A towel that lives in a bag has a harder life than any other towel in the house. It gets wet with dew, wiped across metal, dropped on the ground, used on soil and grass, then folded damp and shut in the dark until the next time. After a season of that it is stiff, thin in two or three places, gray along one edge, and it smells like the inside of the bag. None of that is mysterious. Each symptom has a separate cause, and the cloth itself tells you which is which.
What The Cloth Is Made Of
Most of these towels are terry, which is a construction rather than a type of fiber. A terry cloth has a ground weave holding it together and a second set of warp yarns fed in loosely, so that it rises off the surface in loops. The loops are the working part. The ground weave is only what keeps them attached.
Absorbency comes from the spaces between the loops rather than from the cotton itself. Cotton fiber does take up water, but most of what a towel holds is water sitting in the capillary channels between fibers and between loops. More loop surface means more channel, which is why a thick terry holds several times its own weight.
The loop structure has a drawback in exposure. Every loop is an arch with an opening under it, and anything smaller than that opening can get inside. A flat woven cloth has nowhere for a particle to go except the surface. A looped cloth has a honeycomb of small cavities, and a particle that falls into one is effectively held.
Some towels use a waffle weave or a microfiber knit instead, and both change the arithmetic. A waffle has larger, shallower pockets that release grit more easily. Microfiber has very fine filaments that take up oil well and hold grit between them stubbornly. A golf towel is usually terry, and terry is the worst of the three for grit.
Why Grit Cuts From The Inside
Sand, soil and crushed grass are harder than cotton. Quartz grains in particular are far harder than cellulose, and they have sharp edges. When they settle into the valleys between loops they are surrounded by fiber on every side and pressed against it whenever the cloth is squeezed or folded.
Flexing is what does the damage. Each time the towel is wrung, rubbed or bent, the loops move and the particle trapped under them gets dragged across fiber surfaces. Cotton fibers are strong in tension and poor against a cutting edge, so they part. The break usually happens at the base of a loop, where the movement is greatest.
A loop with one cut leg pulls out the first time something catches it. Lose enough loops in one area and the ground weave is exposed, which is the thin, slightly shiny bald patch that shows up on an old towel. The cloth has not worn away evenly. It has been cut from inside and then had the pieces pulled out.
Which is why shaking a towel out does less than it feels like it does. The loops close over the particles and gravity cannot get them back out past the arch. What does work is volume of water and movement, a drum with room to tumble, so the cloth opens and flexes repeatedly in water that can carry the grit out with the drain.
There is a second reason to care about it. A towel with grit in it is an abrasive cloth, so wiping a club face or a shaft with it drags those same particles across metal. Rinsing a towel under a tap before it goes back in the bag takes out the loose fraction, which is the part most likely to end up somewhere it does harm.
Where The Smell Actually Comes From
The towel goes back into the bag wet, folded, and loaded with plant material. Grass clippings, soil and leaf fragments are organic matter, and wet organic matter in a dark enclosed space begins to break down. Breaking down produces volatile compounds, and volatile compounds are what a smell is made of.
The cloth is an excellent host for that process because it holds water for so long. A folded towel dries from the outside in, and the inner folds can stay damp for days in a closed bag. Cotton also holds moisture inside the fiber itself, so even a towel that feels dry on the surface may not be dry in the middle.
The odor compounds then dissolve into the moisture in the fiber and stay there. That is why a short cold wash often does not fix it. The smell is not sitting on the surface waiting to be rinsed off, it is distributed through the fiber, and getting it out needs the fiber thoroughly wetted with warm water and detergent and then rinsed properly.
Prevention is simpler than cure and it is mostly about drying. A towel hung loose and open dries from its whole surface at once instead of from the edges inward. A towel spread over a rail will be dry in a few hours. The same towel folded into four inside a bag may not dry at all before the next time it is needed.
Grease And Grass Want Opposite Things
Club grease is a mineral oil, which means a hydrocarbon with no polar groups on it. Water cannot grip it, because water bonds to things that will bond back and a hydrocarbon will not. That is why a gray oily smear on a towel survives a cold wash untouched and very often survives a warm one as well.
What it needs is a surfactant and some warmth. Warmth thins the oil so it can move, and the surfactant surrounds it and holds it in suspension until the rinse takes it away. Detergent worked straight into the smear before the wash gives the surfactant time to reach the oil already wrapped around the fibers.
Grass is a completely different problem. The green is chlorophyll, a plant pigment, and it arrives with plant proteins and sugars attached to it. A pigment lodged in cellulose behaves like a dye, and it responds to oxygen bleach and to the enzymes in most detergents, neither of which does anything at all to mineral oil.
The two also disagree about temperature. Warm water helps oil. Hot water sets the protein in a grass stain and makes the green harder to shift, in the same way heat sets any protein. So the useful order is detergent on the oil, enzymes and a moderate temperature on the grass, and no hot water on either one until you know which you have.
The Grommet Wears Its Surroundings
A grommet is a metal ring set through a cut hole, and it exists so the towel can hang from something. The hole is the weak part. Cutting a hole in woven cloth leaves cut yarn ends with nothing holding them but the ring itself, so load that would normally spread across the whole cloth is carried by a handful of yarns at a rim.
Metal and cloth also move differently. The ring is rigid and the fabric around it flexes, so every pull creates a shearing line exactly at the boundary. Over a season that line goes fuzzy, then thin, then opens as a tear radiating outward from the hole. The grommet is usually still perfect when the cloth beside it gives up.
In a machine the ring becomes a hard object in a drum full of soft ones. It knocks against the cloth around it and against everything else in the load, which is both a problem for the towel and a reason to think about what it gets washed with. A mesh bag keeps the metal from beating on anything, including itself.
Heat is the other consideration. Metal warms faster than cotton and holds that warmth, so the cloth touching the ring dries first and keeps drying after the rest of the towel is done. Over many cycles that band of fabric gets dry and brittle while the rest stays sound, which is one more reason a low dryer setting outlasts a hot one.
Golf Towel Care In Rockville
Rockville weather at this time of year works against a towel in a specific way. Cool damp mornings mean more dew on the grass, so the cloth comes home wetter than it would in summer, and cool air means it dries more slowly once it is home. Wetter going in and slower drying out is the combination that produces a stale smell.
Most towels also get put away for the season about now, and that is the moment they are most likely to be stored damp. A towel folded into a bag in a cold garage stays damp for weeks, and cotton left wet for weeks weakens along the folds. Washing it and drying it all the way through before it is stored is worth more than any treatment later.
A towel like this also does better in a load of its own than mixed in with ordinary laundry, because the grit and the oil both move around in the water. WaveMAX Rockville, at 180 Rollins Ave, has a choice of machine sizes, so a small load of bag towels can be run without using a drum meant for bedding.
A Load Of Its Own
Grit leaves a towel in the water, not in the air, so it wants a drum with room to tumble and a generous rinse. Running towels like these on their own also keeps the grit and the oil out of everything else, and a choice of machine sizes means a small load does not need a large drum.
The machines at our self-service laundry on Rollins Avenue come in sizes that suit a small, heavily soiled load, which is what bag towels are, and the extra water lets the loops open and flex so trapped grit can leave with the drain instead of staying down in the pile.
Our machines and the store are cleaned daily.
Nou wash-dry-fold service covers the everyday laundry.
For general guidance, The American Cleaning Institute publishes a laundry basics guide that is a useful cross-check.
The short version
Terry is loops, and loops trap grit that is harder than cotton. Flexing drags those particles across the fibers until the loops are cut at the base and pull out, which is the thin bald patch on an old towel. Volume of water removes grit better than shaking ever will. Mineral oil from a club needs detergent and warmth, grass needs enzymes and no hot water, and the grommet wears the cloth around it rather than itself.
WaveMAX Rockville is at 180 Rollins Ave, easy to reach from Rockville and the surrounding area. If you have a load that will not fit at home, call us at 240-444-1350.