Golf Central

On this day in 1971, at the end of the second successful moonwalk of the Apollo 14 space mission, US Navy Captain Alan B. Shepard became the only person (to our knowledge) to hit a golf ball on the moon.

Conspiracy theorists, internet wackos, and all sorts will say that Shepard was never even on the moon at all, let alone crushing a golf ball for "miles and miles and miles" with a 6-iron that he smuggled onboard the spacecraft inside his space suit. Let's just say that modern-day big-hitters like JB Holmes and Tiger Woods couldn't hit one quite as far as Capt. Shepard muscled up on his 6-iron, many moons away. We like the story just the way it is ...

For the record, the official history books say that Shepard, the commander of Apollo 14 (the crew following in the moon-boots of the ill-fated Apollo 13 lot), fashioned a makeshift club with the head of a 6-iron head to a shaft and before the lunar module took off back to Earth, our bold astronaut had a couple of one-handed cracks in his bulky space suit ... three in fact. The abbreviated transcript of Shepard's golf shots on the moon:

• Shepard: I have a little white pellet that's familiar to millions of Americans. I'll drop it down. Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can't do this with two hands, but I'm going to try a little sand-trap shot here. ... Got more dirt than ball. Here we go again ...
• Fred Haise (lunar module pilot): That looked like a slice to me, Al.
• Shepard: Here we go. Straight as a die ... one more. ... Miles and miles and miles.
• Haise: Very good, Al.

For all you lunar-tics out there, if you want to read the whole transcript and view videos of Shepard's moonshots, you can check out the official NASA site; for the rest of us, well, we're satisfied with sturdy actor Scott Glenn's "stellar" performance as Shepard in The Right Stuff (1983), and with the idea of "Wow! How cool would that be ...?" Have dreams about it tonight ...

(Sometimes the imagination is a lot better than Tiger Woods saying, "3-wood to the right rough, little wedge to the front of the green, made that from 20." And anyway, only Shepard knows the truth and he took it with him back on Earth in 1998, where he died, as a retired real admiral, in all places, Pebble Beach).

On a more blue note, today was a downer in the '50s in Britain for a couple of reasons: Because it was on this day in 1952 that King George VI died in sleep at age 56, and in 1958, seven Manchester United players were killed amongst 14 others in a plane crash in Munich. And we're a "high-brow" site here at IGWT (and when we say "high-brow" we mean in the style of AP Herbert, who said: "A high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso"), so that's all we're saying about it, full stop, except for that it was sad day for football ... If anybody has anything else to say about it, please say it somewhere else.

But if you want a couple of laughs, just remember that it's Quchjaj qoSlIj!, as they say in the Klingon language (in memory of Alan Shepard) to Rick Astley (42), the little ginger fella who swallowed a megaphone and made a worldwide mega-hit in '87 with Never Gonna Give You Up; and to Axl Rose, the singer of Guns N' Roses, and if you really want to have a giggle, just think about Axl trying to wriggle his way out of his spandex trousers at age 46. Gotcha.

This is normally the spot in which we commemorate one person whose birthday it would have been today, had not the vagaries of life interfered. But on February 6th we have an embarrassment of such riches, because today would have been a birthday today for:

• Ronald Reagan (b. 1911), the 40th president of the United States, who as the years roll past becomes a strangely fond image of Republicans of yore, and who never knew what hit him when his call to the ultimate white house came in 2004;
• Eva Braun (b. 1912), Hitler's mistress-slash-wife, and we all know what happened to Eva down in the bunker in Berlin on 30th April 1945;
• Bob Marley (b. 1945), the Jamaican trendsetter of reggae and Rastafarian prophet, who was lost to us in '81 at the age of 36 because of an old soccer injury that turned into killer cancer;
• And for George Herman "Babe" Ruth (b. 1895), the greatest star in baseball history to this day, and who set all that great game's records on boatloads of bootleg whiskey, broads and cigarettes, only to have his records beaten by a steroid-gobbling cheat called Barry Bonds. The Babe played the last game of life in 1948.

Which reminds us, it's only 8 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 30 seconds until pitchers and catchers report to spring training to prepare for the 2008 baseball season. In Golf We Trust, but baseball keeps us alive ... 'Til tomorrow ...