Craig Schreiner is a man of many golf hats.

One of the nation’s foremost golf course architects and a member of the exclusive Society of Golf Courses Architects, Schreiner also has the background of a golf course superintendent, is an accomplished golfer (his first hole-in-one came on Pebble Beach’s famed seventh hole) and a golf historian of the highest level.

If there’s a book written about golf, Schreiner probably has it in his library of 3,400 volumes on the second level of the snazzy new clubhouse at Schreiner’s Prairie Highlands public golf course located in the Kansas City suburb of Olathe, Kan. “Anything related to golf,” says Schreiner, pictured at left with wife Katie. “As old as it is, there’s probably as much written on golf as any sport.”

While golf as we know it today is generally credited to have been founded at St. Andrews in the late 1700’s, there are countless pieces of evidence that golf was played in The Netherlands as far back as the early 1400’s.

One of Schreiner’s many collector’s items books, the “Royal & Ancient Game of Golf,” No. 43 in a limited edition of 900 published in London in 1912, has several illustrations of golfers playing in 1500 while “Golf: A Royal and Ancient Game” first published in 1875, talks about the game being played when it was known as “goff.”

 In fact, a book entitled “The Goff” written by Thomas Mathison in 1743, is a comical poem written in three cantos (verses) recounting a golf match. “It’s a wonderful piece of writing, fascinating reading,” says Schreiner, who does not have an original copy of the book, Very rare, it would probably bring $20,000 if one could be found.

Even more fascinating is the evolution of the golf ball. We’re overwhelmed today by the countless kinds of golf balls but if you’ve never given any thought to how golf balls were first made, it makes for fascinating reading.

“The first ball was known was a ‘feathery’ because it was six ounces of feathers stuffed into a leather ball,” says Schreiner. “They figured if you want a ball to fly, use feathers. They’d use feathers from falcons, pigeons, larks, chickens. It’s tough putting six ounces of feathers into a leather ball. Then they would wet both so the leather would shrink and the feathers expand when they dried.”

Schreiner said the balls were fabricated with three pieces of 5/32nds inch thick leather, usually bull or horse hide, with two cap-shaped end pieces joined by a rectangular middle piece to produce a hollow case. The combination of the drying of the leather and the feathers produced a ball that was hard and playable but very time-consuming and expensive to make.

It would take a ball maker three hours of strenuous work just to create one feathery. “A ball maker would only make three balls a day,” said Schreiner. As a result, the game was pretty well restricted to the well-to-do and royalty.

Weighing anywhere from 1.32 to 1.87 ounces, the balls were not always perfectly round and were easily cut so iron clubs were used sparingly. Rules allowed feathery balls to be changed at the start of a hole but if a ball in play was badly damaged and had feathers exposed, it still had to be played until the hole was finished. Under normal conditions, an average drive was about 150-180 yards but the length of holes was much shorter than today.

That all changed in the early 1850’s with the introduction of Gutta Percha balls. A rubber-like material from the dried sap of sapodilla trees of East Africa, the solid Gutta Percha balls were made by rounding the heated gutta percha material into a ball by hand.

After a few years, metal molds were used, thus making it possible for a skilled ball maker to produce six dozen or more gutty balls a day or 25 times what the feather ball maker could turn out. The volume of production caused the price to drop to a cost that middle and lower income golfers could afford, much to the dismay of the makers of the feathery ball.

“There was a huge uprising when the new gutta percha ball came out, a lot of resistance by the older players because the new ball changed the game,” says Schreiner. “Old Tom Morris, who was a club and golf superintendent and a champion player, was one of the first designers of the feather balls. When the new balls came out, they would go 20-30 yards farther and make the courses outdated. Bunkers were no longer relevant because golfers could fly them.”

Like featheries, gutty balls had their liabilities. “They were the first real challenge to the game,” says Schreiner. “Wooden clubs were used so they would break more. They were not able to keep up with the hardness of the balls hence steel shafts evolved which provided more torque.”

Also, gutty balls became brittle and had a tendency to break up in cold weather and to become soft and not fly as far in extremely hot weather. Likewise, the ball often sustained major blemishes, chips or gouges and after repeated uses, they had to be repainted which created a whole separate industry: ball remaking.

Schreiner hopes to add yet another book to his collection in the not too distant future – one he plans to write himself. Bearing the title “The Heart of Every Hole: The Short Game of Golf,” Schreiner describes it as a thesis on the integrity of every hole.

“The last fortress golf architects have against the distance of golfers today is the greens; they’re the only thing that’s not changed and are the integrity of the course,” says Schreiner, who contends that distance makes a difference only for the better players or about one percent of all golfers. He also points out that a round of golf is designed for twice as many putts (36) as tee shots (18)..

The architect for nearly 30 courses including Falcon Ridge, Falcon Valley, Overland Park’s Westlinks, Winterstone and Prairie Highland in the Kansas City area, Schreiner is currently working on a course in Myrtle Beach with Nick Price and next year on Aug. 15, he’ll renovate all the greens at St. Andrews in Overland Park, Kan.

To preserve the integrity of his green, one of his trademarks is create a fair challenge of golfers. “We make them subtle, not severely sloped, just subtle enough there’s a challenge in reading them,” he says. “Greens are the representatives of all great courses. They should influence tee shots, getting the ball in position to attack the hole and then staying below the hole to lessen the break. Putting is a test of nerves.”

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