An Ode to Odd Sets of Clubs

The second hole at Golden Gate Park is usually about 110 yards. It plays downhill and often downwind. The green is a beautifully shaped, three-tier work of art: a low front bowl, a middle spine just wide enough for a mean-spirited superintendent to drop a pin on, and a back shelf that slopes away and feeds poorly struck shots into a sandy waste area. The decision is usually simple. If the wind is blowing, I hit a sand wedge. If it has died down, maybe I chip a gap wedge. Either way, I hit this green 90% of the time.

The crux of this story is that, when I stood on the tee recently, I only had two clubs: a 7-iron and a putter.

I chose 7-iron and decided to go get my birdie. The pin was back left, and I figured that if I chipped my ball into the first hill above the bottom bowl, I could kill the speed and let it roll out nicely to the back. I choked down, steadied my nerves, and gave it a rhythmic chip. I hit it perfectly. The ball landed within a foot of where I was trying to hit it. Unfortunately, that foot was long, and the ball skipped off the top of the hill. It checked a little, but nowhere near enough for a shot that apexed 30 feet. By the second bounce I knew. An ill-formed plan steeped in greed had put me in a spot of bother. Normally, if I end up back there, something has gone seriously wrong and I’m internally furious. On this day I grabbed my towel, wiped off the face of my club, and chuckled to myself as I bounded down the hill to hit a 7-iron out of a waste area.

I have been playing like this a lot lately. Nine-hole par 3 courses with two clubs, team matchplay with five, a half set here and there, the occasional dabble in vintage clubs. It started as a novelty but has become most of the golf I actually look forward to.

I want to be clear about who is telling you this, because it matters. I have been a serious golfer, by most objective measures, for the past 20 years. Pretty good and pretty serious. My handicap fluctuates within a stroke or two of scratch in both directions, and a bad round used to stay with me far longer than I care to admit. I may not have played in hundreds of tournaments, but I did not play golf casually. I am not sure I knew how.

Some of that has changed for reasons that have nothing to do with golf.

I am 41. I have a five-year-old. I still get out more than most people do, much to the chagrin of my loving wife, but I do not get out the way I used to, and I do not practice the way I used to. At my peak, I was practicing five or six times a week. I cannot remember the last time I went to a short-game area and hit bunker shots for an hour. It strikes me as insane that this was something I used to do.

Here is the trap. The hours went away, but the standard did not. I spent several years playing golf with the expectations of a person who practiced constantly and had an accommodating schedule. I used to measure how happy I was by how few strokes I took. Every round became a referendum, and more often than not, I was going to lose. On a Tuesday afternoon with nothing on the line and nobody watching, I still kept an internal scorecard against a version of myself who had the time to earn that number.

I do not think this is unique to good players. Most golfers I know are carrying around an idealized version of their game, and spending far too much time beating themselves up for not living up to it.

What got me out of it was not a mindset shift or a book or a conversation with a sports psychologist. It was showing up at a par 3 course with two clubs, at first because it was a novelty.

The thing about walking onto a par 3 course with two clubs is that you cannot pick the wrong club.

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That sounds like a joke. It is not. So much of what makes golf punishing is the gap between the correct decision and the one you made, and the way that gets replayed in your mind. Take away the options and the whole apparatus goes quiet. There is no correct club. There is only the club, and the question of what you can make it do.

What replaces it is more interesting than I expected. You start seeing the golf course instead of the yardage. With a full bag, 110 yards downhill is a number I convert into a club and then attempt to execute. With a 7-iron, it is a problem with a half-dozen permutations introduced. Is there a slope I can use? Where do I absolutely not want to be? Where is the most likely place I can two-putt from?

Then there are the shots themselves, which I have become genuinely enamored with. A punchy draw that runs onto the green. A fluttery cut. A choked-down, flighted shot. The always welcome, full-swing stock shot.

There is one I keep coming back to, and it took me a while to understand why. With two clubs, I end up hitting a choppy chip with some cut spin on it, hoping it checks when it lands. It is one of the first shots I ever learned.

I grew up in Oklahoma, on courses that mostly did not have bunkers. I am pretty sure I did not own a sand wedge until I was 16. This was not a philosophy, it was simple logic. There was no sand, so there was no reason to own a sand wedge. Everything around the green got chipped with a pitching wedge or a 9-iron or a 7-iron, because those were the clubs I had. Meanwhile, I was enamored with the pros and their ability to hit a shot into a green and spin it back. That seemed like magic to a 13-year-old playing Wilson Staff Titanium balls his Paw Paw found in the woods. So I practiced tirelessly at hitting down into the ball, putting as much spin on it as I possibly could, hoping to find my ball closer to me than my pitch mark.

I remember the first sand wedge I ever owned. A chrome Cleveland Tour Action 588 with grooves that, to me, felt like Gillette razor blades. I felt like I was absolutely ripping the cover off the ball and I loved it. Unfortunately, as Roger Cleveland's beautiful boy made its way into my bag, my 9-iron nippers started to disappear. After the sand wedge came a gap wedge, then a lob wedge, and over the next 20 years, I got reasonably competent with all of them. I started chipping exclusively with high-lofted wedges. To be honest, I loved it. I still love it. But making my way around a course with two clubs has me rekindling an old flame, and I am just as excited about that.

I should tell you that for a long time I would have rolled my eyes at all of this.

The team at Fried Egg Golf has always had people who play this way. Andy often talks about playing hickories at bucket list courses, the kind of places most people would kill to play. When I first heard about that, I thought it was ridiculous. You get one afternoon at a course like that, possibly one afternoon in your life, and you are going to spend it hitting a mashie?

I did not say it out loud, but I thought it loudly.

What I was missing is that I had confused one way of experiencing a golf course with the only way. I thought the respectful thing to do at a great course was to play it as well as I could. That is a real position, and I do not think it is stupid. It is just narrower than I understood. There are people who get more out of a place by meeting it with the equipment it was built for, or by carrying almost nothing, or by hitting a shot the architect may or may not have anticipated and finding out the ground supports it anyway. That is not a lesser experience. It is a different one, and in some cases it is a closer reading of the course than mine was.

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None of this means I have given up. I still care about playing well. I still keep a handicap. I still want to shoot a number. And I am still absolutely going to try to gut you like a pheasant if you want to play a friendly match. I am not here to tell you that scores do not matter, or that you should go find enlightenment in a five-club bag. That would be a much easier essay to write, but it would be dishonest about how I actually feel.

What I would say is that the pursuit of perfection is one way to enjoy golf. For me, it had quietly become my only way, and it is a demanding standard to hold.

If any of this sounds familiar, the cost of finding out if this is for you is basically zero. Go to a par 3 course with two clubs. Play nine with half a bag. Pull five clubs out of the trunk before a Tuesday round and leave the rest in the car.

The second hole at Golden Gate Park is still 110 yards, downhill, and usually downwind. I have played it six or seven times this year with a 7-iron and I have not hit the same shot twice. The second hole used to be a simple math problem, but it is now so much more. I cannot remember the last time I looked forward to 110 yards of humps and bumps this much.