This episode of Frida Egg Stories is brought to you by our friends at b Dradty. So I want to tell you about the willikru neck tee. It's a long sleeve tea and I'm actually wearing one right now. You'll just have to trust me on that. But as I've been putting this doccupied series together, I've been wearing my Willi crew neck tea a lot because it is so comfortable, made of the softest Peruvian Pima cotton. And you know what,
I look better than I deserve to. So get yourself to bdradty dot com, put a long sleeve T shirt in your cart and inner code TFE for fifteen percent off bdratty dot com code TFE fifteen percent off.
The frid Egg requires a different technique.
What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto.
The green Here's the sake.
Playing out of a buried lion a bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice clean lion a greenside bunker. You'd need to be aggressive on any show weather it's sitting cleanly.
Well, we've all faced it to the dreaded Frida Egg.
Not to bet Beard, though, it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.
What you got cash or huh.
Man, I got something better than cash.
This is from the movie Lords of Dogtown. It's about the invention of modern skateboarding.
These are You're a thane skateboard wheel.
You're a what.
They're in a skate shop. One character has dumped a new set of skateboard wheels on the counter. You're a thane wheels, You're.
A thane man.
It comes from oil, from oil.
With these, you can do the same hard turns that you do under surfboard.
Yeah, yep.
You can even climb walls, man, because they grip the grip they grip. The skaters attach the new wheels to a board, climb the fence of a local school yard, and take turns surfing the asphalt. Light, graceful swerves, jumps and long carves, often embankment.
Oh my gosh, n ripping.
Yeah, insane, insane.
That was nineteen seventy two, and most skateboarders agree that it was the single biggest turning point in the history of the sport. Without the euthane wheel, the forms of skateboarding we know today on vert ramps and skateparks would simply not exist. Unlike the hard clay wheels that preceded them, euthane wheels were not prone to sliding because euthane had some give to it, It formed itself to the inconsistencies
in the ground and made for a smooth ride. At the same time, in spite of being relatively soft for a plastic, eurethane was extremely durable. It was one of the twentieth century's miracle plastics. Flexible and inflexible, soft and strong, a contradiction that could be created only in a lab. In twenty years after, euthane changed skateboarding forever, it did the same golf. This is Friday Egg Stories. I'm Garrett Morrison.
This episode is the last of three to take a closer look at the golf ball, it's design, its history, and its impact on the game. Each installment has focused on a different revolution in golf ball technology. We've gone from the gut to Percha ball in the mid eighteen hundreds, to the haskellball in the early nineteen hundreds, and now we've arrived in golf's modern era, when a new kind
of ball was on the rise. The ball made of advanced, meticulously engineered plastics, the kinds of plastics that first appeared on spaceships but eventually came to surround us in our everyday lives.
Like the whole world is made out of plastic now, so there is there is no application that plastic cannot be used for, except maybe to eat.
That's Harry Brown. You heard from him in the first episode of this series, and in this one he's going to help me tell the story of how plastics entered golf in the nineteen sixth took it over in the nineties, and ultimately re engineered the game.
Verything for very group chemistry.
For the finer world.
We want group carmistry.
That's the bomber.
DuPont was founded in eighteen oh two and became well known for manufacturing gunpowder and dynamite, but at the turn of the twentieth century, the company moved into an exciting new area, the science of plastics. In the twenties and thirties, DuPont invented neoprene, nylon, and teflon. During World War Two, it produced raw materials for parachutes, but it was after the war that the company truly came into its own,
racking up patents for Mylar orlon lycra taivek. This was DuPont's Better Things for better living through Chemistry era, and a lot of those better things were plastics.
I just want to say one word, deal, just one word, Yes, sir, I listening?
Yes? So yeah, plastics.
Here. The nineteen sixty seven film The Graduate pokes fun at what was a real feeling in post war America that the hard times were over, the economy was on the rise, and the future was synthetic. Exactly, how do you mean it's a great future in plastics?
Think about it?
What do you think of that? Yes, I will, I've set that's a deal.
What did people hope that plastics would be and would bring to the world.
I think it's opportunity and democracy. So it's an accessibility. If I'm starting a family and I need to buy a kitchen table, and there's a kitchen table made out of oak, right, and that kitchen table costs seven hundred dollars, And then there's a kitchen table made out of plastic, and that table costs fifty dollars. Okay, I can live the dream and buy a nice, big kitchen table for my family to have dinner at made out of plastic
works in exactly the same way. It just maybe doesn't feel as nice and look as nice and smell as nice, but we can still we can still have dinner on it. And I think you can apply that to any other plastic object.
Aside from cheapness and mass producibility, the main appeal of plastic, Harry Brown told me, was that it could be and do just about anything. It was free from the shackles of nature.
You can engineer it on a molecular level, and then you can kind of shape it into basically anything that you want, so it's almost like magic. You can't make wood do anything that you want, you can't make metal do anything that you want, but you can make plastic do almost anything that you want, assume any shape, engineer it to have greater or lesser durability.
Plastics were about the hope that science could make our lives better, and it wasn't long before that ethos made its way into golf. But before we talk about how fancy plastics took over the game, we should get into some background, because this isn't just a story about technology. It's also about two very different companies. On the one hand, you had Titleist. Out of its factories near New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Titleist produced rubber wound core balls with blotta covers, basically a refined version of the Haskell ball that had dominated the trade since the beginning of the century. Titleists put out an old fashioned product, but one known for its quality and consistency for its appeal to good golfers. On the other hand, you had Spalding, a sporting goods giant. The company had been making golf balls in Chickapee, Massachusetts since the late eighteen hundreds, and its style was flashier
than Titleists. Through the years, Spalding had been unafraid to try new things, so by the nineteen sixties, Titleist and Spalding, a two hour drive between them, were battling for the biggest share of the golf ball market, and it was in that decade, the nineteen sixties, that the modern golf ball made its debut. The modern ball was essentially a mashup of two brand new synthetic materials. The first was developed by James BArch in nineteen sixty three, a complex elastomer.
BArch discovered that this material could be molded into a solid one piece golf ball, but Barch's invention never really broke through. It was cheap to produce, but it just didn't perform very well. Around the same time, though, DuPont was developing a plastic called Serlin, which was tough but pliable. Soon a few manufacturers recognized that putting a Serlin cover on a BArch style elastomer core might be a pretty
good idea. One of those manufacturers was Spalding. Spalding released its first solid core two piece ball, the Executive, in nineteen sixty seven, but four years later the company really put it all together with the top Flight, which had a lively elastomer core and a durable Serlind cover. The key to this ball was spin, or rather a lack
of it. The ball that came before the Wound Ball had a lot of spin that would cause it to climb into the air and land soft, so pros often played very low lofted drivers, sometimes down around six degrees, because they were trying to keep their drives from ballooning on them and losing distance. The top Flight didn't have that problem. Less spin meant a flatter, straighter trajectory, especially in the wind, so you could loft up your driver, launch the ball high and watch it bore through the air.
But there was a catch. The top flight was low spinning off of wedges too, which meant it didn't stop as fast on greens, and skilled players who could be very precise with their short approaches didn't like that loss of control. So ultimately you had two balls that excelled at two different things, the top flight off the tee and the old woundcore blot of covered ball around the greens.
I remember playing en amateur events in New England in the late seventies early eight that's.
Joe Henley, who has been an executive for both Titleist and Spaulding, and.
The good players would have a top flight in there or two in their bag. If you had a two hundred and twenty yard part three into the wind, good players would put the titleist away for a hole and play the top flight on that hole and on the next toll that put the titleist back in play for the rest of the round.
Soon the governing bodies ruled that you couldn't switch the make and model of your ball mid round, so good golfers, including almost every PGA tour player, stuck with the wound ball, whereas many amateurs, maybe not as concerned with spin on their wedges, jumped on the Elastramer and Serlin train, roughly speaking, Titleist for the pros, top Flight for the Joe's.
You know there was rivalry. There was no question there was rivalry.
In the nineteen eighties, Joe Henley was a director of sales at Titleist.
When I was a Titleist, I'd hear the praise those folks in Chickape referring to Spalding's headquarters in Chickabe, Massachusetts. You know, Spaulding was the the giant in the room, you know, the other giant in the room.
Yet the two companies had very different sales strategies, each suited to their style of product. With its premium balls, Titleist wanted to do well at premium outlets, mostly pro shops. At golf clubs.
Titleists had en course market share of forty five percent, let's say, and then the off course golf specialty stores their market share was I believe around thirty percent roughly, and the sporting good stores and mass merchants their market share was much less.
Spalding, with its top Flight brand, took the opposite approach.
Spaulding, on the other hand, you know, had an on course market share that really was maybe high teens or possibly twenty percent at times. Golf especially store market share probably thirty to thirty five, and then they dominated the kmarts at the time or Walmarts and the sporting goods stores.
So whereas Titleist was high end and high margin, top Flight was all about quantity and appeal. The same was true of their marketing approaches. Titleist wanted above all to be the number one ball on tour.
Absolutely matter of fact, the phrase the Titleist used was the pyramid of influence, okay, and the pyramid of influence as a triangle that the peak of that period would be the PGA Tour, European Tour, LPGA Tour, Senior Tour, et cetera. That would filter down, you know, to the PGA Club professional they would be kind of in the next tier. Then it would be leading amateurs.
Titleist was aiming, in other words, for breadth of influence among top players.
Spaulding, on the other hand, didn't go for number most, use number one. They were more advertising of stars, you know, of names and of people that were could be great spokespeople.
Spokespeople like Greg Norman, who had a Spaulding logo in his bag, and Lee Trevino often seen pitching top Flight on TV.
Some people think the way you tell a serious goffer it's whether he pulled a certain ball out on the first tap. Me, I'm only interested in their score card, and players who want to score better are using the top Flight Tour.
Trevino doesn't mention the name Titleist, but he might as well. The ad is addressing the widespread feeling that good golfers used Titleist balls.
Hey, the way you really tell a good golfer is if he has to pull his wallet out on the eighteenth green.
And the new tops like tour balls.
But while Titleist and top Flight were in competition, they also represented a kind of balance between premium and discount, between skilled players and average ones, and this balance gave the game a sense of stability. Think about it. From the late sixties to the late nineties, the strongest golfers knowingly and willingly gave up distance off the tee in order to gain control around the greens. It was a natural sort of bifurcation. While most amateurs took advantage of
the latest and longest most pros chose not to. This was because the modern golf ball was not yet all things to all people. Engineers hadn't figured out how to make a ball low spinning in some situations and high spinning in others. So the hope of better things for better living through chemistry wasn't fully realized in golf, but the nineteen nineties were determined to change that.
You know, I was always a titleist.
Guy Marcomera had played a titleist ball for much of his career, but in nineteen ninety six his contract was up.
And I was friends with Payne Stewart, and he came over one day and he said, hey, Imo, would you ever consider maybe thinking about playing this ball?
And I said what ball?
It was the top flight z Belata, which in spite of its name, had no blota in it. Its cover was made of a soft serlin called zenthane, and the cores was solid elastomer piece ball.
And I said, you know, I never thought about that pain He goes, oh, look, I'm playing it.
It's a good ball.
And I knew at one point I believe Greg Norman might have been playing it.
If Mark was skeptical. You couldn't blame him. Although players like Lee Trevino and Jumbo Ozaki had used the two piece ball to great effect, Payne Stewart hadn't been as successful. Three years earlier, Stuart had signed a huge deal with Spaulding and he had really struggled with his top flight equipment. Some thought he had chosen money over results. PGA Tour player Scott Hoak once told a reporter, after playing a good ball, now he's got to play a range ball.
So Mark had some questions for Pain about the Ziebelata.
You know, how is it like out of the rough?
Are you going to hit more flyers or this or that because of the solid construction, And he goes, no, not at all, absolutely not. It's not like a pinnacle or a hot dot or any of these balls that you know would go really far.
And he was right. So I started trying it.
I liked it.
Meanwhile, Joe Henley was the new director of professional Relations at Spaulding and in early ninety six he had his eye on Marcomera.
He won the tournament champions when it was held at La Costa, opened the Europe with a win. I remember running into the PGA show that year and he was still not under contract to the titleist, so Joe got to work.
By March, Mark was playing the top flight Ziblada and by April he was signing a new contract with Spaulding.
I remember we signed his endorsement agreement at a house who was running in Augusta. There were three people at the table. It was Mark and me and Mark's farther Bob, was witness on the contract. It was quite a step for him. But you know the tour players, people that have changed the equipment out there for money or quickly without really debugging stuff. The failures are some of them are pretty significant, right without naming names. So Mark was
he debugged it. He was, you know, one hundred percent comfortable to product by the time he signed up.
And when Mark signed, Joe had some inside news for.
Him and he goes, you know, Mark, we have this other ball that's coming down the pipeline. We don't have a name for it yet, but it's going to be a prototype ball. We're getting approval right now from the USGA. And towards the end of the year they called me and they said they had the ball ready. It was approved.
It was the ball that would eventually be named the Top Flight Strata. Now, for a long time manufacturers had claimed that their new ball went farther off the tee and spun more around the greens, but the Strata was one of the first to actually do both of those things. Reason being that it was a three piece ball with a core, a cover and a mantle layer between them.
And it was the basis of it was to have a multi multi layer construction.
Dean Snow was a plastics engineer for Titleist, and right away he saw that the Strata was starting to solve the longtime problem of spin off of different clubs.
When you looked at wound golf balls, if you looked at your wedge spin, it was very high and your driver's spin was very high.
Okay, so it's high and high.
And when you took two piece golf balls, the driver's spin was very low, but the wedge spin was very low. So the goal was to say, how do you go from this low driver up to this high wedge.
How do you make that happen.
That's where the multiple layers come in. You see different parts of the golf ball determined spin for different kinds of shots.
When you hit a golf ball.
With a driver, you can press the ball about one third of the diameter. So that's where everything happens. It's the driver, it's the spin rate, it's the ball speed comes.
In from the core.
Now, when you hit with a wedge, the cover is very thin, very soft, and a firm mantle, so you're not getting into the core with a wedge.
You're pinching.
And what happens is the ball will have a tendency to pinch the soft cover to the firm mantle to the hard club and it rolls on the face. So when you pinch it, it rolls on the face. That creates a low launch with high spin. So the layers can troll the spin throughout the ball. The core is really your driver, and as you work out to the outside cover that your wedge and everything in the middle has a model that you can predict. So you said to me, hey, I want a golf ball and make
the eight iron spin be higher. I would work on the layers with the eight iron has impact and change the spin upward down.
So it's like different balls depending on how much a certain club compresses it. I guess like different different balls within the ball become active.
That's correct, exactly right. You activate the layer based on the angle of your club.
And the top flight strata was proof of that concept. It created what Dean calls a spin curve.
Strata was you know, to credit it's a tough fight on this strata was kind of the first that change that spin curve. It showed that the multi layer was able to drop the spin but still keep the wedge spin high. So it showed that you could create a spin curve you know in there throughout the set if you plot driver through sand wedge and you go low to high on spin two, he says Low who wound ball's high high. This showed you could actually change the curve of driver spin eight I and spin wet spin.
You could actually have different things based on having multiple wlayers.
And Mark o'meira was a fan.
The first thing I noticed was I didn't lose any distance, but I felt like the softness, the feel around the greens putting it pitch shots, chips shots, you know, still in the wind.
It was very good.
So the overall aspect of it I thought was better and so I felt like I was playing a more superior product.
So I was, you know, in love with it right away.
The next year, nineteen ninety eight, Mark won the Masters in the Open Championship. He was forty one years old and the first player to win a major with a multi layer solid core golf ball, and his competitors took notice.
You know, they're like, hey, is it just you know, Mark's playing better? Or is it the ball that's helping him play better? Or is it his clubs? So I do believe guard it created a little bit of a buzz out there for sure.
As all this was happening, Titleist was putting together its response. In nineteen ninety the company hired Dean Snell. While Snell had grown up around where Titleist was based, he was not into golf. He was a hockey player.
I didn't have a set of clubs. I hated the game.
One day, though, his dad got him some clubs and dragged him out to the course.
We pull up in the parking lot and as we pull up, there's another group of people getting out of the car, and he's like, hurry up, we gotta beat them to the teeth.
So I'm like, see already, it's not fun. You know what are we rushing for? You're here, get the day off, so we get the clubs.
We go out the first tee my first round of golf, and I hit a T shot and it goes so far to the right.
Didn't even go look for it.
And the second hole, I hit it and it went off into the trees and the woods on the right, and he hit one down the middle, and I'm in the woods and all of a sudden trying to find it, and I see this group of people in my father's face, two guys in my father face, and he's hollering at him, and.
One of them pushes him.
So I came running out of the woods and I closed eyeing the guy knocked him right in his ass and we hummeled him, and everybody came over and the director came out and they threw us off.
On the drive home, his dad told him what had happened.
And he said, well, you were in the woods looking for your damn ball.
He said, the guy up there hit it and it came down and hit my father.
His T shirt.
He didn't wait, so he grabbed a threewhood and he shot it back at him, and the guy didn't like it, so that's why.
He came down and got in this race. So I was sitting there and driving home, I'm like, you know, I think maybe I do like golf. This could be this could be pretty interesting.
You know.
Nonetheless, it was not a burgeoning love of the game that brought Dean Snell to the golf industry. It was plastics. While he was playing hockey at UMass Lowell. He got a degree in plastics engineering and he went on to work for BF Goodrich Aerospace before moving to Titleist, R and D. At the time, Titleist made its golf ball covers with a synthetic form of ballata, but it was a finicky material, complicated and expensive to produce.
And then if anybody ever played golf with a lot of golf balls, when you hit a wedge, the thing would be you'd have to shave it. You know, it have hairsticking up on it. So the durability was a big issue.
Also, Blota created a lot of spin, which meant the balls didn't go very far. So Dean's task was to solve all of those problems with one sophisticated cover material.
Their project that they hired me for was to develop a process to make a eurothing golf ball because it didn't exist.
Eure a thane the skateboard wheel stuff.
So the goal was to say, how do you work on bringing this driver's spin rate down, create a durable cover and help the golf ball be longer. So if the spin drops with your driver, you can add waft. Now they don't have to do six degrees. They can go up. And the more you can drop that spin, the higher you can go and loft, the further the ball went.
And eu athane had a unique potential to do all of this at once.
The uniqueness of it is the cross linking that happens during the process, So it creates bonds that are very tough, which makes the durability be very good. So it's why you'll see euthane wheels on skateboards, you know. So it gives you that durability, gives you the processing to cast it thin, you know, and it doesn't add speed, but it really it changes the whole you can You can do obviously a lot of different ratios, you can do all different hardnesses.
So it sounds like part of what makes your thine special is that it's a really durable material. It's it's tough, but at the same time it allows you to manipulate its softness or hardness correct.
And what's also unique about it is in your Athanes, the softer you go, the more durable you can make it, where in Serlins, the softer you go, the less durabile it is.
It took a few years, but the Titleist team eventually dialed in it's euro Athane process.
My first launch I started in nineteen ninety working on your earth Thane. I brought it into manufacturing in nineteen ninety four with a ball called Tour Prestige, which went to Japan.
The same ball came out the next year in the US under the name Titleist Professional, a liquid core with rubber threads wound around it, all enclosed and cast earth aided. It didn't change the spin curve like the Stratadad, but the earth in cover was optimized. It spun less than blada off the driver and just enough off the wedges. The Professional became the most played ball on the PGA Tour, and in nineteen ninety six a hot shot amateur came to Massachusetts to test it.
Him and his dad came in and I remember two straight weeks of working out of a place called Manchester Wane, which is where the Titles Test facility is. When he left there, he could tell you what his seven iron was going to spin, on, how high it was going to go, and the difference between the bottom ball and this ball. He was very tuned in to what was going on.
That was, of course a twenty year old Tights. A year later, he would strike his titleist professional ball two hundred and seventy times en route to winning the Masters by twelve strokes. It's one of those coincidences of history that's almost too neat. Tiger Woods wins the ninety seven Masters with the Eurothane ball, Mark o'mera wins the ninety eight Masters with the multi layer ball, and around that time the storylines of Woods, Omeira the Professional and the Strata all converged.
We would always practice at home in Orlando at Iyleworth and Tiger and I would always like play our practice rounds together to prepare for the Masters.
The next week.
It was either ninety eight or ninety nine. Mark was playing the Strata Tiger the Professional.
I remember specifically it was like on the eleventh hole at Ileworth or the twelfth hole, and we were around the greens and we were pitching the ball, and he was like, you know, he always called me m oh, he goes, m o, he goes, I don't understand how you, like, you know, hit these little pitch shots where you get so much spin on the ball. I mean, it's like, how do you do that? And I said, you know, Tiger, over a period of time, I'll kind of show you what you.
Got to do.
But it's just this certain technique. I was kind of working them. I was throwing all these golf balls back to him. Next thing, you know, you hit a few with my strata and boom. He saw this thing checking in their spinning and he kind of looked at me and he said, em, oh, it's not you, it's the golf ball.
That's doing this.
I looked at him and I said, exactly, he goes, what you even holding out on me? I said no, I said, to be fair, I said, Tiger, I said, you're playing an archaic at golf ball. That tour professional ball is an archaic at golf ball. I said, you know these companies today, you represent Nike, they build bridgetone golf balls. They can build you a golf ball that's
perfect for your game. And he goes, what. And then about three weeks later, maybe a month later, he called me and he says, you know, you need to come down to my house.
I get to show you something. I'm like, what, And I drive my cart down to his house. He lived four houses down from me, and I.
Come into his house and I go into his office and he's got these three white boxes of golf balls, and he goes, hey, check this out. We need to go out and play some holes. I just got these the other day.
These were the prototypes of what would become the Nike Tour Accuracy, made by Bridgestone, a multi layer solid construction ball with a earth hank cover basically a blend of the strata, and the professional Tiger switched to the Tour Accuracy in May two thousand. In the next three months, he won three majors, and by the end of the summer,
titleist staffers were getting restless. According to John Garretty and Sports Illustrated, the likes of Justin Leonard, Davis Love and Phil Mickelson were quote frantic, convinced that their wound balls put them at a competitive disadvantage. They were right, and in October of that year, at a PGA twur event in Las Vegas, Titleist debuted the pro v one, a three layer ball with the castier thing cover that Dean
Snell had helped develop. Forty seven players used it that week, and two of them, Billy Andred and Phil Mickelson, went one to two.
You know, that's to the manufacturers, that's a home run for them. When they bring a new product out that first weekend it wins.
That's the big splash. You know.
By that time, Snell was heading up Tailor Made's ball division.
And then they're going to have wins the rest of the year because they have such a great staff, you know, and so they're going to continue to win, and then they can make the noise.
Here's another tidbit from John Garrity. At the two thousand Masters, fifty nine of the ninety five players were using wound golf balls. At the two thousand and one Masters, for were and yet in two thousand and one, Titleists still led the ball count on the PGA Tour by a lot. So the prov one had seen the company through the final golf ball revolution and brought it into the age of plastics. Spalding, on the other hand, went bankrupt in
two thousand and two in top flight golf balls. Well, if you see them today, you're probably at the driving range. So in one way, the golf ball has caught up with the promise of better things for better living through chemistry. The solid core, multi layer eurothane covered ball is an amazing object. It's a marvel of design and chemistry, and it seems capable of being and doing anything, or almost anything.
Alex Weber is a free diver.
She just holds her breath.
That's Christopher Joyce reporting for NPR about Alex Weber, a high school student in Carmel, California. Alex was diving off the coast of Pebble Beach golf links one day when she looked down and made a startling discovery.
You couldn't see the sand.
It was completely white golf balls.
You look down and you're like, what are.
You doing here?
Thousands of golf balls.
It felt like a shot to the heart.
So Alex and her friends started hauling them out, often dodging arrant shots from the teas and fairways above, and over the next two years, they removed more than fifty thousand golf balls from the waters around Pebble Beach. With the help of a professor, Alex published a paper on the effects of all of this. Turns out golf balls do pollute, and one of the main culprits is eurethane, which degrades in water. Now, let's not blow this out
of proportion. The paper states that even fifty thousand golf balls will have a minimal impact on the ocean. Besides, the Pebble Beach Company has now started a cleanup program. In general, though plastics pollution is a big problem.
None of what we've manufactured since the inception of plastics has naturally decomposed.
That's Harry Brown again.
The only plastics that are no longer in the environment which we brought into the environment are those which we've burned or those which we've kind of like chemically dissolved somehow. The rest of plastic still exists, and it may it may long outlive us. The thing, and this is the blessing in the curse of plastics, The thing that makes it so magical, its pliability, it's durability, is the thing that makes it an environmental hazard.
So there's a great and terrible irony to the plastics era. These materials can be and do everything we want except not be a threat to us on our environment. We might have better things, but they haven't necessarily made for better living. A few years ago, Harry was playing at Old Hickory, a local course in Indiana.
You know, I drive into the weeds on the fringe and it kind of it borders this pasture and the grass is high. I park the cart, I walk around about ten feet. I find ten balls except for my I don't find my ball. So I'm just thinking, if I'm exploring this little ten feet radius of weeds, there must be hundreds of balls along this fence line's They're everywhere. They're just kind of concealed beneath the surface.
It reminds him of a photobook by Charles Lindsay called Lost Balls.
There's photographs of like golf balls like embedded in bear poop. You know that bears eat and then kind of like cycle back. Of course they're totally intact. You could play around with that golf ball that cycle through the bear's digestive system. But then there's also balls that have been picked up by fish to build nests in streams, balls that have been kind of like picked up by birds
as kind of surg eggs. You kind of eject them into the environment when you hit your hook or your slice, and it goes into the creek or goes into the weeds, and you forget about it, and it's there for five hundred years, and the environment kind of interacts around it, but it's never part of the environment.
Which is sort of a symbol of how golf relates to nature these days. I mean, we play golf in nature, but also against nature, and that agonistic side of the game, battling the elements, beating the course, is where the desire for better equipment, more advanced equipment comes from. It's why we find ourselves playing with graphite, titanium, and eu athane
instead of wood, cowhide and feathers. So all of those lost plastic balls, the ones that the environment refuses to absorb, they're very design and composition, are reminders of how much we want to overcome nature. Yet given that the balls are lost, they're also reminders of how often we still fall short.
I love the ts Eliot palem ts Eliot says, when we're gone and turned to dust, the only thing that's going to be left is basically asphalt and golf balls, maybe not even asphalt.
Were every day that we are leaving, we got lucky.
Coming.
This was the seventh episode of Friday Stories in the third and final installment of Our Ball series. It was produced and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, and it was edited and engineered by Jay Verick. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. We're very grateful to our guests for this episode. Dean Snell now runs his own golf ball company, Snell Golf. Harry Brown has a book called golf Ball. Check out
the link of the show notes. Joe Henley is now the CFO of Trust Engineering in Massachusetts, and Mark o'mera, at the age of sixty three, twenty ninth in the Schwab Cup standings on the Champions Tour. Thanks for listening.