FINDING NO. 14
By Jeff Thoreson
One of the great things about golf is you can play with whatever equipment you want. How many players in the NFL line up on game day and say they're not wearing their helmet today so they can put some extra padding in the lower back area.
Golf tells you to put 14 clubs in your bag, then couldn't care less if you lash 14 field stones to branches whittled from your backyard spruce tree or have plutonium insets in carbon-fiber club faces. Just don't try to add a 15th.
I carry a Rescue club along with the standard driver-3-wood combination. My 3-W set of Titleist irons accounts for eight more clubs. I have $1,000 of putters in the garage, none of which work, but one of which always finds its way into the bag. I'm not as good as I think I am, so I carry a sand wedge. That makes unlucky 13.
Ain't golf wonderful? I get one more choice. You're a kid in the candy store, and you've already picked out 13 candy bars, and now your mother tells you to grab one more. You never imagined picking a candy bar could be so difficult.
Finding the right 14th club is no easy task. During a period of good play before the advent of the Rescue club, I bought a 2-iron. At the time, I was hitting everything well, so it made sense. I carried it for three rounds, found half-a-dozen occasions to hit it and went 0-for-six. On a particularly cool autumn morning, I caught the thing a little thin and loosened two fillings. Since then it has occupied the same spot as most of my putters in the corner of the garage for well-intentioned but thoroughly wasteful golf purchases.
The 2-iron purchase gone awry sent me looking at the other end of the spectrum. I bought the matching wedges to my set of Titleist irons, one a 54-degree and the other a 56-degree. After about 30 minutes on the practice tee, it dawned on me that two degrees in golf is like two degrees in the weather. It doesn't matter if it's 95 degrees or 97. It's hot. Two degrees is not nearly enough to warrant the need for two separate implements. I alternated them in the bag for a few months until I realized there was no appreciable difference between my sand wedge and the 56 or my pitching wedge and the 54.
Welcome to the corner of the garage.
I went even higher. An impulse buy after a tournament netted me a beautiful Cleveland 60-degree lob wedge. Boy, that thing looked sweet. I couldn't wait to miss a green in thick rough on an uphill slope of a bunker to a tight pin. And as soon as I did, I fired that bad boy up, feathered the shot high in the air and watched it land ever so softly and ever so indignantly in the bunker. It only took a few of those before I realized 60 degrees is a pleasant temperature for golf but a nasty number to be etched in your stainless steel club face.
Seemingly out of options, I went back up an octave when a Tight Lies 7-wood caught my eye like Lisa Nelson back in the seventh grade. This, surely, would be the answer. Long and lean, slender and oh-so-nicely shaped in the shaft, she was a petite picture of golf perfection. I visualized hitting her out of the rough from a buck-ninety, drilling her 200 yards from a tight fairway lie or feathering her in from left to right around a front bunker from 185. It did all that and more. Its narrow face was good for thick lies, but on my first effort to hit it off a tee on a long par 3, I scooped right under the ball and hit a Texas Leaguer into the pond that never had come into play. Another time I caught her a little thin and sailed my birdie opportunity on a long par 4 into jail. Out of thick rough, the club did what it was made to do - navigate its way to the ball and send it out with a solid hit, unfortunately in directions that seemed impossible to predict.
The corner of the garage is destined for E-Bay, but my search for the 14th continued. One day at the local golf, tennis and bait store I saved from the oversized golf bag a Callaway wedge marked with nothing but an A, I assumed for attack. Steel shaft and no degree markings, its lines exuded a blue-collar, workman like aura — a little thick on the top and meaty on the bottom. My guess is it had been overlooked in the orphanage for quite some time and needed a home. I had space available — if not in my bag then in the corner of the garage.
I took it to the practice tee, where it continually homed in on the 100-yard marker. I took it to the course, and the first time I was 100 yards from the pin, I dialed it in and the club answered with a birdie opportunity. It has been answering ever since. Like a good love story, this club and I were meant for each other. And like a good love story, it took a series of heart-break relationships to find the right one.
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