By 1902, golf was changing. The new rubber-filled Haskell and Kempshall golf balls were replacing the long-used, and loved, gutta-percha balls. The old gutta was shorter on the carry, but more controllable. The new balls were known as “bounding Billies,” because they bounced and ran through bunkers and hazards with nothing able to stop them. Amateur champion Walter J. Travis actually drove a Haskell 382 yards on the Garden City links in January 1903.
In Southern California, where long dry summers meant hard-pan fairways, summer golf nearly ceased to be when players opted for the new longer-distance rubber balls.
At the Los Angeles Country Club, at Pico and Western boulevards, the club’s bowling alley and ping pong tables replaced summer golf until irrigation arrived about ten years later.
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Here is a short piece from Mr. J. L. Low, published in the Athletic News (UK), Summer 1902, about the impact of the Transatlantic Bomber:
“The mind of the American man is exceedingly cunning, and he has devised a ball which makes it easier for the ordinary mortal to go round a golf course in a low score.
Let us admit this fact, and say, ‘We acknowledge that your ball is easier to play with than a golf ball, but you need not make any more, as we don’t wish the game made easier, our links being laid out to test the strength and skill of a golfer playing with a ball made out of certain recognized material.’
Or there is another course open to us, and that is to counteract this unfortunate inventive power of making the game easy by making the courses longer and more difficult. On courses which are at present of good length the holes would need to be lengthened by about thirty yards in order to give good driving its former advantage ; and there are other ways of making the rubber ball tremble within its skin.
But of the two ways of escaping the curse of these new balls and restoring the game to its old position as one of the most difficult of games, the former seems the more simple and less expensive ; the cost of altering our courses is, in fact, too great to contemplate.”
“In the meantime it cannot too extensively be advertised that scores made with patent balls are only equal to scores made with gutta balls from ‘short tees.'”
From Mr. J. L. Low in the Athletic News (UK), Summer 1902. Transcribed by J.Jones – ©2019 golfhistoricalsociety and jibjones All rights reserved.
