Great Leaps Forward
The Evolution of a Game, From 1890 to Today
By Cameron Morfit
February 2007

From persimmon woods to ProV1s, the modern era has spawned hundreds of important equipment innovations. Here are several groundbreakers that made the game more fun — and a whole lot easier.

1890s
Persimmon wood
Innovator: Unknown

The first persimmons were plentiful, beautiful and way more durable than their birch-wood predecessors, even if early models bore little resemblance to more artful persimmon iterations such as MacGregor's MT M85 Eye-O-Matic (1952-55), which is considered the classic in 1987, persimmon woods were hanging on. (Louisville Golf still cranked out 4,000 clubs a week.) But a decade later, when the last of the superstar persimmon devotees — Justin Leonard and Davis Love III among the — switched to metal, the persimmon era ended.

Credit: Jeff Ellis