I find I experience the game at a more meaningful level when I'm scoring badly, and so I purposely use a set of irons inherited from Walter Hagen's great-grandniece Betty and a driver that I carved myself with a pocket-knife out of an old beech-tree felled by lightening. I still tend to shoot in the 90s, however, and that level of efficiency simply doesn't recreate the feel (and the joy) of the average golfer playing the game during its golden age, and so to get a better sense of that I recently started using marshmallows as my golf balls of choice. The challenge and, well, flat out fun of it all is beyond words -- especially when I'm playing my home course (a C&C reno that replaced all the bunkers with grass hazards and shortened the course some 2000 yards, to 4100 yards from the tips). I'm telling you: when you hit one of those puffy white marshmallows just right using forged blades from 1920s, the feeling (i.e. as if you've hit nothing at all) runs from your hands and through your arms and straight into your heart. On the other hand, getting up and down from a grass depression to a double plateau green running 5 on the stimpmeter can have even a true lover of the game asking if it's all worth it!!
Peter