Tales From The Bunker

There is a common misconception that Gene Sarazen invented the sand wedge. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Scottish golfers in the 19th century had special clubs for getting out of the sand. Walter Hagen was using a battle ax of a sand wedge in the late 1920s, with a hickory shaft and a smooth concave face, later deemed illegal,  with a lot of loft and about a half pound of weight in the flange. What Sarazen did was invent the modern sand wedge.

Gene was a good friend of Howard Hughes.  Sometime in the late 1920s, he went flying with Howard Hughes. When Hughes’s plane took off, the flaps on the wings came down and Sarazen made a connection between the flaps and the flange you could add to a club that would allow it to slide through the sand and help the ball pop up.

Sarazen experimented by soldering flanges to his niblicks, which were similar to a modern pitching wedge. By building up the flange so that it sat lower than the leading edge when soled,  the flange, not the leading edge, would contact the sand first, and explode sand as the shot was played. The additional weight provided punch to power through the thick sand.

Sarazen’s newly developed technique with the new club was to contact the sand a couple of inches behind the ball, not actually contacting the ball at all on most sand shots.

He sent the clubs to Wilson, and the company used those prototypes to come up with its first sand wedge in the early 1930s. Almost 80 years later the club has barely changed. Sarazen’s contract with Wilson lasted 75 years, the longest endorsement contract in sports. He was still under contract with Wilson when he died in 1999 at age 97.

As a player who hates bunkers, I cannot even imagine the nightmare sand play would be without Sarazen’s  invention.

Until next time, as always keep ‘em in the fairway.

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