Today, the word “swing” has come to mean a golfer’s entire game. If you’re bad at golf, you swing for the fences. If you’re good, you play for par. But golf used to be more of a slow pitch game, where the pitcher had to have good control and precision, so that the ball went as far as possible.
Most of those skills were learned by playing other sports-basketball, baseball and football. The control and precision that kids learn in baseball are useful in golf if you can get them to transfer over: once they’ve learned how to throw a curveball or catch a football or kick a soccer ball, they’ll already know how to handle the club. But then came the jcb Golf Course Collection 2015/2016: A blog about the new golf equipment .
The phrase “jcb golf course” is a bit of a mouthful. A better name would have been “golf equipment.” This is because in the world of golf equipment, there is no gap between the jcb and the golf. Golf clubs are made by companies that are not companies at all, because they do not have any physical location. There are no jcb golf courses.
There is only a single jcb golf course in the whole world. It was built by jcb, which is a company that makes machinery. Each club they make is called a “tool,” and each tool they build into a club is called an “accessory.”
The jcb logo looks like a golf ball, but it isn’t. It’s a bag of golf clubs, and it has been used on golf bags since the early 1960s. But what is the point? Why use a logo that represents something else?
The answer is that the logo was originally created as a kind of funny joke. At the time, jcb was owned by the U.S. government’s Department of Defense, which had been setting up businesses in Europe since World War II in order to make sure the war didn’t come back to bite them in their rear ends.
A golf company called Amtmann & Co. based in Germany had been made for one of these businesses and was doing a brisk trade. When the Department of Defense got wind of it, they thought it would be funny to send someone over with a bag of jcb clubs and say “Here take this.”
In those days jcb didn’t have its own logo; it used an American eagle to represent it, but except for soldiers and spies, nobody knew what an eagle looked like. Therefore no one would recognize an eagle branded with jcb as representing anything other than itself, so the deal worked out well for both sides.
JCB, like other companies, uses the term “golf” to mean almost anything that isn’t work. It makes a lot of money selling jukeboxes and drills, and it makes a lot more money selling golf clubs. But it’s not really the job of a golf club to improve your ability to play golf.
Golf is the correct term. Golf isn’t just a game. It’s a way of life: thirty-some years ago I used to go to Pebble Beach every year and talk about golf with people who had been there for decades, who would say things like, “Remember when you swung through there in ’63?”
The way I play golf has changed, but I have learned to play it with the same passion and commitment as when I was sixteen. I have a new set of drives, but they are still good ones; my swings haven’t changed much because my technique hasn’t changed much either. But the equipment has changed enormously. Now you can buy clubs that are so light they fly through the air like darts: if you can hit them at all without hitting them too hard, they will do exactly what you want them to do.
I look at that equipment and I think: why bother using clubs? What if someone
We know the golf clubs are new because they have a different name from the clubs that came before. The clubs do not have a unique name because they are new, but because they are better.
In a sense, we don’t care if the clubs are new or not: we care that they give us an extra chance to get a hole in one, or to make a nice swing on a tough putt, or to stop our ball exactly where we want it to go. All the other things, like their color or shape, don’t matter. But in another sense, we do care. If you bought just one of the new golf clubs and then lost it, you would be able to buy another one and still get the same feel and performance.
In both senses, then, there is no reason for us to be upset when some golf club manufacturer calls his product something different from all the others: if he makes more money by calling them something else, what does it matter what he calls them?
Golf’s greatest pastime is now played by a minority of the players, and it’s still not as popular as it was.
In 1910, more than 90 percent of golfers were members of clubs. In 1946, only about 6 percent were. I’m not sure what percentage are active today.
Golf is just too expensive for most people to play. The equipment alone costs much more than $300 from a major manufacturer, and you have to think about the cost of lessons and food while playing. The average golfer spends $100 every time he plays, and that’s before he pays for his caddy, who doesn’t even get to keep the clubs he gives you. And that’s after taking into account the cost of membership in your local club and the loss you’ll experience when you play on other people’s courses.
These days, if your golf club isn’t the best there is, you’re out of luck. The equipment companies are all in the same business, and their goal is to make money from people who want to hit a ball as far as possible. And they’ve all made a deal: they each develop products that work best for different kinds of players (or else they’d all be using the same ones), and no one can use their equipment in tournaments hosted by anyone else’s company. They know what they have to do; they just don’t like having to do it—your inability to use their equipment will keep you from making money.
So what do the companies have to gain by developing “best ever” products? For one thing, they need customers, and if they develop the most expensive stuff on the market, they’ll get more customers than if they develop cheaper models. But it doesn’t stop there. If every golf club manufacturer develops its own equipment, golfers will go from hole to hole with multiple sets of clubs, which means no one will ever actually play one course long enough to master it—which means no one will ever pass on that knowledge to other players.