CRITICAL MASS : Where have the 2-irons gone? Blame it on the times
Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008
My left-handed golfing buddy, bless him, just sent me an e-mail asking my advice as to where he might acquire a two-iron.
He had one once. It was a Taylor-Made. He got it about 11 years ago when he first took up what the Brazilians call “The Wretched Game.” I remember seeing it in his bag. I looked at it with wonder and amazement. I had seen two-irons before, even lefthanded two-irons, but even then they were becoming rare, especially in the bags of novices. The consensus was that ordinary mortals had no business trying to hit a two-iron. I will accept responsibility for introducing my friend to golf, but I never told him to get a two-iron.
My left-handed friend is not sure what happened to his original twoiron. I think it disappeared from his bag about the time a cluster of seven-woods blossomed there. (He had four. ) Some of these were eventually replaced by so-called hybrid clubs, which nobody seems to know how to hit.
And then the other day, my friend pulled out his three-iron — another club that regular humans are not supposed to be able to use safely — and allegedly hit it well. (I say allegedly because I was not there, and while I trust my friend, I know he is not always sane and sensible when he is on the golf course, where 240 yards sometimes looks and feels like 300. After you’ve topped your way around a scruffy muni for five hours, flushing out a half-tagged toe shot that flutters up like a startled grouse can feel like victory. )
But what matters is that my friend feels like he hit his three-iron well. And having hit it well, he believes that he might be well-served by a two-iron. Only he can’t find the old one. So did I have any advice on where he might find a new one ? Or a used one, cheap ?
My friend asked my advice because he knows I know these things. I know the best place on this continent for a left-handed golfer to find used clubs is in the trade-in rack of Nevada Bob’s on the corner of Yonge and Richmond streets in Toronto. (I also know it’s not the influence of Mike Weir that causes the disproportionate number of left-handed Canadian golfers, it’s the slap shot. ) I know the online sources for used golf clubs, the auction sites and the factory outlets. I even have a pretty good idea as to what sort of two-iron my friend would have the best chance of hitting successfully — I suggested he try to find an old Ping G 2 HL model and even pointed him to a Callaway X-12 with one of the old Memphis 10 “uniflex” shafts.
I know this because I am a golf degenerate and I told him this because I am an enabler. And because he is old enough to decide for himself whether he really wants a two-iron. All I can say in my defense is that I told him that not even Tiger Woods regularly carries a twoiron anymore. THE COMING OF THE CHOSEN
Tiger Woods started all this, you know.
As you may have heard, he won his 14 th major golf championship in San Diego recently. He beat a thoroughly human guy named Rocco Mediate, a 45-yearold with the swing of a B-flight club champion, a nice smile and uncommon equanimity in the face of heartbreaking bad luck.
I’m not saying Woods is an evil being, but he’s the reason my friend took up golf. He’s probably the reason most people who are trying to play golf now took up the game. (He’s partly the reason I took up golf after a decadelong hiatus. ) And he’s probably responsible for more than a few people quitting the game.
Woods shouldn’t have this kind of influence on us, because he is not a regular human. If he wanted, he could hit a two-iron 100 feet high and 270 yards far. But a year or so ago he traded out his two-iron for a five-wood, a concession more to the ingenuity of modern golf equipment design than advancing age or the diminution of his skills. (Woods is 32 years old, an age generally considered the beginning of a professional golfer’s prime. ) With the modern golf ball, which spins a lot less than golf balls used to, a five-wood can be a slightly more versatile club; it’s a little easier to manage out of the rough or a bad lie.
Still, I am disappointed that Woods seems to have forsaken his two-iron — a club that he used extensively off the tee when he won the British Open at Holylake two years ago — because he hit his long irons as well as anyone since Jack Nicklaus, who is acknowledged as being the best long iron player ever. (For a lot of reasons, it’s not really fair to compare Nicklaus to Woods, but Nicklaus hit Tiger-quality long irons with demonstrably inferior equipment. )
And while a long iron is not as effective an implement as a lofted wood or a hybrid club, it is a more elegant weapon. We don’t remember Ben Hogan’s 19-degree hybrid shot at the 72 nd hole of the 1950 U. S. Open at Merion; the famous photograph is of him holding his finish with his one-iron — a club that Lee Trevino famously said only God could hit. Does that mean the rest of us shouldn’t even try ? THE DEATH OF THE PRECISE
The point of playing golf — for the great majority of us — ought not to be to shoot the lowest score we possibly can. Technology makes things easier but in the process robs us of some of the sensations once thought integral to our games.
I grew up playing baseball at a time when metal — aluminum, in my day — bats were just beginning to dominate. When I was in Little League they were still a novelty that everyone wanted to try out; by the time I was in high school they were the norm. (But not for me; I hit with a Louisville Slugger with a knobless grip emblazoned with the autograph of Nellie Fox, an instrument I now realize was probably particularly ill-suited to my swing but fit my self-image well. )
Now you have to go to a major or minor league game — or to one of the “wood bat” leagues designed to help amateurs transition to the pros — to hear the genuine crack of the bat. And it’s not simply an aesthetic experience (although that may be reason enough to cling to old ways ): There is a qualitative difference between hitting a ball in an organic sweet spot and missing it by a fraction of an inch. Metal bats don’t provide the same precise feedback — the penalties for imprecision have been muted.
I might sound like a codger were I to suggest that’s one of the biggest problems with our society today. At times it seems futile and fogeyish to insist on doing things the “right” way. Every profession and vocation seems to have lost part of its art: Basketball players have abandoned midrange jumpers (and free throw shooting ) for flashy crossover drives and thunderous dunks. Hollywood has abandoned the adult market for recidivist 14-year-olds. Political discourse in this country has devolved into shout shows. Results have become more important than style. The ends matter more than the means.
Precision has become needless and effete.
Maybe we need to return some of the degree of difficulty to our cozy lives, to purposefully complicate our pastimes. No pain, no gain, the cliche goes. Anything worth achieving is worth failing at.
So maybe what we need is to return two-irons to mere mortals and let them hack away inefficiently and ineffectively until they make a lucky strike and the ball sails high and long. And something sweet and rare spikes in our calloused hearts. E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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