This was in the Sunday Age this morning:
Ogilvy revisits the '30s and uses a hickory shaft to iron out a myth
Mike Clayton
December 9, 2007
GOLFERS in Melbourne are in danger of taking Royal Melbourne for granted. Here is one of the world's great golf courses right in the suburbs. Playing there more than 30 years after I first struck a ball off its first tee is still a thrill.
I have heard endless stories in the past few months from members and visitors about how the course is suffering in the drought and it's true that the fairways are not in great condition, but when Geoff Ogilvy, Scottish golf writer John Huggan and I played there on Friday it was about as much fun as you can have on a golf course.
This is not, however, a column about the condition of Royal Melbourne but rather how it plays when you give one of the best players in the game a couple of clubs that were made before Bobby Jones won the grand slam in 1930.
Jones was the last of the great players who used shafts crafted from the hickory tree.
Ogilvy and I had played Royal Melbourne a few years ago with wooden drivers but this time we went out with a circa 1925 hickory shafted two wood and a "driving iron" that had about the loft of a two iron.
The wood has a beautifully shaped head and a very firm shaft and that is the trick for anyone wanting to play around with hickory. The shaft has always been the most important part of any club, modern or ancient, and arguably they were even more important in an age when it was impossible to mass produce quality and consistency.
Jones had always struggled with his eight iron and years after he died they invented a machine that could match shafts perfectly. They tested Jones' clubs and, sure enough, the eight iron was the only mismatched shaft in his set.
RM has been accused of being obsolete and if the best players are the measure then it's true that the four par fives on the West Course are very short and are easily reached with middle-iron second shots. Great design is still great design and Melbourne's designer, Alister MacKenzie, was railing about how far the ball was going in 1930. He would be horrified at what has happened since and anyone reading either of his two great books (Golf Architecture and The Spirit of St Andrews) would understand the contempt he had for those who failed to understand the spirit of the game.
Anyway, Friday was an interesting exercise. We took our modern drivers with heads the size of frying pan heads off the first but the hickory club came out on the second tee.
Ogilvy had never hit a wooden shaft but he had a couple of hits and concluded that "my body will tell me how to hit it".
It took him no time to adjust to the feel of the shaft and after a few holes he said "you just don't even want to pull your normal driver out when you can play like this".
Manufacturers have made fortunes mass-producing quality metal drivers and they have unquestionably made the game easier for the average player. Mishits are more than kindly treated by the big heads but off-centre hits with a small-headed wood with a hickory shaft are not pretty.
Ogilvy barely missed the middle of the two wood's clubface and anyone watching would have been astounded how far he drove the ball. Into the strong south wind off the eighth tee he covered 230 metres and down wind off the next he was right at the 270-metre mark. At the long par-four 11th he lost one high and right on the wind and had to hit a three-wood from there but that was about the only bad one he hit. At the par-five 12th and 15th he easily reached the greens with seven-iron second shots and at the final hole ripped the hickory over the corner of the dogleg and hit a wedge onto the green.
There was nothing revolutionary about our conclusions as we walked off the 18th. That RM played so short for a great player using a hickory shaft backed up what MacKenzie said all those years ago. The custodians of the game need to control the ball because RM, like most of our wonderful suburban courses, has no more land.