Old Hickory - The root, branch and trunk of the ancient and honorable game.

Forbes ^ | James Y Bartlett

[wallcrawlr]

An entire generation of golfers, the tiger-maniacs and sergio-philes, does not know the sound of wooden club hitting ball. For them, golf is defined by the tinny plinks, clanks and plonks of titanium-reinforced steel meeting plastic. Even the larger body of golfers has forgotten what it is like to try and strike a ball with a hickory-shafted club, or to find a green with an odd assortment of spoons, cleeks or niblicks to putt on shaggy greens with wooden-headed mallets or to suffer the ignominy of a stymie.

Steel-shafted golf clubs were approved as legal tender by the U.S. Golf Association in 1924 (although the grumpy traditionalists of the R&A didn't concur until 1929), and by the '30s, hickory trees were no longer an endangered species. Which means that almost no one today remembers the ancient art of swinging a thick-shafted hickory club, much less the sound made by an applewood head meeting gutta-percha. Gutta balls, of course, were the short-lived technology that replaced the delicate featheries until they too were replaced by the longer-flying wound-rubber orbs invented by Cleveland's Coburn Haskell at the turn of the century.

Well, I can tell you of that muffled click--a wonderful sound--because I have been to a remarkable little place in the hills of West Virginia called Oakhurst Links, where hickory is still king.

The Oakhurst Links was established in 1884 on the land of Russell Montague, a wealthy Bostonian who for health reasons had been advised to find someplace other than the Back Bay to live. Air-conditioning not yet having been invented in Scottsdale, Montague settled on White Sulphur Springs in the hollows of West Virginia, noted for its health-inducing waters.

Farmer Montague was approached one day by a neighbor, George Grant, who was awaiting the arrival of his nephew, Lionel Torrin, a young Scotsman who had been off growing tea in Ceylon, and whose love for golf meant he took his sticks with him everywhere he went. Wanting to be a good host, Grant and two other neighbors, Scottish expats Alexander and Roderick McLeod, proposed to build a golf course on the flatter parts of the rolling pastures of Montague's Oakhurst Farm to give Torrin a place to play.

Montague, probably having just downed a couple of glasses of the local funny water, apparently answered with the 19th-century equivalent of "far out, man," and so they did.

A nine-hole course was duly laid out, the Oakhurst Links club was formed and Mr. Torrin was made welcome. The club continued even after the young Scotsman's visit, and, indeed, prospered.

Sometime after the opening in 1884, another local golfer, George Donaldson, returned home to Scotland to pick up some clubs and balls for the boys. But on his return to the States, he was confronted by curious Customs agents, who had never seen this odd collection of wood-headed sticks before. Fearing them to be implements designed for murder, they confiscated Donaldson's load.

Undaunted, Montague and his friends went to a local carpenter, one Frasier Corron, and asked if he could make them some sticks. Although the wizened backwoods country joiner must have wondered what these boys had been drinking, he agreed.

The process was not uncomplicated. The clubheads of the spoons, or wooden clubs, were made from kiln-dried applewood, long-toed and skinny. The sole plates, introduced to add more strength to the clubs for hitting the hard material of the gutta balls, was made from ram's horn, which had to be soaked in vinegar for a day to soften it up enough to be shaped and cut.

The thick hickory shafts, which had to be knot-free for strength, were joined to the apple heads in a rude groove and tenon, and fisherman's line was wrapped around the joint for more strength. Finally, strips of leather hide and wool were wrapped around the butt end to form the grip.

When the gutta balls became popular in the mid-1800s, irons were added to a golfer's weapons. Before the harder gutta-percha balls came along, iron-headed clubs were rare as they tended to split the horsehide covers of the old featheries. The first narrow-faced niblicks, designed to hoick a ball out of a wagon-rut, grew in sizes and shapes. Longer, straight-faced cleeks and driving irons were joined by lofted niblicks of all kinds, designed for work around the green, and by mid-iron mashies.

The Oakhurst boys hacked around their nine-hole course for about 20 years, and instituted the Oakhurst Challenge Medal, the first regular golf competition in the country, starting in the late 1880s held every year on December 25. Yet no one saw fit to invite Montague, Grant or the McLeods to the meeting in New York in 1894 that formed the Amateur Golf Association of the United States, later the USGA. The charter clubs were St. Andrews of Yonkers, Newport, Shinnecock Hills, The Country Club and Chicago.

In 1914, Charles Blair MacDonald built the Old White course at the nearby Greenbrier Resort, a couple of twisting mountain roads away from Oakhurst. Because of this "modern" course just down the road, and with many of the area's Scottish immigrants leaving for service in the First World War, play petered out at Oakhurst and the course returned to its former state as a pasture for Montague's horses.

Yet there was something that kept calling golfers home. Even during the fallow years, local golfers would venture out to Montague's farm and hit balls for practice on the flat and open bottomlands near the road. One such occasional visitor was a young golfer from nearby Hot Springs, Virginia, named Sam Snead.

In 1959 Snead, now a famous champion and professional at the Greenbrier Resort, told Lewis Keller that Rev. Cary Montague, Russell's son, was thinking of selling the old family farm at Oakhurst. Keller eventually bought the place and used it as a summer retreat and thoroughbred farm. But as an avid golfer, he knew the history of the place. One of his sons found an old gutta ball in the creek and one day he stumbled on a golf cup, still buried in the ground.

Encouraged by friends, including Snead, Gardner Dickinson, the late dean of golf writers Dick Taylor, and golf course architect Bob Cupp, Keller began to research the history of the old links and in 1994, Cupp brought a crew of eight to West Virginia and began digging.

Thanks to the exhaustive records kept by the Montagues, which they gladly shared with Keller, he was able to reconstruct the approximate layout of the course. Working mostly by hand with rakes and shovels--practically no dirt was moved by machinery--the crews peeled back decades of turf and found the original sites for greens and tees. The fairways were mowed out and Keller imported a flock of black-faced sheep to keep the grass clipped.

But Keller didn't want to have just another golf course in his front yard. His dream was to re-create the golf experience that had begun in the West Virginia mountains in the 1880s. That meant finding someone to make reproductions of the old hickory-shafted clubs, which he found in St. Andrews, and even reproductions of gutta-percha balls, which are made in Birmingham, England.

Instead of grass tee boxes, the course at Oakhurst has rectangles of hard-packed sand, as did the original. One reason is that the familiar wooden tees of today were unknown back then. Instead, at the start of each hole, a golfer would reach into a bucket of water, scoop some into an adjacent bucket of sand, make a little handful of mud and create a little hillock on the tee, plopping the ball down on this tee of wet sand. And that's how it's done at Oakhurst today.

It is likely that the original greens at Oakhurst were also hard-packed sand Many of the first courses in America had sand greens until advances in seed technology permitted a smoother putting surface. But Keller, along with his advisor, Cupp, went ahead and planted bent grass. Never mind USGA specifications, which call for layers of substrate and sophisticated drainage They just prepared the surface, worked in a little loam and scattered the seeds.

Bob Cupp's chief superintendent, Billy Fuller, who was formerly head greenskeeper at the high temple of Augusta National, "had some shivering fits" during this part of the course construction. But the greens have grown in perfectly, and because they aren't stressed by daily close-mowing, the grass is plush and smooth, even if they run about 3 on the Stimpmeter.

The fairways are a bit less than plush, just as they were a century ago. The 45 or so sheep that graze on the links do a fair job of keeping the grass cut short, although the drawback of this greenskeeping method is the droppings that occur throughout the course. One of the three local rules is that one is allowed a free drop from the castings. Another is that if the ball breaks, you play the largest piece until it is holed.

But this is an authentic experience. After a tour of the old farmhouse, which Keller and his family have turned into a clubhouse and golf museum of sorts, you are taken into the pro shop to select your weapons a wooden-headed playclub or driver, a driving iron (roughly equivalent to a three-iron), a niblick (about a nine-iron or wedge) and a wooden-headed putter. Four clubs, that's it. Plus you're given two gutta-percha balls. If you really want to get into the spirit, Keller will lend you a pair of plus-fours and argyle socks, and a floppy cap. Combined with a starched white shirt, gaiters at the elbows, a bow tie and high-laced boots, you'll be the picture of 19th-century golfing sartorial splendor!

I elected to keep to my shorts, polo shirt and my own golf shoes. I asked Keller if there was a secret to playing with hickory clubs, and he said that swinging slowly seems to yield better results. "Hickory torques quite a bit during the swing," he confided, "and if you try to rip at it like a modern club, you'll find it hard to get the clubface back to the ball square."

I swished my playclub a few times, trying to get a feel for its weight. The driving club was reinforced with lead in the back of the odd, long-nosed clubhead, giving it a nice heft at the end of that thumb-thick hickory shaft. Taking Keller's advice, I mounted my ball on its little hill of sand, and tried a nice smooth swing. The ball skidded down the hill into a nearly dry pond about 60 yards away.

Eventually, I got the hang of it, and on the fifth tee, set high on a hill overlooking the fairway and a bunker-surrounded green, I nailed a beauty which caught the wind and sailed towards the middle of the green. The ball landed and bounded forward, almost reaching the putting surface. Huzzah! Just call me John Daly of the Hickories! Then I checked the scorecard My power surge had traveled all of 210 yards. Most of it straight downhill.

That's OK. Neither power nor scoring is really the point at Oakhurst. The scorecard does not carry "par," as such, but lists a number under the category of "shots." It's the number of strokes a reasonably good player is supposed to use to get the ball into the green. Two for most holes one on the short 106-yard third, three on the two brutes the 322-yard second and the 356-yard eighth. Gutta balls, made from the resin of the Malaysian sapodilla tree melted into a mold, do not fly through the air with anything like the ease of a Pinnacle.

It is a gentle perambulation around Mr. Montague's old pasture, except for the steep climb up the fourth fairway. Carrying your four wooden clubs, watching the sheep grazing placidly around you, listening to the wind sweeping down the mountain, it's quite easy to fall under the spell of the place.

Golf is still golf, even if the weapons look and feel different. I nailed several playclubs, hit a beautiful hooking cleek into the fourth green, used my niblick iron to make a nice hopscotch over my partner's damnable stymie (the third local rule in effect) and I even got the hang of putting on slow greens with a wooden mallet.

The next day, we played a round at the Greenbrier course at the world-famous resort. A wonderful course, to be sure, but an entirely different experience rushing around in golf carts, trying to choose from 14 different clubs, watching that hot ball flying...toward the woods. I found myself longing for Oakhurst's rude fairways, naturally flowing in the West Virginia countryside. I wanted to bust another 170-yard drive and feel good about it.

Lewis Keller had joined us after our round at Oakhurst's 19th hole a shady spot under a tree at the last green, where he gave us tall glasses of fresh lemonade. He told us about the National Hickory Championship, held July 4 at Oakhurst (those folks, many of them collectors of old clubs, dress to the 19th-century nines), and the foundation he has created for Oakhurst Links that he hopes will be funded in part by some of golf's national organizations. Keller knows he won't last forever, but he kinda hopes Oakhurst does.

[Redbob]

Good post.

[1Old Pro]

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