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editor's note
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 Geez, I thought, is he ever going to get in trouble for that when he gets back. My father, who worked for NASA on the manned space program, had impressed on me that all of the agency’s missions were masterpieces of the bean counter’s art: nothing, but nothing, deviated from the plan. Somewhere, someone, at some level, knew every screw and bolt and wire that went into the enormous Saturn V rocket, not to mention the mind-roastingly complex lunar and command modules. As for the astronauts, they were rationed right down to the last few teaspoons of Tang. No extra energy bars, no errant cookies, and absolutely no gum (which no doubt brassed off the former fighter pilots, who choffed the stuff like cows). Sneaking the head of a 6-iron on board? It was like asking to bring along a grand piano, or so I assumed. Nevertheless, Shepard, known for his mercurial temperament (“Smilin’ Al/Icy Commander” was the way Tom Wolfe described him), managed to pack it into a pocket of his pressure suit after overcoming objections from Manned Space Center Director Bob Gilruth that hitting a 6-iron shot on the lunar surface would be “frivolous.” Gilruth apparently had no worries about the extra weight. Neither was he concerned about the possibility that Shepard might shank a shot and end up conking one of the multimillion-dollar lunar experiments and put it out of commission. No, Gilruth, like so much of the NASA brass in those days, guarded the portals of public relations with almost missionary zeal, and he only relented after Shepard explained that the reduced-gravity iron shot would be a fine way to demonstrate to the TV audience (watching in color, no less) the physics of lunar gravity. (That lack of gravity caused the shot to arc over an area where Shepard and fellow astronaut Ed Mitchell had set up some experiments. “One of the experiments failed a couple of weeks later,” Shepard said later with a laugh, “and they blamed my golf ball for hitting it.”) The mission, and the shot, brought Shepard wide acclaim, but he returned from the moon with a secret, one that he revealed to no one, not even his wife: the brand of golf ball that he struck on the moon. Also conscious of NASA’s public image, Shepard said he did not want to commercialize history. After Shepard’s death in 1998, it was revealed that he hit a pair of new Spalding driving range balls that had been provided by his local pro, Jack Harden from Houston’s River Oaks Country Club (Harden also had fashioned Shepard’s collapsible 6-iron). Harden reasoned, his son said later, that the two-piece Surlyn-covered balls with their characteristic two blue stripes and the printed words PROPERTY OF JACK HARDEN would hold up well in the moon’s extreme temperatures, which range from 250 degrees Fahrenheit to 150 below zero. The balls remain in the lunar dust. Shepard did not get in trouble. |
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