The end had been coming for a long while, and finally it arrived, on the Sunday before the PGA Championship. I was playing in my regular game, at home in Philadelphia. I used my $400 Titleist 975D titanium driver 12 times. Didn't hit a single fairway. Given the places I was driving the ball, my round of 86 was no small feat. (I'm an 11.) The next morning I was in the factory of the Louisville Golf Club Company, just down the road from Valhalla. Louisville Golf is the last large-scale U.S. manufacturer of persimmon drivers. I was looking to go back to wood. Seems like most everybody is. Well, that may be an exaggeration. But Elmore Just, president of Louisville Golf, had heard that Bob Estes, winner of the 1994 Texas Open, was considering going back to a wooden driver. Just also reported that Bobby Nichols, the 64' PGA champ and a native son of Louisville, had sent a nephew to the factory to pick up one of Just's new Smart drivers, with the idea that Nichols would consider using it at Valhalla. But that was before Nichols pulled out of the tournament. Still, Just hopes that wood will come back. "It has a good past," he says. "No reason it can't have a good future. We're just trying to keep our dog in the fight." All of golf-caddying, playing, spectating, manufacturing- is rooted in optimism.
Louisville Golf was founded in 1974, in the heyday of persimmon, an era when all golfers, but pros in particular, had a much more personal relationship with their head-covered clubs. After all, the wood with which they made their living had itself once been alive. On the practice tee at Tour events, players would routinely use the words and manners of courting in regard to their wooden clubs. A tasseled sock would be pulled off triumphantly, and a neighboring player would grip the club loosely, waggle it a few times and say, "She's a beaut."
Many of those beauties were made by Louisville Golf, by Elmore Just or one of his four brothers: Ron, 54, Mike, 50, Robert, 48, and Gerard, 44. Mostly they made clubs for other companies. When Payne Stewart won the '91 U.S. Open, he played a laminated, big-headed Wilson Whale driver made in the back shop of Louisville Golf on Grassland Drive, in an industrial zone on the outskirts of the city. The Hogan Apex persimmon driver Tom Kite used in winning the '92 U.S. Open was made by Louisville. "I remember on the last hole," say Ron Just, "the TV guy said, `Looks like Kite's using a three-wood here to play safe,' and then they show the club up close and I say, "That's no three-wood. That's our driver!"
At its peak, Louisville Golf employed more than 100 woodworkers and produced about 800 clubs per day. Now it employs 11 woodworkers and makes maybe 100 clubs a day, half of them fairway woods and drivers, the other half wooden-headed putters. The Just brothers watched as the Tour, and the golfing nation with it, went from all wood to nearly all metal.
The last holdout was Davis Love III, a superb driver, who used the same No.1 wood-a pear-shaped Cleveland Classic-from his rookie year in 1986 through the middle of '97. That year Love came out with a book in which he wrote, "Golf is somehow more pleasing to me when played with a driver made of wood." We were of like minds. (I helped with the typing on Love's book.) I had a long-term relationship with a MacGregor Eye-O-Matic, from the '50s, an artwork that I hit sort of short but mostly in play. Love was the hero of Elmore and Elmores everywhere, wood men trying to hold on.
Then in August 1997, Love won a major, the PGA, using a new driver, a Titleist 975D, with a titanium head that had the loft of a putter and a shaft about as flexible as a wooden leg. Awhile later he gave me one of his spare drivers and said, "If I switched, maybe you should too." I spent three years trying every loft and every shaft flex. There were some good moments, and my best drives with those clubs were my best drives ever. That was the tantalizing thing. But there were more moments of misery than anything else. My heeled shots went dead left. They had no curve to them, tree-bound from the get-go. Toed shots were the same, affording me a visit to the right woods on an equal-opportunity basis.
Elmore Just has heard this all before. "That's why wooden clubs are better," he says. "The wood club has more curve to it, more bulge and more roll. Because of that curve, an off-center hit with a wooden club imparts more spin on the ball. What people don't seem to realize is, that's good. You want your heeled shots to start down the right side and draw back."
I had come to the right place. Just fitted me for one of his Smart drivers, a solid piece of persimmon-a wood that's hard and heavy-but with a somewhat bigger head than the classic shapes from the Eisenhower years. With hope in my heart, I plunked down $375 for the club. (About the only good thing the titanium clubs have done for him, Just says, is raise the bar on what golf nuts will spend for a driver.) My club was assembled to order. I asked for a heavy head with 10.5 degrees of loft, a D-5 swing weight, a 44 inch lightweight graphite shaft with a regular flex and a Winn grip, one wrap oversized. My new wood would be ready the next day.
Louisville is a woodworking town. One of the biggest employers in the city is still Hellerich & Bradsby, maker of the Louisville Slugger baseball bat-Powerized!-and PowerBilt golf clubs. Elmore Just, who is trim and graying and 52 years old, grew up in South Louisville, the working-class side of the city, and was the first Just to go to college, which he did at Bellarmine on a partial golf scholarship. After college and the Army, Just came home to Louisville and took a job at H&B, and it was there, in the early `70s, that he got bit by the clubmaking bug. When a clubmaker, the late Earl Gordon, left H&B to go into business for himself, Just went to work for him and learned alongside him. "If you heard Earl Gordon talking about clubs, he sounded like a poet, but Lord was he mean," Just says. "He'd say to his pregnant wife in the dead of winter, `I got to take care of some things; go out and warm up the car for me.'" Before long, Just got in his car and left Gordon, too scared of the man to return for his Royal manual typewriter and big wooden desk. It was then that he started Louisville Golf.
Just has been a tree buff and a persimmon head since he was 15, when he started playing golf at a public course that had a small stand of persimmon trees. In the fall he would eat the sweet, ripe fruit in mid-round. The great regions for persimmon in the U.S. are in the bottomlands along rivers in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, but a half-dozen persimmon trees are growing on Grassland Drive in Louisville too. Just planted those trees about 15 years ago. "Come fall I'll go out at lunchtime, gather a dozen or so persimmon fruits and eat'em at my desk," says Just, who in 1984 wrote a 48-page, self-published book titled The Persimmon Story, which concludes with a family recipe for persimmon pudding. "I like to leave the fruit in my mouth till you've got nothing but seeds."
The man is a zealot. A pamphleteer too. On the Monday afternoon of PGA week, he handed me a green piece of paper with six of his own talking points on it. Here's number 6: "Is there a conspiracy? In 1989 a leading golf publication did a test comparing persimmon to steel heads. The results showed persimmon actually outperformed metal. The test was never printed." I took the green sheet and my persimmon seeds and wished Elmore a good day.
I don't know about any conspiracy, but certainly metal woods, which are far cheaper to produce than woods made of wood, benefited from a marketing campaign the likes of which golf had never seen. On Tuesday morning at Valhalla, I asked Greg Norman, possibly the greatest driver in golf history, if he missed playing with wood and if wood could ever come back. "We were discussing that on the driving range the other day," he said, "wondering what would happen if players used their old wooden clubs. Quite honestly, they'd probably do just as well as they're doing now. As to wood coming back, I don't see that taking place. It's not a very forgiving material for all you guys." Just says the opposite. He says wood is more forgiving for all us guys.
I went looking for Bob Estes and found him in the locker room, actually reading the news section of a newspaper. I asked him if he was considering a return to a wooden driver. "Considering?" he said. We left the locker room, found his caddie and his golf bag. Estes pulled out his driver. It was gorgeous, a MacGregor Tommy Armour 945TW Tourney made in 1953, with a medium coffee finish and an X-100 True Temper steel shaft in it, 43 ? inches long. Estes had bought it from a man in Mesquite, Texas for $700. The PGA would be his first week with it.
"I've tried about every steel and titanium driver there is," Estes said. "I feel like I'm going to hit more fairways with this one, that's the main thing. I get more feedback with this club; I know where on the face I've hit the ball. The titanium drivers carry a little farther in the air, but on a dry fairway I don't feel as if I'm giving up any distance. At home I've got a bunch of wooden three-woods and four-woods and five-woods. They might be coming out soon, too."
Estes went off to practice, and all around the practice tee thousands of people started to gather for the Champions Clinic, a PGA tradition in which the golfing gods-all former PGA winners-share their wisdom with the rest of us. The driving portion of the clinic was handled by Love, Jack Nicklaus and, in his first Champions Clinic, Tiger Woods. Woods, using a Titleist 975D, was launching tee shots so far and so high that Lanny Wadkins, the emcee, said Woods could have two balls in the air at once. Now would be a good time to point out that I have never thought that my problems with my 975D could be laid at the head of the club. As Woods has been demonstrating, the club works when swung properly. At the clinic, he gave an excellent tip: If you feel as if your head is coming over the ball at impact-he was talking to me!-move your head back in the stance by moving your right foot back. I was eager to try it.
It was getting late. Just was at the Louisville Golf booth in the merchandise tent at Valhalla with my new Smart driver. I went over to pick it up. It was gorgeous, with a tan grip, a black shaft, a mahogany finish, Just's signature on the heel, my initials on the bottom, a black insert and no scoring lines, just a circle of eight gold dots to indicate the sweet spot. (Just says scoring lines do nothing for a driver.) I shook hands with my clubmaker and said goodbye, club in hand. I was more than eager to try it.
It was past 7 p.m. Only a few players were on the practice tee at Valhalla, and not too many security people. I gathered a dozen balls out of a practice bunker and slipped onto the tee, next to Jesper Parnevik, who was whaling on drive after drive with his Callaway Great Big Bertha. The ting sound was so stinging it almost made my ears hurt. I made eye contact with no one, afraid of being thrown off the range. I thought about my new head position, about what Tiger had said, and made some swings. My shots off the heel were all in play, and I could feel where I was hitting them. My good shots sailed through the heavy, musky, Louisville air. What a joy.
On my way back to my car, I walked through the players' valet area. Brent Geiberger was waiting for his car. I had caddied for his stepfather in a half-dozen tournaments years ago, when Al Geiberger, the '66 PGA champ, had a bright red Spalding golf bag made of kangaroo skin and a beautiful Spalding driver made of persimmon. I triumphantly pulled the headcover off my new Smart driver and handed it to Brent. He waggled it a few times and placed it gently on a straight line on the concrete sidewalk to check if the face was square. He had grown up on wooden clubs. He knows the drill. He handed the club back to me and said, "Not bad looking. Not bad looking at all."
Putters
Irons
