There was a balata ball in my range bucket the other day. A Titleist. I wouldn’t have noticed it, except I always check the Titleists in my bucket and keep the Pro V1s.
This particular ball got me wondering. When was the last time I saw someone using a balata ball? Or hitting a persimmon driver? Or wearing metal spikes? These were all common sights for most of my golfing life, and now they’re gone.
The other side of the coin is this question? What replaced them? Balata balls, which good players could “work” and bad players could hook and slice, gave way to multilayer balls such as the Pro V1.