 |
BOGIE |
 |
Sample Illustration of a Ancient Golf Club and Ancient Golf Ball
 This
was Mulligan's play club. His old hickory shafted golf clubs were vogue
during the 18th Century. If you were lucky to find one today,
this collectors item would be in a sorry state... warped and tattered.
Collectors or dealers are faced with the need to restore them to some
semblance of their original condition, but there is no clear consensus
on how far this restoration should go. Replicas of these ancient golf
clubs are one answer to a golf collector's quest to own one.Ancient hickory shafted golf clubs are scarce and therefore valuable. Most wooden shafted golf clubs are found in a poor condition and therefore look very old, but in most cases they are just neglected. Of course, some clubs made before 1900 do indeed command high prices, but golf has become a worldwide passion in past 50 years and believe it or not millions of clubs were made with wooden shafts between 1900 and 1940. As a result, most of the clubs you would find are neither rare nor valuable, even when in good condition.
|
 One
of the first golf balls was known as a featherie. Craftsmen, like
Stymie, softened leather pieces in water, stitched them together with waxed threads, and then stuffed them with boiled goose
feathers. A man’s top hat was used to measure the right
amount of feathers needed for each ball. Imagine stuffing a top-hat-full of feathers into a pouch not much
larger than an egg! As the dampened leather and feathers dried out,
the leather would shrink and harden, while the
feathers inside expanded to make
a tight fit.
The size and weight of such balls, especially the featheries, was up to the owner's taste; players drilled holes in their balls and filled them with lead shot at times when a heavier ball was advantageous, such as in high winds. It is tempting to assume that all of the great tech stuff happened after we figured out how to make beach sand into microchips. But with a pastime as ancient as golf, something must have clicked early on or it never would have survived this long. That hook may well have been the Featherie golf ball, perfected by the Dutch around five or six hundred years ago from a basic technique used for game balls in ancient Rome. They would stuff a hatful of wet feathers (and remember, they liked BIG hats in those days) into a wet inch-and-a-half leather pouch, sew it up, and let it dry. The feathers would expand, and the leather would shrink, creating a ball as hard as...well, a golf ball. This made for a very resilient and lively projectile, especially when compared to the wooden balls used previously. The featherie golf ball performed remarkably well on the links, as evidenced by a recorded drive of 361 yards by Samuel Messieux in 1836, at the Old Course in St. Andrews! Sure, it was just skin and bird hair, but it was still a quantum leap by any measure, sort of the transistor of golf balls. For more than 400 years, it was the ball of choice. That is, if you could afford it. These ball's extravagant cost (Stymie could produce only four or five golf balls per day) sealed their ultimate fate when the cheap "guttie" ball appeared around 1850. |
