“There’s something undignified about being 55 and worrying whether something’s cool or not,” Mat Osman, the bassist for the band Suede, said in a recent Guardian profile. I’m not quite 55 but I’m close enough, and the line resonated with me because passing this binary judgement felt like such a central concern of the early 1990s, the period which I’d recently been interrogating in response to Pitchmarks’ call for papers on noteworthy golf clubs of our acquaintance.
There’s a temptation, when one sets off on a nostalgic journey, to present one’s younger self as having been as in-the-know as we imagine ourselves to be in the present day. When threads of early musical influences appear on social media, there’s an instinct to curate, to proclaim allegiance to unimpeachables—Wire or Television or The Minutemen—and all the while a Kiss poster molders in the corner of a closet of a place we once called home. Airbrushing away the awkward zits-and-braces era of our consumer tastes is a bit like keeping a vanity handicap—it may not harm anyone else, but it doesn’t help us, either.
For Gen X golfers, this revisionist tendency is diminished somewhat by the broad understanding that when we were coming up, cf. Osman, almost nothing about the game was “cool.” I’m speaking specifically of the decade-long period between the ’86 and ’97 Masters, between Yes Sir! Nicklaus and Tiger’s awe-inspiring entrance on the global golf stage. This was the Interregnum of Price and Faldo, Norman and Strange. Great players all, and there were many more, but they were leading actors in a sport that had since the peak of Palmer been on a slow retreat into niche status. In the ‘80s, tennis towered over golf in terms of participation and broader cultural relevance, a detail that younger readers might have difficulty contemplating. Golf’s popular image was defined by Caddyshack, which came out in 1980 bearing the (broadly accurate) message that the game and its culture were desperately backward, the province of snobs and idiots. It’s a funny movie, but I don’t know anyone who took up golf because of Ty Webb. The point is that those who found their way into the game did so mostly in the absence of pro-golf messaging from society at large, and in many cases that absence itself was the draw.
There’s a considerable amount of interest these days in vintage golf equipment. John Ashworth’s company, Linksoul, has been working on getting golfers to try (or re-try) persimmon. We drool over Instagram accounts that feature refurbished Hogan and MacGregor irons from the ‘50s and ‘60s, or even Mizuno offerings from the turn of the millennium. However, the equipment of the Interregnum seldom features in this retro lovefest. When it is, it’s often in the context of an Ugly Club slideshow—no one could have predicted the long Internet half-life of the Cleveland VAS irons, easily the most heinous clubs to ever win a major (Corey Pavin, 1995 US Open, Shinnecock Hills). The coolest tech innovation of the early ‘90s, the Callaway Big Bertha metalwood, isn’t much of a collector’s item. In the same way that you can find the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in any Goodwill, they’re all over eBay for $20. Take your pick.
So it was a transitional period in more ways than one. My relationship with the gear from my first years in the game exists at another degree of separation, one driven by a genetic quirk that, in the world of golf, was significant 35 years ago: I am left-handed. The only other golfer in my extended family, a Cajun uncle-by-marriage named Ross, identified this—of all things, and not the ridiculous shaft-steepening habits that have bedeviled all my days—as a problem. His reasoning, I soon came to understand, was altogether bizarre: He believed that teaching pros would not give me lessons, accustomed as they were to saying “left arm”, “right wrist”, and so on. Ross tried to help me switch sides, lending me his clubs to play a second ball at the West Virginia state park course near where our families would meet for holidays. It was a well-intentioned and short-lived experiment.
Lefty stayed lefty, then, and it’s hard to overstate the parched equipment landscape that we southpaws wandered during these years. There were, of course, big, beautiful brick-and-mortar golf shops that I loved to visit in 9 th and 10 th grade, even though I understood that 99% of the inventory was unplayable in my hands. My bag (an awful blue-leather Burton clone with a shoulder strap that could cut steel) filled up with clubs that essentially chose me. A Wilson Sam Snead putter—this one was a no-brainer, as it was a straight blade that could be used by lefties and righties alike. Clanky Ram Accubar irons. Spalding Executive persimmons followed (after much parental begging) by Spalding Executive metalwoods. (The persimmons were better, though I needed to quit the game for the first time and let the dust settle before admitting that to myself.) I also carried a Golden Ram 2-iron, a gorgeous, out-of-my-league blade that I found deep in the woods, lodged in a tree about eight feet off the ground, at the country club where I caddied for a couple of summers. At the end of the loop I brought it into the pro shop, imagining it might go into a lost-and-found bin, but when I handed it over to one of the assistant pros he gave a smirking glance and said, “I know exactly whose club this is, and you should keep it.”
As a teenager I had a subscription to Golf magazine, and the equipment ads were an endless parade of forbidden fruit—stuff I’d never afford, wasn’t made for the sinister, or both. I fetishized one product above all… and this is the moment where I unroll my Kiss poster. Sometime around 1988, Hillerich & Bradsby launched a line of irons under its Powerbilt brand—the TPS, or “Tournament Players Series.” I was a baseball player, and H&B had some cachet in that world—they made the Louisville Slugger. Fuzzy Zoeller was their ambassador on Tour. I had no opinion about Fuzzy as a player, but when I watched him on TV it was hard not to notice his caddie humping around an enormous orange staff bag with a lightning-bolt mark on the side. For reasons that weren’t clear to me at the time and indeed are now a complete mystery as I settle into middle age, I thought this was cool as hell.
The TPS irons themselves had orange paint fill, and a funky stamping pattern that framed the grooves on the club face. Some models had the number of the iron stamped on the sweet spot. More than anything, though, I was fascinated by the ad campaign for these irons—which I was certain I’d never own. Memory can bear false witness, but at the time I felt like they were being marketed differently than other clubs. For one, H&B didn’t use a celebrity endorser for the TPS line. Fuzzy appeared in ads for a Powerbilt iron that served as the K-Mart house brand, but TPS was…premium. What they did, instead, was line up the entire set of irons over a photo (almost always an aerial) of some Tawny Kitaen of an ‘80s golf course. Something Robert von Hagge might have built—huge ponds, flowing amoeba bunkers, buxom ‘dozer mounds, probably some palm trees—the works.
They also let the copywriters go wild—the ads were wordy. H&B’s approach to pitching the TPS was not dissimilar to how Packard might have tried to sell you a car in, like, 1935. They demanded a solid minute of your time to set the scene and run through the myriad virtues of their bulbous cast cavity-back iron. The message was—and this is going to sound spectacularly stupid, but we’re in deep now: These bad boys will help you bring this saucy minx of a golf course to its knees. I appreciated this a great deal more than some three-word tagline paired with a photo of Tom Watson. As a kid I knew that golf was cool, but I was less convinced that pro golfers were cool—a position that I hold to a certain extent to this day.
So I coveted these dumb orange blobs, but as is sometimes the case with bad crushes, I never confessed my love to anyone. I didn’t drop hints to my parents or start a little savings fund from my various minimum-wage jobs to try to pay for them myself. In an age when information wasn’t a couple of clicks away, I didn’t muster the ambition to find out if they were even available in my dexterity. Then one day in 1994, when I was a senior in high school, I saw one—a left-handed Powerbilt TPS wedge—in a shop’s used-club bin. I don’t think I even checked the price sticker—I bought it immediately. My excitement mounted when I pondered the fact that this wedge was stamped “W”; my Ram Accubar set, crucially, ended with a “P”. By this point in the tale it should be clear that I was not a “high golf IQ” junior, but I took this to mean I had acquired a sand wedge.
And I’d never owned a sand wedge of any kind before, much less a fabled TPS! This, I told myself, would be a powerful weapon against the terrible “Steamshovel” Banks bunkers—ten, fifteen feet deep—that had given me fits in the past. I couldn’t wait to put it to the test. When that moment came a few days later, I carefully set up, opened the face the way the brown pages of Golf magazine had taught me, drew the club back…and bladed the ball into the tenth dimension. Now, I’m no Seve—not then, not now—but this was no sand wedge, either. I remember going back and checking the ads. H&B, quite reasonably, had stamped their sand wedge with an “S”. For the next several years, I carried two pitching wedges. Despite knowledge to the contrary, I told myself that one of them was special, the perfect instrument for my daring bunker escapes. Occasionally it worked, too.
I still have my Powerbilt “W.” It has survived multiple moves and even a natural disaster. I would’ve loved to have waxed poetic about something unimpeachable, some “cool” Australian blade or a rare feat of samurai craftsmanship, but no. My favorite club is just a pokey, middle- of-the-road (at best) orange pitching wedge that I convinced myself was something other than what it really was, every step of the way. I don’t recall hitting any highlight reel shots with it, but I was never disappointed by the club’s performance—that was beside the point. What mattered was that it represented youthful enthusiasm—my desire to burrow deep into the game—and the feeling of possibility it gave me at a time when possibility was everywhere in life. The TPS imprinted itself on me first through good old-fashioned advertising, and again today by nostalgia. Those two elements can be combined and marketed in countless ways; their valence produces something that can render us helpless, even when we understand it and can see it coming a mile away.
And with that in mind: Kiss is still touring, by the way.
My Dad, who gifted me his love of the game, was a lefty who took up golf right handed due to the dearth of equipment for those who hit from "the wrong side of the ball." In his day, born in 1926 (and passed way too soon in 1990), it was fairly common for lefties to be shoe-horned into playing right handed. He was a fine player (6.3 index when he passed, not bad for 63) and always felt that having his dominant arm leading the swing was an advantage for him.
I seem to recall reading about Billie Jean King having taken up golf after her tennis career, and because of the relative size and strength of her right arm, as opposed to the left, someone convinced her that she should learn to play lefthanded. She went for a lesson from Bob Toski, who convinced her otherwise in a few moments of their lesson. My thought is to stick with what you've got and just continue having fun!!!