If it ain't broke...

Remember these?

These are the crappy clubs I mention in an earlier post with the wild-and-crazy idea that I would play them, expressing the quaint notion that, with their whippy, 40-year-old shafts, it's the swing, not the stick. Well, was I ever WRONG! Sure, I could hit them, but only after making swing adjustments that I just know will have put me out of sync with my current gear. Every iron shot was pulled, and the driver... I don't even want to talk about the driver. So, having learned the hard way that technology is my friend, I shall not ever abandon it again.

However, my foray into the unplayability of older clubs has led me to wonder if the idiosyncratic swings of older pros--Trevino, Palmer, even Nicklaus--weren't a result of the crude shafts which were available when they learned the game. Conversely, could the cookie cutter pro swings--so named and criticized by Hal Sutton in a Golf Magazine article--be a result of the consistent quality of golf equipment in the modern era? I have neither the billions of dollars nor the top-notch research team to put that question to the scientific test, but the golf swing has adapted as technology changed: hickory to steel, steel to graphite, etc. Who knows--if we're all playing the same shafts, maybe our swings should look similar, too.