The Hickory Golfer

There are a lot of golf courses in play in Sarasota, but when it comes to hickory golfers one of the first places you should look at is the Bobby Jones Complex. Sarasota has loved golf since 1885 when John Hamilton Gillespie showed up in town with his Scottish sticks. Bobby Jones was attracted to the area in 1925 to help sell estates for George Adair’s Whitefield Estates. Sounds like a pretty good job. Jones got to play a lot of golf at the new Donald Ross Whitefield Estates Country Club and Sarasota took him in like their own son. So much so that when he won the British Open in 1926 the community leaders presented Jones with a 1926 Pierce-Arrow sedan.

Sometime around 1924 the city sold some land and with a bond issue commissioned Donald Ross to build an 18 hole municipal course. It was officially opened in the summer of 1926 but Jones did a dedication February 13, 1927. Years later when another 18 holes was added they named the two courses the American Course and the British Course with the American front and back nine named Merion and Interlachen and the British front and back named St Andrews and Hoylake for his 1930 Grand Slam victories.

So there are two courses here, well actually three if you include the executive course. If you want to play the Donald Ross course that was opened in 1926 just remember Paul Revere saying about the British and you’ll be fine. The British course is the quintessential Donald Ross course with turtle greens. The back nine of the American course has been referenced to Ross in a variety of places on the internet but not by the Donald Ross Society. Those holes definitely have a Ross look to them, but maybe it’s just that. I’ll let others decide in the comment section below as to the true architect.

So don’t be like me and say, “I want to play the Ross course” and let the starter send you off on the American Course. That said, you won’t be disappointed playing either course and the American Course is just fine. In fact, Ron Garl did such a good job on the front nine with it’s mounds and water that it reminds me of several Scottish courses I’ve played over the years. The fairways grass is thin requiring crisp contact and the greens are lightening fast. Play the ball below the hole or die (aka three putt). Don’t let the 5,992 yards fool you into this is an easy course. You have to think your way around the course like the architects that designed it.

Just step up to the first hole and you’ll see what type of player you are. The tee shot requires a slight draw to avoid the trees and fairway sand trap. A middle iron to the green and your home. I really liked the second hole with it’s rolling mounds and prevent the slightly errand drive on the left from finding the muck. Hole 3 is very short but you have to think about shaping your shot here again. My problem was I shaped it too much into the creek. Hole 5 has a nice blind shot with a creek for the idiot who pulls out his driver. Then hole 6, which is pictured to the left is the true risk and reward hole. You want to position your ball on the left hand side so you have a straight shot at the green, but the water on the right will challenge you to see just how accurate are you from 200 yards out. I really enjoyed the par 3 8th. If this is isn’t a Donald Ross hole then it’s a good study. Back to front slope. OB for both the American and British course just to the left of the hole and a carry over marsh. Lovely. The 9th is great finishing hole. Hit a good drive down the middle. Based on your position you might be able to go for the green but the water is a stiff penalty.

The Interlachen side didn’t thrill me until the 13th hole. I’m sure my headache played a major role in that but 13 just really grabbed by attention. Make sure you have enough club or your dribble into the sand pit. When I stepped up to 14 I new a draw was in order and hit perfectly but don’t let your green shot leak to the left like I did. Kerplunk!!! Yeah there’s water there. The 16th is large two tiered green which requires a correct club usage. The last two holes on the course are possibly my favorites. The 17th is only 343 yards but all I needed was a Driving Iron to be in the right position. 18 is a great finishing hole. Water down the left but don’t think the right is safe. The big trees love golf balls and a long drive will end up jail. A slight draw works well here but only slight.

All in all well worth the time. If it is a Donald Ross design, on the back nine at least, I like it and if not it’s a very good imitation. Oh and one more thing. If you setting at the Pirates preseason baseball game and ask the guy next to you whether the Bobby Jones Course is good or not, ignore the answer. Sarasota has a ton of modern resort style courses that any idiot can play. I would rather play the Bobby Jones Complex with the fast greens and thin fairway grass.

In my previous post on Warming up in Florida I wrote about the Twin Creek Golf Club in Gulfport, FL as a place to warm up before you hit the real courses. A little further north in Clearwater is another great executive course to get your golf juices going.

The Clearwater Executive Golf Course is just a few miles west of the Phillie’s spring training facility and right next to the Clearwater Air Park. This will never be your final destination for golf, but it’s a great place to start coming out of your winter hibernation. The grass only practice facility is a great place to get started with a small or large bucket of balls. In fact if you just caught a Phillie’s game you can drive a few minutes down the street and hit a large bucket of balls before dinner. Don’t worry about it getting dark because the driving range is lighted.

Now for the course itself you’ll find a wonderful place to work on your irons with a little bit of woods thrown in. The 18 hole course is a par 63 and a pleasing length of 4,350 yards. That means you have nine par 4 and nine par 3 holes. The driver isn’t really necessary except for maybe four or five par 4 holes, but you should be able to hit just about every club in your bag at least three times if you were playing par golf.

The greens are well kept and given the winter that they just had in 2010 the fairways were acceptable. Worse case move the ball in the fairway if you need good grass. After all you are warming up, this is the time to get your groove back not play it down and dirty like you do in the summer. The traps here are nothing like a regular course, but if you get in them the sand is good and doesn’t hurt to have a little sand practice. The trees on the course will make you forget that this is a muny course. My wife’s favorite tree is just passed the little bridge on the left side of hole 4. She’s taken several pictures there over the years.

While several of the holes on the course are just plain ole simple golf holes there are plenty here to keep your attention. I’m fond of four holes on the course: 1, 4, 17, 18. Hole 1 is a pretty simple 173 yard par 3 with an sloping green. Nothing hard here but it is 173 yards right out of the chute and you’ve got a lake on left and the ob range on the right which should be more than enough to distract the wandering eye. Hole 4 is a short par 3 with the tree on the left. It has one of the those Donald Ross slopes catch basins in the front that attracts anything the remote bit short. Hole 17 is eye pleasing par 4 slight dogleg left where you can really left the driver fly. I love it for that aspect alone. The elevated green should be about 120 away with a good drive. Finally 18 is driveable 250 yard par 4. Let it rip and see if you can reach the green with a hickory driver.

I can play 18 holes in just a little under 2 hours if no one is on the course, which has occurred late in the day more than once, and feel ready for the real courses in Florida if I can get in with a 72 or lower. Any higher and I’m back out on the course for more work.

A lot of people will head down to Florida for spring break to get away from the final onslaught of winter. Both coast of Florida offer a number of wonderful historic courses to play but who wants to go play a classic Donald Ross course with a cobweb swing of winter. Where can you go to warm up that swing and still have fun.

If you are on the St Petersberg peninsula I have a couple of suggestions: one I’ll mention here and another in another blog. In the south of the peninsula there is a charming muny 18 hole par 3 course that has everything you need to get your game jump started. The Twin Brooks Golf Club in Gulfport is close to Interstate 275 so it’s easily accessible from almost anywhere.

The driving range is excellent for hickory golfers. Well it doesn’t have the softer balls but the max yardage is around 225 yards with gigantic net at the end to capture your bombs. Of course you are suppose to be warming up so why on earth are you hitting a driver. Just focus on a mashie on down and you’ll be fine. There are plenty of targets at a various distances so you can start to dial in your distances. One warning: I think the mats are used on the weekend so don’t come to hit on the range then.

As for the course it will give you all you can handle with it’s pint sized greens. The fairways are nothing to talk about. The only good thing you can say about them is you will learn how to hit off of spars conditions. But the tee boxes are plush and the greens will take you back to an era when you actually had to lift the ball when you struck it. You don’t need anything more than your 150 yard club. For me that meant I took 6 clubs out on the course. I got plenty of work on 70, 90, 110, 120 yard tee shots with a couple of long shots at 140 and 150 yards. The greens are all elevated and as I said smallish so take dead aim for the middle. Misses carom off the sides, sometimes massively.

If you are looking for the historical side of this site, it has been confirmed that Al Capone owned this land back in his boot legging days. Rumors in the club house say he had the facility made for his boys because they were a bit to rowdy for a regular golf course. I think that is kinda doubtful but who knows it might be true. The course is now the home of St Petersburg First Tee program. The weekends will see quite a bit of activity from that group but during the week your safe.

I can play 18 holes in around one and half hours if there is no one on the course and then follow it up with another 30 minutes on the range and be done for a morning work out. While the putting surfaces are heavy it’s still a good place to start. The morning is full of dew, as you can see in the pictures, so I’m sure in the afternoon the greens are better. All in all it’s a great place to find your swing for the rest of the vacation.

Adam Myers at the SandTrap.Com takes a serious look at 5 courses that previously hosted majors that are affordable to play and puts Musselburgh Links at the top of the list. If your a truly devoted golfer you recognize this course as the first home for the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers who now reside in Muirfield, but more importantly you should recognize this course as the first home of golf.

Musselburgh Links is a fine choice as the top pick. Documentary evidence records golf being played on Musselburgh Old Course in 1672, earlier than any other course. Mary Queen of Scots is believed to have played the course in 1567; its origins, however, are probably in the twelfth or thirteenth century. To those that think only hosting major championships make a course Musselburgh has proudly hosted six British Open Championships between 1874 and 1889. But with only 9 holes the new Murfield couse took on the British Open mantel in 1892 and the Open never returned.

The course is primarily on the infield of the horse race course so expansion was not a consideration. The only other course that I know that incompassed a horse racking track, or should I say did, is Brookline Country Club in the United States where a race course intersected with the first couple of holes when the 1913 open was played there (this is no longer the case).

I haven’t ever played at Musselburgh Links, but I’ve got a standing invitation from John Rigg to play there with hickories. According to him “It would be sacrilege to go there and and play with steels.” Since some of you can’t play a course like St Andrews or Carnoustie without steel and certainly won’t bring both a modern and hickory set to Scotland, Musselburgh Links will rent a set of hickories for a very reasonable price.

As golfers we almost lost Musselburgh more than once over the last few years. In 1982 a group of enthusiasts formed the Old Course Golf Club and in tandem with the local authority, resurrected the course and brought it back to a decent standard. Still developers saw land with different eyes and in 2007 there was talk of destroying the course (well at least modifying beyond recognition) for horse race track improvements. Fortunately, Hands Off Our Links, a local campaign group which included the Old Course Golf Club, fought the development bringing it to the attention of local people and politicians and gaining support locally, nationally and internationally.

With the course safe for the time being the club has devised a worldwide associate membership to raise awareness of Musselburgh’s history and provide funds for future development. Sure the membership comes with a list of privileges, most of which many of us we’ll never use, but this isn’t about a club membership it is about preserving our golfing heritage.

So if you have a £90 that you could donate do as I’ve done and consider becoming an Overseas or an Associate Member to the club. You may not use any of the facilities, but this is one golf course we want to preserve for future generations.

Steve Eling recently called the PGA disciplinary policy “the hickory shaft of sports-league disciplinary codes” and “an antiquated joke, the vestiges of a flawed philosophy that dates back to an earlier era“. While I agree that John Daly, the subject of the Eling’s disdain, should be disciplined, I find the “hickory shaft” and “antiquated joke” lines a cute and inaccurate literary reference.

Hickory wood has a unique combination of strength, toughness, and elasticity with a shock-resistancy that makes it an ideal choice for a golf shaft. While I’ve broken more than a couple of shafts (due to a poor swing execution), I’ve got more a couple hundred shafts that are still going some 90 years after they were installed. Properly installed on a classic Stewart iron or a Jack White wood you’ve got an instrument that in the hands of a master brings rounds of ohs and ahs and in the hands of a rank amateur performs as well as first year student on the violin.

It’s quite different form the composites shafts and clubs we have today. Clubs and shafts that have made the game so easy that golfers with really poor swings are sporting low single digit handicaps. If they would use a hickory shafted club they would quickly find out how poor of a golfer they really are. Today’s clubs and shafts are a product of our “everyone wins” society. No longer are there winners and losers, just winners. No longer can you miss a shot a 1/4 to 1/2 inch off the sweet spot and it have a major impact on your distance, it still goes 95% of your distance. There is no penalty for a poor strike, for hitting the ball into the rough, for screwing up.

No, I think the PGA disciplinary policy is more like the clubs of today. Daly is missing the sweet spot significantly and PGA is acting just like modern clubs by punishing with just a mere 5% loss. What Daly needs is a good session with one of those strong, tough, elastic, shock resistant (to the deliverer not the delivery) hickory shaft meetings of the minds out behind the wood shed from a bygone era.

I wonder how close that swing would be to a golf swing?

Playing hickory golf is like riding a motorcycle, “It is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when you’re going to have an accident.” Sooner or later the head of a club is going to come of. Invariably, it will be one of your favorite clubs or if you’re like me it’s a brand new club that your just trying out (well at least it’s new to you) .

It has happened to me a handful of times in a variety of situations including water, weeds, and today an iron fence. Every time I end up spending a significant amount of time finding my prized head. Each time I learn another little tidbit that I hope will help others. Read it, commit it to memory, remember it or you’ll be like me spending more time than you would like finding your valuable possession.

• Watch the Head – Unless you are extremely lucky there will be two objects flying in the air. One has a $4 value at the most, the other could be as much as $400 and unless your playing replicas, one is replaceable and the other is not. So ignore the temptation to follow the ball and WATCH THE HEAD. Last summer I had a rare head snap off at the shaft on a 165 yard par 3. Unfortunately, the blue tee boxes are shifted to the right of the fairway with the 120 yard carry over the tall grass. My rare head went flying into the tall grass. Since both the ball and the head went flying in the same direction I committed a fatal mistake by not following the head and watching the ball. I was sure I thought I knew where there head was. I couldn’t find it that day and it took me almost one hour the next day to find the head and the shaft which knifed deeply into the grass.
• Raise Your Sunglasses – The head is not round and is going to take funny hops and bounces. Today my new “Bonnie B” oversized drive went flying off the shaft. It bounced not once, but twice off an iron fence bordering the course. I had a pretty good reference point where it initially hit the fence (see the next point), but I didn’t see the carom. I clearly heard it hit the fence but had no idea where the head was. I ended up finding the head on the back side of the fence some twenty five feet further down. This after a really thorough search for over 30 minutes (remember the first point and you’ll know why I didn’t just leave the head there). If I had seen the head bouncing not once but twice I would have spent less time searching.
• Establish Mulitple Reference Points – Finding your club is somewhat like finding and errant golf ball. Establishing the flight path is first and foremost but right after that try to establish a cross reference point if possible. Third post up on the fence, right of the tee box, what ever cross reference you can come up with. March of last year I had just finished a wide soled mashie niblick and was taking it out for a trial. On our par 3 6th I tried to press the shot and ended up snapping the head which went tumbling into the water. I quickly established the bounding path and then figured the head slipped to the sunken depths at about 20 feet off the line where it entered the water. Once I finally got the right extraction equipment (I’ll share that later), It only took me about 5 casts to find the club.
• Get Some Help – Your playing partners, oh I forgot I often play by myself (don’t ask it just works out that way). So today when my driver head went tumbling off the fence I labored for a good 15 minutes until the owner of the house came out. When I saw him I asked if he would mind helping me. After showing him the hickory shaft he was even more interested in finding the head that was on his side of the property. And after a good 10 minutes of searching he asked for my number which I gave him on a business card. We looked another 10 minutes before I gave my well I’ll try this once more and we found the head. Then we talked another 10 minutes about hickory golf (it’s March, 45° and the course on this Sunday was empty).
• Get All the Parts – At least as many as you can find. You might think that this wouldn’t apply to irons because most likely you’re going to just reshaft the head, but as a shaft maker knowing how the shaft broke is important to me and then I’ve actually had one iron head break rather the shaft. Now when it comes to wood heads there is a good chance that the head has come loose because the glue was not strong enough.1920s glue doesn’t compare to modern epoxy. Most heads are on pretty solid and I’ve only had 2 head comes off both within a week of acquisition. Occasionally the head will break or splinter from the shaft. With a good epoxy the head can be as good a new even with splinters. So get all the parts and if anything is a little loose make sure it won’t come off until you get to the repair shop (that’s home for a hickory golfer).
• Make Notes – This only applies if you can’t find the club immediately. Trust me you are going to come back and try to find the head until it is back in your bag properly reshafted. So take down notes about where you think the head is. Finding the head is often hard work even when you know where it is. You’ll probably remember but hey taking notes will help.

Sometime in the future I will share how to extract an iron head from a watery grave. Until then with a little bit of luck and the points above I hope you will be able to find that head in minimal amount of time and get your club restored for another day at the course.

You’ve just collected your first set of hickory clubs and you’re headed to the course to see if you can play when all of sudden it hits you..

What tee box should I use?

While it may seem like a difficult question the answer is pretty simple. Use the same method you used to select the tee boxes with your modern clubs.

Method? What method…I just go the tips and let her rip.

Alrighty then, here are a couple of guidelines you might consider.

Leave your EGO at the Clubhouse

For most hickory golfers this isn’t a problem. A good many have already checked their ego at the door and are seeking a different type of game by playing hickory. But for you blockheads that think you have to tip it then please consider the following.

Hickory clubs
• Are not as forgiving as their modern counterparts – This means that the margin for error is much smaller and while you can hit the center some of the time you aren’t going to hit it all the time, nor nearly as much as you did with modern clubs. So that modern Driver that consistently goes 240 will probably go 230 when hit well and maybe as little as 200 on a slight mishit.
• Have a higher center of gravity – This means that the effective loft that you will be able to achieve with hickory club will be lower than your modern club. In short your hickory club will have a lower flight which will translate into less distance. In my own case my modern 5 iron goes a 195 yards and my hickory 3 iron only flies 183 yard. Both are at 28°.
• Were designed in a era when 6,500 yards was a long course. Today’s clubs are designed for course at 7,200 yards. Or is it the other way around. Anyway you get the picture.

So unless your name is Sean “The Beast” Fister and you can hit a hickory driver off the ground over 300 yards check your ego at the door of the clubhouse and play a more appropriate tee than the tips. BTW, I actually saw Sean hit that drive at the Arkansas Hickory Open reception.

Multiple your 27 or 28° lofted iron by 36

27 or 28° should something like a Mid-Mashie or a Mashie Iron. If you have a later model Tom Stewart like I do a 3 iron is the club to look for. In my case I average about 180 to 185 yards with this clubs so that would be between 6480 and 6600 yards.

A couple of side points. If you have Tad Moore’s clubs don’t use the Jigger as your measuring club. While it has 29° of loft the shaft is generally shorter and you won’t hit it far enough. Some players may only have a Mid-iron and Mashie in the set. No problem, just multiple the average distance of your Mashie by 42. It comes out to about the same yardage. Note I’m assuming your Mashie is about 36°. It may not be so adjust the multiplier appropriately.

Look for flex tees

Look and see if the club has any flex tees. If they do there is probably a good reason they exist and using them will help you enjoy a round. For instance at my local club I could easily play the blue tee at 6579 yards based on my 3 iron distance. The whites at 6,040 yards are a little light for my personal taste. But there are three holes that really cause of a problem when I play with hickories.

• #1 has a ravine at 190 yards from the blue but is only 175 from the whites. It is a tricky hole with a limiting landing zone and a prevailing cross wind. For me the white tees are better for a low shot with my 1 iron that settles near the 150 yard marker.
• #8 is an uphill left hand dog leg protected by bunkers on both sides. I’ve smashed drives from the blues but still end up 150 uphill hards away from the blues. From the whites I can control the shot with a brassie and be the same distance.
• #11 has a carry of 205 yards from the blue tees but little or no carry from whites. With a mishit I’m doomed in a wasteland of weeds during the summer. It’s a simple par 5 but if you can’t get off the tee it is a least one or two more strokes to get back in the fairway.

Fortunately the club has put together a set of flex tees that incorporate #1, #8, #10 and #11. The distance is only 136 yards shorter that blue tees. I appreciate the help on #8 even though it’s an unfair advantage to the power hitters in league and can ignore the disadvantage of upper tees have on #10. But for the me the advantage of #1 and #11 makes a big difference in my rounds.

GIR distance and clubs

This is generally done after a round is over, or even after a couple of rounds have been played, but can be done in advance if the course has a map. Calculate the average GIR (Greens in Regulations) shots that you made and which clubs were used. A GIR shot is the first shot on a par 3; second on a par 4; and third on a par 5. Your GIR shots should look like a bell curve over the range of your clubs with your middle range clubs getting most of the action. If the bell curve centers on the long irons or woods in your bags then move up a tee. who really wants to hits long irons into a green all day. If it centers on niblics then move back a tee. This isn’t pitch and putt unless that is something that you need to practice.

To illustrate on my home course If everything goes right I should use my 55° Niblick twice, 49° Niblic once, Mashie Niblick 3 times, 40° Mashie 4 times, 36° Mashie 5 times and Mongrel Mashie 3 times which covers a distance from 80 yards to 170 yards with most of the shots between 120 and 155 yards. If I moved back to the tips I would hitting the Mongrel Mashie and 3 iron the most with the majority of the shots at 150 to 185 yards and moving up a tee box I would be hitting the Niblick and Mashie Niblick the most something between 70 and 120 yards.

Final thoughts

Golf is something to be enjoyed not as Mark Twain described it as “a good walk spoiled”. If you play from the right set of tees the challenge will still be there, play your round in a timely fashion and most importantly enjoy the round.

Trying to break from the winter blues in Colorado my wife and I have escaped to the severe clear weather and warming sun of San Diego for a three day weekend. The weather is awesome but I’m even more delighted to find a golf club that is creating a hickory golfing league. A hickory golfing league is pretty oh hum in North Carolina and Scotland, but in California, and the rest of the world, it’s a pretty dramatic move.

Jason Egnatz, the director of golf at Rancho Bernardo Inn, along with Chris McIntyre of Play Hickory Golf are teaming up to create the  league at Rancho Bernardo Inn. Starting Tuesday March 2 the club plans on hosting a weekly nine hole hickory event starting at 4:00pm. The league which will be open to both guest and locals reminds me of the way South African clubs in Johannesburg run their weekly events.

I met Jason today when one of his staff saw my hickory clubs and suggested I show Jason my 60° lofted Tom Stewart. It didn’t take long before we were showing each other what was in our bag and asking each other questions about grips, shafts, restoration and everything related hickory. His staff told my wife that Jason started playing hickory for the same reason that I did; golf had gotten too easy and with hickory clubs the challenge of golf was restored.

I’m excited to see a golf professional really supporting hickory golfers like Jason is. I’m looking forward to the next time I return to San Diego and being able to tee it up on a league night with an vibrant hickory golf league at Rancho Bernardo Inn. Players can sign up for the hickory golf league by calling the pro shop at (858) 385-8733 or by sending Egnatz an e-mail at jegnatz@jcresorts.com

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The truth about being a hickory golfer is that sooner or later, and generally sooner than later, one of your shafts is going to to have to be repaired. Sometimes the repair is simple and you can use the existing shaft and other times you have to replace the shaft. I’ll save the later for another discussion and focus on the repair of a split shaft.

Split shafts, in either woods or irons, have to the be the easiest of shaft repairs. In the middle the Mid-Pines Hickory Open my Mongrel Mashie develope a rather long split that semi spiraled around the shaft. While I’ve seen a couple shaft split on just one side this is the more common split all the way the through.

Of course the first question is how do you know you’ve got a split anyway? Periodically I will test all of my clubs by grabbing the head and flicking my wrist causing the butt end to hit the ground. You can do this on any surface but I prefer our downstairs berber carpet. A solid club will make a thump not unlike the thump of a good sand shot and a broken one will just vibrate in your hands.

When I initially started to repair the Mongrel it looked like the split started and ended before the hosel. This made the repair easy. Putting the good part of the shaft in a vise I mixed up some epoxy and just twisted the the split open enough to slide a toothpick full of epoxy in it. Turned it over and did the other side. Then took the club out of the vise  and open the split by hand while moving the club back and forth so the epoxy could spread a little better.

Using a wet rag I cleaned the excess epoxy and wrapped strips of painters tape, the blue stuff, about every six inches. Then simply apply a 1/2″ pipe clamp over the tape to secure the shaft. I had to install 4 clamps repairing the Mongrel and once the clamps are secure you need to wipe off the excess the epoxy. Put the club aside for 24 hours while the epoxy hardens. The next day loosen the clamps and remove the tape. Unless you’re lucky you’ll need to strip down the shaft and apply a new stain and shellac.

The shaft will probably be better than new. Kinda like a bone repairing the epoxy will make the joint stronger. We’ll see, I suspect I didn’t inspect the club well enough and the split is down in the hosel. If that’s the case the shaft won’t last very long and I’ll be replacing it soon. Until then the Mongrel Mashie is back in my bag.