Golf Clubs

(The below is taken almost verbatim from a recent e-mail to my particular friend Fred, because I am lazy.)

I have been thinking a lot lately about modern v. traditional, with regards to golf. I clearly prefer the traditional, natural links courses over the modern American over-watered, paved-cartpath strip mall courses. My recent thoughts have been to clubs, and if I should revert to my beloved collection of persimmon woods.

There was a time that I actually played with hickory-shafted clubs, circa 1910s-20s.
Although giving up dozens of yards on every shot, I played with a sense of appreciation of the past (and, I confess, a deeper appreciation of my self for appreciating the past).

I graduated from those clubs to a set of ca. 1930s steel-shafted Bobby Jones clubs. (Although R.T. Jones, Jr. never used steel shafts, the sets of clubs bearing his moniker had his seal of approval.)

From there I went briefly through a set of cast (not forged), perimeter-weighted, offset, oversized King Kobra irons. I was using these when I first met and worked with Duncan McCallum, my Scottish golf pro who worked at the (now defunct) driving range in Mission Bay. Duncan used beautiful forged Ben Hogan irons, which I loved. Justin Leonard, whose career I was following after his improbable come-from-behind Open Championship win at Royal Troon, also played Hogan blades.

Blades (irons made from forged-not cast-steel) are as notorious for their accuracy as they are for their lack of forgiveness for even slightly mis-hit shots. (If you’re ever in the clubhouse at Pebble Beach, which is a public building on a municipal course, you can see a glass case with one of Gene Sarazen’s original sand wedges. There is a visibly worn circle, right in the middle of the sweet spot. A woman asked Sarazen why he had sanded down the middle of the face of the club, to which he responded that he hadn’t, that was the result of hitting so many balls there. She refused to believe that EVERY shot it exactly in the same place. But that’s why he was a professional golfer. And she was not. But I digress.) I was not ready for forged irons, but I found a cheap set of used Hogan blades and have used them ever since.

At the same time, I got three persimmon Hogan woods (1, 3, 5). I used those for years and years, but over the last few years I have phased them out in favor of metalwoods. For the most part, my metalwoods have been very traditional looking (if not sounding), based on the standard dimensions of wood clubs. My latest club is a new Hogan driver, which is not obscenely, space-agely large, but it is slightly outside my comfort zone. This club has perhaps made me re-think my decision to abandon the persimmon.

I also recently added a matched set of hybrids, which I greatly love. Hybrids became fairly big about five or so years ago.

As you are no doubt aware, golf manufacturers are always looking for the next big thing to foist off (at grossly overblown prices) to their desperate consumers dying to improve their game. About 15 years ago, the latest wave were the Adams Tight Lies fairway woods (metals), which offered long and accurate shots from good lies in the fairway. Soon after, there were dozens of replicas flooding the market.

The Tight Lies revolutionized the average player’s conception that fairway woods were impossible to hit, instead fostering the belief that fairway woods were much easier to hit reliably than the hated long irons. This thought process has now been taken to a (logical) next step, the development of the hybrid sets. Adams again is leading the charge. In their flagship A4 set, the low irons/wedges have a fairly typical modern look, not unlike other wedges and low irons on the market. (The high loft of these clubs make them fairly straightforward for the average golfer to hit reliably.) As the clubs get longer, they morph more into the fairway metal look, so when you get down to the 3-iron, it is essentially a small version of the Tight Lies. The wide, rounded body distributes the center of gravity and allows for the forgiveness of the fairway metals. In between, there is a series of clubs, not unlike the old illustration depicting evolution: ape to man. Each descending club is a little bit less like the wedge and a little bit more like the fairway metal. The end result – the hybrids – look almost identical to the original hickory-shafted, long-nosed woods used in the 17th and 18th centuries in Scotland.

It’s come full-circle.

My golf links

For at least five years, I've daydreamed about making my own golf course. It would (naturally), be a links (or, at least, links-style) course. Ideally, it would be walking distance from my house, and open to me whenever I wanted to play.

There's an obscure sub-genre of golf called pasture golf, which takes on some of the tenets of the fabled Scottish shepherds who allegedly invented golf: take the land as you find it, add a hole, and get the ball into the hole in as few strokes as possible. Fortunately for the Scottish shepherds, their fields were beautiful, rolling linksland. Unfortunately for most Midwestern pasture golfers, their fields are dry, dusty, flat-as-a-pancake hayfields. So, that's a bit of a loss.

There's a vacant lot I pass every day, twice a day, on my train to work. It's, oh, I don't know, 100 yards wide and maybe 300 yards long. There are pipes sticking up here and there, and it's very hilly, overgrown with native grasses and weeds. For years I've envisioned a course laid out on that property. Here's how it would work:



A green in every corner, with tee boxes on either side. From each tee box, you could play to the three other greens (blue lines). This, essentially, makes a 24-hole course over a very small area. The down side is that every hole criss-crosses every other hole, making play by more than one or two groups extremely dangerous.

But, the good side: no waits on the tees.


The ultimate, of course, would be to do this on a patch of linksy ground near a large body of water. Lake Michigan, while not an ocean, has proven itself worthy of passing for one with the much-vaunted Whistling Straits just up the road apiece.



And I've found a stretch of undeveloped (or, at least, at-one-time-developed-but-now-apparently-abandoned) land on the shores of Lake Michigan, just south of Chicago:

View Larger Map
I'd love to take that piece of land and turn it into a links-style course on the edge of the lake.

It is not big enough for a regulation course, I think (although 9 holes would probably fit quite well). And I wouldn't have $300 greens fees, either, to play there. It would be a private club, for members only, but the membership dues would only be enough to cover the expense of maintaining the course (most of which would be done by sheep, anyway). No, the exclusivity would be based upon the golfer's appreciation of links golf. You'd have to write an essay to join. And you'd have to convince the committee (the committee would be me) that you are a true links lover. No carts. No cart paths. No beer girls. No clubhouse and grille.

Just golf.

Leaving that for the moment in the pie-in-the-sky dreamland where it belongs, I do so happen to have a big vacant lot/flood overflow basin just down the hill from me, a two minute walk. Driving past it this morning, I see it's all dirt and knee-high weeds. I doubt there's a square foot of what you could describe as "fairway" turf on the entire property. But, on the plus side, it's THERE.

I'd guess at it's longest diagonal it's maybe 130, 140 yards. Which is long enough to practice a short game. I may just head down there this weekend with a bag of grass seed and a spade. I'll stick in a couple of holes, seed around a few spots, and wait.

Maybe my personal golf links is closer than I think.

Askernish

My particular friend Fred recently asked me if I had read the article about the newly-rediscovered Askernish golf course in the April 20th New Yorker magazine.

(Two side notes: a) he didn't so much ask as say "I presume you read . . ." I'd like to be cool enough to read the New Yorker, but b) Have you seen the New Yorker? Every article is like 15 pages long. Dense, typewritten pages. And it comes out every week. I just don't think I have the time to keep up with that much text.)

I finally - after much wailing and gnashing of teeth - secured a copy of the magazine in question, and . . . wow. I went from an apathetic "meh, my golf trip is never going to happen, so what?" to "oh-my-god-I-have-to-plan-every-detail-about-my-trip-right-this-second".

A well-written article, it follows the uncovering of a Tom Morris gem on the tiny island of South Uist (off the west coast of Scotland), which seems to be everything I would want in the a golf course: original, natural, as-you-found-it linksland. I'm smitten.

Completely.

So, it's gotten the juices flowing, and once again I'm dying to set off on my adventure. Over the last couple of days, I've been researching the kind of old-school, true links courses I want to play. Askernish is, of course, the top of that list. And Machrihanish has never left the list. But, just like last summer when I was planning this trip, more and more times I find a Scottish course I want to play, it turns out to be in Ireland.

One other thing I had forgotten is my home-base/cottage idea. A stroke of genius, that. So, here's my new plan:

Fly into Dublin (or Belfast, if that's cheaper). the home-base for the first week is County Donegal, which is on the northwest coast of Ireland. There are a heaping handful of courses to play there: Connemara, Carne, Rosapenna, Ballyliffin, Nairn&Portnoo . . . the list goes on and on. Home base in a cottage in County Donegal, equidistant from all courses.

Then a drive over to the east coast to play Ardglass, which is technichally in Northern Ireland, but a not-to-be-missed course nonetheless. Then a quick pop up the coast to Larne, where we catch the ferry to Troon, in western Scotland.

From here, it's a series of bed-and-breakfasts as we hit Machrihanish, on the Mull of Kintyre, from where there is another ferry to the island of South Uist, on which lies the aforementioned Askernish.

After that? Maybe a drive down the west coast to Glasgow to see the sights and then across the M8 to Edinburgh. I think the trip culminates on the east coast of Scotland, with a late afternoon round at St Andrews. It seems silly to go all that way and not see the Home of Golf. And, while playing the Old Course typically requires a papal injunction, from everything I've read, that typically applies to a foursome, trying to book on a specific day, in the morning, in high season. I have read in multple places that a single can sign up in the morning and it is rare indeed that he does not make it out that afternoon. I'll take my chances.

The down side to this plan is that for any non-golfers in attendance, that first week is relatively uneventful. Across the country from Dublin, the most interesting non-golfing attraction is the potato famine museum. Which, you know, sounds thrilling and all . . .

Maybe I should go for a week, and then meet up with the others for a week or two? That way I get some unencumbered golf, and then we can do the more touristy parts of Scotland together? Hmmmmm.