What is the secret to golf? Every golfer may want to find the answer, here we trace back to the origineof golf.
During the time of Christ, golfers used wooden golf balls and wooden golf clubs made from the hickory tree. Then, in the early 1600's, the featherie golf ball was invented. The featherie golf ball was a hand sewn cowhide bag stuffed with goose feathers and painted. Because it flew so beautifully, it lasted for 200 years. In 1848 Reverend Doctor Robert Adams hardened the sap of the gutta percha tree into latex and invented the gutta percha golf ball, which replaced the featehrie golf ball from 1850 until 1900, when rubber took over. The rubber balls lasted until 1930. Today's balls have a titanium metal core with many layers of surlyn and balata coverings. Golf club shafts evolved from hickory tree wood with persimmon tree heads to steel shafts and now to graphite shafts with very large titanium heads. Despite the incredible advances in golf club and golf ball technology, the handicaps of male and female golfers have not gone down, according to noted author and custom club fitter Steven Passarell. How could this be? Here is the answer.
Famed Psychiatrist and 9 Handicap Sigmund Freud explained the human ego: "The human ego is the part of the cerebellum concerned most with feeling like a great human being. In many cases of over developed cerebelli, the human being begins to believe that in a prior life, he was the Messiah Jesus Christ, or Napoleon Bonaparte, as a defense mechanism to the haranguing of over critical parents and the resulting wounded ego." (Austrian Journal of Medicine Volume XXIV, page 69). Golf club and golf ball manufacturers have known forever that the most important thing to the male and female golfer, the cure for an ego wounded in childhood is distance off the tee.
From the time of Jesus Christ until the time of Jack Nicklaus, scientists knew that the exactly perfect length for the men's driver was 43". It didn't matter how tall you were because God gave taller players longer arms. Every golf club manufacturer from the time of Jesus until the time of Jack knew that if you made the driver shaft even 1/8 of an inch longer, the golfer would hit into the ground, and in an effort not to hit into the ground, the golfer would make swing changes and then begin to spray the ball all over the park. This is why at long driving contests the fairway is the width of a football field and the golfers with their long shafts are still blowing it out of bounds.
