people, the target of cartoons mocked by other journalists, made fun of here and there, and it didn't phase him. He just marched on. He just soldiered ahead with his objections to the Haskell.

So why did he feel so strongly about the ball? Well, it had to do with his overall vision of golf.

Lowe was concerned first and foremost to try to preserve various attributes of the traditional Scottish game.

These attributes belonged to three main categories, the courses, the rules, and the equipment. In the traditional Scottish game, as low knew it, you had courses on the seaside, links, rules based on the old Saint Andrew's codes, and clubs and balls fashioned locally out of wood iron and got a percha.

Because he thought those attributes made the game the interesting game that it was, and not because those attributes would make it a popular game, but because those attributes had intangible benefits to golfers. They tested character, They developed perseverance, the ability to deal with good breaks and bad breaks, which all led to higher levels of camaraderie. It was a metaphysical view that saw golf as important to character and absent the attributes.

Of the older game.

Low believe those benefits to character were less available. The difficulty and unpredictability of the game is a feature, not a problem. And for so long as people have the idea, and this is a phrase that Glow returns to again and again that they that they want to quote conquer golf, tame golf, it's a completely incorrect mindset to bring to the game. The haskell sits in the middle of all

And so in the process of debating the Haskell ball, Low articulated an entire philosophy of golf. He liked to say he represented the conservative party of the game. Now, of course, conservative has a political meaning now as it did then, but this is different. Low used the word literally. He wanted to conserve the old ways of Scottish golf. He thought those old ways built character, bred camaraderie and

Let's go back to nineteen oh one nineteen oh two. The Victorian age was coming to an end. The Edwardian age was just a borning as they say, and Low was a young man very much an at Wardian. Younger men like Low, like Cold, like Fowler, like Simpson, were trying to sort out a different way to think about golf than their what their Victorian forebears had taught them.

For the Victorians, broadly speaking, golf was about fairness. It was about a very public display of virtue. So to them, any course design, any rule change, any new club or ball that seemed to make the game more fair, more regular, was clearly good. But at Wardian golfers like John Lowe saw things differently.

It was okay to just enjoy the challenges of the game. It didn't have to have a higher moral purpose, enjoy the process and learn from the process, whether or not it brings you, you know, gets you into heaven ultimately.

And Gardians made golf more about private enjoyment, private self and provement.

And there are things that I can do that I like to do, and that's okay, and that's okay, and golf, for Low is that thing. It might not make for better civil servants in the British Empire, but it's fun.

In other words, fairness and public virtue were beside the point. Lo saw golf as an individual, heroic adventure, and anything that made the game less adventurous, easier, more predictable, more under control, he tended to reject.

One of the key motivations for science is to take control of nature. Low's concern is those people that want to take control of golf. Golf is a man made thing, and it can be changed if man wants to change it. But if we are going to enjoy its real benefits, we have to leave it where it is, in its more or less traditional forms. And if that means golf becomes less popular, so be it.

So.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, it was the Victorians versus the Edwardians, the Party of Equity versus the Conservative Party, And while they all bickered, the British ball manufacturers got to work.

By nineteen oh five nineteen oh six, a couple of years after the haskell Is not banned, they're all sorts of experimental balls coming out with different sorts of windings, different sorts of cores. Some use mercury, some use water, some all sorts of different things, virtually all of which didn't really pan out as advertised. But there was this

What are some examples that you can think of?

Well, I mean, just you know, our golf ball will go much farther, last longer and staying round longer than the haschol You know, extraordinary links, you know, the usual advertising burgs you and I can sort of make up here on the spot are all for the first time being promulgated by golf ball manufacturers.

But it wasn't just marketing, There were some real advances in technology happening.

The ball was getting longer and longer again because there were simply no rules and why not try something.

Yet by the end of the decade, a funny thing had happened. A lot. More golfers had come to agree with John Lowe that something needed to be done about the ball. This was partly because more edward ends had come of age, and it was partly because the so called Conservative Party had a number of eloquent supporters in the press, including perhaps the greatest golf writer of all

As far as I know, every open venue made substantial additions to its length between say, nineteen oh five and nineteen ten. They had no choice, They really had no choice, and it was a shadow that hung over the game. Golf courses couldn't be sure at any point in time that they weren't going to have to undergo yet further major changes to match up with the golf ball.

And this was how something like a consensus started to form.

Nobody can deny that the new balls are really affecting golf courses. It's just in front of your face. Don't even begin to tell me it hasn't had an affecting golf course.

In nineteen thirteen, John mow became chairman of the RNA Rules Committee. The stage was set. The RNA and USGA were in touch, Various standards were being discussed, and the passing of the first ball rule in golf history seemed imminent.

And then World War One hits and everything comes to a screech and hall.

World War One brought devastation on a scale that Europeans could scarcely understand on the Western Front, trench warfare rage for four years. Obviously, no one was really thinking about golf at the time. Well, John Lowe sort of was.

Even though normal functions that the RNA were shut down during World War One, low kept discussions of the ball alive among members of the Rules Committee.

Wouldn't let it go.

There were a few basic proposals on the table. J. H.

Taylor h and Harold Hilton had an idea that what we ought to do is licensed ball manufacturers and as a condition to them making approved balls, we can inspect your factories to see how they make balls. That sort of thing.

That would be a strict sort of regulation, giving the governing bodies direct control over all aspects of the ball, including its design and material composition. Not a popular idea among manufacturers. Other proposals were less stringent.

Willie Parker was among the first to suggest the idea that we limit balls by limiting its weight and size. In other words, it can't weigh more than x or have a diameter of less than X.

This would qualify as regulation, but it would also give manufacturers plenty of room to innovate. For John Lowe's part, he was frustrated that no one seemed to want to go back to the gutty, so he came up with an alternative, the floater.

The ball that floats, easy standard to implement and enforce. Does it float.

The floater did gain support among those fellow conservatives, but the problem was most golfers liked what the round ball did for them, and they knew that any ball that could float had no chance of beating the Haskell. The floater would effectively be a rollback to the gutty, and that was where things stood. When the war ended in late nineteen. The next year, the Daily Mail newspaper sponsored a tournament at Saint Andrews that came to be known

People were hitting the golf ball distances they had never seen before. People were hitting the fourteenth hole, the long hold at the old course with a driver and a seven iron. They were chipping onto the seventeenth holl for their second shots. People were shocked, stunned.

So as soon as the RNA opened back up, John Lowe was ready.

He was able to present to them a subcommittee that he had formed to investigate ball regulation, named the committee members and said, we're going to contact the USGA, ball manufacturers in the British PGA and get everybody on board. And that's exactly what they did. Immediately, the USGA writes back, says we're with you on this, buddy. Let's do it. Something's got to be done.

But it turned out that other US golf organizations were less enthusiastic.

The Western Golf Association and the USPGA oppose any ball rules at all. Nothing we want nothing. We want pure libertarian golf. I can play with any ball I want to play with. Get out of my face.

So in nineteen twenty, the USGA traveled to Mierfield for a summit with the RNA, and the American delegates had bad news for John Lowe.

We can't do the floater. If you're going to do the floater, we're out of here.

Now. Keep in mind, at this point, Lowe was about fifty years old. He was no longer an upstart firebrand. He was an elder statesman, maybe a little gentler, maybe a little more diplomatic. So he decided to compromise on the ball role At Mierfield, the RNA and USGA agreed to regulate size and weight a minimum diameter of one point sixty two inches and a maximum weight of one point sixty two ounces, which was approximately the size and weight of the best performing balls of the time.

But low thought, well, I was defeated on the floater, and that's a disappointment. But I got a rule, and that rule ought to be able to shield us from further ball improvements down the line, and I'll count that as a victory.

That was May nineteen twenty, Just a few months later, before the rule even went into effect, the ball manufacturers had a surprise, they came out with prototype balls that fit the new specifications.

It turned out the prototype balls went farther than the older ball, and everybody was in shock, absolute shock. Jaje Taylor says, Load, my girlfriend, Load, you really screwed this up. It's just a big miss.

To this day, nobody knows exactly how the manufacturers did it.

The theory is that they made the windings were tighter, there was a slightly thinner cover, that the core was made out of some sort of liquid know one. Loan never could figure out what they did. He was deeply frustrated by I think he felt betrayed by the manufacturers because they had been in close consultation with him up to the ball rule, and I think he felt backsided by them. I suspect, Garrett, this is rank speculation that the manufacturers got together and talked about it and they

The events of nineteen twenty made a few things very clear. One, if you regulate just the size and weight of the ball instead of what it's made of, you're not doing much.

If you give the manufacturer a max men limit, he's going to push it in ways that pikers like you and I can never imagine.

Two.

The new rule didn't settle the ball issue. It did the opposite. It ensured that the debate would continue.

That that wrestling men. It took a war. That wrestling match between the ingenuity of the manufacturers and the rule makers in the game is very much still with us.

And Three, golf itself would not be what John Low envisioned. It would not be an island in time. Instead, golf would change as the world changed, and whatever the current science was, the game would that it.

But so the origin story is I was at a golf outing.

That's Brett sergallis the author of Golf's Holy War, The Battle for the Soul of a Game in an Age of Science. He's telling me how he came up with the idea for the book, you're.

On the potting green, you're hitting balls, you're eating like a box lunch of sliced apples, you know. And there was a guy named Skip Latella who was giving a lesson on the range. It was giving a demonstration. He was using these things called flex sword discs, which are like these hard rubber things, almost familiar now, where a student was standing on them, and he was kind of teaching the student how to move, and it didn't seem

This was two thousand and eight. Brett was a young reporter at the New York Post. He had played golf in high school but hadn't really kept track of the game.

I still had my DCI irons and like my old nine to seventy five d driver, I didn't really know exactly too much about the cutting edge of the game. And I was like, well, what has happened to golf in this time where I haven't been paying super close attention.

So Brett went up to skip Letella, the guy with the flexwor.

Disks, and I was like, well, who uses these things? Like is there a teacher that uses them? And he said David Glenn's. So I went out and I spent some time with David Glenn's talked to him, and he had a guy down the range that was teaching named Henry Ellison who was like the exact opposite. He was like this spirit virtual, esoteric, like really just interesting guy. He had a long relationship with technology and then he had this horrible divorce with technology and ended up becoming

Brett had stumbled upon a widening divide in twenty first century golf, a divide between science and art, between technology and spirituality, however you want to put it. And the more Breton I talked, the more I was reminded of the Party of Equity versus the Conservative Party, the Victorians versus the Edwardians, the manufacturers versus John Low.

You know, it kind of represents a worldview. Do you think of life as something inherently solvable? Or is their inherent mystery? So how you kind of look at the world then projects on how you play and think about the game. How do we deal with like all of this increasing technology and all of this data that's now at our fingertips? You know, do we embrace science or do we kind of resist technology?

Brett thinks these questions are especially keen for golfers.

You want to grab hold of something tangible and you want to know that you have the answer. And golf is you're constantly like there's nothing, nothing's perfect. You never hit a perfect shot. It's just constantly dealing with small or large amounts of failure. And how do you deal with that?

One way to deal with it is to turn to science and technology, whether that means flex or desks, track man numbers, or the latest ball in a chaotic game. These technological supplements give us more control, or at least the promise of it.

It is the promise of having more control. When I got fitted for my driver, you know it's adjustable because every driver is now right and the fitter set it to a certain setting that was optimal for me, and I haven't touched it, you know, because to me it's it's like, okay, well I now know what this is going to do. Yeah, it's definitely there's definitely a feeling of more control. There's no question about that.

So we know John Low well enough at this point to have an idea of what he would say here. Golf should be unpredictable, uncontrollable, and if there is control, the players, not the implements, should be the agents of it. Brett does kind of agree with that view.

To me, the equipment's made it a little less interesting to watch at the pro level because the bad shots are not as bad.

But he agrees with it only to a point.

Am I going to give up my four sixty cc driver? Am I giving? Am I going to give up control?

Like?

I don't. I don't want to. I don't want to get worse.

In this way. Brett is like a lot of golfers, both now and one hundred years ago. He sees that equipment advances haven't all been positive, but he just can't get behind the idea of a rollback.

Well, it's it's a nice idea. But it's it's impractical. It's good to think about. It's like a thought practice it's not going to happen, you know, So it's cool to like like it's like the guys that go out and where and wear plus fours and play with hickory. Cool like great, Go have fun, Go play from the front, Go play Marion from the fronties with Hickory.

Awesome. That's not going to happen every day, you know. It's just it's it's over.

Equipment has gotten to the point where it is and it's not going to go backwards. So I don't think that's the answer. It's it's romantic bordering on delusional in terms of practically working, the answer lies and how do we deal with what we have right now? Because that's practice, that's the practical situation of the game. Gotcha, Sorry, I didn't even know like crush that romantic idea, but.

Fiddle with some of the vocabulary and we could have had the same conversation at Mierfield in nineteen twenty, maybe with John Lowe sitting nearby stewing. Yet some things have changed since nineteen twenty, and the way we talk about golf, for one, thing. Professional golfers have far more of a voice now, and generally speaking, they side with the Victorians.

The dominance of professional players over the culture of the game is now almost complete.

That's Bob Crosby. Again, you've probably figured this out, but he's an Edwardian.

If you are playing golf in order to put food on the table for your family, you will have a very very different concept of how golf ought to operate as a sport than if you are playing it as an amateur then playing it for pleasure or playing it because it's interesting and challenging. Between those two then diagrams, there's a very little overlap.

And today the Party of Equity has pushed the Conservative Party to the margins of golf, and we're all more or less having the same debate we did in the early nineteen hundreds, but with one big difference.

The difference, and I mean this to be controversial. The difference is that decide defending the conservative view of the game during those first two decades of the twentieth century was far more articulate and effective in making the case for conservatism than the Conservatives have been today. There is no one alive today that writes as well as Bernard Darwin,

There's something sad about that.

There's something very sad about but there you are. You can't do much better, So borrow steel whatever you have to do.

On that note, how about we borrow a little John low Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Bob to read me the final paragraph of Lowe's nineteen twelve essay Golf and the Man.

What we desire to see is that men should act nobly and chivalrously by the game, having no regard for any little chance or trick which may give them an opportunity for personal display or game. They must love the game, but love it honorably. Man must continue to fight his battle, and fight it bravely, but golf must remain unconquerable. Golf and the Man is It is a deeply philosophical look

John Lowe's defeat on the ball front set the terms for the modern game. As long as the ball was a certain size and weight, it could be made of anything. It could even be made of space age plastics. That's next on Friday egg Stories. This was the sixth episode of Frida egg Stories and the second installment of our Ball series. It was produced and hosted by me Garrett Morrison and was edited and engineered by Jay Vierick. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Many thanks to Bob Crosby

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