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Speaker 2: The fried egg requires a different technique. What you need
Speaker 2: to do is actually square the face so they'll dig
Speaker 2: down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right
Speaker 2: out onto the green.
Speaker 3: Here's the take Playing out of a buried lion of
Speaker 3: bunker is completely different than playing out of a night
Speaker 3: and clean lion of greenside bunker. You need to be
Speaker 3: aggressive on any shop weather it's sitting cleanly for its
Speaker 3: Friday egg.
Speaker 2: Well, we've all faced it.
Speaker 3: The dreaded Frida egg.
Speaker 1: Not to be feared, though, it's actually a pretty easy
Speaker 1: shot to hit. When Harry Brown was eight years old,
Speaker 1: he lived in rural Pennsylvania. One day, at the end
Speaker 1: of a neighbor's driveway, he found a big pile of
Speaker 1: golf balls abandoned next to the trash. Harry didn't play golf.
Speaker 1: None of his friends played golf, but as eight year
Speaker 1: olds do, they found a use for Harry's discovery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we threw them at each other. We we hit them,
Speaker 2: We hit them with baseball bats. We treated them as
Speaker 2: any other kind of cool thing that you would find
Speaker 2: on the bottom of somebody's driveway, and just made do
Speaker 2: improvised right away.
Speaker 1: Harry's eight year old mind was struck by the unique
Speaker 1: properties of the golf ball.
Speaker 2: It was like a super ball. I couldn't figure out
Speaker 2: how an object that hard could have that lively abounce,
Speaker 2: have that much life that kind of interested me, and
Speaker 2: maybe that's what made me wonder unconsciously what was going
Speaker 2: on inside this thing that almost made it magical, like
Speaker 2: a piece of rock that behaved like a piece of rubber.
Speaker 1: So one rainy afternoon, young Harry became bored enough to investigate.
Speaker 1: He picked up one of the golf balls and took
Speaker 1: it to his basement.
Speaker 2: In the basement there was a hacksaw, and then there
Speaker 2: was a vice. Vice plus hacksaw plus golf ball equals.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't call it scientific, but I was just purely
Speaker 2: curious about what was going on inside this thing.
Speaker 1: First, Harry put the ball in the vice and he
Speaker 1: began cranking.
Speaker 2: As you can imagine, it started to compress and distort.
Speaker 2: As it became compressed, I kind of saw it had
Speaker 2: a plasticity that maybe he wasn't apparent when when you
Speaker 2: see it kind of rolling around in the street or
Speaker 2: in the fairway that it's it did compress like rubber.
Speaker 1: It bulged out, but it didn't break open. So it
Speaker 1: was time for the hacksaw. And as he started cutting
Speaker 1: through the ball, just you know.
Speaker 2: Layers and layers of wound rubber bands, you know, popping.
Speaker 2: It was It was kind of cool, obviously. I mean,
Speaker 2: as you saw and they pop, you know, the tension releases,
Speaker 2: it almost crackles.
Speaker 1: This was a wound golf ball, of the type that
Speaker 1: skilled golfers preferred for much of the twentieth century. Underneath
Speaker 1: its firm white cover were rubber bands pulled tight around
Speaker 1: a core, and inside that core was liquid.
Speaker 2: I didn't expect it to shoot water into my face,
Speaker 2: which it did so.
Speaker 1: So all of that tension that the ball contained, that
Speaker 1: pent up power that made it so lively, was released,
Speaker 1: and what was left on the floor was just a
Speaker 1: dead lump of rubber threads and ballata. It was satisfying,
Speaker 1: and it also just weird, all this complexity inside something
Speaker 1: so simple. His mind started to race and make analogies.
Speaker 2: It did seem to me immediately like a miniature planet,
Speaker 2: because on the surface, all you see is the surface.
Speaker 2: But then you cross section into it, like the way
Speaker 2: a textbook cross sections into a planet, and you see
Speaker 2: there's all kinds of things going on inside it.
Speaker 1: About thirty years later, Harry Brown was an English professor
Speaker 1: at the Paw University, and he became fascinated once again
Speaker 1: with the nature of the golf ball, its ability to
Speaker 1: be both rock like and rubber like. It's plain skin
Speaker 1: and intricate guts. But now he was thinking about those
Speaker 1: traits of the ball like an English professor. He was
Speaker 1: reading them.
Speaker 2: And then you can read these things going on inside
Speaker 2: it as a kind of language that tells the story,
Speaker 2: a code that tells the story of where the object
Speaker 2: came from. And then it becomes connected and embedded within
Speaker 2: a new network. It becomes disconnec from the network of
Speaker 2: playing the game of golf, and it becomes embedded in
Speaker 2: this new network of rubber and plastic and the factory
Speaker 2: that produced it, and the history that kind of leads
Speaker 2: up to that particular design.
Speaker 1: In other words, once you cut a golf ball open,
Speaker 1: once you render it useless for golf, you begin to
Speaker 1: understand a lot more about it, what it's made of,
Speaker 1: where it came from, and what history produced it. This
Speaker 1: is Friday Stories. I'm Garrett Morrison. This episode is the
Speaker 1: first of three to take a closer look at the
Speaker 1: golf ball, to cut it open, so to speak, and
Speaker 1: reveal all the weird complexity it contains. My hope is
Speaker 1: by understanding more about the golf ball, about its design, history,
Speaker 1: and impact on the game, we can understand more about
Speaker 1: golf itself. Each installment of the series will focus on
Speaker 1: a different revolution in golf ball technology. We'll start with
Speaker 1: the Guta percha ball, which appeared in the eighteen forties.
Speaker 1: It was one of the great turning points in golf history.
Speaker 1: As the historian Stephen Procter puts.
Speaker 3: It, the single most revolutionary thing that has ever happened
Speaker 3: in the history of golf is the introduction of the
Speaker 3: gutty ball.
Speaker 1: Not the single most revolutionary ball or piece of equipment,
Speaker 1: but the gutty, according to Stephen Procter, was the single
Speaker 1: most revolutionary thing that has happened in the history of golf,
Speaker 1: and in this episode we're going to try to figure
Speaker 1: out why. First, though, you have to know something about
Speaker 1: what came before the gutty, namely the feathery.
Speaker 3: Yes, so a feather ball was made from mostly from
Speaker 3: cow hide, and it would be three little leaves, almost
Speaker 3: like an open flower. They would be sewn together from
Speaker 3: the inside so that the seams were on the inside
Speaker 3: and stuffed inside out, so there would be a little
Speaker 3: tiny hole left in it. Through that a workman would
Speaker 3: take a whole hatful of either duck down or goose down,
Speaker 3: usually wetted down some to make it easier to work with,
Speaker 3: and then stuff it in through the hole by hand.
Speaker 3: Feathers would be flying everywhere. There was quite a bit
Speaker 3: of respiratory disease in these shops as a result of
Speaker 3: stuffing these balls all day. So once you got them
Speaker 3: all stuffed in there, jammed up, jammed up, jammed up
Speaker 3: so that it would create a tight enough fit to
Speaker 3: make the ball work, then you would sew the hole
Speaker 3: up and it would be painted white and left to
Speaker 3: age and dry for a week or two while it
Speaker 3: firmed up.
Speaker 1: The result was an excellent ball. The feathery flew long
Speaker 1: and straight, surprisingly so for an object made of farm animals,
Speaker 1: and for over two centuries, from the early sixteen hundreds
Speaker 1: to the mid eighteen hundreds, it was the ball that
Speaker 1: serious golfers in Scotland used. But there were problems with
Speaker 1: the feathery. For one, an experienced workman could make only
Speaker 1: a few a day, which meant it was pricey.
Speaker 3: A single feathery costs more than one of your clubs.
Speaker 1: To make matters. Worse, featheries had a way of unexpectedly
Speaker 1: bursting open that meant to play frequently, you needed a
Speaker 1: lot of them.
Speaker 3: They were really confined the game as far as proper
Speaker 3: golf goes. Golf with an actual ball like was used
Speaker 3: in the game to people who were super wealthy who
Speaker 3: could afford to buy multiple featheries.
Speaker 1: So you could say the feathery determined the social structure
Speaker 1: of golf. At the top you had the wealthy gentlemen
Speaker 1: who played on the links at Saint Andrews and Musselborough.
Speaker 1: Then you had the professionals who caddied, repaired clubs and
Speaker 1: made featheries. And among these professionals were the finest players
Speaker 1: of the age, players like Alan Robertson and Old Tom Morris.
Speaker 3: It was a very curious relationship. The gentlemen could not
Speaker 3: really function at golf without the professionals, but mostly they
Speaker 3: thought of them as ruffians.
Speaker 2: Not Alan.
Speaker 3: Alan was a shop owner, he was in a different class.
Speaker 3: But the men who worked for Alan, the men who caddied,
Speaker 3: you know, they were definitely considered low lifes by the
Speaker 3: rich men who they worked for.
Speaker 1: So you had two classes, gentlemen golfers the workingmen who
Speaker 1: served them, And in that way golf was a mirror
Speaker 1: for Scottish society at large. Yet the game itself had
Speaker 1: a way of turning things upside down because on the
Speaker 1: links the professionals almost always had the upper hand on
Speaker 1: the gentlemen.
Speaker 3: They were vastly superior at that age to any amateur player,
Speaker 3: and they could always humble them on the golf course,
Speaker 3: and that sort of created a little bit of an
Speaker 3: equilibrium that was pretty unusual class wise in that era.
Speaker 3: In other pursuits.
Speaker 1: This was essentially the golf world that the feathery created.
Speaker 1: There were gentlemen and there were workingmen, but during the
Speaker 1: matches that social order could be upended, with the likes
Speaker 1: of Tom Morris taking control. It was a break from
Speaker 1: the status quo, but a safe and temporary one. When
Speaker 1: the match was over, the gentlemen settled their bets and
Speaker 1: the workingmen went back to work. That was golf until
Speaker 1: the gutty came along. Origin story number one. There was
Speaker 1: a young man in Saint Andrews named Robert Patterson. He
Speaker 1: loved golf, but he couldn't afford a regular supply of featheries. Well.
Speaker 1: One day in the early eighteen forties, he received a
Speaker 1: box from Southeast Asia. It was from his brother a missionary.
Speaker 1: Inside was a statue of a Hindu deity, Vishnu, the preserver.
Speaker 1: All around the idol for protection were dark shavings. These
Speaker 1: turned out to be guttapercha, the dried sap of a
Speaker 1: certain tree in Malaysia. It proved a useful substance. When
Speaker 1: it was hot, you could mold it into anything, but
Speaker 1: when it cooled it was firm and durable. Soon young
Speaker 1: Robert had an inspiration. He heated up some guttapercha, rolled
Speaker 1: it into a ball and took it out to the
Speaker 1: old course, and golf was never the same origin story
Speaker 1: number two. Listen, gutta percha was all over the place
Speaker 1: in the eighteen forties in Britain there were entire factories
Speaker 1: devoted to producing guttapercha goods. Probably a bunch of factory
Speaker 1: thought of mashing the stuff into a golf ball around
Speaker 1: the same time Robert Patterson did, if not before, I
Speaker 1: mean that feels like what actually happened. Right either way,
Speaker 1: By eighteen fifty, virtually no featheries were being sold anymore.
Speaker 1: That was because the gutta percha ball, although it didn't
Speaker 1: go much farther, was a big improvement. In a couple
Speaker 1: of ways.
Speaker 3: One was it was there was a certain instructibility about
Speaker 3: it which went right to the heart of the principal
Speaker 3: problem with the feathery. You know, the gutty very rarely
Speaker 3: burst apart. When it did, you could heat it up
Speaker 3: and you could mold it back together and roll it
Speaker 3: around in your palms and let it harden for a
Speaker 3: week or two, repaint it, and you'd be able to
Speaker 3: get it back into something like functioning order, which obviously
Speaker 3: was never possible with the feathery.
Speaker 1: The gutty's durability wasn't just convenient, It also changed the
Speaker 1: way the game was played. Remember, featheries often broke, especially
Speaker 1: when struck by an iron headed club, so golfers used
Speaker 1: almost all wood headed clubs. But when the gutty arrived,
Speaker 1: that changed, and the best player of the time was
Speaker 1: quick to catch on.
Speaker 3: You know, young Tom Morris was one of the very
Speaker 3: first people who realized, you know, you can just you
Speaker 3: can just use an iron on this ball, no problem.
Speaker 1: And once the gutty allowed golfers to use irons as
Speaker 1: much as they wanted, they had access to a much
Speaker 1: greater variety of approach shots. Young Tom Morris took full
Speaker 1: advantage of these.
Speaker 3: So there were two things that he did. One was,
Speaker 3: if you were in front of a bunker and you
Speaker 3: had to carry it to get to the green, you know,
Speaker 3: you couldn't hit a run up shot. Obviously, there was
Speaker 3: a wooden club they called a baffing spoon that was
Speaker 3: very highly loft, and you could hit with that, but
Speaker 3: it was very difficult to control the landing. Tommy learned
Speaker 3: the art of controlling the landing with the rud iron.
Speaker 1: The red iron was small and roundish and had the
Speaker 1: loft of a modern wedge. Before it had been used
Speaker 1: mainly to get balls out of cart tracks, but with
Speaker 1: the more durable gutty, Tommy began to use the rud
Speaker 1: iron for all kinds of short lofted approaches.
Speaker 3: And of course immediately everyone followed, and that was the
Speaker 3: very beginning of the use of iron clubs. The second
Speaker 3: thing he did is he carried a lofted driving iron
Speaker 3: in his bag that he had cut down the shaft
Speaker 3: on his father probably had in their golf shop. So
Speaker 3: he would bump the ball over rough ground in front
Speaker 3: of the green if he didn't have anything in front
Speaker 3: of him, and then master the art of making it
Speaker 3: stop a foot from the hole, and he was absolutely
Speaker 3: deadly at that shot. And so those kinds of shots
Speaker 3: were the beginning of a whole revolution that extended them
Speaker 3: to mid iron. So then you would be developing what
Speaker 3: they would call a wrist shot, you know, and it
Speaker 3: would be a way of cutting the ball a little
Speaker 3: bit as you hit it up to the green so
Speaker 3: that we had a little side spin on it and
Speaker 3: stop when it landed. But it was just one thing
Speaker 3: following upon another, somebody else inventing something else.
Speaker 1: All of this creative shot making represented a major departure
Speaker 1: from the previous generation of golfers, you know.
Speaker 3: In the days before Tommy Alan Robertson. In his day,
Speaker 3: they played the type of golf you'd call palky that's
Speaker 3: a Scottish word that means cunning in wit or strategy usually,
Speaker 3: and what they would do is they would be maneuvering
Speaker 3: the ball right, left, whatever to stay away from the
Speaker 3: hazards the iron game, and Tommy in particular introduced the
Speaker 3: idea with to heck with the hazards, Let's go for
Speaker 3: the flag and if it lands someplace back, we'll get
Speaker 3: our red iron knocked it out.
Speaker 1: The game. In other words became far more dynamic and aggressive.
Speaker 3: That's all attributable to the Gutty. The Gutty made that possible.
Speaker 1: But there was an even bigger set of changes that
Speaker 1: they got a perch, a ball set off you see
Speaker 1: before the Gutty, and we covered this earlier. Golf played
Speaker 1: on the links was limited mostly to gentlemen and those
Speaker 1: who caddied for them and sold them clubs and balls.
Speaker 1: But golf did exist outside of golf courses.
Speaker 3: People played in the churchyard, people played on their street.
Speaker 3: People played golf wherever they were. That was the national
Speaker 3: pastime of Scotland. So they did play a form.
Speaker 1: Of golf, and they played with whatever was at hand.
Speaker 3: You know. They made balls out of wood, made them
Speaker 3: out of champagne corks. They did whatever they had to
Speaker 3: do to find a ball and a stick and play.
Speaker 3: But they didn't play the long game of golf, let's say.
Speaker 3: David Hamilton, wonderful historian in Saint Andrews, has a book
Speaker 3: called Scotland's Game in which he just points out that
Speaker 3: there are two types of golf in very early Scotland.
Speaker 3: The short game that you played wherever you could find
Speaker 3: a spot, and the long game played properly on the links.
Speaker 1: That division, the long formal game versus the short local
Speaker 1: casual game was created in large part by the feathery,
Speaker 1: by how expensive it was, how brittle it could be.
Speaker 1: But the gutty was instantly different.
Speaker 3: You know, a gutty cost half the price of a feathery,
Speaker 3: So that alone revolutionized the game more than almost any
Speaker 3: single event in its history from that day to this one.
Speaker 3: It really opened up the game to the masses for
Speaker 3: the very first time, they could go out and play
Speaker 3: proper golf, with proper equipment that they could afford to
Speaker 3: buy and own.
Speaker 1: And that old split between the long and short games
Speaker 1: of golf began to break down.
Speaker 3: And what happened is that anyone could now play the
Speaker 3: long game and the short game, of course, disappeared over time.
Speaker 3: So it brought many, many thousands of people onto the
Speaker 3: golf course from all walks of life. And that was
Speaker 3: probably the most revolutionary part about it, was the fact
Speaker 3: that anyone could buy it and now anyone could play, maybe.
Speaker 1: Not literally anyone, but certainly the middle class. And in
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen hundreds the middle classes of Britain were expanding,
Speaker 1: So the gutty allowed a lot of people access for
Speaker 1: the first time to the official game of golf played
Speaker 1: on an official course.
Speaker 3: And that starts a whole series of changes that are
Speaker 3: amazing and rippled down through the ages and fundamentally changed golf.
Speaker 1: All right, So that's what the Guta percha ball did,
Speaker 1: but we haven't really talked about what it was. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, the ball was made entirely of guttapercha,
Speaker 1: which is actually one of the most important materials in
Speaker 1: world history.
Speaker 4: So one thing I will say to you is, please
Speaker 4: don't say that gutta percha is a type of rubber,
Speaker 4: because it's not. It's like saying hats are a type
Speaker 4: of dog, because they both happen to be fury animals.
Speaker 1: That's ale In Godfrey, she wrote a book about gutta
Speaker 1: perche obviously knows a thing or two about it.
Speaker 4: Well, it's a gum from trees that were basically called palaquiuan,
Speaker 4: which is a bit technical botanical terms, the Palaquiuan genets
Speaker 4: of the Sabatasi family.
Speaker 5: That's a bit boring, isn't it.
Speaker 1: These Pollaquium trees grew in specific parts of Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: especially on the island of Borneo. In the eighteen forties,
Speaker 1: more and more Europeans were showing up in the region,
Speaker 1: competing for control of trade and natural resources. Natural resources
Speaker 1: like guttapercha. So it's no surprise that Robert Patterson's brother
Speaker 1: was in Singapore at the time and that he sent
Speaker 1: home a box padded with guttapercha. In fact, a great
Speaker 1: deal of got to purcha was traveling from east to
Speaker 1: west back then. Soon factories in Britain were manufacturing all
Speaker 1: sorts of gutta purcha based products.
Speaker 4: Just about everything you could possibly think of, bit to frames, jewelry,
Speaker 4: soles of shoes. So basically what we would these days
Speaker 4: make out of plastics, you know, using a term loosely,
Speaker 4: people would make out of gota percha.
Speaker 1: What do you think it was about got to purchase
Speaker 1: that made it so adaptable and so appealing for so
Speaker 1: many different uses.
Speaker 4: I think partly because you could mold it into any
Speaker 4: shape you like, which because you can't do with the
Speaker 4: rubber because it's sort of too flexible, and there wasn't
Speaker 4: anything else much.
Speaker 5: You could mold. And you know, some of the things
Speaker 5: they made I think.
Speaker 4: Were quite attractive because because it sets hard, you know
Speaker 4: you could get a very sharp finish.
Speaker 1: Basically, the same traits of gutta percha that suited it
Speaker 1: to golf balls malleable when hot yet firm when cold,
Speaker 1: also suited it to many other things, including what was
Speaker 1: maybe the biggest infrastructural project of the age.
Speaker 5: I wonder if I could insulate some telegraph tables with this.
Speaker 1: The telegraph was a recent invention. It promised near instant
Speaker 1: communication between different parts of the world, which was a
Speaker 1: new idea and incredibly radical. But for there to be
Speaker 1: an international telegraph network, there had to be a great
Speaker 1: number of undersea telegraph cables, and those cables had to
Speaker 1: be insulated with a material that was pliable yet strong.
Speaker 4: And so the extra strength of guttaperchain meant that you
Speaker 4: could make a stronger telegraph cable and it wouldn't bend
Speaker 4: and stretch and twist and break and all.
Speaker 5: That sort of thing.
Speaker 1: The British industrial machine kicked into overdrive.
Speaker 4: I'll say the first successful international telegraph cable was probably
Speaker 4: the one cross the English Channel in eighteen fifty one,
Speaker 4: so it wasn't very long.
Speaker 5: What's that twenty miles or something.
Speaker 4: By nineteen oh three, when the longest ones had been laid.
Speaker 5: I think the world total was about.
Speaker 4: Two hundred and thirty thousand nautical miles. Wow, so that's
Speaker 4: about enough.
Speaker 5: To go from the Earth to the moon and halfway
Speaker 5: back again. And all of that's coated with gut a purchase.
Speaker 4: So one of the calculations made at time was that's
Speaker 4: twenty seven million trees.
Speaker 1: It's worth taking a moment here to describe how guttapercha
Speaker 1: was extracted. The indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia did the work,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't easy. They were chopped down a Paloquim tree,
Speaker 1: cut strips into the bark and let the gums slowly
Speaker 1: drip into a container. After a day or two, they'd
Speaker 1: collect what they had and boil out the impurities. Then
Speaker 1: they'd mash it all together, twist it into a rope
Speaker 1: and ship it off.
Speaker 4: So that was basically how it was really for I
Speaker 4: would say about seventy years, all of those twenty seven
Speaker 4: million trees worth a gutta perchure, we're pretty much all
Speaker 4: done by chopping it down and doing it like that,
Speaker 4: which is just just even now, after however many years,
Speaker 4: I still cannot believe that that was done. The labor
Speaker 4: involves in doing that. I don't know whether you've ever
Speaker 4: been to Borneo, but it is bloody hot and steep
Speaker 4: and dangerous.
Speaker 1: How much would you get out of one tree?
Speaker 4: Not much, is the answer. Maybe as little as half
Speaker 4: a pound, which is not much.
Speaker 1: Oh I think.
Speaker 4: If you've got a pound from a tree, he'd be
Speaker 4: pretty happy, very actually.
Speaker 1: Another historian, John Tully, has claimed that this method of
Speaker 1: producing got to purchase caused a quote unquote Victorian ecological disaster.
Speaker 5: It's a good name for a.
Speaker 1: General article, but Helen Godfrey isn't so sure about that.
Speaker 4: I don't think it ruined the ecology of the region
Speaker 4: at all. I think it had an impact in the
Speaker 4: immediate area. But was it significant personally? I don't see
Speaker 4: how it could be.
Speaker 1: What's not in question, though, is the extent of the
Speaker 1: impact that got a purchare and got appurchare telegraph cables
Speaker 1: had on history. How did the telegraph reshape the world?
Speaker 1: What would be the first place that you would go
Speaker 1: in describing the impact that the telegraph had just on
Speaker 1: life in the world.
Speaker 4: Well, it's one of those how long's a piece of
Speaker 4: string questions? It's just unimaginable because They used to say
Speaker 4: at the time that the telegraph annihilated time and space.
Speaker 4: In those days, the quickest way you could get information
Speaker 4: from someone was probably by railway. So if you wanted
Speaker 4: to send a message to someone from say, I don't know,
Speaker 4: New York to Los Angeles, it would have taken days,
Speaker 4: wouldn't it if you were lucky, whereas a telegraph could
Speaker 4: do that in minutes. It's just unimaginable the difference. And
Speaker 4: there was a story I read somewhere about what was
Speaker 4: the war America fought with England in about eighteen twelve twelve.
Speaker 4: Many people in fact died in that war after the
Speaker 4: war was over because they didn't know the war had finished,
Speaker 4: whereas had they had telegraphed.
Speaker 5: I guess, guys, you don't have to worry.
Speaker 4: About killing yourself now because actually we're finished. But multiply
Speaker 4: that thousands and thousands of times over. How do you
Speaker 4: say what the impact was, because we just just I
Speaker 4: don't know.
Speaker 1: People at the time often referred to telegraph cables as
Speaker 1: the nerves of the modern world. So I guess Gutta
Speaker 1: purcha was the connective tissue of this new global economy,
Speaker 1: an economy that somehow brought the rainforests of Borneo into
Speaker 1: contact with the urban factories of Europe and with the
Speaker 1: pastoral links of Scotland, and that is what the Gutta
Speaker 1: Percha ball was made of. So it's fun to make
Speaker 1: all these connections, but do they mean anything. One take
Speaker 1: would be that by embracing Gutta percha, golf became complicit
Speaker 1: in imperialism, but that might be a stretch. The production
Speaker 1: of the gutty ball was just a tiny fraction of
Speaker 1: the overall Gutta purcha trade. Yet golf did become part
Speaker 1: of the story of an industrializing, globalizing world in the
Speaker 1: mid eighteen hundreds, and not just like metaphorically. There were
Speaker 1: telegraph companies that actually made Gutta purchase golf balls as
Speaker 1: a side hustle. So here's how I've started to think
Speaker 1: about it. Golf likes to imagine itself as a kind
Speaker 1: of isolated realm. We've got our values, we've got our customs,
Speaker 1: and whatever's happening in the outside world, the game stays constant.
Speaker 1: In reality, though that outside world is continually seeping into
Speaker 1: the game, and one of the main cracks that seeps
Speaker 1: through is the golf ball.
Speaker 2: Go to a golf museum and put three balls on
Speaker 2: the table in front of you.
Speaker 1: Right, that's Harry Brown again, the kid with the hacksaw.
Speaker 2: Get a feather ball, a gut to perch a ball,
Speaker 2: and then anything made basically since the sixties of the seventies,
Speaker 2: a poly you're athane ball. Just ask yourself a simple question,
Speaker 2: where do the materials to make the ball come from?
Speaker 2: And who makes them? And how is it made? So
Speaker 2: put those balls on the table and you can see
Speaker 2: them as products of three major phases of economic development
Speaker 2: over the last say three hundred years maybe more.
Speaker 1: First, the feathery phase.
Speaker 2: Ball made of farm animals essentially represents a pastoral or
Speaker 2: a pre industrial phase of global economic history where you
Speaker 2: didn't have to go to the other side of the
Speaker 2: world to harvest sap from a tree to make the ball.
Speaker 2: You just went outside into your barnyard and collected the
Speaker 2: raw material there.
Speaker 1: Second, the gutty phase.
Speaker 2: The imperial phase, the industrial phase. So you may have
Speaker 2: a kid in Scotland playing golf in a kind of
Speaker 2: heroic individual way, but the thing that he's playing with
Speaker 2: originates in Southeast Asia on the other side of the
Speaker 2: planet and comes to him in Scotland as the result
Speaker 2: of a globalized colonial economic system.
Speaker 1: Third, the phase we're living in right now.
Speaker 2: The post industrial phase where you have a chemical company,
Speaker 2: so not a rubber factory, but a chemistry laboratory, right,
Speaker 2: which is these aren't tinkers, right, these are scientists who
Speaker 2: are like making things to kind of like propel the
Speaker 2: Cold War. The objects that are being used to explore space.
Speaker 2: And they also happen to be working with a material
Speaker 2: that's now being also used to craft golf balls.
Speaker 1: So you have the feathery, the gutty, and the modern
Speaker 1: synthetic ball. Each of those represents a different time in
Speaker 1: a different world. You start on an eighteenth century farm,
Speaker 1: you move to a nineteenth century factory that gets its
Speaker 1: materials from a global imperial network, and eventually, by the
Speaker 1: mid twentieth century, you end up in space. At each
Speaker 1: of those moments, the ball has gathered up the stuff
Speaker 1: of the world, brought it into golf and transformed golf
Speaker 1: in the world's image. Think about the gutty. It was
Speaker 1: made of the very material that joined together a new
Speaker 1: global industrial society, a society where the middle class was
Speaker 1: emerging and growing. And what did the Gutty do. It
Speaker 1: made golf available to the middle class. So the golf
Speaker 1: ball is a kind of vector. It sucks up history
Speaker 1: and carries it into the game for better for worse.
Speaker 1: But there is one ball that's missing from Harry's timeline.
Speaker 1: About a half century after the Gutty came the Haskell.
Speaker 1: And if the Gutty changed who could play golf. The
Speaker 1: Haskell changed something about the game's very essence. That's next
Speaker 1: on Frida Egg Stories. This was the fifth episode of
Speaker 1: Fried Egg Stories. It was produced and hosted by me
Speaker 1: Garrett Morrison, and it was edited and engineered by Jay Vierick.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Big thanks to our
Speaker 1: guests for this episode. As it turns out, all three
Speaker 1: have books. Stephen Proctor wrote Monarch of the Green, a
Speaker 1: biography of young Tom Morris, Helen Godfrey wrote Submarine Telegraphy
Speaker 1: and The Hunt for Gutta Percha, and Harry Brown wrote
Speaker 1: golf Ball, which is part of Bloomsbery's Object Lessons series.
Speaker 1: Links for all three are in the show notes. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.