I don't know of a game that's changed more in the past 50 years or so than golf. I've been playing since the late '60s and honestly don't believe I could go out and play a round today play with the equipment I learned on.
I still have the MacGregor one iron I used in high school; if you sliced a fun-size candy bar in thirds lengthwise, you'd have an approximation of its clubhead.
Every couple of years I'll take it out to the range and try to hit it. Eventually I do, but it's never the high-arcing majestic ball flight I remember. It's a squirting dart, low and diving, a topspin forehand of a golf shot. It makes its distance on the ground. My modern seven iron flies further.
I say all the time I played my best golf in my 40s and 50s, but the truth is my teenage self was playing a much more difficult game.
After college; golf became too expensive. It wasn't until my mid-30s that I began playing again, at my wife's urging. I suspect she wanted to get me out of the house.
By then the game was different. Woods were now metals. Only a few holdouts clung to their old persimmon Eye-O-Matics and Kenneth Smiths. My beautiful blond custom-built Irving King 32B driver was obsolete. Big Bertha was the rage. Titanium was being introduced as clubhead material.
I bought a set of irons and a three-wood first, then waited a couple of months before trying one of the toaster-on-a stick modern drivers.
And when I hit one--whoa. It was like playing basketball with a tennis ball on an eight-foot hoop. Against preschoolers.
Distance was, as the ads promised, effortless. I was hitting the ball further off the tee than when I was kid. And when I was a kid, I was as long as anybody; guys on the PGA Tour were hitting it 260 back then. (In 1980, the average drive on tour was 256.89 yards.)
Bill Glasson led the tour in driving in 1984, averaging 276.5 yards per drive. He only made six cuts and made $17,845 on tour. (I made more working for the Shreveport Journal, which lends credence to the old adage "drive for show, putt for dough.")
In a year or two, the average drive on tour was over 300 yards.
A friend of mine's uncle died the other day; he was 93 years old and a tough old bird.
"The man refused to hit off the forward tees," my friend texted me. "That's the kind of man he was."
I understand that attitude. But I acknowledge my best golf is likely behind me. I had an intimation of mortality recently when I put a regular shaft in my driver.
For the golf nerds out there, let me be precise: as of a couple of weeks ago, I've been hitting an Adila Rogue 110 MSI in regular flex in my Callaway Epic Flash driver. It replaced a Mitsubishi Diamana White Board d70 in an X (extra stiff) flex. The 60-gram Adila is tipped an inch, and the overall length is 43.5 inches.
For the rest of you, let's just say this is roughly analogous to trading in a Shelby Cobra for something like a Lexus. Anyone can drive a Lexus. If you don't know what you're doing, you can kill yourself in a Shelby Cobra.
It's not that I can't drive a Shelby Cobra anymore, it's just that I don't go as fast as I used to. So I no longer need the extra high-end performance that can be squeezed out of it.
I could kid myself and say maybe it will come back, but that's wishful. I slipped on the ice in February, and it was nearly a year before I got back the full range of motion in my right arm. Then I had a bike accident last summer, which, though I landed on my face, had me limping around gingerly for a while. I really didn't make a full-fledged all-out golf swing until about six weeks ago.
And when I did, I found things had changed. I spent a session on a launch monitor (geez, I'm nerdy) and confirmed it. I was swinging my driver about 12 miles per hour slower than a couple of years ago. That's a touch more than 10 percent falloff, which would be really alarming if golf was all that important. I honestly considered quitting.
Instead, I took advantage of the technology of modern club design (something I've not always appreciated; I don't especially want my clubs to be adjustable) by unscrewing one shaft and sticking in the other. It took two minutes and made a difference.
A few rounds into the new shaft-era and I'm hitting it respectably well. My spin rate (sorry, more nerd stuff) is too high, and I have hit a couple of scary screaming hooks, but overall I'm happy with the setup. I'm hitting five irons and six irons into my favorite 475-yard par four and have a chance to get on most of the par fives I play in two.
And I haven't had to move up a set of tees. Thanks, technology.
I guess I could find some moral instruction in this. Golfers--male golfers; women don't seem to have these weird ideas about gear--have stigmatized the regular shaft to the extent that you can go on the Internet and buy after-market labels to stick on golf shafts to misrepresent their flex. This despite the fact that there's no real industry standard for what an "extra-stiff" is compared to a "stiff" or "regular."
Shaft flexes are like women's dress sizes--just as you will find some very generous 4s and 2s in the racks at Dillard's, you'll find a lot of really soft stiff shafts.
This despite the fact that no one cares what flex anyone else plays; we just don't want to think of ourselves as "regular" players. We want to be the big strong macho men, making a big furious effort resulting in the ball going far.
Really, we'd be better off if we just relaxed into our unexceptionalism. Make a smooth swing. The ball will go far enough.
If it doesn't, maybe move up a tee box.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].