Clubs, Swings, & Tips

THE GOLFER OF EARLIER TIMES assembled his bag of unmatched, individually-made clubs one by one over a period of years. If completed, this process of elimination provided him with a playset of clubs that were deemed the ideal weapons to do battle against bogey. He was not without superstitions about these individual clubs and their powers and often gave them names. Representing earlier generations of players, Gene Sarazen’s autobiography shows him to be inseparable from certain clubs. He mentions his well-known invention of the sand wedge and his abiding affection for his jigger, a shorter, shallow-bladed club with the loft of a mid-iron: “My old jigger was the most responsive club I ever owned.” Sarazen tells fellow players: Get on intimate terms with your clubs, so that none of them are strangers to you. Maybe you’re carrying too many. I think a principal reason why we developed such solid shot-makers in the early days was that golfers played with only eight or nine clubs and got to know them all. When I won my third PGA title, I had five or six irons in my bag, no more. Any club that cut into my confidence I threw out. Whenever I pulled a club out during that tournament, I knew I was working with an old friend. “Here’s an old fellow I know,” I would feel as I gripped my mashie, for example. “I’ve had a lot of dealings with him. I can depend on this fellow.” During a recent golf telecast, Byron Nelson talked about the six iron of his early days on the tour. It was called a spade mashie then. He said he had a whole bag of shots with it ranging from an opened-face cut shot from 130 yards out, to a closed-face low hook from three-iron distance. It was his favorite club, and he used it so much that the other pros began calling him “Spade Nelson.” At my home course, Chandler Park, there was an older playerperhaps he was in his early sixties but to us boys he seemed ancientwe called “Captain Jigger.” He drove, played his mid-iron shots, chipped, and putted with his jigger. He became our hero instantly and received his nickname when he beat a pro with only his jigger. The driving-range pro, having just finished tenth in the Michigan Open, showed up at the course a few days later dressed to kill, and challenged that he would play the best ball of any two of us. Stunned and intimidated, we stood mutely by when the old man quietly replied to the pro, “I’ll play you with one club alone, my jigger, for one hundred dollars. My only condition, I win all ties.” The pro had left himself no room for retreat. He started off well and was three up at the end of four, winning the first, a long par four, and the third and fourth, par fives. He then lost the fifth through eleventh holes to Captain Jigger’s successive pars for ties. A birdie at the par-five twelfth did little to save the pro, as Captain Jigger parred the thirteenth and fourteenth for a victory. Many contemporary players annually change their clubs, like a ritual of purification and renewal. It is not uncommon to meet players who exchange individual clubs and sets of clubs throughout the playing season. After a poor round, disheartened players regularly stomp into the pro shop and buy a new set, as if this will end the curse upon them. Ironically, yet gratefully, we called one of our members “Mr. Clubs.” After nearly every round that he shot above his sixteenhandicap, he went directly from the eighteenth green, where he signed our caddie cards, to the pro shop. There he picked out a new club or two (usually a driver, often a putter, and occasionally a wedge) before joining his friends at the grill. More than once, an assistant pro told us, he even bought a putter or driver identical to the one he had traded in just months before. I remember once how he even left the driving range in the middle of a miserable practice session, only to return minutes later with a brand new set of clubs to finish hitting his bucket of balls. Frequently, the pro shop sold us the clubs he traded in. We were thankful to have them, even though for our first round or two, we superstitiously feared that they carried the curse of “Mr. Clubs.” I even had one of his clubs regripped to remove his curse from the club. Whether they regularly buy new clubs, or stick for decades with their old clubs, few golfers resist treating their clubs as magic wands. Even the most skeptical of golfers believes that some sort of special magic resides in his clubs. In any player’s bag, he or she has one or two clubs that are really cherished (usually a driver, putter, wedge, or sand wedge, although sometimes it is the odd wood or iron). This favorite club, which may have been in his bag as long as he has played the game, has special powers for the player. It may have been given to him by his father; he may have won it as a youth in a skins game; he may have given it, in the home vise, an odd bend or twist years before; he may have won his first major victory with it; or, having developed a special trust for a club, like a putter or wedge used since childhood, he may be unable to conceive of playing without it. Bobby Jones thought special powers resided in his “Calamity Jane” putter. Jim Braid, five-time British Open Champion, was identified with his brassie. There was the magic of Walter Travis’s Schenectady putter, a center-shafted oddity borrowed on the very eve of his 1904 British Amateur victory. And most magic of all, for a single shot struck by it, was Gene Sarazen’s four wooda new model called the Turfrider, that had a hollowed-back solewhich he used to hole out his 235-yard second shot on the par-five fifteenth for a double-eagle two. Thus forcing a tie, he went on to win the tournament in a playoff. Wherever this four wood is now, it must still resonate with the powers of that shot made sixty-plus years ago. When a player develops a special attachment to a club, he feels bonded to it like an old friend. He trusts it to do what no other club can do. He feels personally betrayed by it (or as if he has betrayed it) when he strikes a bad shot with it. The loss of such a cherished club by theft, by an unthinking and hurried trade, or losing it by carelessly forgetting it on the course, can damage a player’s game, leaving him lacking in confidence until that particular club or its equal is found. More than one player traces his decline as a golfer to the loss of a club, especially his cherished putter. And there are cases of a recovered club being responsible for a recovered game. Even though I have not yet come across a golfer’s will in which he declares the disposition of his clubs, I am confident such wills must exist. Players don’t want the wrong person to inherit their clubs, as if the wrong swing would betray the grace of his woods and irons. As concerned as the Japanese Samurai is about the proper transmission of his family sword, so the player wishes that his clubs pass into kindred hands. If the player has clubs he trusts, he has other clubs of which he is wary. I had two such clubs, a nine iron I called “Shit Face” and a two iron I called “Mean-Son-of-a-Bitch.” They were both capable of powerfully good and terribly bad shots. No club is as dangerous as a fickle one that can hit wonderful shot after wonderful shot, only to betray the player to disaster when he is most counting on the club. Sometimes a single heinous shot can totally destroy a player’s relationship with a club, and the club will likely end its days rusting in a basement or garage, never to be played again. Nicknames are common for favorite clubs. I, for instance, have christened as “Big Pete” an unidentifiable fifty-year-old, fifteendollar, sand wedge. I know of no wedge as heavy, as good out of heather rough and seaside sand, and as capable of stopping a ball on the hardest surface. And I often talk to it, both before and after shots. Every good player is in love with a club or two. I’ve read of a British champion who called his three clubs “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Charity.” I recently met an old Royal North Devon player and clubmaker who told me to name every club in my bag. “Swing ‘em and play to their name. That’s the secret,” he confided to me. “Take your time naming them,” he continued. “Name them only when you know the best shots which fly from them.” Then, as if in a trance, he took a club slowly from one of the many bags in his cluttered workshop and uttered the club’s name. It was “Low Runner,” I recollect, and he repeated “Low Runner” once softly in advance of his swing, again as he waved it over an imaginary ball, and then again as he gently stroked the club past the pretend ball. As he put the club gently back in the bag, he said, “Name it. Swing to its name.” Then he added, “Your clubs must be your friends.”