Spikes: The Move from Steel to Soft
In 1924 Walter Hagen donned the first pair of steel-spiked golf shoes. We can only wonder how greenskeepers reacted. It took another 67 years before those metal spikes started to disappear. We know that greenskeepers rejoiced.
The idea for plastic "spikes" came from a man named Ernie Deacon. In 1991 he wanted to develop an alternative winter cleat that wouldn't damage the roots of the Idaho course he managed. He asked local inventor Faris McMullin to work on the idea.
A fortnight later, McMullin handed Deacon a prototype of the original swirled cleat. The two men thought it would be used only on Deacon's Warm Springs Golf Course, a muni located in Southeast Boise. Not so. Softspikes was founded and, with an aggressive campaign targeting course superintendents looking to save money on maintenance fees, the trend, from metal to plastic, took off quickly. The rest as they say, is history.
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