Fourteen clubs are allowed in the bag. The harder question is whether all fourteen have earned their place.
Last month, I took my 3-wood out of the bag and replaced it with a mini-driver. Golf manufacturers would probably prefer that I think of this as something new. I don't. It is basically the 2-wood I remember from my youth.
That change was only the latest attempt to solve a problem I have been working on for more than fifty years: Which fourteen clubs actually deserve a place in my golf bag?
The Rules of Golf allow us to carry fourteen clubs. The number sounds generous until every slot is filled and a new club promises to make the game easier. Then something has to go. Every addition becomes a judgment about the shots we expect to face, the shots we believe we can hit and, perhaps most revealingly, the golfer we think we are.
My bag has never really been finished. It has simply been a snapshot of my golf game at a particular moment in time.
The Bag I Thought a Golfer Should Carry
When I began playing seriously in 1975, my parents gave me a set of Lord Byron clubs by Northwestern for my birthday. The set included a driver, 3-wood and 5-wood; irons from 3 through pitching wedge; a sand wedge; and a putter. Thirteen clubs in all.
There was room for one more, and I had read that all good players hit a 1-iron. So naturally, I added a 1-iron. There was only one flaw in my reasoning: I was not one of those good players.
That first bag reflected what I believed a serious golfer was supposed to carry. Long irons were badges of honor. Woods were actually made of wood. A standard iron set began with a 3-iron, and nobody seemed particularly concerned that most amateurs could not hit it consistently.
A couple of years later, I replaced the Northwestern driver with a Power\Bilt Citation and then a Hogan Apex. The Citation remains my favorite driver from the persimmon era. A well-struck shot with a persimmon driver had a sound and feel that today's oversized titanium heads cannot quite reproduce. The sweet spot was tiny, but finding it was immensely satisfying.
Searching for the Answer
Like most golfers, I have always been susceptible to the idea that one unusual club might solve a problem the rest of the bag could not.
In 1979, I tried a Ginty utility club made by Stan Thompson Golf. It had the loft of a 7-wood, the length of a 4-wood and a cast zinc sole plate designed to slide through difficult lies. It was promoted as "The Answer to Problem Lies." I discovered that I had more problems than it could solve.
The Ginty did not last, but the impulse behind it certainly did. Golf equipment has always been sold on hope: more distance, more forgiveness, a higher flight, a softer landing or an escape from the kind of lie that has already ruined your mood. Occasionally the promise is real. Sometimes the supposed answer merely creates another question about which club to remove.
Tom Kite, Phil Mickelson and Mr. 64
In the early 1980s, Tom Kite changed the way I thought about the short end of the bag. Kite was an extraordinary wedge player, and he advocated carrying three wedges. I had only two. That clearly had to be corrected.
The 1-iron came out and a lob wedge went in. I believe it was 60 degrees, and at the time it felt revolutionary. The swap was also a small step toward sanity: I gave up a club I thought good players were supposed to hit for one that could actually help me save shots.
A few years later, Phil Mickelson began playing a 64-degree wedge. Once again, a Tour professional showed me a shot I wanted to have. The 64 went into my bag, the 3-iron came out, and my friends began calling me "Mr. 64." This experiment worked. I could get up and down from places where a conventional wedge left me with few good options.
But a club's usefulness changes along with the golfer swinging it. As I got older and lost some of the speed required to hit the high, soft flop shot, the 64 became a 62 and eventually a 60. I did not stop loving the spectacular shot. I simply became more realistic about how often I could produce it.
When Woods Stopped Being Wood
The next great change was not one club but an entire category. I received my first metal wood, a TaylorMade Burner, for Christmas in 1990. It quickly went into the bag.
Then the original Callaway Big Bertha arrived in 1991 with an oversized stainless-steel head. TaylorMade metal woods were already appearing in the hands of leading professionals, and before long persimmon was pushed almost completely out of competitive golf. What had been standard equipment for generations became a nostalgic curiosity in remarkably little time.
The metal woods were larger, more forgiving and easier to launch. Later titanium heads became larger still. Technology did not eliminate bad swings, but it made the punishment less severe. I loved my Power\Bilt Citation, yet sentiment could not overcome the advantage of a club that produced better results on imperfect contact.
That has become one of the recurring lessons of my bag: a beloved club and the most useful club are not always the same thing.
The Long Irons Begin to Disappear
By the early 2000s, another supposed problem-solver was becoming difficult to ignore: the hybrid. Todd Hamilton's victory in the 2004 Open at Royal Troon provided the demonstration. He used his Sonartec hybrid from seemingly everywhere, including around the greens, and showed that the club was more than a rescue device for average golfers.
Soon my 5-wood and 4-iron were gone, replaced by hybrids. The transition continued a trend that had begun when the lob wedge displaced my 1-iron and the 64-degree wedge displaced my 3-iron. Over the years, my longest iron kept getting shorter.
Today, even the 5-iron no longer has permanent job security. I sometimes replace it with a 7-wood. There was a time when carrying a 7-wood might have felt like an admission that I could no longer hit a proper long iron. Now it feels like evidence that I have finally learned what the scorecard rewards. The 7-wood launches higher, lands softer and is useful from more lies. There are no style points for making the game harder.
Building a Bag for the Golfer I Am Today
When I was young, I chose some clubs because they were what good players were supposed to carry. Later, I chose clubs because Tour professionals showed me shots I wanted to imitate. Now I am more likely to ask a simpler question: What gives me the best chance to hit the shot with the swing I have today?
That question can produce different answers from one course to another. A 7-wood may be more valuable than a 5-iron when the course demands high approaches that stop quickly. A different wedge configuration may make sense on firm links turf than on a soft course with deep rough and fluffy bunkers. Tee length, wind, turf, bunker sand and the types of misses a course creates can all change which fourteen clubs earn their places.
The hardest part is avoiding duplication. Many golfers carry clubs that travel nearly the same distance because tradition says the set should flow in a particular order. The name or number on the sole matters less than whether the club produces a distinct, dependable shot. If two clubs do essentially the same job, one of them is occupying a valuable spot.
That thinking led to my most recent change. I rarely hit my 3-wood from the fairway, and it did not give me enough separation from other clubs to justify its place. The mini-driver gives me another reliable option from the tee: more control than my driver, but more distance and confidence than the 3-wood it replaced. It fills a job rather than merely filling a gap in the numbering.
The Search Continues
Fifty years after I first tried to solve the 14-club problem, I am still working on it. The 1-iron is long gone. So are the persimmon woods, the Ginty, the 3-iron, the 4-iron and Mr. 64. A 7-wood sometimes replaces my 5-iron, and last month my 3-wood lost its place to a mini-driver.
The changes trace more than the history of golf equipment. They trace my own history as a golfer: what I admired, what I copied, what I learned and what I finally became willing to admit about my game.
A golf bag should not be a museum dedicated to the player we used to be. It should help the player standing on the first tee today.
The funny thing is that after five decades of technological progress, my newest club looks suspiciously like something I could have carried in 1975. They call it a mini-driver. We used to call it a 2-wood.
Maybe the perfect golf bag does not exist. Maybe the fun is spending a lifetime trying to find it.
What’s in your bag? What club do you miss the most?
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Comments
Hi George hope you are doing well… nice work… my approach has been to remove every club I can’t actually play with. This has the advantage of only needing a pencil bag and always being able to carry!
John, That is an advantage for sure! I am looking for an old-school cart bag that can carry 20+ clubs for casual rounds.. :-)
Excellent as always. You should have a monthly column at Golf Magazine. Every club in my bag has to give me a feeling of confidence or it can’t stay. This is why my bag is so mismatched. When I sole the club it has to assure me it’s the right tool! Good work, Jorge!
Reminds me of what Lee Trevino said when in a thunderstorm he walked the fairway holding up a 1 iron. “Not even God can hit a 1 iron”