Man Played Golf On Moon
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The grey dust stretched out in every direction, silent and still, and the work was done. Two astronauts had spent hours planting instruments, gathering rocks and exploring the hills of Fra Mauro. Now, near the end of the final moonwalk, with a television camera watching and millions of people back on Earth looking up at their sets, the mission commander reached into his kit and produced something no checklist had ever carried to another world.
A golf club. Or at least, most of one.
The man holding it was Alan Shepard, and to understand why that little club mattered so much, you have to know what it cost him to be standing there at all. Ten years earlier he had been the first American in space. Then illness had taken flying away from him, and for most of a decade he had watched other men go to the Moon. The golf shot lasted only a few seconds. The comeback behind it took years.
Fifteen minutes that made him a hero
On 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard squeezed into a small capsule called Freedom 7 on top of a Redstone rocket in Florida. The flight lasted about fifteen minutes — up into space, in a great arc more than a hundred miles high, and back down into the Atlantic Ocean. He did not orbit the Earth. He barely had time to look around. But he was the first American in space, and the country treated him like a returning king.
Shepard was one of the Mercury Seven, the original group of American astronauts, and he seemed built for the job: a naval test pilot, cool under pressure, fiercely competitive. A longer Mercury flight was planned for him, and he was picked to command the first mission of the next programme, Gemini. His career was climbing as fast as his rockets.
Then his own body betrayed him.
The disease that stole the sky
In 1964, Shepard was grounded. Doctors had found the cause of the dizzy spells and nausea that had begun to trouble him: Ménière’s disease, a disorder of the inner ear. The inner ear is where the body keeps its balance, and for a pilot — a man whose life depends on knowing which way is up — an unreliable inner ear is a career-ending verdict. He was removed from flight status.
NASA gave him a desk instead. Shepard became chief of the Astronaut Office, the boss of the very men who were flying the missions he had dreamed of. Think about what that meant, day after day: training astronauts, approving plans, waving crews off to the launch pad, and then watching on television while somebody else got his sky. He stayed. He worked. He smiled for the cameras. But nobody who knew Alan Shepard believed he had accepted it.
An operation eventually offered hope. Surgeons corrected the problem in his inner ear, and in 1969 — five long years after he was grounded — Shepard was restored to full flight status. He was forty-five years old, an age when most astronauts of his generation were retiring. He wanted the Moon.
The oldest man on the Moon
Getting back on flight status was one thing. Getting a Moon mission was another. Shepard was first assigned to command Apollo 13, but NASA managers worried that his crew needed more training time, so they were moved back to Apollo 14. When Apollo 13 then suffered its famous in-flight emergency and never landed, Shepard’s delayed mission became the one that had to put America back on the lunar surface.
Apollo 14 launched on 31 January 1971. With Shepard were Edgar Mitchell, who would walk beside him on the Moon, and Stuart Roosa, who stayed in orbit in the command module. On 5 February, Shepard guided the lunar module Antares down to the Fra Mauro highlands — the target Apollo 13 had never reached — in what was praised as the most accurate landing of the whole Apollo programme.
Shepard was forty-seven years old. He was the fifth person ever to walk on the Moon, the oldest man to do it, and the only one of the Mercury Seven — the pioneers of 1959 — to get there. Across two moonwalks, he and Mitchell worked for more than nine hours on the surface and gathered about ninety-three pounds of lunar material. Every minute of it was the prize of a comeback almost nobody had expected.
And Shepard had brought a secret to celebrate it.
A club hidden in a sock
Shepard loved golf, and somewhere along the way he had begun to wonder how far a golf ball would fly in the Moon’s weak gravity, with no air to slow it down. So he had a plan made. A golf professional in Houston, Jack Harden, modified the head of a Wilson Staff six-iron so that it could be attached to the handle of a tool the astronauts carried for collecting emergency samples. The club head and two golf balls travelled to the Moon tucked inside one of Shepard’s tube socks.
Stories often call the club smuggled, and it is true that the public — and most of NASA — knew nothing about it. But honesty deserves a place here: Shepard did quietly ask permission. He put the idea to Bob Gilruth, the director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, who took some convincing. Shepard promised he would pay for the club and balls himself, and that he would only take his swings at the very end of the mission, once everything important had succeeded. Gilruth agreed. The secret was kept from nearly everyone else until the moment came.
Four swings in a spacesuit
At the end of the second moonwalk, on 6 February 1971, Shepard fitted the six-iron head to the sample tool handle and turned to the camera. He explained his problem with a grin in his voice: “Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can’t do this with two hands.”
A pressurised spacesuit fights every bend. His gloves were thick, his shoulders could barely turn, and the ball sat in loose dust scattered with rocks — golfers would call it the worst sand trap imaginable. Shepard swung one-handed.
The first swing mostly moved dust. The second caught the ball but sent it only a few feet sideways, which drew a joke from mission control about a slice. He swung again, and this time the first ball flew — into a nearby crater, as it turned out. Then he dropped the second ball, took his fourth swing, and connected properly. The little white speck sailed away out of the camera’s view, and Shepard delivered the line that has echoed ever since: “Miles and miles and miles.”
His partner joined in the fun. Edgar Mitchell grabbed a staff from one of the experiments and hurled it like a javelin. It landed in the same crater as Shepard’s first ball. Then the two men climbed back into Antares, and the world’s strangest sports event was over.
The honest measurement: not miles at all
For fifty years, people guessed. The weak gravity and empty sky made wild numbers sound possible, and Shepard himself later estimated that his best shot might have carried about two hundred yards. It was a good story, and nobody could prove otherwise — the balls were too small for any camera in orbit to spot.
Then, for the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 14 in 2021, imaging specialist Andy Saunders took a fresh look. Using high-resolution scans of the astronauts’ original photographs, enhanced and stitched together, he managed to find both balls and even one of Shepard’s divots, and measure the distances properly. The first ball had travelled about twenty-four yards. The second, the famous one, about forty yards.
Forty yards. On a normal golf course, that is a gentle chip onto the green. But I would argue the truth makes the moment better, not worse. A forty-seven-year-old man, sealed inside a stiff suit that would not let him use both hands, swinging a tool handle with a club head tied to it, standing in dust no human had touched a decade earlier — of course the ball went forty yards. The wonder was never the distance. The wonder was that the game happened at all.
Where the club is now
The golf balls never came home, but the club did. In 1974, at the U.S. Open at Winged Foot, Shepard donated it to the United States Golf Association. It remains on display at the USGA Golf Museum and Library in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, where visitors can see the most travelled golf club in existence. A replica of the club, along with Shepard’s famous tube sock, is displayed at the World Golf Hall of Fame in North Carolina.
Shepard retired from NASA and the Navy in 1974 as a rear admiral, and he died in 1998. Of all the Mercury Seven, he alone stood on the Moon. And near the landing site at Fra Mauro, undisturbed in the grey dust exactly where they fell in 1971, two small white golf balls are still sitting there — the trophies of a man who lost the sky, refused to accept it, and won it back.
Common questions
Who was the first person to play golf on the Moon? Alan Shepard, commander of Apollo 14. On 6 February 1971, near the end of his second moonwalk, he hit two golf balls using a Wilson Staff six-iron head attached to the handle of a lunar sampling tool. Nobody had played golf on another world before, and nobody has since.
How far did Shepard’s golf balls actually go? Not nearly as far as his joking claim of “miles and miles and miles.” For decades the distance was guessed at, but in 2021 imaging specialist Andy Saunders analysed enhanced Apollo 14 photographs and located both balls: the first travelled about 24 yards, and the second about 40 yards.
Why did Shepard swing the club with one hand? His pressurised spacesuit was too stiff for a normal two-handed swing. The suit resisted bending, his gloves were thick, and he could hardly turn his shoulders, so he held the improvised club in one hand and swung that way — and still had to take four swings to hit two balls well.
Was Alan Shepard really grounded before Apollo 14? Yes. In 1964 he was grounded because of Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that caused dizziness and nausea. He spent years running the Astronaut Office while others flew. Corrective surgery fixed the problem, and he was restored to full flight status in 1969.
Where is the Moon golf club today? The club is on display at the USGA Golf Museum and Library in Liberty Corner, New Jersey. Shepard donated it to the United States Golf Association at the 1974 U.S. Open. The two golf balls remain on the Moon at the Apollo 14 landing site in the Fra Mauro highlands.
