FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Since Allan Robertson apprenticed a young Old Tom Morris in his golf shop at St Andrews in 1839, manufacturers have trotted out various materials to sell us clubs. Timbers such as beech, hornbeam, hickory and persimmon gave way to steel, graphite, chrome and carbon fibre.
In 1985, Santa gave me a Ping 5-iron made of beryllium, a copper used to make “nuclear weapons and reactors, missile parts, rocket propellants, navigational
