Sun, Feb 07, 2021 page11

• Shepard’s tee shot on moon turns 50

  • AP
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  Fifty years later, it remains the most impressive bunker shot in the history of golf, mainly because of the location: the moon.

  On Feb. 6, 1971, Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard and his crew brought back 40kg of moon rocks, but left behind were two golf balls that Shepard, who later described the moon’s surface as “one big sand trap,” hit with a makeshift 6-iron.

  “I thought it was unique for the game of golf that Shepard thought so much about the game that he would take a golf club to the moon and hit a shot,” Jack Nicklaus said this week.

  

  Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard conducts an experiment near a lunar crater on Feb. 6, 1971.

  Photo: NASA via AP

  Shepard became the first American in space in 1961, as one of NASA’s seven original Mercury astronauts. After being sidelined for years by an inner ear problem, he became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as Apollo 14 commander.

  However, he did more than just walk on the moon.

  Shepard waited until the end of the mission before he surprised US viewers with what he had up his sleeve — or in this case, up his socks. That is how he got the golf gear in space.

  “Houston, you might recognize what I have in my hand as the contingency sample return; it just so happens to have a genuine 6-iron on the bottom of it,” Shepard said. “In my left hand, I have a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans.”

  He hit more moon than ball on his first two attempts. The third, he later referred to as a shank. And he caught the last one flush, or as flush as an astronaut can hit a golf ball while swinging with one hand in a pressurized spacesuit that weighs 82kg on Earth.

  Shepard had asked Jack Harden Sr — former head pro at River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas — to build a 6-iron that he could take to the moon.

  Harden managed to attach the head of a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron to a collapsible tool used to collect lunar samples.

  It is still up for debate how far the golf shots went.

  “Miles and miles and miles,” Shepard said in a light moment that was broadcast in color to a captive television audience on Earth.

  Not quite — the shot for years has been estimated at 200 yards, remarkable considering how much the bulk of his spacesuit restricted Shepard’s movement.

  Imaging specialist Andy Saunders worked out through the use of image stacking techniques that the first shot went 24 yards, while the second went 40 yards.

  Former PGA champion Jimmy Walker hits a 6-iron about 200 yards on Earth, so he worked with Saunders to see how far he could hit one in one-sixth of the gravity.

  “He was known for saying miles and miles,” Walker said. “They took my launch conditions and said my ball would fly 4,600 yards and it would have just over a minute of hang time.”

  That would be a little over 4km — that also would be a conventional 6-iron, while wearing golf shoes and a sweater vest.

  What stands out all these years later is that Shepard even thought about taking a golf club to the moon and back. Reportedly, the inspiration came from Bob Hope, who carried a golf club just about everywhere he went, including a trip to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston a year before the Apollo 14 mission.

  Still, Shepard is the only person to hit a golf ball on the moon.

  “It was designed to be a fun thing,” Shepard said in a 1998 interview, five months before his death at age 74. “Fortunately, it is still a fun thing.”
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