The SOCIETY #135

Merion & The Ball That Changed It All

At the dawn of the twentieth century, American golf faced a problem few could have anticipated.

The golf ball had become too good for the golf course.

In the 1890s, as golf began spreading rapidly across the United States, many of America’s earliest courses were built for the gutta-percha ball. The “gutty,” introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century, had transformed golf once already. Made from the hardened sap of the gutta-percha tree, it was cheaper and more durable than the old feather-filled ball and helped make golf accessible to a much wider audience.

But the courses built for it reflected its limitations.

The gutty did not travel extraordinary distances. A well-struck drive might cover something in the neighborhood of 180 to 200 yards, depending on conditions and the golfer swinging the club. Courses could therefore fit comfortably on relatively small pieces of property. Holes were shorter, hazards were positioned closer to the tee, and greens could be reached with clubs and shots that made sense for the equipment of the Victorian game.

That was the golf that first took root in America.

Clubs appeared outside Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago and other growing cities. Some began with nine holes. Others squeezed eighteen holes onto properties that today would seem impossibly small for championship golf.

Then, almost overnight, the mathematics of the game changed.

The Arrival of the Haskell Ball

In 1898, Coburn Haskell, working with Bertram Work of the B.F. Goodrich Company, developed a radically different golf ball. Instead of a solid mass of gutta-percha, the new ball used tightly wound rubber thread surrounding a solid rubber core, eventually covered with gutta-percha.

The wound-rubber ball flew farther. Considerably farther.

At first, many traditionalists were skeptical. Golf had spent decades adapting to the guttie, and there was little reason to believe another ball would immediately replace it. But competitive golf has a way of settling equipment debates quickly. Once leading players demonstrated what the new ball could do, its advantages became impossible to ignore.

The Haskell did more than add yards to a drive.

It effectively shrank the golf course.

A bunker that had once required a strong carry could suddenly be flown. A hole designed to demand a full wooden-club approach might now require an iron. Strategic features that had been carefully placed for the guttie golfer were suddenly in the wrong places.

America’s golf courses had been built for one game. The Haskell had created another.

A Young Golf Nation Faces an Old Problem

The timing could hardly have been more consequential.

American golf was still remarkably young. Many of the clubs that would eventually become the country’s great institutions had been founded only a few years earlier. Their courses were often products of necessity rather than grand architectural planning. Clubs acquired whatever land was available near growing cities and constructed courses appropriate for the equipment of the day.

The Haskell ball threatened to make some of those courses obsolete almost as soon as they had been completed.

Clubs generally had three choices.

1. They could lengthen and change their existing holes.

2. They could acquire neighboring property and expand.

3. Or they could abandon their original course and begin again somewhere else.

The transformation helped usher American golf from its Victorian beginnings toward the era of golf course architecture.

And few clubs illustrate that transition better than Merion.

Merion and the Course the Ball Left Behind

The club we know today as Merion Golf Club began as the golf section of the Merion Cricket Club outside Philadelphia. Golf was added in the 1890s, when enthusiasm for the Scottish game was sweeping through America’s established sporting clubs.

Its original golf course was at Haverford.

Like many early American layouts, it belonged to a particular moment in the game’s development. It was conceived when golf was shorter, equipment was less powerful and comparatively modest acreage could accommodate a legitimate course.

But golf was changing with extraordinary speed.

The rubber-cored ball was only part of the story. Golfers were becoming better. Clubs and shafts continued to improve. Competitive golf was growing. Expectations for what constituted a first-class golf course were changing as well.

Merion’s leadership recognized that repeatedly stretching an old course could only accomplish so much.

Eventually, the club chose the more radical solution.

It moved.

In 1910, Merion Golf Club acquired land at Ardmore, and a young club member named Hugh Wilson was entrusted with creating a new course. Wilson traveled to Britain to study the great courses of the Old World, absorbing ideas from places where golf had evolved over centuries rather than decades.

When Merion’s East Course opened in 1912, it represented something fundamentally different from the club’s earlier golf.

This was not simply a longer version of a Victorian course.

It was a course conceived for modern golf.

Wilson used angles, bunkering, changes in direction and demanding green complexes to challenge a golfer whose ball could now cover distances the founders of American golf could scarcely have imagined two decades earlier. Merion would eventually become one of the great strategic courses in the world and the setting for some of the most important moments in American golf history.

There is a wonderful irony in that evolution.

The course that would become synonymous with Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and the U.S. Open was, in part, born because technology had helped make Merion’s earlier golf course inadequate for the future.

Golf Architecture Becomes an Arms Race

Merion was hardly alone.

Across America, established clubs confronted versions of the same problem. Courses were lengthened. Bunkers were moved farther from tees. New back tees appeared. Additional acreage was purchased when possible. Clubs constrained by development or geography began searching for larger properties farther from city centers.

The Haskell ball therefore influenced something much larger than scoring.

It influenced American geography.

The first generation of American golf clubs had often been established close to the communities they served. But as golf required more acreage, clubs increasingly looked toward undeveloped land beyond the expanding suburbs. That movement provided architects with larger canvases and, frequently, better natural ground.

At almost precisely the same moment, golf course architecture was emerging as a recognized profession.

Donald Ross arrived in America in 1899. Charles Blair Macdonald was developing his architectural philosophy. Seth Raynor would soon follow him. A.W. Tillinghast, George Thomas, Hugh Wilson and others would eventually create courses specifically designed around strategy rather than merely providing eighteen places to play a golf ball.

The technological revolution and the architectural revolution were intertwined.

The Haskell ball did not create the Golden Age of American golf architecture by itself. But it helped create the conditions that made that age necessary.

The Ball That Helped Build American Golf

It is tempting to view the Haskell ball simply as an important chapter in the history of golf equipment.

Its real legacy is much larger.

The rubber-cored ball arrived at precisely the moment when American golf was deciding what it wanted to become. By making many of the country’s earliest courses too short or strategically outdated, it forced clubs to reconsider their land, their architecture and even their locations.

The result was a remarkable period of reinvention.

Victorian golf courses gave way to larger and increasingly sophisticated layouts. Architects began designing holes around angles, choices and strategic hazards. Clubs moved from cramped suburban parcels onto expansive properties where the great courses of the American Golden Age could emerge.

Merion’s journey from Haverford to Ardmore is one of the clearest examples of that transformation.

Today, when we look at Merion’s East Course, it is easy to see a timeless golf course. Yet its origins were rooted in change.

A new golf ball had altered the dimensions of the game.

An old course could no longer contain it.

And from that disruption emerged one of America’s greatest golf courses.

In that sense, the Haskell ball did not merely travel farther than the gutty it replaced.

It carried American golf with it!!!

TWO OF BOBBY JONES’ LONGEST DRIVES OCCURRED AT MERION GOLF CLUB

Bobby Jones was a huge fan of Merion Golf Club, and perhaps that love for Merion allowed him to loosen up and swing freely. During Jones’ career it was not that rare for him to hit a 300+ yard drive (using hickory shafted equipment) but these two examples of Jones hitting 350 yards at Merion are very well documented.

In 1916 Bobby Jones as a teenager hit his drive OVER the 8th green which was over 350 yards in length.

Above is a letter from Bobby Jones responding to a fan who wanted to know what was the longest drive he ever hit.

Jones’ replied:

“I have no means of knowing accurately what was the length of the longest drive I have ever made. The longest I can remember with any degree of accuracy, occurred on the 8th hole at the Merion Cricket Club in the Amateur Championship of 1916, in my first round match against E. M. Byers. The hole is 350 yards in length and my drive went over the green. I am sorry but this is the best that I can do for you.”

—

A second example is just as impressive because the 18th hole is well marked by Ben Hogan’s famous plaque from the 1950 US Open.

The difference between Ben Hogan’s drive and Bobby Jones’ drive decades before???

Jones hit his drive nearly 100 yards longer than Hogan. While Hogan’s approach left him 200 yards, Jones had just about 100 yards into the same green from the same tee box!

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