“Hickory makes it like a game again..."

Finally catching up here on long reads and not surprisingly as a lover of hickories I thoroughly enjoyed Curt Sampson's Golf World story on the Americans traveling to Scotland for the Hickory Grail and Scottish Hickory Championship.

Maybe it's not quite Darwin playing the Walker Cup at The National Golf Links in 1922, but Sampson is an embedded contestant and does a fine job capturing the spirit of the trip along with the joys of hickory golf.

This band includes many recovering hickory players.

“December 2014,” said Mark Wehring, a Houston-based corporate compliance officer, and the best player among the American contingent.

Those weren’t dates of last drinks. Both Deinlein and Wehring had Tennent’s ale in their recent past and near future. They were instead the month and year they’d last hit a ball with what Ingvar Ritzen of Stockholm disparaged as “hollow clubs” (Ritzen joined the woodmen in 2011). Why, oh why, I asked, are you—all of us—making a hard game harder? Some pointed out recent offenses: the preposterous sight of a player looking at a topo map instead of the ground before a putt. How 460cc drivers obliterate the traditional size ratio of clubhead to ball. No matter how much bodacious Brooks Koepka’s biceps bulge, when an average drive in the U.S. Open is 392 yards, or whatever it was, something ain’t right. It’s time to turn back the clock, the uber-traditionalists agreed, to remember why the ancient Scots picked up a club in the first place.

“Hickory makes it like a game again,” said Carolyn Kirk, of Ganton, England, the lone woman on either Hickory Grail team. “You do it all by eye, you bump it in. You get huge pleasure when you hit a good shot and when you don’t, well, it’s a hard game anyway.”