Technology in Golf

Equipment

As golf has grown more competitive, players have wanted equipment that performs better. Golf balls have changed from feather-filled leather sacs to complex composites. Golf clubs have changed from wooden shafts and club heads to carbon fiber shafts and precisely engineered club heads.

Health

As sports nutrition has increased, treatment of injuries improved and knowledge of the human body grown, athletic potential has increased. Athletes today are now able to play at an older age, recover more quickly from injuries, and train more effectively than in previous generations. These advances have opened up a specialized type of fitness populary known as `Golf Conditioning` which was first brought in to the public eye by such golfing greats as Tiger Woods.

Instruction

Golf has often been in the forefront of technological advances in sport. Systems have been developed that measure the speed and spin of golf balls after they are hit, measure club head speed and even how the body moves during the golf swing. Video motion capture has played a large role in measuring aspects of golf that are difficult if not impossible to measure and understand with the human eye.

Tools such as launch monitors are able to measure club head speed as well as golf ball speed and spin, projecting the most likely flight path of the ball. Video capture devices allow body position and angles to be determined at different points of the swing. Motion capture devices allow for most information to be gathered at one time, measuring position, angles, orientations, as well as velocities at many points of the swing. The benefit of motion capture devices is that they utilize computers, which are cheaper to store data on than high speed video and are more precise.

Golf humour

Many jokes revolve around the game of golf, either as a setting for an otherwise generic punchline or as the target of a barb. One humorous definition of golf was "a good walk spoiled." John McEnroe asked rhetorically, in reference to whether golf is a sport, "I thought a sport was where you had to run or something." Winston Churchill once described golf as "...a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose." Some business people like to say, "The worst day on the golf course is better than the best day at work." J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that golf originated from hobbits, after Bullroarer Took knocked the goblin king Golfimbul's head off with a wooden club, sending it down a rabbit hole thus winning the battle and inventing golf at the same time. During a stand up comedy act, Robin Williams did an entire set related to the invention of the sport by drunk Scots.

Etymology

The word golf was first mentioned in writing in 1457 on a Scottish statute on forbidden games as gouf,^[27] possibly derived from the Scots word goulf (variously spelled) meaning "to strike or cuff". This word may, in turn, be derived the Dutch word kolf, meaning "bat," or "club," and the Dutch sport of the same name. But there is an even earlier reference to the game of golf and it is believed to have happened in 1452 when King James II banned the game because it kept his subjects from their archery practice.^[28]