Shooting For The Moon

Golf lost a friend when Alan Shepard died of leukemia on July 21. Shepard was the first American in space, the man who rode a Mercury capsule, launched by a seven-story Redstone rocket, for 15 minutes on May 5, 1961. That feat secured his place in history, but the cocky, cigar-smoking Shepard would have more than 15 minutes of fame. In 1971 he became the fifth man on the moon, but Apollo 14's mission commander didn't just moonwalk.

"Gonna hit a little sand shot," he said, dropping a ball onto the powdery lunar surface. Gripping a six-iron affixed to a collapsible utility tool, swinging one-handed—his moon suit was too bulky to allow a normal swing—he chili-dipped the ball 100 feet toward a small crater. "I got more dirt than ball," he said, his voice crackling through the void. But the American can-do spirit won out: He took a mulligan. Shepard dropped a second ball and hit it pure. "There it goes!" he shouted.

The balls' fate would puzzle him for years. "Both balls are still up there," Shepard said in 1991. "Perhaps the youngsters of today will go up and play golf with them years from now." Later, however, he reconsidered. "The temperature goes from 250 degrees to 150 below, a swing of 400 degrees. I think they've exploded by now."

Which is it? Are the balls perfectly preserved in the lunar vacuum, or have they turned to dust? It would help to know what sort of balls they were, but Shepard never answered that question for fear of commercializing history. "I've never told anybody. I've never told my wife," he said.

His golf pro knew, though. Jack Harden, the pro at Houston's River Oaks Country Club, provided the sawed-off six-iron that Shepard took to the moon. (The club resides at the USGA museum in Far Hills, N.J.) Harden received a shipment of two-piece Surlyn-covered range balls from Spalding in 1971. "They had two blue stripes on them and said PROPERTY OF JACK HARDEN," says Jack Harden Jr., whose father died last August. "Dad knew there'd be extreme temperatures up there, so he gave Shepard some of those durable range balls."

Some scientists think the balls should still be playable. "They can be in nothing but pristine condition," says Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesman Eric Hayne. Says Rob Navias of NASA, "There's no way to be sure, but I believe they're in good shape, perhaps partly embedded in lunar dust." Navias grants that partially buried balls would undergo extreme heat and cold. "Still, a golf ball is a pretty durable object."

Not always, says Troy Puckett Jr. of Cayman Golf in Albany, Ga., who has tested balls in near-lunar conditions. "I can guarantee those balls are not unchanged," Puckett says. "A Surlyn ball—that's a DuPont ionomer resin. It's largely a ball of plastic. Any exposed part would tan a little at first, like a ball you leave out in the sun. With more heat, the dimples would smooth out. We see that happen when we heat a ball at 200 degrees for a couple hours. In time the cover would turn brown, and with the cold of the lunar night, probably crack and fall off." As the balls' cores froze and dried, Puckett says, "they'd get hard and brittle, going up to 150 or 160 compression, hard as a rock. Then they'd probably sit there forever in the vacuum." Even if those balls embossed with Jack Harden's name were as subject to decay as our mortal selves, remnants of them wait to be found someday.

"He lived every golfer's dream," President Clinton said of Shepard last week, "taking his six-iron and hitting the ball, in his words, 'miles and miles.' "

Shepard, who had houses in Houston and Pebble Beach and played to an eight handicap, found it odd that his moon shots nearly overshadowed the rest of his career. "I'm probably a hell of a lot more famous for being the guy who hit the golf ball on the moon than as the first guy in space," he said. Yet the first golfer in space was not merely a sportsman or a hero. He was both.

Senior Freshman
Gary, Player