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The fried Egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.
Here's the thing.
Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a night and clean.
Live a greenside buker.
You need to be aggressive on any show, whether it's sitting cleanly or it's Friday Egg.
Well, we've all faiked that the dreaded Frida Egg not to be feared, though it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit. It is September fourteenth, twenty twenty one. I'm at Gearhart Golf Links in Gearhart, Oregon. That's the northern Oregon coast, and I'm at the US Hickory Open. It is beautiful morning. You can hear the ocean nearby. Hear that, but you can't see it from here. And I'm just gonna follow some folks around and see if there are any stories here. Maybe you can hear that note of
doubt in my voice. I'm at the US Hickory Open, the second and final round, pretty much on a whim. I live about two hours from gearharten figured I had no excuse, but I arrived, looked around and realized I was kind of a stranger in a strange land. So if you don't know much about Hickory golf, first of all, that makes two of us. But the main thing you should be aware of upfront is the rule about equipment in the US Hickory Open, which is put on by
the Society of Hickory Golfers. You need to play with wooden shafted clubs from nineteen thirty five or before, or you can use replicas of those models. Simple enough, But as I walk around the practice screen recording, I find myself just a little puzzled by it all. Most of the women are in long skirts and blouses, and most of the men have plus fours or plus twos on, you know, the pants that kind of hang below the
knee and billow out a bit. And I try to imagine myself taking part in this world, and they can't quite do it.
There's finally Madeland after fourteen hours.
It's not just the fashion, which honestly some people pull off really well. It's the idea of giving up the comforts of modern golf. Look, I love the history of the game, but I think I'd have a hard time actually living it, giving up the big drivers, the big putters, the space age materials, all the things that are supposed to make golf more manageable and make me a better player. I mean, this is a hard game. Why would you
choose to make it harder. I'm Garrett Morrison, and this is Friday Stories Today, a collection of conversations from the US Hickory Open, or really I should call it a series of efforts to understand twenty first century Hickory golf, where it came from, how it's played, and why some people get absolutely hooked by it. When I get to Gearheart Golf Links, some players are already out on the course, but it'll be a couple of hours before the leaders
in the open division t off. I'm trying to get my bearings, so I look through the t sheet and right there in the final group, I see a familiar name, Colin McNamara.
I'm a writer. I write poems, and I teach at Washington State University.
He's also written a few things for the Frida Egg website, which is how I know him. And you're here at the US Hickory Open. Is this the first time you've been in an event like this?
It's the first time I've been in an event this big. I have played in several Hickory tournaments, but this is a this is another animal.
Apparently Colin was ready, though he posted a good score in the first round seventy six.
I hit it pretty well. A couple bad shots. You know that. That's where Hickory golf really diverges from modern golf. It's much less forgiving. So I had a couple terrible shots, but thankfully no television cameras caught those, and then I made a lot of putts, so I ended up with a really good score.
So he was going into the second and final round in fourth place, two shots back. Colin McNamara is younger than your typical Hickory player. He's in his late twenties now, and he's been playing exclusively with vintage clubs for about five years.
It started I think I saw something online at first, and you know, I bought a club in an antique store, fixed it up, you know, played with it, bought another couple of clubs. Pretty soon I'm traveling around to play in tournaments and dressing in my homemade knickers.
So wait, homemade knickers.
Yeah, I'd say they're effectively plus fours. I sewed a little band of elastic into a pair of good will pants, and you know, I put the elastic up around my knee and draped the rest over the sock, and it looks authentic enough to get by with this crowd.
I find that Colin has a nice way of explaining things. He doesn't take himself too seriously, but he knows his stuff, and he's incredibly passionate about Hickory golf. It occurs to me that he could serve as a kind of guide for me today, and who knows, he could very well win the tournament. So I make a mental note to keep checking in with Colin throughout the day. Okay, perfect, that's good. I'll let you prepare yourself mentally for battle and good luck.
Thank you so much.
Here Chapter one, John Henry versus the Industry. I'm starting to get the lay of the land at the US Hickory Open, and what I see is a few main hubs of activity. There's the practice screen and the first tee. There's the area around the scoreboard, which is just a big dry erase board on wheels, and then between the parking lot and the clubhouse there's an outdoor workshop staffed by a man named John Henry Williams.
John Henry Williams pesfessionally I'm retired, but as a hobby I repair golf clubs.
Specifically, John Henry repairs and restores the types of clubs being used today. In fact, he's one of the very best at it. His workshop has a mixture of things, some of you could find at most hardware stores.
Cordless drill files are probably the biggest thing I use a lot of.
Others you've probably never seen before.
Well, I have a shaft straightening machine. It's a woodplank with some round knobs on it that a gentleman in Vermont invented to straighten wooden shafting clubs.
Now, John Henry would prefer to be playing today, but.
Three weeks ago I was diagnosed with a subbural hematoma, and so the doctor said no golf for at least a month, which killed me. I've been waiting for this event for two years. So the second best thing for me to do was to bring my temporary I roll in cart and do golf club repair for people down here that needed something done. You know, these are old clubs and they just sometimes need a little tender living care.
Yeah, it looks like you have a customer right here. In fact, come on it. It's all right, very very casual interview here face inserts it.
I can do that.
Yes, people keep approaching John Henry throughout the morning. Some have questions about a particular club. Others need this or that small repair, like re whipping the black thread around the neck of a wood.
Yeah, this is fairly simple to do.
Curly here, I thought he would just explain to him why the whipping is there? Glue it on, but you don't glue it on.
You have to whip it.
You can glue it on, but it doesn't stay very well.
And what I'm picking up on is that the builder like John Henry, is a key fulcrum in the hickory world world like everything relies on these old clubs being playable, and he keeps them that way. To do that, he has to maintain a highly specific skill set, one that frankly doesn't have much market value these days. So how and why does someone become a master of this particular craft.
Well, I grew up playing golf. I was I had asthma, so the the biggest thing I could do was play golf. My dad introduced me to golf when I was eight and gave me some plastic clubs and a ball, and I just went and hit them. And grew up on a farm in Virginia, so I had lots of room to go hit golf balls everywhere.
John Henry went on to play in high school, in college and ended up working as a club.
Pro and then got out of the business because I realized as a country club professional you have to walk the line, and you can't be somebody that gives your opinion and if you ask me what I think, I tell you, and that's never going to be.
A good thing, you know.
So so I realized I needed to do something y else, and I loved golf clubs and started collecting clubs, go to flea markets, go to garage sales and pick them up and then take them back to the garage and kind of tear them apart and see how they were put back together. More of a hobby, just messing around, and then there were people said, well, you got skills to do this, so well, okay.
So around nineteen seventy six, John Henry went into business as a club repair guy, but around him the industry was changing. Metal headed woods came out in the late seventies, and at first they didn't make too much of a dent in John Henry's per Simon wood business, but then they started to show up on the PGA Tour. In nineteen eighty four, Lee Trevino became the first player to win a major with a metal headed driver, a.
New PGA record of fifteen under par, and the first champion to ever shoot four rounds under seventy in a PGA championship and win, and you ought to kiss that punter league.
When metal woods hit the tour, the per simon market was dead because everybody wants to play with the guys on tour playing. So metal woods just changed the club repair business. Nobody needed to have a metal wood refinished. The golf balls didn't show them up. There's no expense in repair, and it was just something that my market in repair business just went into toilet and you could hear the flush.
But it wasn't just the financial realities that had changed. The work itself had become something totally different.
Metal woods. It's mostly computerized now, I mean it really is. They're not taking a piece of clay and saying, let's shape it this way, or let's take a piece of wood and rasp this out and cut this insert in. And it's not a bad thing. I'm not trying to poo poo the idea that they don't have any skills,
because they do. But it's not hand crafted. It's not taking a piece of wood by and running a file across it until you get to shape and you run your fingers across it and you get the feel if you don't like that, well I'll change it a little bit. Or how am I going to add a little bit of weight to this thing? It's none of that anymore. I think most of it is done today by computers, and no, I'm not interested in doing that. I like being able to hand work a golf club.
So John Henry changed paths again. He went to work at Sandpoint Country Club in Seattle. Mud Green's raked bunkers and eventually became the assistant superintendent. After he retired, he kept working part time in the pro shop, but he needed something else to do with his time. As it turned out, just outside the gate at Sandpoint was a club repair shop run by Jim von Lasso, incidentally the father of Andrew von Lasso, who's leading the US. It reopen as we speak, and.
I went over to a shop a couple of times taking clubs from Sandpoint, and once I walked through the front door, I'm going, you know, this is just so familiar, and I missed doing this. So when I retired, I just fixed up a little spot down stairs in the basement and started working on golf clubs again.
And it's since it was mostly a hobby now not a business. John Henry was free to work on the clubs. He wanted to work on the old stuff, the hand crafted stuff.
The craftsmanship is unbelievable of what these guys used to do. I mean, I'm never I'm at awe of the different clubs that I take apart about how they put them together back in the day. And they weren't using the machinery that we have nowadays. These are guys that are, you know, hand drilling things. They're auguring things out, and it's I would love to go back and watch some
of these craftsmen put clubs together. Even the guys in the pre nineteen hundred clubs were truly crafts and and the stuff that they did, I think it's like it's a work of art.
It really is.
It doesn't look like it, but let me hand you two pieces of wood and you go do it. So when I can take those clubs and and get a chance to work on them, it's just like, Okay, this is part of history, and so I'm working on history. And that's that's the cool part.
Nobody gets confused out there and uh, yeah, you got your own individual market be great.
I played it was a pink and white one time, but I had to give up.
Because the other guy said what number?
So here's here's the My name is Stravko Barbik, and I am the head golf professional at Gear Golf Links. I go by Ze because it's easier for everybody to pronounce. I am enjoying the sunshine and watching these wonderful people play golf and doing the starting on the first tea, it is our eleven thirty tea time from Port Townsand, Washington. Rob Berman, Well done.
Could you introduce yourself?
Yeah, I'm Rob Berman. I'm one of the co founders of Northwest Hickory Players.
And what are we doing right now?
We are just off the first Sea Center cut one hundred and forty yards in on a sixty five degree day and perfect weather on the sea side of Oregon, final round of the US hick Reopen. None of my group's in contention, so we're here.
To have fun. Chapter two, Rob Berman plays a hole. So at this point, John Henry Williams has helped me understand the appeal of Hickory golf clubs as objects, the history behind them, the craftsmanship that goes into them. But now I need to see what it's actually like to play them. So I pull aside Rob Berman as he's walking off the fifth green. I ask him if he can talk me through all of his shots on the
next hole, the sixth, and he says sure. He might end up regretting that, all right, So what's the plan on this hole? This is a tricky hole. It's got a blind approach, it's all uphill. So the trick for.
Me is getting out far enough that I can have a comfortable club into this green.
So what are you going to hit here?
I'm gonna hit my brassy, which is my driving club. It's twelve degrees, hoping to hit two twenty if I if I'm lucky, how that shot go? Well? Garrett? With a uphill fairway. Like so many people, I tend to try harder than I. Shit pulled that too far left changes the whole planning. Now I'll try to punch it up to one hundred yards and wedge it.
On it's out stop. I've proven to be bad luck for you so far, so that one is in a fair way bunker. But back in the whole corridor, we.
Did We did have a few players that walked off the course yesterday and there's two schools of thought on that. You know, most of us don't take it too internal, you know, if we're not playing well.
Very nice, you know, like like a lot of tournaments that are accessible to a lot of different people. There are those who are very competitive and than those who just want to have fun.
Yeah, And we have pros plane in this tournament and rank amateurs, and we've got players from eighteen to eighty, and.
That's what's so much fun. You meet new.
People and you share what you love.
Fairway bunker shot. What club are you gonna have here?
I'm gonna use my eight iron, which is the equivalent of a pitching wedge, just to get out of this fairly low bunker and try to leave myself an angle into this very hard pin.
Right, all right, we're on the fairway, all right. The approach, Wow, now that was a nifty shot. Tell me about that.
That's my one hundred and forty yard club from one hundred and twelve yards. So that's just a little knockdown shot, as Jean Harry Varden would call it.
Push shot. First good shot at the hall. All right, so you've got a putt. Could you tell me a little bit about your putter.
Yeah, I've got a pretty special putter to Jean Gassier. Jean Gassier won the nineteen twelve French Open. He played out of Chantilly, France, and after his win in nineteen twelve, his potter model became popular.
It's a beautiful club. It's a wooden potter head, you know, kind of I don't know what you compare it to. It's like it's a mallet with toe hang. Yeah.
They used to call it the piano because it's kind of shaped like a grand piano. It's pretty uncommon.
One, two, three, four or five. Oh, he's got about a ten footers or six. But it's been fun talking about all the different clubs. I mean, the cool thing is that each club has a story, right, Each club has some homemade elements and has decades of history behind it. I think that's a big part of the appeal of this kind of golf. You know, it's not just nostaga, right, You're playing with these things in the present, and they have kind of beauty, integrity, craftsmanship in and of themselves.
And he missed the pet for six. That's a seven. He might have missed the shorty too. I wanted to ask you like. So, one of the ideas of one of the selling points I suppose of modern equipment and the attempt that it makes is to reduce the number of times a player has a bad hole. And so, you know, when you have a bad hole with your hickory clubs, what is your attitude towards it?
Yeah, I suppose you can be way more forgiving on yourself if you have a bad hole, because there's so little forgiveness in these clubs. You know, that's the beauty of hickory golf. You get these clubs and you have to learn them. It takes time to learn them. Some clubs you never can hit, and occasionally you find a
club that's just suited perfectly for you. Yeah, And you know, Garrett, it all comes down to fundamentals of your swing, and if those aren't tuned, it doesn't matter what you have in your hands.
Not far from where I leave Rob is the fourth tee. I wait there for a few minutes and the final group arrives. Andrew von Lasso is still leading, and Colin mcnamarath is telling me that he sucks. Literally, he says, Garrett, I suck. He's three over through three and things don't improve. On the fourth hole, he hits his t shot over the green over a low wooden fence out of bounce. His provisional does almost the same thing but stops short after His drive on the fifth hole a good one.
I catch up with him in the fairway. Tell me how it's gone so far? Oh, not good? So far? Thanks? Not good so far? What's your state of mind life at the moment?
Yeah, I feel fine. It's gonna take some made putts to get back into it.
Right now.
I think I'm down seven after starting down too, so I've got a little work to do. But yeah, I just gotta make some putts. It can change in a hurry.
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This is the US Open the Eckery, Yeah yeah, I mean we play this course all the time. Yeah, so I have fun to watch these guys hit the ball and anticipating this for about two years. Yeah right, I mean, and.
Uh, the sign's been up for two years.
Yeah. And we live right here, and so we watch a lot of golf and it's a great place. And yeah, those are great.
They are gone.
Yeah yeah, everybody's having a good time.
So and just to see these guys hit it.
I can't hit it.
As far as they do, and I've got high tech stuff.
Chapter three, tad Moore and the Society. A crowd is slowly thickening around the scoreboard by the clubhouse. Right in the middle of it is an older man sitting in a chair. Periodically people come up to him and shake his hand.
Yeah, this is tad Moore.
There are a couple of ways you might have heard of tad Moore. Maybe the main one is through the line of milled putters he did with Max Fly in the nineties and early two thousands. You know that famous picture of Ian Woosnam winning the Masters throwing a big uppercut fist pump. If you look in his other hand, he's holding a Maxfly Tadmore putter. But if you're a Hickory player, you may not associate tad Moore primarily with milld putters. Instead, you probably know him as one of
the founding fathers of modern Hickory golf. The more I've walked around the US hick Reopen, seeing how many people are here and how enthusiastic they are, the more I've wondered how it all got started, how this community formed even as the rest of the game moved on. I've mentioned this to a few people and they've all told me, well, you've got to go talk to Tad Todd. Can you give me an idea of how you got interested in playing older clubs?
Yeah, I think that the older clubs. When being a club designer, I wanted to see what people had used in the past, because there's really nothing new in golf. I don't care what any of these people say. There's nothing much new. So I had a collection at one time about thirty five hundred clubs, and around nineteen seventy five a good friend of mine talked me into playing some Hickory golf. I did that for a little while, kind of, but.
There wasn't really anybody in Tad's area in Georgia who wanted to play Hickory's with him, so he left it alone for a bit.
But in nineteen eighty eight a good friend of mine, Bobby Farino, who was a big club dealer club collector, he convinced me to go and play in the Golf Collector Society meeting in Palm Springs.
Well.
Interestingly, the Golf Collector's Society, which was the progenitor to the Society of Hickory golfers started when I was three years old. It was started in nineteen seventy.
That's Rob Burman again. In addition to being a good sport about quadruple bogies, Rob is the host of the Plus four podcast, which focuses on hickory golf. Well, I figured he was the right person to fill in some historical background here.
From the nineteen seventies, For thirty different years there had been annual conventions of the Golf Collectors Society at various places in the United States, and inevitably there would be trade shows, and these collectors from the US would bring their clubs and they would swap and trade their hickoryes
as well as moderns and steel shafted clubs. At some point between nineteen seventy and the year two thousand, they started what they call the Hickory Hacker event where the collectors would go out, as they say, for grins and giggles, to just play their hickory clubs, and often it was a scramble format. Part of it was just a fascination with these incredible antiques and they wanted to get a feel for what it might have been like back in the day to hit these clubs.
It was in one of these Hickory Hacker tournaments that tad Moore played in nineteen eighty eight.
So I went out and played, and I thought I want it, but I didn't. But it really got me enthused about playing with hickory golf clubs. So from that point there was probably about twenty guys that were actively playing hickory golf in the United States.
As you can imagine, as time went on, some players wanted to become more serious about playing hickory clubs steadily, and they didn't want to do the scramble format. They actually wanted to start to do genuine competitions. And this rift developed from what I understand, between the collectors that just wanted to go out and have a fun time once a year and a cadre of people that included tad Moore, that wanted to actually make more of a commitment to hickory golf as a pastime and a hobby.
Those of us that play want to feel history. We don't want to look at history, we want to feel it.
Until one night at the dun Vegan in the Saint Andrews, we were all sitting around and had a few pints, and the idea was that we should do something about a group.
And it was over some beers of the Don Vegan that Tad and some others decided to get formal about putting together an official society, creating their own set of rules and really becoming independent from the Golf Collectors Society.
This was the beginning of the Society of Hickory Golfers, which was officially founded in the year two thousand.
First eight years I was a president, and I was what I like to call a benevolent dictator, and we move forward.
The Society of Hickory Golfers now maintains a set of rules, runs a handicap system, and of course puts on the US Hickory Open. Around the same time he helped the society get started, Tad Moore made another critical move. He began to manufacture Hickory shafted golf clubs replicas. Again at
a tournament like the US Hickory Open. Not limited to clubs that were actually built before nineteen thirty five, you can also play replicas that have been approved by the Society, and a lot of players here today have Tad more replicas in their bag.
Really, in my view, there are two people that are on the same level as Tad, Tad being one of them. The other is Mike Just, who passed away a number of years ago, but Mike and Tad roughly around the same time. There's a debate about who was first. Both of these gentlemen were golf club manufacturers, Mike Just being affiliated with Louisville Golf and Tad with his own company.
As the society became popular and fashionable, they both started making their own brand of modern replica Hickory golf clubs. Both of these gentlemen sort of helped make the barriers to entry much more accessible for many of us because it's much easier to get into the sport with a unified, matched weight set of irons or woods, which really makes that step between modern clubs to the purest hickory game if you're only playing original antiques, very accessible for the average player.
And so the beauty of this game is that they can buy a set of replicas from me get started because the clubs are going to be exactly what they need to play in the right shafts and right grips and everything, and they can get started, and then if they want to go to the original way they can, But today we ship all over the world. We shipped to Australia, we shipped to New Zealand, we shipped to Germany, Sweden, UK, Scotland, Japan and Canada. I we ship all over the world.
So the growing society and group of people that play with hickory golf clubs is really big.
Do you think there's something about the direction that the equipment business has taken since the early two thousands even that has made people kind of along for these kinds of club because the equipment has gotten so modern and engineered. Do you think there's this sort of yearning that people have for something a little more crafted.
That's a really good question. I honestly think that what has happened is is that that people have bought into the market of modern golf equipment and found that they haven't gained anything. Their handicaps still stays the same. But geez, I just spent three grand on equipment and two grand on a lessons and I'm still shooting the same score. So they hear about this and they go out and
play it. They play from you know, more forward t's, and all of a sudden they're shooting the same scores, you know, and so this is wonderful, you know, to actually make a set of wood shafted golf clubs and equipment. And then someone like yesterday walks up to me and says, this is the greatest game in the world. Thanks for making my club.
Chapter four, Colin McNamara crosses the valley. If I were calling right now, I wouldn't be in a very thankful mood. I walk with him on the thirteenth hole, a part five, and he hits his second shot into some long fescue and loses his ball. He ends up with a ten on the next t We have a bit of a weight and I asked him if he's willing to talk again, an what kind of a day has it been so far?
It's been a long day, but a very fun one.
This last hole you had a bit of a struggle. Ye, these things happen. Do you think they happen more often in Hickory golf?
I think they do. Yeah, Hickory golf is not a forgiving game. That said, you know, I like to think that it doesn't reflect the person I am.
That score on that whole, Well, I guess what reflects the person you are is how you reacted to it. You're still pretty upbeat. You know.
It's like there's an uncanny valley of attitude, right and I've gone through the valley. Now I'm up the other side. So it's all gravy from here where.
You've let go in a sense and you're just having fun.
I feel true freedom makes call.
There is something semi serious that I want to know from Colin. I want to know whether days like this shake his faith. I mean, if I had a round playing Hickory's where everything went wrong, I'd probably say, you know, screw it. I'm putting the cavity back irons and the frying pan driver back in the bag. Tomorrow. Help is out there and I'm taking it. Is there ever a moment? Do you have moments where you're like, I wish I
was just, you know, playing with modern clubs? I know, no, never, never. Yeah, I switched.
This is now going into my fourth year with entirely Hickory's, and I haven't once. I just gave away my clubs to my best man at my wedding a couple months ago. My modern clubs. I don't even have modern clubs anymore. I've never thought about them.
And that is what I still can't quite relate to, the idea of not even being tempted. Is pain a feature or a bug of Hickory golf?
Boy, I really think it's it's still a bug because it's still golf. But it's a bug that golfers love to have bite them.
And yet, Okay, So playing Hickories enhances pain, right, I don't.
If it does, you have to admit it also enhances pleasure though, right the good shots feel better. Even if the bad shots feel worse or more frequent.
The good shots feel better. This reminds me of something I heard in the morning from John Henry Williams, the club repair guy. He was talking about introducing people to Hickory golf.
And when you give them a club and you take them out on the golf course and they hit that first pure shot. Because Hickory golf, the sounds are different. They're completely different. When you swing a wooden shafted club or hickory club, it's a swooshing sound when the shaft is going through its motion and there's no click when it comes off to club face. But man, when you hit one that is dead solid and it comes off, it feels so good because it all resonates up through
the shaft into your hands. You don't get that feeling with metalwoods. You don't get that feeling with new clubs. It's different, and when you experience it, it's just like, oh, that was so nice, And when you hit him bad, you have exactly the same feelings.
That was just awful.
So we're all familiar with those days when the swing is just a little bit off, when you're playing hickories, that can be pretty brutal. And so how do you get through those days?
You know, you smile and you you talk to the nerds following you, and really it's it's kind of all about humor at this point, and it's all about having the attitude that you know, I'm out here with clubs, I love playing a game I love.
Let's leave it at that. Meanwhile, Colin's playing partner, Andrew von Lasso, is making the game look easy. On the seventeenth hole, he bludgeons a drive down the middle and hits a low spinning Mashie niblic to two feet. The turn is his. There's a small gallery walking the course and the vibe is turned casual, almost party like got a beer.
Things are looking up even further than they were already. Cheers Martin.
And that's when it clicks for me. Maybe a little too late. I've spent all day trying to understand why some golfers choose to play with Hickory clubs, but I've missed the obvious thing. This is a group of friends, and once people are in it, they want to stay in it. Up by the eighteenth green there's a big crowd waiting. The final foursome puts out and each player gets applause and pats on the back. It's like the last day of summer camp. Let's keep in touch and
let's do it again next year. Seventy four seventy seventy two. Whoa Andrews. This episode of Fridagg Stories was produced by me Garrett Morrison, with transcript help from Meg Atkins. Many thanks to Rob Alswed, Northwest Hickory Players and the Society of Hickory Golfers, and special thanks to Jason Vangild who is the general manager of Gearheart Golf Links, and to
Forrest Goodling, who's the superintendent. If you stick around after this music fades out, you'll hear a quick post round interview I did with Andrew von Lasso, the twenty twenty one US Hickory Open Champion. We'd love to know what you think of Fridagg's story, so feel free to reach out on Twitter or Instagram or leave a rating and review on iTunes. Thanks for listening.
It could have gone the other way if I had a bad attitude, you know, just like, hey, relax, we're playing Hickory golf here. It's a hard way to play.
What's the biggest challenge of playing Hickory golf? I mean, you play a lot of you know, off with modern equipment, and you play qualifiers, you do all that stuff. So the biggest adjustment for you to Hickory golf? What what do you think that is?
I'd say it's not quite slowing down your swing. You gotta slow down your swinging away, not take as much a big not take a full swing like flight hit flighted shots most of the time, and sometimes it's good to hit it up up in the air. But like you know, it's not like the the modern game where
you're trying to just hoist everything. I normally don't, but just having that trust, like this club's gonna it's gonna be there, and you can hit these load draws or low phades, and you can hit it high also, but I find keeping it low to the ground playing the links courses, it's like that's the It's how it's meant to be played.
Yeah. Yeah, Well, what's the biggest joy of playing with this kind of equipment to you? I'd say hitting it solid. I love that feel.
And then the sound, it's that extra like this deep sound with the Hickory and same with hitting this solid club modern club.
I just love hitting it solid. Yeah.
And then when you now when you're playing Hickory second shots drives, you're looking at more than just looking at the flag. You're like, hey, I gotta play this left side here off this bank. Like that shot on seventeen was like, all right, I know the pin's kind of middle, right, Well let's look left. I know the green slope into the right. I landed in that area, took the slope, released out to a foot, and I'm like, now that was really satisfying because you're not gonna fly it to
the five eighty eight yards. I'm not gonna fly eighty eight. I'm gonna fly a seventy five have release and just play the course. Play the You know you're playing the course, so