TEE TIME ON THE MOON

A historical anecdote that tees off on readers who think that scientists are invariably serious people.

The 1971 Apollo 14 mission, the third to land on the moon, had tasks and experiments aplenty lined up, but, as they say, all work and no play…. So along the way, Alan Shepard Jr. pulled two golf balls out of one of his spacesuit pockets, attached a golf club head (a 6-iron, for the curious) to the rock scoop used to collect samples, and let fly. As moon suits of the day didn’t allow him to look down at his feet, it didn’t go well, but he did get one solid whack…which, according to a measurement made 50 years later by Andy Saunders, a photographer on Earth, went all of 120 feet. As Kelly drolly notes, “Saunders calculated that a good golfer could hit a ball over three miles” on a lunar course. Sure, but (as he doesn’t mention) all these years later, it’s still a record distance. The author adds plenty of carefully researched detail to a story that is usually barely mentioned in histories, if at all, and, at the end, a very helpful overview of every Apollo mission and what it accomplished. Being as the balls were hit in a vacuum, the sound effects (“POW!”) that Fotheringham adds to his painted scenes of figures in heavy suits lumbering over rocky moonscapes are a misleading but minor shank. Everyone in view is White until a final glimpse of a dark-skinned earthly golfer. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

More stunt than highlight, but this “eagle” does land.