Tiger Woods brought this vintage golf ball to the Masters and wowed Rory McIlroy. So we tested it
Vintage balata golf balls.
Ryan Barath
During his more than 30-minute press conference on Tuesday at the Masters, Tiger Woods discussed a number of topics including the PGA Tour’s new designated events schedule, persimmon drivers and one of the hottest topics in golf — the proposed rollback of the golf ball for professionals.
One of the most interesting anecdotes Woods told beyond hitting his old persimmon driver last week at his home club in Florida was that during his practice round with Rory McIlroy on Monday he had brought some balata golf balls with him, and at one point threw a couple down on the green for Rory to putt with.
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Now we don’t expect golf balls to go back to the days of wound cores and balata covers, but to get a sense of how they perform when paired up with a modern driver, this equipment guy went into the archives and pulled out the only balata golf balls he could find and put them to the test using a Foresight GC Quad.
It should be noted that any balata golf balls, even ones in pristine condition, are over 25 years old, and with that have been exposed to the elements for an extended period of time. But nonetheless, a test is a test, and for this I used took two shots hit under similar club delivery conditions and with similar face contact points (a great benefit of using a GC Quad) to demonstrate just how much performance is gained with a modern multilayer ball.
Results
Before getting into the numbers, the first thing that became abundantly clear at the start of testing was just how different the balata ball sounded and felt off the club face — which is something Tiger said Rory mentioned immediately after hitting a few putts. Compared to the new multilayer ball, the balata felt extremely soft and muted, which helps to demonstrate why it would have been the choice of high-level players looking to maximize short-game control.
Although I’m only comparing single shots with a driver to each other, the most standout data points (above) are the lower spin and higher ball speed of the modern ball. A larger data set also demonstrated that the balata had a larger variance in spin from shot to shot with some slightly off-center shots spiking to upwards of 4000 rpm.
When paired with a lower MOI driver like an old wooden persimmon, it’s easy to see how missed shots could lose 30-40 yards when this equipment was the norm, which certainly makes us happy to be living in the era of modern equipment!
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