Golf: Make Mine Aluminum

Like most duffers, Henry Hook tried everything. He bought Jack Nicklaus golf clubs, Arnold Palmer golf gloves and Ben Hogan golf shoes; he memorized Gary Player's Positive Golf, watched Dow Finsterwald's Golf Tips on TV, and visited a Sam Snead Driving Range three times a week. He used balls with rubber centers, steel centers and liquid centers, switched from a cash-in putter to a bull's-eye putter to a mallet-head putter. And he still couldn't break 100. "I don't understand it," he complained. "I played worse last year than the year before, and worse the year before than the year before that." Asked a friend: "How are you doing now?" Sighed Henry: "I'm already playing next year's game."

Next year might actually bring some improvement if Henry is lucky enough to get a new set of golf clubs for Christmas—clubs with aluminum shafts. Like the steel tennis racket, the aluminum-shafted golf club is being touted as a breakthrough of science. For 15 years, club manufacturers have been trying unsuccessfully to improve on the now-familiar stepped steel shafts that replaced hickory in the 1920s. Fiber-glass shafts, for instance, are whippier than steel, but their extreme flexibility only tends to exaggerate flaws in a golfer's swing. Aluminum is more rigid than fiber glass, and lighter than steel. The lighter shaft allows manufacturers to put more weight into the club head. The result for the golfer: a faster swing with the same effort—and increased distance on each shot. Another advantage of the speeded-up swing is that the club head tends to rotate less, thereby reducing the chances of hooking or slicing the ball. Tempering the aluminum so that it would not bend was the major manufacturing problem, but several companies—notably Wilson, Spalding and MacGregor —have finally licked it.

Slightly costlier (by about $20-$45 for a full set of woods and irons) than steel, aluminum-shafted clubs have received impressive testimonials from the pros. Arnold Palmer used them to win this year's Los Angeles and Tucson Opens, is now marketing his own line of clubs. Billy Casper, Sam Snead, Gary Middlecoff and Julius Boros all are experimenting with aluminum clubs, and George Archer claims that his new aluminum-shafted driver gives him an extra 15 yards of distance on every tee shot. That, says Archer, helps account for the fact that he has won $93,200 on the pro tour this year.