Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

Last week I played golf with a friend who uses a Titleist driver and 3 wood. We got up to the 17th tee and he gave me the 3 wood and said, “Try this.” It had a heavier head than my MacGregor, which I like. I teed it up and hit the ball straight down the fairway, clearing a fairway bunker I occasionally have difficulty getting past using my driver. Of course, I knew it had to be the club!

Actually, I thought about the feel of the club, and concluded the added clubhead weight was the primary advantage. I’m an engineer, so preservation of energy and momentum instantly came to mind. I got home and did a quick search for the Titleist 983 series of clubs just to see what they cost, but also to find out a little about the swing weight. The Driver is about $500, and the 3 wood costs about $225. A little steep. A lot steep. Maybe when I get my handicap down in the single digits, I’ll reconsider.

Well, there was no information on club head weight, so I pulled out the handy Golfsmith club builders catalog. All their driver heads are in the general vicinity of 200 grams. No help.

Last night I pulled out two of my old drivers. One is the first metal driver I ever bought. It was manufactured by Head, better known for their tennis gear. But it has a low profile, and I’ve used it off the fairway many times. I’ve reshafted it three or four times as I experimented with club assembly. The head is a little heavier than my current Liquidmetal driver, but not by much. I may put some lead tape on it to see how that affects my shots.

The second driver is one of my traditional clubs, and one I always enjoy hitting. It is a Harvey Pennick persimmon head on a graphite shaft. Nobody hits persimmon clubs any more. Everyone wants the latest technology. But I generally hit the ball just as well with this driver as I do with any other. It just has a smaller sweet spot, which requires more consistency in my swing.

But when I hit the sweet spot on my persimmon driver, the sensation is magic.

When I started playing golf, I found a set of old clubs at a garage sale. They had metal shafts coated to look like wood. They were rusty and pretty beat up. But I learned to hit the ball with them. I decided I needed some new ones while playing with a new partner one day. He asked if I was going to use my brassie or my niblick on the next shot.

I was a young GI, with very little disposable income. And a new set of clubs, a complete set of irons and woods, cost $100 in the Base Exchange. It took quite some time before I convinced myself I had enough money to get that set, but I finally did. Like every set at the time, the woods were made from laminated maple. They served well, but they just weren’t persimmon, the royalty of golf. A persimmon driver alone could cost more than what I paid for my complete set. That wasn’t happening.

I eventually moved up to a set of Wilson Staff 1200 woods, almost top of the line for laminated maple woods. And I used them for more than a dozen years. I picked up the Head driver in a bow to the advancement in technology. I’ve used it off and on now for about ten years.

As I got interested in rebuilding clubs, I picked up a few persimmon heads to play around with. They have become throw-aways. Nobody wants a wooden wood any more. I liked the feel when I struck the ball well, and I could control the design myself with different shafts, inserts, grips, and modifications to the head itself. I bought a new persimmon head from Golfsmith, attached it to a light Aldila graphite shaft tipped at 45 inches, and put on a Winn grip. It is a nice club.

I pulled it out yesterday and made a few swings in the back yard. It goes back in my bag this weekend. The weight is a little more than others, but I don’t subscribe to the “lighter is better” mentality. I know from coaching baseball (and engineering) that swing speed is what matters, but you should swing the heaviest implement you can at the fastest speed. If the added weight slows your swing, get something lighter. But the added momentum of additional weight moving at the same speed increases ball speed. Distance. Yes, distance suffers if you don’t hit the ball “on the screws” and the smaller clubface is less forgiving. I don’t care. It actually makes me swing better knowing that.

The additional benefit is the feel of hitting a shot well with persimmon. The sound is different, too, although it isn’t the “click” we used to get from a persimmon hitting a wound ball with a balata cover.

There are few things in life better than standing on the teebox as the sun comes up on a beautiful day, the smell of dew on the grass and the feel of a well-struck ball off the face of a persimmon driver. I love this game.