OK, I COULD NOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO POST THE JPEG, BUT HERE IS THE ARTICLE WRITTEN BY CURT SAMPSON AND PUBLISHED IN DMAGAZINE EARLIER THIS YEAR AFTER THE BYRON NELSON...I REALLY LIKE THE ARTICLE AND HOPE I'VE GIVEN IT PROPER CREDIT...I TRIED TO FIND THE ARTICLE ON DMAGAZINE'S WEB SITE BUT WAS UNSUCCESSFUL.
The Gentleman and His Stick What would happen if today’s golf pros hit Byron Nelson’s driver?
Byron nelson was an apple-cheeked country boy trying to balance the demands of matrimony and a difficult job. “Byron, we’ve been married one year,” Louise Nelson observed at the U.S. Open in suburban Pittsburgh in 1935. “I haven’t bought a new dress or a new pair of shoes or anything for myself in all that time. But you’ve bought four new drivers and you’re not happy with any of them. Either you don’t know what kind of driver you want, or you don’t know how to drive.” Early the next morning, the chastened husband sanded and shaped a Spalding in the Oakmont Country Club golf shop, and, as he recalled with considerable understatement in his autobiography, How I Played the Game, “I never had any trouble with my driving after that.”
MacGregor made a copy for him five years later, and that was the stick Nelson used to win all those tournaments in the ’40s. The company naturally produced a line of Byron Nelson autograph model clubs. I have one, procured many years ago by my brother at a rummage sale and then summarily swiped by me. A week before this year’s HP Byron Nelson Championship, I noticed the old brown driver in a bag of misfit clubs in my garage. And I thought what if? So I tucked the club under my arm and strolled onto the TPC practice tee the day before the tournament.
Approaching touring pros practicing is a delicate art. “Excuse me, Phil,” the deferential journalist will say, sotto voce, during a lull in the athlete’s exertion. “When you get a minute, may I ask about your plans for the U.S. Open?” But no matter how careful the timing and diplomatic the greeting, you still often get the gimlet eye and forbidding body language. “Maybe later,” Tiger Woods once replied to my gentle request, meaning “undoubtedly never.” But on this day of days, the old club and I were the coolest guys at the party.
Why did everyone want to hit the Byron Nelson driver? That we were at Nelson’s namesake tournament probably had something to do with it. For the older players who tried it—Michael Bradley, Vijay Singh, and Corey Pavin—the experience was pure nostalgia, because they had learned the game with flammable clubs in their bags (the transition to metal-headed woods took place in the mid-’80s). The younger players, I think, responded to the romance of the thing. Back in the day, hammer marks, drill holes, and dabs of lead were badges of honor, indicating thoughtful tinkering on off-the-rack equipment. But today’s sticks are relatively soulless and perfect. No modern pro stands in a tiny, shellacscented room with a rasp in his hand and motes of sawdust in the air. You don’t sand titanium.
“Wow, does that feel funny,” said Pavin after his first hit with the pear-shaped chunk of persimmon. “The ball feels like a marshmallow. It feels good, actually. You get a lot of feedback in the hands.”
The feedback continues in the air. With his third swing, Pavin hit a pop-up. Had the game been baseball, the second baseman would have had it. “Woops,” he said. “A little high on the face.” Minutes later, Vijay Singh swung the wood wood and whacked a hook big enough to catch a whale. Today’s clubs hit knuckle balls; big curveballs just aren’t a part of the game anymore. The old clubs were much harder to hit far and much harder to hit straight.
The club’s look disoriented the pros. The scale looked off, like a 4-ounce can of beer. According to Randy Shade, a technician in the Adams Golf equipment van, the overall length of the Nelson driver was a little more than 43 inches, and the volume of its head was about 170 cubic centimeters. Modern drivers are usually about 45 inches long, and their canned ham-sized heads encompass up to 460 cubic centimeters, the legal limit. The plain brown stain, the lightly rusting steel shaft, the whipping holding the head and shaft together, and the Phillips screws securing the sole plate and the insert— none of these elements has an equivalent in today’s golf sticks.
The acoustics also threw the world’s best players for a loop. Modern clubs contacting modern balls produce a shrill, resounding threek—or the sharp knock of a coconut falling on concrete. But the Nelson driver made only a subtle, muffled slap.
“It’s so quiet, it’s like a silencer,” said Kevin Streelman, a pro I’d never heard of. (So much for who I’ve heard of. Streelman finished tied for 13th and won $125,666 in the tournament.) The Illinois native and Duke graduate put down his Cleveland HiBore Monster XLS driver, whose Mitsubishi Rayon shaft was decorated with pictures of ninja throwing discs. His shots with the modest old wooden club flew low and not very far—about 50 yards shorter than with his gamer, he estimated.
Kevin Na loved the sweet feel of the Nelson autograph model. “You could go out with this driver and still score,” he said.
“I wouldn’t want to try it on a 490-yard par four,” replied Michael Bradley. Exactly—golf courses around the world have had to add length in response to the equipment. Four hundred ninety used to be a par 5. Now, with the average drive on the PGA Tour approaching 300 yards, 490 is easily accomplished with a drive and an iron.
By the time Little Byron and I reached the end of the tee line, we’d gathered an audience of about 25. Equipment reps with IDs on lanyards, over-tanned caddies in bibs and khaki shorts, a couple of players (including Swedish star Jesper Parnevik), and red-pantsed tournament volunteers— they all wanted to see Chad Campbell go old school. That Campbell agreed to take part in the experiment was a coup, because the Colleyville resident is regarded as one of the purest, most consistent strikers in the world. The results would therefore provide a credible picture of Then and Now in golf. To complete the scene, I’d acquired a dozen period golf balls from Gilbert Freeman, the director of golf at Lakewood Country Club in Dallas. I handed Campbell the club and a sleeve of Titleist balata 100s, going gray with age.
Uphill and against a light wind, Campbell had been hitting his Adams A4 Tech driver with its Graffaloy Tour X shaft an average 291 yards (as measured on a machine called TrackMan, a radar unit that can detail trajectory and distance of any golf shot up to 400 yards). With the wood club and the old ball, his average distance fell to 247. The old ball hit by the old club spun furiously through the air, about 60 percent faster than with Campbell’s high-tech stick.
Vijay Singh strolled over to investigate the hubbub. He wanted to try the Nelson driver, too, and he wanted to beat Campbell’s best (with a modern ball) of 253.9. Singh is an A-list golfer whose hatred of the media is legend, but after conversing with me briefly, he hit and hit until the TrackMan operator called out, “254!” The little crowd cheered. Vijay smiled. Meeting adjourned.
What had this exercise proved? Only that the game with wood woods and quicksilver balls had been a good one. Hooks and slices were amusing, and maddening, and 300- yard drives were more impressive when they were rare. Then about 25 years ago— without a vote—a triumvirate of consumers, manufacturers, and the United States Golf Association changed golf from an art to a track and field event.
What did Byron Nelson think about how evolving equipment changed his sport? I don’t think he was too sentimental about it. After all, 75 years ago, he was himself the first master of a new technology—the steel shaft. Nelson once gave me a tour of his workshop, but the sawdust on the floor came from the beautiful coffee tables and curio cabinets he made from scratch, not from wooden golf club heads. And in those few years near the end of his life when he hit the ceremonial first tee shot at the Masters, Nelson swung a big ol’ metal-headed Cleveland.