Virginia Golfer September / October 2014 | Page 14

TheRULES

Why 14 Clubs are Allowed in a Bag

S

ome things in golf will always
remain constant. Competitors
will look for just about any
advantage that will help shave
a few strokes off their score. A
driver that will give them 10 additional yards.
A putter that will help them sink a few more
4-footers. A distance measuring device that
will tell them the exact yardage to the hole.
Eighty years ago, golfers may have
employed different techniques, but their quest
was still the same: how to get the ball in the
hole using as few strokes as possible—within
the Rules of Golf, of course. Up until 1938,
the answer was simple: carry more golf clubs.
It would seem reasonable that the more
clubs a player carries, the more options they
have to execute different varieties of shots.
That was certainly the philosophy of many
players in the 1920s and 1930s who felt that
they should not be disadvantaged by carrying
a limited number of clubs.
Three-time USGA champion Lawson
Little frequently carried more than 30
clubs when he played. According to the
United States Golf Association’s Executive
Committee minutes, some players carried
full sets of right-handed and left-handed
clubs in competition. Even the great Bob
Jones was known to carry as many as 25
Prior to a restriction being put in place, former
national champion Lawson Little used to put all kinds
of golf clubs in his bag, packing in as many as 30 on
some occasions.

12

by MICHAEL TROSTEL

clubs while playing a round.
How did we get to the point where players
were frequently carrying more than two
dozen golf clubs in their bags? You have to
go back to the late 1890s when the popularity
of the game surged in the United States and
Great Britain.
“There was an outpouring of creative
energy in many aspects of the game at that
time,” says Rand Jerris, senior managing
director of public services at the USGA. “It
was the end of the Victorian era, and with a
new century on the horizon there was a great
deal of experimentation with golf course
architecture, the golf ball and, especially,
golf clubs.”
Not only were more clubs introduced to
the marketplace at this time, but there was
a greater variety as well. And perhaps most
importantly, a flourishing economy propelled
the expansion of the game beyond the elite
classes. A great number of people now had
the leisure time and money to take up golf—
and were able to purchase the equipment
needed to play.
As the game grew and evolved over the next
two decades, matched sets of clubs became the
norm in the 1920s. These were standardized
and more affordable than the individual
clubs made by skilled craftsmen such as T
om
Stewart and Robert Forgan.
One other major change in this era was
that steel began to replace hickory in golf
club shafts. Originally banned by the USGA
and R&A in 1914, the increasingly popular
and more durable steel shafts were legalized
by the USGA in 1924 and the R&A in 1929.
While the construction of the new steel
shafts allowed players to swing harder and
hence, hit the ball farther, it limited their
ability to manipulate the ball.
Players responded by carrying more clubs
with varied degrees of loft. Whereas Francis
Ouimet won the 1913 U.S. Open with only
10 clubs, Little and others were using in
excess of 30 clubs at national championships
by the early 1930s.
In 1935, George Jacobus, president of the
PGA of America, wrote a letter to USGA
president Herbert Jaques inquiring whether
the USGA planned to limit the number of

VIRGINIA GOLFER | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014

clubs a player may carry in his or her bag.
He offered to write articles supporting a
restriction if the USGA took a stand on
the issue.
The USGA proceeded to survey the
players in the field during the 1935 Open and
Amateur championships and discovered that
players were carrying on average between
18 and 19 clubs in their bags. The USGA,
R&A and PGA of America intensified
their discussions on the topic with the
ultimate goal of ensuring that skill, and
not technology, was the ultimate factor in
determining a golfer’s ability.
“It’s telling how prominent of a role the
PGA played in these discussions,” Jerris says.
“Professionals stood to benefit the most by
carrying extra clubs, but their voice was the
strongest in setting a limit on how many a
player could carry. Ultimately, I