Turning back the golf clock by playing with hickory shafts

One does not see today's skiers dusting off the old wooden slats. The ones that were physically attached to the feet with tough leather straps on boots tightly laced to the feet. They were a broken ankle or leg waiting to happen on ungroomed ski slopes, let alone serious head injury from flailing helicopter blades after a fall.

But some golfers are hearkening back to the good old days when hickory shafted clubs with funny names - not numbers - filled a bag that was slung over the shoulder. And courses were walked, not ridden in carts.

About two dozen golfers hit the fairways at The Fairways last Wednesday for a beta-test of a trip back in the sport's time machine to hit the little white ball.

Hickory is known for being hard, stiff, dense and shock resistant and has led to the wood being used for tool handles, baseball bats, drumsticks - and golf clubs. "Honestly, this is my first time playing it," Ryan Pitkonen, who organized the Oct., 18 event, said.

Pitkonen, the superintendent of The Fairways was introduced to the clubs via use of a putter this past summer. "I putted well with it," and after that the thought of a tournament was born. The club that captured Pitkonen's imagination allowed him to putt the ball on his line better than any new one, he said.

He even hinted to possibly melding some of the old - he's not saying what - and new technology in the future in a club.

With the use of some of about 70 sets of clubs that a local hickory enthusiast has collected, and rents, the group set out on a gorgeous day on the course.

"Anything different, changing the game," was Pitkonen's motivation. "Sometimes golf can get boring; we play the same game over and over, so to play something different, going back to our roots was something cool."

Playing about 100 rounds per year, Piktonen knows the game well and the differences the wood shafted clubs offer vs. the state-of-the-art offerings of today.

"You lose 15 percent (distance) or so playing them, which is why we played a forward (women's) tee," Pitkonen explained.

New technology is making most golf courses obsolete, Piktonen claims. "People are hitting it (the ball) so far it's outdating a lot of golf courses," he said. "It's driver, seven-iron to a par-5. That's not what it's supposed to be."

For golf courses to be built to accommodate today's play, they need to expand by 50 percent, Pitkonen said. "That's 50 percent more land, 50 percent more water, 50 percent more fertilizer and 50 percent more mowing."

Those are non-starters in a sport that has seen vast losses of play, with the older generation slowly fading away and young people hard to sell because of the time a round of golf takes to play.

The goal is to try to build a bigger tournament in 2019, earlier in the season, however, and hopefully a two-day affair.

A hickory tournament had been planned a few years back in observance of the 100th birthday of Spokane's Downriver Gold Course, but there was not enough interest.

"I think it was just people being scared of it, it's going to be too hard, it's going to be this," Pitkonen said. There were a wide variety of skill levels engaged in the Fairways version, and "Everybody enjoyed it."

Avid golfer, Kevin Davis suggested, "I think the ability of the golfer had to be better to be proficient." But to play with the hickory shafts and the funky-sounding clubs like mashie and niblicks was what Davis called using "anti-game improvement irons."

After his outing Wednesday, Davis was certainly looking to get his regular clubs back in his hands and the result was notable.

"It certainly worked out, coincidently, this is not a common affair, but I did not play good at all but two days later I had a hole-in-one with a pitching wedge," Davis proudly proclaimed of the feat on the par-3 16th at Liberty Lake.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].

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