A golf club that may be the world’s oldest will be sold this weekend in the US, with observers expecting it to realise millions of dollars.
The iron club was made around 1500.
It will be sold on Sunday night, November 17 at Golden Age auctions.
An opening bid of $5,000 was demanded. The club is currently valued at $22,000 by one bidder. Expert observers expect it to go much higher.
But how does one prove that a piece of wood and metal is actually a golf club?
In the case of this example, it’s with a 100,000-word report by gold historian Jeff Ellis.
Ellis describes the club as “a monumental discovery”.
That discovery was made in the 1990s, when the club was sold at a Scottish auction house for what Ellis says is a “relatively small amount”.
He said: “Nobody in the room knew what to make of it, me included.
“The auction catalog … had a low estimate for the lot and no accompanying image. At the time, I did not understand what I was looking at, so I passed on the iron.”
It was sold and then picked up by an American collector in 2001 for a considerably larger sum.
The Troon Clubs at the British Golf Museum. They were discovered in 1898 and probably date back to the 1740s or 50s. Image courtesy of BGM.
He allowed Ellis to study it in depth, including taking X-ray images of the metal blade.
Ellis believes that differences between this club and others previously believed to be among the oldest ever made are because this one is older.
Golf can be dated back to 1457, when James II of Scotland banned it (along with football) in order to keep young lads at their archery practice on Sundays.
It is probably descended from earlier sports that may have been picked up by Scottish soldiers in France. In Scotland the game developed on its own path and became the pastime that players, fans and collectors now spends billions on every year.
The Troon Clubs are currently believed to be the oldest surviving golf clubs. They probably date from around the mid-18th century. Marks on the clubs suggest they were owned by Jacobite sympathisers, who supported the “Pretender” claim to the English throne of Charles Stuart. That might be why they were hidden away so well for so long.
This club is much older according to Ellis. And less complete, with just a stub of its wooden handle attachced to the iron blade.
Valuing such clubs is hard. There is no direct comparison. The most recent sale of anything like this club was of a square-toe iron sold in 1994 for $1.9 million.
Golf collecting is a valuable business. Fans of the game include some of the wealthiest men in the world.
Golf collectors will be watching this sale as closely as any final approach shot as it will set a mark for any similar items that are discovered.
And such discoveries are possible. Golf was relatively widely played in its Scottish heartlands, and metal clubs are easily robust enough to last centuries while being all too easy to miss or misidentify.
