Now that was fun

[Ravenous Bugblatter Beast]

Cripes, I haven't had this much fun out on the course in a long time. Having found the remnants of my father's old starter set, I was itching to play some holes with them. So last night when I had cleaned them up, I had gently used a brillo pad on the old grips to restore some tackiness to their feel, enough so that I could get a grip on the club and not feel like it would come flying out of my hands.

Along with the 1-wood, 3I, 7I, 9I, and putter, I filled in the rest of things with my 3-wood of present, an old Wilson early cavity back 5-iron, and the 50* Hubert Green wedge for a grand total of 8 clubs.

Long story short: I played 14 holes in 9 over par. Not too bad all things considered especially since I've just identified a swing flaw that I'm now correcting.

But it was fun. I had to do some thinking out there, and I ended up playing some in-between types of shots by choking down on the longer iron and taking hair off my swing. In that way I was able to create in 4-iron, or 6-iron, or 8-iron distance.

I had a great time with the 1-wood off the tee. It's an amazing sound when you hit one flush off the screws, it's a sharp crack sound, and very satisfying to see the ball flying with a low, boring trajectory.

And overall I was quite pleased with the progress I made in correcting the swing flaw. I made another adjustment that I hadn't done yet on the range, which was leaning forward and hinging my torso at the waist. That made it a lot easier to keep the shoulder plane, rotation around the spine, and my left elbow straight.

It was a fun 14 holes. One birdie along the way, a better swing, and a chance to play with clubs that long ago were held by my father's hands.

[JEFF4i]

That's really awesome man, I'm glad you had fun.

[Ravenous Bugblatter Beast]

It was a lot of fun, especially in places where it felt like I had to think about what to do with my setup to adjust for yardages. I rather enjoyed the challenge of that.

It's probably not a bad sort of idea for almost any golfer to try, go out and play a round with only 7 or 8 clubs, and find yourself needing to think about your approach for those in-between yardages. I think too often we subtly get caught up in the idea of equipment playing us instead of us playing the equipment. A way to rediscover that it is up to us to make the shots is to limit the equipment, and suddenly you'll find that feeling of you playing the course, and it's not the clubs so much.

[BigJim13]

I still have the first set my parents bought me about 17 years ago in my garage. It consisted of Persimmon 1,3,4,5 woods, 3,5,7,9, pw in the irons (blades of course). The irons heads are tiny and the woods are heavy which i like, but its still cool to pull out the old set and hit a few.