A person should never be too confident, let alone arrogant, in making  any assumptions about one’s golf game.  I am old enough that I should know this.  Oh well. After my recent rant about how vintage golf clubs are just as good as modern ones, I played a few normal rounds with them. Guess what? They ARE just as good, but only when your swing is at its best.  That’s why game improvement clubs were invented- because our swings are often (usually?) not at their best. Guess what?  My swing didn’t take long to let me down.

I believe all players should keep a set of old blades and persimmon woods around to take out a few times a year, just for fun. Stripping yourself of expectations, just go out and remember the most fundamental things about the game.  Leave the GPS at home, play the forward tees, carry your clubs so you can hear them jangling in the bag as you walk.  I’ll always keep a few sets of old clubs a round for that reason.  On my first real trip to Scotland (other than the quick run up to Dornoch I describe in my first post), I played with persimmon woods and old Wilson staff fluid-feel blades. It was pretty cool hitting a persimmon driver off the first hole of the Old Course. Over the course of my two weeks playing, however, I was very inconsistent with these old clubs, though I did manage a 72 one day at Brora- my best round of the trip. I also came within two inches of a hole-in-one at Turnberry which would have been a memory of a lifetime.  But I digress.

The fact is that the two best rounds of my life have been played with major game improvement irons- Top-Flite XL2000s and the original TaylorMade 2009 Burner irons. This probably is not a coincidence.  So next time I go all “old school” (and I’m sure there will be a next time) please remind me of these inconvenient truths.

Here are my latest irons, vintage RoboCop!