[Dan Kelly]

Peter --


You're asking us to write a book!


Say, there's an idea....


Dan


P.S. Possible title: "A Dot With a Smile: Remembering Golf As It Was."


P.P.S. I started with one club, a Christmas present: A Rawlings 6-iron. Learned to hit a golf ball playing cross-country golf around our yard, with wiffle golf balls. Those could develop smiles in a hurry, too -- and quickly taught me the importance of playing the wind!

[Bruce Katona]

I learned with a cut down driver hitting shag balls in the old lumber yard across the street from my uncle's house (who taught my brother & I how to play).  We hit whiffle golf balls to practice and had Lee Trevino plastic golf shoes.
 
My first set of clubs were hand-me-downs - Kroflite blade irons and a mismatched sets of woods; my favorite was a plastic headed 4 wood I really hit well.  Balls - my uncle like "Blue Max's and Spalding's.  The 100 compression balls were like hitting rocks and roots early in the spring and late in the year - it was difficult to get them airborne.  My 1st balata I smiled horribly on the 2nd swing.
 
Cavity backed irons and metal woods made the game easier to play.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Pete,

Since you asked, my very earliest memory was waking up when we got to our new house near Chicago, and running to the basement to see if my Lionel trains had arrived.

I remember a lot about my early golf. Neighbors members at Medinah...a few times on the range or that big putting clock before I played 3 holes on No. 2, then a "sneak on Monday" where we played all three courses......then, being relegated to public courses like Old Orchard, Rob Roy, Mt. Prospect muni (recently discussed and nearest to my house) to my utter disappointment that Dad wouldn't join the club!  (I knew the difference, BTW, and had decided to be a gca after my first round at Medinah....I think I tell the whole story in my interview on this site)

As to greens on those public courses, I recall asking, and they were mowed at 1/4".  Tees and bluegrass fairways at an inch if I recall correctly.  Roughs 2-4 inches.  Fairways green, roughs brownish late in summer, due to single row irrigation.

Patty Berg clubs for Xmas (age 12) and then MacGregor Tourney, with the split level sole (odd how that has changed) for better divot control, not to mention aluminum shafts!  There was a discount golf shop over in Skokie and it was like being a kid in a candy store.  Those lasted me until 1977 when my Xmas gift was custom clubs from a local maker.  Sam Snead instruction book.

I would be remiss in not mentioning my first golf balls - The Po Do from Walgreens, usually picked up on the way to the course.  I recall buying some more expensive "Faultless" cut proof golf balls advertised by Lee Trevino, much better than the Po Do.  I did manage to cut one once.  Sometimes, Dad would let me use his Spalding Dots.

Really heavy golf shoes, always blister inducers.  I recall reading even Arnie got blisters and enjoyed them because he loved golf that much....

Read my first architecture article not long after I started playing.  One was by Gary Player and I recall "One reachable, two in between and one true 3 shot par 4" as being a main point there.  And the old HHWind article from Golf Digest, touting Ross chocolate drop mounds.  I have asked before, but if anyone has scans of those, I would love to download for old time sake.

[Bill Brightly]

I remember having to move after 8th grade because Dad changed jobs. I went from good athlete in small town to perfectly average athlete in very large town of Cherry Hill. I was last cut from high school basketball and baseball teams, so I guess I was looking for something to do and started swinging my fathers golf clubs.He joined Little Mill in the summer. I'd caddy for him on weekends and my mother would drop me off at the course on weekday mornings. I would play 36 or 54 holes almost every day if it wasn't crowded. I remember one day I started in a light drizzle which only got heavy as the day went on. But it was warm and I had the whole course to myself, so I played 72 holes. I always remember one swing with a soaking wet glove and a beat up old leather grip on my wooden shafted sand wedge... and the club went 30 yards in the air. Thank God I was a single, I might have killed someone!

He was a big smoker. Perhaps I was focused on finding his ball all day (he was REALLY wild) or studying the other golfers to learn how to play, but I said to him after one round: Dad, that was awesome, you didn't have a cigarette all day! He looked me and said are you crazy? I smoked a cigarette on every hole! Do you think that speaks to the greatness of golf: a kid can only see the good things and ignore the bad on a golf course?

[Bill_Yates]

Played Crafton Public Golf Course, a 9 holer near Pittsburgh. Played with my Dad or my best friend TK. Had Wilson Staff woods and irons like Arnie. Wore black and white Pro Shoe spikes with large black flapping kilties, like Sam Snead.


The course was flat with a unique first tee. You paid your $1.50 fee at the shack, continued to the tee and placed your ball in the top of a tube, when it finally reached the bottom you were up. The tee was a square grassless fenced-in area with benches built into the fence. The benches were lined with all of the owners and playing partners of the countless balls ahead of yours in the tube. You always had a large audience on the first tee sitting and watching within 5 yards of your swing. You quickly learn that first tee jitters are a total waste of time, and always hoping for several muffled "nice shot" comments as you stride down the first fairway.


As a kid from "da Burgh," even with nine overcrowded holes and long waits on every tee ahead of me, it was Heaven.


And by the way, I can't count how many times I holed out on #9 with a 42 and beat Arnie, Gary and Jack to win the U.S. Open.

[Jay Mickle]

 I started in the late 50s carrying bags for my parents around McCall Field outside of Philadelphia. It was a course owned by Philadelphia Electric Company for use by employees (those were the days). As we would drive into the club it was my job to hop out of the car, put my father’s smiley Spalding dot ball in the starters golf ball rack and count how many balls were ahead of us.
When I turned 16 I bought my first set of clubs from the pro: a traded in set of Spalding registered irons and a magnificent set of Izett deep red persimmon 1 ½, 2 ½  and 3 ½ woods. Thirty years later I traded the irons with original grips to a collector for a much newer set of Wilsons with new grips. Two of the woods cracked and the 3^rd just is gone. Now I pay good money for clubs with old hickory shafts. Go figure.
I was young and strong and could hit the ball up close to the green on the first hole about 1 in 20 times. I could hit Lynn Blvd, which paralleled the right side of the first fairway at least half the time. The course was only about 4500 yards but quite a challenge for a directionally challenged golfer.
On days that I didn’t have to work I would walk 2 miles to Springfield CC. A round of junior golf cost $1. I spent many a day playing there. As I often missed the fairway, I recall walking through the rough tuning my swing by hitting the flowers off of dandelion plants. No Augusta  syndrome then, I once borrowed my father’s hickory putter,  that he used until he died, and putted really well with it. Perhaps its 7⁰ of loft was what was need on slow fuzzy greens.
 

[Kalen Braley]

My memory isn't from playing golf, but from going out to the course with my father.
 
It would have been sometime in the late 1970s, I would have been 7 or 8, going on a course in northern cali that is NLE.  I don't recall much except that its the only time my Dad ever took my brother and I out to the course. I recall he would hit the ball and it seemed a mile off, and we'd go try to go find it.  The first time I "found it", I promptly picked it up followed by my father yelling and screaming at me for picking it up.  I then recall my brother wandering off a few fairways over and my Dad getting hot under the collar for that as well.
 
I guess perhaps he was somewhat justified for never taking us out again, but then again, my Dad is such a hot head and not really suited for a game like golf I suppose... We played years later when he was in his 70s, but he could barely swing the club by then.

[Tom_Doak]

My first rounds were in the early 1970's.  I had a flashback a couple of years ago, when I played golf at The Sheep Ranch, and encountered some knotweed in the rough on one of the early holes.  The courses of my youth were far weedier than most anything I've seen recently.  Most everyone would see that as a good thing, but it had been maybe 25 years since I'd seen knotweed in play, and I realized I'd missed it 

[Dave McCollum]

I remember golf was for nerdy guys who couldn’t play real sports.  My family were members of a golf club that had a lake for swimming/fishing as well as a spring-fed creek with rapids.  “Shooting” (swimming) the rapids was forbidden which, of course, we did all the time.  Even though we didn’t play golf, we spent as much of the summer as we could there.  We even built a “fort” in densely overgrown area where we camped out, sometimes for days.  When we got hungry, we’d head for the clubhouse and order a burger, always careful to avoid the grumpy old guys playing cards after golf.  Golf wasn’t for kids.  Golf and cards were for gambling, sometimes for high stakes.  I knew a guy who played back then and was near a scatch HC.  He couldn’t afford to lose.  He kept $4,000 rolled up in a sock so his wife wouldn’t know the stakes he was playing for.  About our only golf was trying to smash golf balls as far as we could with our Dad’s discarded clubs.  I remember a MacGregor  #2 wood as the one I could hit the farthest.   What a wasted opportunity!  Yet, there wasn’t much time for another sport after football, basketball, track, and baseball.

[Jon Wiggett]

My first rounds were in the early 1970's.  I had a flashback a couple of years ago, when I played golf at The Sheep Ranch, and encountered some knotweed in the rough on one of the early holes.  The courses of my youth were far weedier than most anything I've seen recently.  Most everyone would see that as a good thing, but it had been maybe 25 years since I'd seen knotweed in play, and I realized I'd missed it 

Tom,

I was very pleasantly surprised to see daisies growing (and flowering) on the tees and fairways at TOC during The Open this year. The message of sustainable and environmentally responsible course maintenance is really beginning to be implemented by many of the more forward thinking golf clubs here in GB&I. I am not always the R&A's biggest fan but in this regard I really do have to take my hat off to them.

Jon

[Dan Kelly]

  I recall buying some more expensive "Faultless" cut proof golf balls advertised by Lee Trevino, much better than the Po Do.  I did manage to cut one once. 

Jeff --


Buy a dozen now for only 79 bucks!

Www.ebay.com/itm/box-12-golf-balls-faultless-lee-Trevino-signature-1960s-/380102137015

[Forrest Richardson]

Will never forget my father coming out of the temporary clubhouse at The Boulders (c. 1971, first nine Red Lawrence w/ 2nd by Arthur Jack Snyder) and exclaiming ... "All be damned...it's gone up to a dollar a hole!!!"

[Pete_Pittock]

Early 1960s playing a round at Glendoveer East and noticing a piece of wood nailed onto a fir tree. Some rounds later I figured out it was a rudimentary yardage marker (200), don't know if the course or a player added it.

First time I ever saw one other than plantings at 150.

[Kirk Gill]

I first played when I was in fourth grade, and got my first set in fifth grade. Wilson, Billy Casper signature. Laminated woods. I still stick the old 4-wood in the bag on occasion.





And the bottom...





They weren't great clubs, and I badly needed more than the group lesson or two I took. You can see, deeply etched into the bottom of the magical 4-wood, the remnant of my horrifically outside-in swing. Yes, to speak generously I hit a fade.
Since my grandparents lived in Upper Arlington, Ohio, it was all about Jack Nicklaus. He was the hero, the reason to play.

In terms of the golf courses I played, they were mainly Denver Municipals, and Indian Tree in Arvada. They used to mow Willis Case Golf Course all at fairway height, until they started putting on airs and having rough. I think they started putting more sand in the bunkers at right about the same time........

[jeffwarne]

Early 1960s playing a round at Glendoveer East and noticing a piece of wood nailed onto a fir tree. Some rounds later I figured out it was a rudimentary yardage marker (200), don't know if the course or a player added it.

Forest Hills, a Ross public in Augusta and home to one of Bobby Jones 5 wins in 1930, had white rings spray painted around the trunks of trees that were 100 (approximately)    yards out when I played there in the late 70's

[John McCarthy]

  I remember sprinkler heads being marked  in about 1981.  Before that some courses had a 150 pole, plate or bushes.  Some had nothing.

The actual distances were of some debate.  We had a tree that was 143.  Then someone paced it off and it was 139.  Debate raged.  Surveyers were brought out.  Then some guy with a laser.

One thing I learned as a caddy for better players, never give a yardage ending with a 5 or 0.  They think you did not pace it off. 

[Mark_Rowlinson]

Started playing golf mid 1960s, largely with my father at Lilleshall Hall, a little, late 1930s, Colt course in the countryside in rural Shropshire. It was here that my father persuaded me that the golf course I was playing was more likely to be of interest than my golf over it. In 1967 I went up to Oxford and joined the University Golf Society, not that there was any chance of my playing at University level, but it gave playing rights over Southfield for £5 a year, quite a bargain. I also occasionally ventured as far as Huntercombe, Frilford Heath, Northamptonshire County and Tadmarton Heath, but to do that you had to know someone with a car.


Lilleshall was a very basic club and course, very wet in winter and a lot of balls were lost when they plugged on landing. With fairways hewn out of dense forest many errant balls were lost, but for a keen-eyed youngster an excursion into the trees usually turned up a few discoveries.


My father and his brothers played left-handed. They were not left-handed but had batted that way round as cricketers. There was little or no choice of golf clubs, Dunlop Bob Charles were the only ones available as a matched (sort of) set. I had a motley collection of random clubs most with brown-painted metal shafts. Many grips were leather - I still have a leather-gripped fairway wood. Balls were two-spots or, occasionally Dunlop 65s or Penfolds. These were 1.62".


Conditions on most golf courses were poor, especially in the winter. Many bunkers would have permanent pools in them, the sand was rarely raked and often it was compounded into a hard putty. Greens were probably only mown once a week (by hand). There was no watering of fairways, greens or tees. Tee pegs were rarely used - but you were lucky if you could find sand in the tins left on the tees. Usually an iron club was used to scuff up the grass sufficient to tee up the ball. Greens were generally much slower than today and surfaces uneven.


Occasionally we went to Northern Ireland where I played Royal County Down with a cousin. That was completely unlike anything I had experienced elsewhere - especially the need to chase approach shots through the bunkers to reach the greens. I rarely completed the round, having run out of balls! We played the 2nd course, too, from time to time. I had never encountered bunkers of such depth - or gorse of such ferocity!


At Lilleshall there were occasional marker posts on the edge of the fairway 200 yards out from the tee and in those days I could usually hit the ball past them with ease. In fact, because of the narrow fairways, I became adept at using a 3-iron for all full tee shots and I could comfortably reach those par 4s longer than 400 yards in two shots - certainly not so today! There were no par 5s at Lilleshall.


In 1966 the football World Cup was played in England and the England team trained at Lilleshall (the old Hall having been converted into a sports training facility). I can recall Hurst, Charlton and the rest of them training on a pitch just over the fence from the 9th fairway. Heady days!

[Joe Bausch]

I started the game in the mid 70's as a 10 year old playing a little 9-holer, a place called McDonald in Evansville, IN.  Most of the time I was with my older brother.  We just played to have fun.  I didn't play a competitive match for at least a few years.  I had a season pass to play weekday golf at this course for I think maybe 50 bucks.  My dad would drop my off at the course on the way to work and my mom would pick me up later in the day.  I can remember some summer afternoons it being so hot only youngsters like myself would be out there playing.


Some pics of McDonald after I re-visited it this past summer after a 30 year absence (to find this Ed Ault course was a very good place to learn the game!):


http://xchem.villanova.edu/~bausch/images/albums/McDonald/

[Mike Hendren]

It looked like this in 1974:



Men's championship won with Haig Ultra irons (aluminum shaft) Powerbilt Citation persimmon woods, Wilson R-90 sand wedge and Mickey Mouse mallet putter purchased at Walt Disney World.

Dad forked over $15/month for dues.  Plenty of Stewart Sandwiches and Country Time Lemonade. 

[Mike Hendren]

A few brands of golf ball I played in the 70's:

Acushnet Club Special
McGregor Linkmaster
Podo (carried exclusively by Crain's Drugstore)
Faultless 
Royal Plus 6
Maxfli (Red Dot)
Ram 3-D
Golden Ram (they made a 110 compression ball!)
Maxfli (Blue Max)

[Peter Pallotta]

Bogey - what, and nary a mention of those slacks?!  That's a million dollar cut, and a colour that Jimmy Demaret would've loved! I am currently using the Haig Ultras myself, with the contoured soles -- the lofts are a club weak or so, but the balance and feel are wonderful!

Gents, I missed this for a few days; thanks for sharing those memories/experiences.

Peter   

[Mike Hendren]

Peter, I miss polyester. Trousers could have doubled as a table-cloth an Italian restaurant.  I believe those are the maroon on maroon leather Footjoys.  Loved the maroon on white and black on black better.  I still can't believe a Dad who never made more than $35K a year would pop for $100 shoes.

Dang my bag was tight.

Won the men's championship at 16 in 1974.  Played lights out in 1975 but lost by 4 shots to former Chicago Cubs All-Star Jim Hickman.  Won in 1976 a week before college matriculation thanks a 4-iron from 190 yards to five feet on the second playoff hole. It's been steeply downhill ever since but the beer's always been cold.

Golf has been so good to me. 

[Peter Pallotta]

Mike - it may have been "steeply downhill" ever since, but most who play golf can go "steadily uphill" for years and still never experience hitting a 4 iron 190 yards to 5 feet to win the club championship! Thanks for sharing. And a reminder that "looking good is half way to playing good!"
Peter

[Tom Fagerli]

So glad to hear some love for the Haig Ultras! I have a sent in the garage. Favorite irons I ever owned- notice I didn't say best (as in results). In my area the PoDo was sold at Walgreens. Firestone (yes the tire store) sold Jack Nicklaus branded balls. The best ball for us was the TopFlite as it went FOREVER and you couldn't cut it. (The early 70s version). I loved the Blue Max ball.

[MCirba]

What a wonderful thread!   Thanks for such a splendid idea, Peter. 

I'll try to weigh in with my own probably reiterative thoughts on my start in the game back in the 70s, but since I've been on a bit of a photo roll lately, perhaps posting one of me circa 1975 will tell you all you'd need to know. 

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