Time for another post in the continuing series ‘Understanding The Game’. This time around we are going to cover the ball. As usual with these posts, this one is a little longish, so keep reading beyond the fold. Before getting into all the gory detail, the short and sweet of it is: for 90% of the players out there which ball you use makes no difference what so ever. For the pros, and those players with a around a 5 handicap or less, no piece of equipment is more important than the ball.
The story goes that the first ball was actually a rock. Golf started with shepherds hitting rocks into gopher holes with their sticks. From the rock things moved on to carved wooden balls. In the early 1600’s things moved from wood to the ‘featherie’. To make a featherie you took a top hat full of goose feathers, boiled them down to the point where they would all fit into a small cow hide bag, which was soaked until it was soft. The opening of the bag was sewn closed and the bag was left to dry. As it dried the feathers expanded and the cow hide shrank, producing a hard round ‘ball’. When it was dry the ball was oiled up, and painted white. The average drive that could be hit with this ball was around 150 yards. Featheries had a few disadvantages. First of all they were expensive and time consuming to make. So one ball would cost the equivalent of $150 - $400 today. It was impossible to make a perfect sphere, so the flight pattern was always a little erratic. The seam tended to split when the ball hit something hard, and if it got wet it totally fell apart. In spite of these flaws the featherie was the standard until 1848, at which time one Robert Adams ( or Robert Adam Paterson, depending ) came up with the ‘guttie’. The guttie was made from the gum of the Malaysian Sapodilla tree. The gum was heated and formed into a sphere. This ball didn’t carry as far as the featherie, but it was much easier to make, the balls were a uniform sphere, and they could be repaired by re-heating. The balls were produced by machine, but many wound up with slight dents or scores on them. And according to lore, players discovered that a marked up ball carried farther than a smooth ball. So the makers had the machines add patterns on the balls. The most popular pattern was the ‘bramble’ which consisted of raised bumps. In 1898 Coburn Haskell introduced a ball which had a rubber core, wrapped in thread, which was then given a hard shell of ‘guttie’ gum. In 1905 William Taylor applied the dimpled pattern to the hard outer casing, and the modern golf ball was born. Today’s balls have all different types of materials in their cores and their covers, and while the thread wrapping is gone, the core is still surrounded by a layer( or two, or three, or four ) of various materials before the hard outer coating is applied.
About the dimples. Believe it or not, the dimples matter. It has to do with aerodynamics. Here is my attempt at the physics behind it: When the ball is traveling through the air there are two forces working against it. The first force, which is actually much the weaker of the two, is friction. From the ball pushing against the air molecules. The dimples have no effect on friction. The second, much stronger force, is drag, created by the lack of air pressure behind the ball. A smooth sphere flying through the air has a large pocket behind it with low air pressure, which creates drag. By adding the dimples the amount of air moving towards the back of the ball is increased( the dimples act like little scoops) so there is more air at the back of the ball, which means there is a much smaller pocket of low air pressure behind the ball, which means the drag is considerably less. Got that? If you really care about the physics here is a web site that explains it much better than I can. Complete with pictures. This ‘lack of drag’ effect helps all golfers. Hence all golf balls have dimples.
The web site also explains about the relationship between spin and lift. In 1877 a British scientist named P.T. Tait discovered that a ball hit so that it spun around it’s horizontal axis, with the top of the ball rotating back towards the golfer, produced a lifting force. This kind of spin is called ‘backspin’. A ball hit with backspin will fly higher than a ball hit with no spin. Dimples do not create lift, but they definitely help with lift, and the combination of dimples and backspin really help with lift. But here’s the thing, it’s hard to hit a golf ball with backspin. You have to be a very good golfer to hit a ball with backspin, on purpose. On any given shot any golfer might take a swing that would result in backspin. But to do it consistently, on purpose, time after time, you have to be very good. Dimples have limited effect on spin. What does? The hardness of the cover on the ball. A softer cover means the groves on the club head face can press into the ball and help create backspin. The trade off is that a softer cover ‘bounces’ less, so when it leaves the club head it won’t travel as far as a ball with a harder cover. And there is the trade off. Distance vs. spin. If you are a very good golfer, and can hit a ball with backspin, you have to decide which is more important to your game, and choose your ball accordingly. Which may have you thinking ‘Well then if I’m not that good I should pick a ball with a hard cover, so I can at least hit it farther.’ Not really. If you had 3 golf balls in your hand, could you really tell which one had the soft cover? Soft is a relative thing. If you are very good, and swing with a lot of club head speed, then the difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ might be 20 -50 yards. But most of us don’t generate enough club head speed for there to be any real difference between hitting a hard or soft ball.
So to wrap up things up: dimples reduce drag and that helps every golfer, so all balls have dimples. Other than that the type of ball you hit really only matters if you are very good, and have to make a choice between distance and spin. For the majority of golfers out there any ball will do.
Here is what The Golfer has to say about choosing a golf ball:
From my perspective, there is no piece of equipment that is more important than the ball. Every ball makes trade-off’s between
Distance
Spin
Feel
Durability
For instance a “harder” ball generally goes further but spins less on soft shots. You have to know your game, to know what type of ball you want to play. It all depends on your skill level and what you want to do.
Why is all this important. Well, if I’m 40 yards away, on the fairway, and I have 10 feet of green to work with (distance between the cup and the edge of the fringe), I want to know if I hit the ball with my 60 degree wedge, it will hit twice and spin back (if I hit it right). There are a lot of balls that won’t do that, but will give me 10 more yards on my drive. I am willing to sacrifice some distance on the drive, to get better feel around the green.
On the last feature (Durability), the ball I play has ok durability but not great. The thing is, I play a course that has water on 14 holes. Generally a ball ends up in the water before it gets scuffed up (i.e., I lose it before I break it).
If I could ever find a ball that gives me the longest driving distance and the best spin, but only lasts 1 hole and costs $10. Yea, I might use that ball just to have the fun of the perfect ball.
Now, after all of that, if you still feel like there really must be a difference, other wise why all the fancy advertising? Then here is a nice feature in this months Golf magazine that purports to be able to help you pick just the right ball for you. Me? I’m going to go grab whatever is rolling around the garage floor and hit the practice range. Practicing my putting will have a much greater effect on my game than the type of ball I hit.
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