The Story of Golf
The Story of Golf
Where it began, no one knows. The origin is lost in the mists of time.
It might have been on a country road in Normandy, or in an alley near the Roman forum. It might have been among sand dunes above the North Sea, or on a hillside overlooking Peking. It might have been in a field in Flanders or a courtyard in London or on the frozen surface of a Dutch canal.
No one can say precisely where or when the game of golf(discount golf clubs) was born, but one thing is certain: No other form of recreation has transfixed its practitioners with such engaging appeal.
Today, as we approach the twenty-first century, hardly a country in the civilized world remains untouched by the glorious epidemic that is golf. Its lure is difficult to define and impossible to exaggerate-an obsession that can begin at any age and last a lifetime.
The elemental appeal of golf stems from one of man’s primal instincts: the urge to strike an object with a stick. Indeed, reasonable skill in club-swinging surely was key to the survival of the caveman. It’s not hard to envision homo erectus hefting a sturdy tree limb to swat at stones or bones or whatever came into his path. In this sense, the notion-or at least the motion-of golf is older than civilization itself. Fundamentally, golf(Callaway/Ping/Cleveland/Mizuno/Taylormade golf clubs)was not invented but was born within us.
But it was civilization that gave the game its spin. Depending on whom we choose to believe, the first primeval golf shots were struck somewhere between two thousand and six hundred years ago. The earliest possible ancestor dates to the Roman Empire. It seems that the Roman soldiers were enthusiastic sportsmen, and one of the ways they kept in fighting trim was by playing paganica, a game in which they swatted at a feather-stuffed ball with curved sticks. But all evidence suggests that this was a team sport, and that the ball the troops were striking was moving, not stationary. Thus, if paganica was the forerunner of a modern game, it was more likely field hockey than golf.
Illustrated scrolls from the early Ming Dynasty (mid- to late-1300s) depict something called suigan, described as “a game in which you hit a ball with a stick while walking.” At least one scholar has suggested that the silk traders of the late Middle Ages might have exported this or a similar game to Europe, where it was spun and refined into golf.
A stained glass window in England’s Gloucester Cathedral, dating from the mid-fourteenth century, shows a figure wielding a stick in the middle of a distinctly golf-like backswing. Was this golf? Possibly. But it might also have been another stick-and-ball game, with the exotic name cambuca, which was known to be played in England at the time
Across the English Channel, the French had taken to a rather genteel courtyard game called jeu de mail. Originally developed in Italy, it was a curious blend of billiards, croquet, and miniature golf, played with long-handled mallets and large wooden balls within a well-defined area. The object was to hit the ball through one or more iron hoops, using the fewest possible strokes.
Jeu de mail caught on briefly in England where it became the rage of the ruling class under the name “pall mall.” It was first played in London on the street with the same name, which now runs between Buckingham Palace and Piccadilly Circus. Back in 1629, King Charles I was an avid pall maller, and the court of St. James included an impressive one thousand-yard-long area for royal play.
By the eighteenth century, however, this game had played out except in southern France, where a more expansive version saw the Basques hitting over hill and dale to targets such as the sides of barns and pasture gates. Shades of golf there, for sure.
Meanwhile, in Belgium they were hooked on chole, a game with a delightfully spiteful quality. It was played cross country, usually in teams, with the players wielding heavy iron clubs to propel an egg-shaped wooden ball distances of up to four hundred yards. A target —a church door, a tree, almost anything—was established, sometimes as much as a mile away, and then the two teams bid on the number of shots needed to hit it. The low-bidding team led off by taking three strokes toward the target. Then the opponents—known as decholeurs—were allowed one stroke to send the ball into the nastiest possible trouble. Thereafter, the offense resumed pursuit with three more strokes, followed by one more for the