Golf players forever being thrown curveball as game moves on

The emergence of the LIV series has generated all sorts of fist-shaking rancour over the past few months but the R&A and USGA’s plans for a reined-back tournament ball for elite competition has prompted the kind of shrieking moans you would get when a screaming banshee has an industrial accident with an angle grinder.

“It’s so bad for the game of golf,” whined two-time Major winner Justin Thomas.

“It’s the most atrocious thing you could do to the game,” hissed former US Open champion Bryson DeChambeau.

As for the equipment manufacturers faced with the prospect of engineering a ball that travels, on average, 15 yards less than it does now? Well, the doom-mongering bigwigs at Titleist reckon it will drag the game so far back, the top players may as well shove a sleeve of featheries into their tour bags.

All of which brings us nicely into this historical meander to that more tranquil golfing age of the 1800s.

Then again? When it comes to talking balls, there has always been contention and controversy.

Back in ye day, Allan Robertson was the supreme golfer of his time and the head of a ball-making empire in St Andrews. His feathery was king. That was until the much cheaper, more easily produced gutty came on the scene.

The manufacturers of today may be grousing and groaning about the prospect of a restricted ball but that is nothing compared to the pickle Robertson found himself in.

“There was a lot of pride in this business which had been in the family for years and, all of a sudden, he thinks it will all come crashing down on his watch because of the gutty,” said the eminent St Andrews historian and author, Roger McStravick, whose latest project is a book on the life and times of the great Robertson himself.

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“He’s thinking more of the family and its heritage rather than the future of golf.

“It’s well documented that he purchased as many gutty balls as he could, put them in a barrel and burned them all.”

We look forward to the aforementioned DeChambeau doing something similar if the R&A and USGA get their way by 2026.

Robertson’s despair was heightened by the fact that his loyal playing partner, former apprentice and employee, the grand Old Tom Morris, started playing the gutty ball and was effectively fired on the spot. So much for birds of a feathery sticking together eh?

In Robertson’s eyes, it was an act of treason akin to the shenanigans of the Gunpowder Plot.

“For Tom to play with the gutty would have felt like a huge snub and Robertson would have been pretty vocal about this potentially ruining him,” said McStravick of an episode which hastened Old Tom’s move to become keeper of the links at Prestwick.

“It would have been the talk of the town. But there was too much goodwill between the two men to let it fester. They got over it fairly quickly. And it was in their interests, financially, to get over it.”

The Robertson and Morris alliance, of course, was one of golf’s most prolific and profitable partnerships as they cleaned up in a series of challenge matches.

“These were pretty lucrative,” noted McStravick. “There was a match with a first prize of £40 and they would get £20 each for winning. An annual salary for a keeper of the links like Tom was £5 so there was basically a four-year salary on offer in some of these outings. They got back to playing matches together very quickly and their mutual admiration for each other never waned.

“Robertson’s scrapbooks were filled with clippings about Tom. He was as proud as punch of him.

And Old Tom was equally as admiring of Robertson and would always talk of ‘Allan Robertson my friend’.”

Robertson would, in fact, move into manufacturing the gutty and played with such a ball when he became the first player to break 80 on the Old Course. There could be no turning back.

Presumably, that’s what the modern-day manufacturers will be telling the game’s custodians as golf’s latest stooshie over a ba’ unravels.