Early history
The company was founded in 1876, the year that Albert Spalding was pitcher and manager of the old Chicago team for which “Pop” Anson and Evangelist Billy Sunday played. It was Spalding’s Chicago team that first appeared in regulation baseball uniforms. It was Spalding’s company that standardized early baseballs and developed the modern baseball bat with the pronounced bulge in its business end.
In 1892, A. G. Spalding & Bros, acquired Wright & Ditson and A. J. Reach, sporting goods companies, and put itself in an almost monopolistic position to profit from that trend in U.S. life that was to add the football stadium to collegiate architecture and golf .to the businessman’s routine. And back in the days when the golfer was viewed with scornful alarm, Julian W. Curtiss, former president of Spalding who died in 1915, visited London, learned golf, returned with the clubs and balls from which resulted the manufacture of early U. S. golf equipment.
History of Spalding Golf Clubs
This article was written by Peter Stevens for golflink.com
No matter what brand of club you pull from your bag, you owe some thanks to one company – Spalding. At the turn of the 20th Century, golf had stirred mild interest in the United States, and A.G. Spalding & Brothers sporting goods saw an opportunity. The company was already selling golf balls when, in 1905, it became the first in America to offer its own brand of golf clubs.
The Early Years
Starting in 1900, Spalding opened clubmaking factories in London and in Fife, Scotland, producing forged iron heads for Spalding clubs sold both in the U.K. and U.S. Irons made during that time are distinguished by an anvil cleek mark. The company’s unique “baseball mark” – A.G. Spalding had helped put baseball on the map – was stamped on the clubs and below it “Made in Great Britain” appeared. Throughout America, the affordable Spalding clubs flew off the shelves and reaped huge catalog sales.
Innovation
Spalding introduced many variations of hickory-shafted clubs to bring distance and control to the professional and duffer alike. The company was selling aluminum fairway clubs by 1910, and its Gold Medal series (1910 to 1919) featured aluminum bronze. Spalding’s lead-faced putters also provided better touch for players. One of the most famous Spalding clubs was the Cran Cleek (club with a narrow face and little loft) for poor fairway lies and even putts. Today, collectors prize the narrow-faced Cran Cleek.
Deep Grooved and Drop Forged
Golfers have always known that deep-grooved irons produce better control and spin. Spalding led the way with such deep-grooved designs as the “waterfall” and waffle-face irons.
Until the USGA banned deep-grooved irons, Spalding’s Stop ’Em and Dedstop clubs brought a smile to countless players’ faces.
By the Roaring ’20s, A.G. Spalding & Brothers was using the process of “drop forging” to manufacture metal clubheads. Clubmakers’ traditional method had been to shape metal heads with an anvil and forge; now, like Henry Ford’s assembly-line Model T’s, Spalding craftsmen used a mechanical hammer to craft clubheads, drill sockets in them to attach the shaft and then polish the heads, all of which allowed Spalding to manufacture matched sets of clubs and mass produce them.
State-of-the-Art Shafts
Spalding clubmakers paid as much scrutiny to shafts as to heads. The company experimented throughout the 1920s and 1930s with lathe-turned hickory shafts that featured circular ridges spaced at standard intervals down the entire shaft. The design gave the clubs an exotic bamboo look; the underlying message being that these clubs offered players bamboo’s legendary flexibility and whip-like strength.
Too Many Choices
With Spalding’s mass-market success breeding scores of imitators, players could pick and choose from countless club lines. Golf bags bulged with 20 to 25 clubs, and the USGA, fearing too many specialty clubs had watered down the game’s skill levels, took action. In 1938, the USGA passed an edict limiting players to 14 clubs.
The success of Spalding golf clubs had compelled the USGA to act, but the company had blazed the proverbial trail for club innovations and sales to come. Today, that legacy rests with every golf club that hits the American market.
Peter F. Stevens is an author and journalist whose 10 books include “The Voyage of the Catalpa.” For more than 25 years, he has contributed to a wide array of publications including “American Heritage,” “American History,” “Yankee,” “VFW,” “Golf,” and “Golf News.” The “New York Times” frequently syndicates his work.
Brief biographies of A.G. Spalding can be found in “The Ballplayers,” edited by Mike Shatzkin (New York: Arbor House/William Morrow, 1990; Library of Congress call number GV865.A1 B323 1990) and “Biographical Dictionary of American Sports. Baseball,” edited by David L. Porter (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000; Library of Congress call number GV865.A1 B55 2000). The definitive biography is “A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport,” by Peter Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985; Library of Congress call number GV865.S7 L48 1985).