Sea Island Life Magazine Fall/Winter 2014 | Page 31

DAVID W. LEINDECKER

A

mong the many legends about Sam
Snead, one of golf’s icons, is that
he often won bets playing with a
limb cut from a tree. He probably
didn’t tell challengers that he learned to play
golf with tree limbs, rocks and tin cans buried
in the ground. While many golfers aspire to
reach Slammin’ Sammy’s levels of greatness,
amateurs and pros alike often need more
help from their equipment, fueling industry
research and the development of instruments that facilitate hitting the ball farther
and more accurately.

A Hitter’s History

woods, but Callaway’s Big Bertha was the
catalyst club that got everyone talking about
switching to metal. The head on the Big
Bertha was so much larger than the persimit was too big. Oddly enough, the original Big
Bertha had a 190 cc (cubic centimeter) head,
and today’s drivers range from 420 cc to 460
cc. The goal of the big head, of course, is a
bigger sweet spot.
“From then on, the game became more
equipment- and performance-driven,” Veal
explains. Since the debut of the Big Bertha
driver in 1991, the sport of golf has continued to change with new materials, tools and
insights on how to guide golfers to the coveted hole in one.

Rory Mcllroy

CHATCHAI SOMWAT

Six hundred years ago, golfers started out
much as Snead did, with rudimentary wooden
clubs. The Scots, who get credit for creating
the game, hit leather balls stuffed with feathers. “Featheries” gave way to more durable
balls, which led to drivers with hard persimmon heads and hickory shafts. The 1800s ushered in clubs with iron heads and steel shafts.
In the 1930s, golf’s governing bodies limited
the weight and size of golf balls and the number of clubs in tournament players’ bags.
As clubs evolved, their colorful names—
brassie, spoon, cleek, mashie and niblick—
disappeared, and numbered woods and irons
became the standard. Only the putter kept its
original name and purpose.
In the late 1970s, club designer Gary Adams
created a stainless steel driver he called
TaylorMade and formed a company of the
same name. A few PGA TOUR players began
to use his Pittsburgh Persimmon model, and
metal woods were here to stay