December 31, 2009

Two more inches of snow last night.  It's lovely, but the prospect of playing any golf before the end of the Christmas holidays is receding into a white oblivion. My garage apartment is full of vintage irons and persimmon woods that I have been collecting at a frightening pace since last October when I first caught this virus..

Why does a person decide to make a difficult game even harder by switching to blades from his Taylormade Burner 2009 irons that are 1 inch overlength to go with their souped up lofts such that even a 57 year old can hit irons of prodigious length? (This is, of course, one those many relative terms in golf.) Not only have I switched to blades, but I have switched to OLD blades. With old, heavy shafts with weird labels I have never seen. Maybe I saw them when I played high school golf in the late 60s but I have long since forgotten. Wait!  There's more.  I am also using persimmon woods again.  Most of my golf through the fall was played with Honma persimmons made in the 90s sometime and yes, I admit, they do have graphite shafts.  So calling myself a vintage steel golfer is already stretching the truth.

So why does a golfer who is routinely made fun of  (or held in contempt) for collecting all the latest golf clubs suddenly sell all of these modern instruments of torture and go back to the golfing equivalent of the Middle Ages? Damned if I know. One day in October I just got weary of trying to hit the longest drives of my life and decided to play a round or two with a persimmon driver and 4 wood that I had in my stash. Guess what?  It was really, really fun.  The next step in this downward spiral was purchasing a set of late eighties Wilson Gooseneck blades. The deities of the golfing universe, not surprisingly, allowed me to play one very special round with these irons on a beautiful autumn afternoon.  The round culminated with a perfectly struck 2 iron (God, do they still make 2 irons!) of the 18th tee that went about 230 yards (much of it roll). I was hooked.

Sometime between then and now, I have purchased a ridiculous number of vintage irons sets (I will post pictures as I start playing them) and some old and not so old persimmon woods. I even bought a really nice, and really counterfeit, "Texas Classic" driver that I thought was one of the famous Texas soleplate drivers done by the Wood Bros. of Texas.  But that's another story I'll save for later.

So here's the plan.  Play a full year of golf with vintage blades and persimmon woods. Compare my scores with those I have had over the last couple of years with the latest technology.  Try my best to show that technology is worthless hype compared to the feel of a pured forged blade or the funny non-sound of the ball coming off my persimmon driver. Try really hard to keep my index as close as I can to what it was when I started (3.8).

To make it interesting, I will play in my club championship with these old clubs (I never win anyway), and take a set to Scotland with me in July when some friends are joining me after the Open Championship for two much-anticipated weeks of links golf. So yes, there must be a picture in here sometime of me teeing off the 1st hole at the Old Course or Royal Dornoch (or both, Lord willing) with my persimmon driver.

I also want to do some head to head testing of different clubs, including comparing old and new technology- I kept my shortened Taylormade R9 driver and Cleveland Launcher 4 wood and Srixon hybrid to use for these tests. Or, wait, maybe they are psychological crutches, just in case I get discouraged? I'll leave that to Don, the psychologist in our group, to figure out. I'll introduce you to the great friends that I play golf with and talk about why I love the game and try and convince you to join me in trying out some vintage steel sticks and sharing your experiences and stories here.  I'll show you pictures of my clubs as I put new sets into the bag and report the results.
Happy 2010.

Next: What exactly is a vintage steel club?  Or, are there any rules to this game?