‘Tis better to have lofted and sliced than never to have lofted at all.
Thus sayeth brother Bernard Darwin.
What he was talking about was a ball known as “the putty,” made by a company named Eclipse. He tried one for a while in lieu of the then-standard gutta percha, or “gutty”, and wasn’t too pleased. The putty was hailed as the cure for a slice, guaranteed to go straight. It usually did. Unfortunately, it never got much altitude. For links courses, that wasn’t a big problem as long as no hazard lay between you and the target. But extricating the putty from a bunker was near impossible.
The search for the perfect ball continues today.
When I first began playing golf, the ball was made of a center core, rubber with some kind of liquid inside, wound with rubber and covered with balata. If you hit them poorly, they smiled back at you. A deep enough gash pretty much ruined the ball. Some manufacturers also used a Surlyn cover, a synthetic rubber developed by DuPont. It suffered abuse a little better, but wasn’t soft enough to get the kind of spin better players want.
Acushnet made a ball called the Titleist. The Acushnet name is often forgotten, but the corporation still manufactures Titleist and Pinnacle golf balls, along with other golf equipment. They were, and still are, considered the top of the line in golf balls. But they no longer wind rubber.
Spalding came up with a different approach to ball manufacture. They created the Top-Flite, a ball with a solid core. It was durable, and had pretty good spin characteristics. If you played a Top-Flite, people thought you were either cheap or a poor golfer. Everyone knew good golfers played Titleist.
Today, all companies makes balls with solid cores. Some have a solid core with a urethane cover, some have a solid core with a thin layer between the core and cover. Some others have a solid core with a second wrap of another material, an outer core, and then a cover. Four layers has become the standard for a premium ball. Each layer provides some special characteristic to enhance a player’s skills. Thin and soft covers and outer layers provide “feel” and spin, and the harder interior provides the compression to get more distance on shots hit harder. Combine those with new driver technology and people hit drives more than 300 yards on a regular basis.
But, you know…Sam Snead and Jack Nicklaus could hit the old balata ball with persimmon and drive it 300 yards when they wanted to. The search continues for the perfect ball for the weekend golfer who slices or hooks or tops his shots on a regular basis.
A new ball is a treasure. The cover, painted bright white, gives you a sense of a new beginning every time you open a new sleeve of three. It is shiny. No scuffs or scratches. That will soon change. Golfers cringe when a ball hits a cart path. No, our swings aren’t so perfect that the flight of the ball on the next shot will be greatly affected, but our psyche is. The ball gets dirty and we wipe it off or wash it at the next tee box. But it will never be the same. It becomes a utility player rather than the star. Soon it finds its way into a different pocket of the golf bag, one reserved for those soldiers who’ve done their duty and still have some life remaining, but are no longer the elite. It will serve as a provisional, ready to step up when one of the new guys has gone astray, but will never again start off a tournament round.
Throwing away an old ball is almost a sin.