MEMORABILIA AND COLLECTIBLES 10 Gary Morangives an insight into novel ways of hitting the ball further from unusual locations with specially adapted clubs
IN RECENT years the number of people who have made it to the top of Mount Everest has increased exponentially. Purists among the mountaineering community have denigrated the efforts of some of the summiteers, dismissing them as mere tourists with enough money to pay a guide and a team of Sherpas to all but carry them to the top.
One wonders what they have to say about Robert Vaughn, an oil and gas executive from Dallas, who stood on the world's highest point in May of last year. On the plus side, Vaughn had quarter of a century of climbing experience behind him and was no Johnny-come-lately to the world of mountaineering. But heaven knows what the purists thought of him taking out the sleeve of golf balls he purchased on departure from Dallas airport and whacking two of them towards Tibet and the other in the direction of Nepal with a specially constructed four-iron!
Like a true golf nut, Vaughn wasn't worrying so much about what others thought as about his swing and the flight of the balls. "The air is just so thin up there. I was amazed at how fast the ball came off the clubface." Given the limitations imposed by his gear - limited shoulder turn, thick gloves and crampons rather than soft spikes - the speed of the ball off the clubface seems of little consequence and Vaughn didn't go looking for the missiles. "Who knows how far they went?" he wondered. "The two I hit over toward Tibet had a 10,000 foot drop."
Vaughn did return to base camp with the four-iron which was presented to him by a friend just a few days before his departure and prompted that last-minute airport shopping. The shaft was made from a golf ball retriever presumably so that it could be telescoped into his backpack and after returning home, Vaughn donated the club to the United States Golf Association for display it in their museum along with some other famous novelty implements already in their possession.
They include the club which astronaut Alan Shepard used to become the first golfer in space during the Apollo 14 lunar mission in 1971. Inside his spacesuit, Shepard carried the head of a six-iron and a few golf balls. The club's Teflon shaft was adapted from a tool designed to scoop lunar rock samples and its total weight was 16½ ounces. Shepard's spacesuit was even more restrictive than Vaughn's mountaineering gear and he had to swing one-handed and could barely move let alone rotate his hips in textbook manner. Nonetheless, he made contact and was perhaps the first golfer to legitimately claim to have hit the ball miles. You can see Shepard's efforts at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZLl3XwlAIE and one wiseacre in Mission Control can be clearly heard to remark after the first shot: "That seemed like a bit of a slice to me, Al." After retiring, Shepard donated the Moon Club to the USGA during the 1974 US Open.
Space golf reached another level on a 1996 Shuttle mission. Prior to take off, instructor Tim Terry arranged for a putter and ball to be smuggled aboard the Endeavour so that his friend Brian Duffy could have a game while orbiting the earth. Putting literally took on a new dimension as trajectory was added to the regular variables of length and line with a roll of duct tape serving as a floating "hole".
The so-called Shuttle putter is now also in the USGA's keep at their museum in Far Hills, New Jersey.
The most recent case of golf in space occurred on November 22nd, 2006 when cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin used another special club to launch a ball into orbit from the International Space Station. Canadian company Element 21 developed proprietary scandium alloys for use in the aerospace industry and now uses the material in golf shafts and clubheads. The space shot was really a publicity stunt for the company with Tyurin using a pure gold-plated scandium six-iron.
Initially Element 21 had plans to donate the club to a charitable cause and also manufactured 321 identical sets which they thought would become prized collectibles.
Concentrating now on the wider golf market and on getting their shafts and clubs used by professionals, the gold-plated clubs remain at the company headquarters with no immediate plan for their future. The ball, ultra-light in case it hit anything important, has so far travelled over 242 billion miles according to www.issgolf.com which is a fair crack for a one-handed swing.
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