Page 17 of The Book of Summer

July 20, 1940

Cliff House, Sconset, Nantucket Island

The Legend of the Golf Ball

-OR-

Rubber Man and the Dentist

Many years ago, a decade almost, two men met up at the club in Sconset as they were wont to do several times per week, June through August every year.

One was a skinny fellow, a scientist by training but a businessman by trade and sheer doggedness—now a honcho of some repute. He’d founded a rubber-processing operation, selling to industry. The top producer for a time.

The other man was bigger, brawnier, a former Harvard linebacker whose middle had somewhat gone to pot. He was a dentist, an entirely new profession amid his family. They had been stock speculators previously, which worked well until it rather didn’t. Now the family sneaks by on its old prestige.

So on this particular day, these two men, both fathers with a passel of kids between them, grabbed their sticks, and headed to the Sankaty Head Golf Club.

Things started out most inauspiciously, for the Rubber Man at least. He was the superior player and thus more prone to golfing discontent. As for the Dentist, any shot not destined for a bunker or the Scotch broom was dandy by him.

By the sixth hole, a straightforward job, the morning had taken a sour turn. The Rubber Man missed a very makeable putt, by his standards anyway. Enraged, he launched his putter into the brush, followed by a seven iron toward some other gent’s caddy. After completing his tantrum, Rubber Man picked up the offending ball from where it sat on the green.

He held it to his eyes.

“The core is off-center!” he shouted. “I hit that ball expertly!”

“Is it the lie of the green?” the Dentist suggested.

It sounded right anyhow.

“No, no, no,” Rubber Man said. “It’s the ball. I’m gonna slice this bastard open and take a look inside.”

“Or you could x-ray it.”

“Come on,” he said with a scoff. “Where am I going to find an x-ray machine?”

“I have one,” the Dentist reminded him. “I’ve used it to study your teeth.”

“Hot damn! You’re right. Sometimes I forget you’re a tradesman, too. Come on, let’s go.”

Soon Rubber Man and the Dentist were ensconced in a Packer, motoring toward Boston. Once in the city, the Dentist unlocked his office, making a liar out of its “closed for two weeks” sign.

They fired up the x-ray machine. To the Dentist’s vast surprise, though not at all to Rubber Man’s, the golf ball was the problem. Its core was off-center, oblong and tilted.

By the next summer, Rubber Man had patented a cross-winding machine, which created a perfectly round core. And just like that, his company began manufacturing golf balls along with the swim caps and water bottles they’d resorted to when rubber prices fell. A few years later he’d use this same machine to develop the “dead center” ball. He’d name it “Titleist” for all the titles its users would surely win.

“I never thanked you for that,” the Rubber Man said, years later, on that same sixth hole at Sankaty Head. By then one-fourth of U.S. Open entrants used his Titleists. “You suggested the x-ray machine and in effect improved both my golf game and my balance sheet. The former immeasurably more important than the latter, of course.”

“Speak nothing of it,” the Dentist said, stumbling.

His old friend was not known for his compliments or a tendency to give credit where credit was due. He may have been a scientist-turned-businessman but he lacked the smooth glad-handing of the type.

“Yesterday I transferred ten thousand shares of Young Processing Company into your name,” Rubber Man told him, matter-of-fact.

“Much obliged,” replied the Dentist, as yet unsure whether this gesture was generous or miserly to the extreme. What did ten thousand shares mean, really?

“It’s unfortunate you’re too elderly to have more kids,” the Dentist said, joshing for the most part. “Or I might ask that you name one in my honor. It only seems fair.”

Rubber Man laughed.