Mashie-niblick
Encyclopedia
Early golf club
Golf club (equipment)
A golf club is used to hit a golf ball in a game of golf. Each club is composed of a shaft with a grip and a clubhead. Woods are mainly used for long-distance fairway or tee shots; irons, the most versatile class, are used for a variety of shots; Hybrids that combine design elements of woods and...

s were all made of wood
Wood
Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...

. They were hand-crafted, often by the players themselves, and had no standard shape or form. As the sport of golf
Golf
Golf is a precision club and ball sport, in which competing players use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes....

 developed, a standard set of clubs began to take shape, with different clubs being fashioned to perform different tasks and hit various types of shot. Later, as more malleable iron
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...

 became widely used for shorter range clubs, an even wider variety of clubs became available.

Woods

They were:
  • Play Club: Driver
  • Brassie: 2-Wood
  • Spoon: Higher-Lofted Wood
  • Baffing Spoon: Approach Wood


These were made of wood and were used until being replaced by the numbered system used today.

Irons

They were:
  • Cleek: 2 Iron
  • Mid Mashie: 3 Iron
  • Mashie Iron: 4 Iron
  • Mashie: 5 Iron
  • Spade Mashie: 6 Iron
  • Mashie Niblick: 7 Iron
  • Pitching Niblick: 8 Iron
  • Niblick: 9 Iron
  • Jigger: Very low lofted iron, shortened shaft


The Mashie Niblick was not a wedge.

The traditional set of irons was invented by Archibald Barrie and were used from 1903 up until about the 1940s. The introduction of the standardized numbered iron set produced by the Spalding Sporting Goods Company
Spalding (sports equipment)
Spalding is a sporting goods company founded by Albert Spalding in Chicago, Illinois, in 1876 and now headquartered in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The company specializes in the production of balls for many sports, but is most-known for its basketballs...

in the early 1930s caused the traditional set of irons to gradually give way to numbered convention.

The traditional irons varied greatly in loft (+/- 5 degrees). The shape of the head determined some of the playing characteristics of the club; most traditional heads were roughly egg-shaped.

Sabbath sticks

Sunday or Sabbath sticks were the golf enthusiasts' answer to the Church of Scotland's discouraging golfing on Sundays. Clubs were disguised as walking sticks, the club head comfortably fitting in the palm of the golfer's hand, until feeling unobserved, the stick was reversed and a few strokes were played.

External links

  • http://golf.about.com/cs/golfterms/g/bldef_mashienib.htm
  • http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/hi/english/static/in_depth/golf/2001/the_open/masterclass/jargon_busting/mashie_niblick.stm
  • http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236310/
  • http://www.p4a.com/item_images/medium/04/83/38-01.jpg
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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