They Didn't Have Discount Golf Clubs When They Were Kids

It's funny to hear our elders commiserate about not having such amenities or luxuries as transportation to school when they were kids, so they had to—they will spare no detail in telling us—walk five miles in knee-deep snow, had to go the long hard journey with ratty shoes, or had to waah waah waah, to the point where their kids will now sarcastically add glib details such as how they probably had to carry siblings on their backs, too, and often without shoes.

But if you think about all the technological advances that now provide us with things our elders and ancestors had to go without, it really is quite remarkable what we are blessed (or spoiled) with today. One set of those things, if you'll allow the awkward segue and great reach from shoes and transportation, is the available collection of discount golf clubs. And to appreciate what spoiled [adult] children we are, we might consider the clubs our ancestors had--which were surely not discount golf clubs--by looking at a brief history of golf clubs.

In the late 1400's in Scotland, near St. Andrews, in the areas of what is now known as Edinburgh, the first golfers might have been saying to their ungrateful offspring that they didn't have clubs (never mind discount golf clubs) when they were young lads. All they had were sticks which they used to push around an object on the ice their ancestors had also started the game on.

By the 1600's, to be sure, discount golf clubs were nowhere to be found in 1687, when Thomas Kincaid, medical student and golf fanatic, wrote about how golf clubs were made in his now print-elusive diary entries and in his book, Thoughts on Golve. So Kincaid and crew likely admonished the youth of the time about what deprivation they had to endure. Poor Scottish golfers.

The ghosts of the 17 th century, then, might tell us that discount golf clubs were not yet even a figment of the craftiest of golfer's creative imaginations, though the clubs were taking on importance and attention. First, the existence of irons is made evident by a discovery of two irons in a secret cupboard in a home on High Street in Hull (according to the British Golf Museum). In the same cupboard, too, were six woods, which historians estimate are 18 th century clubs—now, with the irons, part of the collection called the Royal Troon Golf Clubs. Next, history reveals some ways in which the clubs were used: according to writers David Nicholls and others, the irons of the period were too rough on the balls, and so were only used as rutting clubs—to retrieve balls from by hitting them out of the deep ruts created by the cart wheels. The woods did most of the work, that is, being used for most golf play.

Through the late 1800's, the golfers could still decry their crude and heavy irons—made by blacksmiths and purchased by no means as discount golf clubs. But maybe by 1910, when factories took over the mass producing of both irons and woods, the golfers could get some relief. Maybe by 1925, when steel shafts were part of the streamlining of clubs. Maybe it wasn't until the 1980's that our elders could stop bemoaning their suffering—when titanium and graphite replaced heavier, more costly metals and materials.

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