Clubs

Several otherwise respectable writers on the history of golf clubs have suggested that a 'sand iron' is a relatively modern invention, going back no further than Gene Sarazen in the 1930s. Given the importance of seaside links to early golf in Scotland, with the inevitable prevalence of sand, the lack of such a club seems rather hard to believe. Moreover, the historical record rapidly disproves the argument.

The Duke of Montrose received an invoice in 1628 from James Pett of St Andrews for,

'Bonker clubis, an iron club and twa clubis of my awin'

An early iron club ca. 1820

What is clear, though, is how the club would be used. Until the arrival of the gutta percha ball in 1848, golf was played with a featherie. The cost of this leather sphere stuffed with goose feathers was often more than the cost of a decent club. To top it with a wooden club was to invite disaster but to top it with an iron would guarantee its destruction. The explosion shot from a bunker, striking the sand behind the ball, was as much a financial necessity as anything else and did not begin with the R-90 in 1932, as Wilson Golf's press releases on wedges suggest, but several centuries earlier. It is even described in one of the first instructional books on golf, Willie Park Jnr's, The Game of Golf in 1896.

In the early part of the 19th century, the main iron club in the golfer's armoury was the rut iron, a variation on the 17th century club shown which evolved into a very small-headed club (to allow it into confined lies such as cart ruts). It was very heavy (partly from the way hosels were made and also because, with the rule of 'play where it lies' it was often in unfriendly environments where no wooden club should venture) and the face was noticeably concave. It must have been a tricky shot using this in a bunker as the margin between a well hit shot and a shank is small.

A rut iron ca. 1860

This club continued in similar form until the 1880s and, in shape at least, some of the small-headed niblicks of the following forty years copied it even if calling them rut niblicks is usually the province of an optimistic golf memorabilia auctioneer.

With the advent of the gutta, striking the ball with an iron club was no longer a last resort and the number of club types soon multiplied as did the options for playing out of a bunker. Some players favoured the lofting iron, a stiffly shafted club, wider at the toe than at the heel and thicker at the bottom of the blade. The earliest incarnations were quite dished but this concavity disappeared from the design over time. Others preferred to use the mashie which came in the late 1880s and was popularised by J H Taylor. Its use in sand is remembered in Bernard Darwin's description of the pot bunkers at St Andrews 'with room for one angry man and his mashie'. Even though its shaft was whippy, it had little loft and a shallow face, there were those, like the famous amateur John Ball, who chose to use a cleek for the bunker shot.

A Charles Brand lofting iron ca.1890

James Anderson mashie ca.1895

Dished face cleek, 1880s

The changing niblick

Cardinal Dreadnought niblick, 1925

There was one more evolutionary step for the large-headed niblick to become what we would recognise today as a sand wedge. That was the addition of "bounce". It came not from an established clubmaking firm but from a Texas country club player, Edwin MacClain He successfully filed a patent for a sand wedge (he seems to have been the first to use the term) in 1928. It had a large flange on the sole of the club which MacClain described as a wing or deflector. The angle which this makes with the horizontal, the bounce angle, allows the club to scoop the ball out of sand. The patent was taken up by the L A Young company of Detroit who made the Walter Hagen range of clubs. With Walter's name on the club, and Walter himself using it, it was an instant success. Although the head was large, like the modern niblick, it borrowed something too from the rut niblicks of the previous century, a concave face. This was the case also with the Skoogee niblick which William Gibson of Kinghorn offered as a sand iron under their own name and as a product for Slazenger. Photographic evidence of these clubs in use showed that the ball struck the blade twice, first on the bottom and then on the top of the blade. As a result, in 1930, both the R&A and the USGA banned all concave irons from the start of the 1931 season.

LA Young, Hagen Wedge, 1928

Gibson Skoogie niblick, 1928

The following year, 1932, while a professional in Florida, Gene Sarazen produced his version of a sand iron, supposedly spending hours in his garage with 9-irons and the entire stock of solder of the local hardware store. The result was what he called the New Port Richey Wedge (after the town where he was living and working) and which the Wilson Company sold as the R-90 sand wedge. The companies who made the concave face wedges simply adapted their designs to have flat faces and, so, L A Young sold the Walter Hagen Iron Man model and the Sandy Andy. Spalding were quick to see the potential of this new market and introduced the Dynamiter and Blaster models.

Spalding Blaster, provisional patent ca. 1935