A Brief History of the Golf Club

From blunt wooden instruments of the old days to today's adjustable, insanely high-tech drivers, golf clubs have been getting better and better since the Scots gave us this frustrating, exhilarating pastime.

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960–1279: Royals from China's Song Dynasty play chuiwan, hitting balls into holes with a set of 10 bejeweled clubs.

1400s: Despite earlier evidence of proto-golf in the Netherlands, Scotland gets credit for inventing the game.

1800s: Par for the course, golf makes its way to the United States. Players use 20 to 30 wooden clubs of various functions to hit featheries, hard leather balls stuffed with feathers.

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1856: America's hickory trees get the shaft when Robert Forgan exports them to Scotland to make golf clubs. Harder persimmon wood is used for the club heads until drop forging allows for mass-produced iron heads in the late 1800s.

1931: Billy Burke becomes the first golfer to win the U.S. Open using steel-shafted clubs painted to look like wood. But there's no faking Burke's unique grip—he only had three fingers on his left hand.

1932: Pro golfer Gene Sarazen thinks outside the sandbox to develop the modern sand wedge, and uses it in his British Open victory.

1939: Golf's rule-making authority decrees the use of no more than 14 clubs in a round but puts no limits on dorky apparel.

1959: Engineer Karsten Solheim invents a putter with more weight at the heel and toe of the blade and a thinner, lighter sweet spot. The novel design makes it easier for golfers to hit the ball straight. He quits his day job, creates the golf-equipment brand Ping, and makes a fortune.

1971: Alan Shepard takes one small swing for a man, one giant drive for mankind when he hits two golf balls on the moon at the end of the Apollo 14 mission. The second travels over a mile.

1973: Lightweight graphite-shaft clubs become popular among women and senior golfers. The rest of the world—ahem, PGA Tour players—catches on by the mid-1990s.

1980: In Caddyshack, Rodney Dangerfield's character stocks his bag with a driver that dispenses beer.

1991: Callaway rocks the golf world when it introduces the Big Bertha stainless-steel-headed driver. Persimmon-headed clubs quickly become garage-cluttering relics.

2013: TaylorMade's R1 driver adjusts to 12 different lofts and seven different face angles, adapting the club to playing conditions. Isn't that cheating?

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