For some people looks are everything. Line and color were always a big part of my life in my previous line of work so the esthetics of certain things is quite important to me. I wouldn’t say I am overly hung-up on the superficial but I am adamant about one thing: I absolutely can’t play golf with ugly clubs.
I am not a very active golf consumer. I do not spend a lot of money on girlie-girl outfits. Correction: I never spend money on girlie-girl outfits. Whatever I am wearing is usually what fell out of my closet just before my tee time. My bag is fully stocked with several changes of clothes but most of them have been in there since last season. My club pro once asked me if I’d misplaced my iron again, and he wasn’t referring to a golf club. Another day the pro shop owner refused to sell me new spikes for my golf shoes. She took one look at the cracked and creased leather, ceremoniously dumped them in the trash and sold me a new pair. A fashion statement I am not.
Nor do I buy a lot of golf gadgets or insist on a shiny new sleeve of balls each time I tee off (though however scruffy, it must be a Titleist). Thanks to a recent Golf Digest poll at least I now know I am not the only one who wears her glove until it is am embarrassment of filth and holes. But my clubs… they have to be pretty.
Still, golf club manufacturers will never get rich on my account. I put a lot of thought into my club purchases. If I found a good looking shovel and a hoe worked for me, well, that’s what you’d find in my bag. But a name-brand shovel and a hoe, please. I was so very proud of my first set of irons, custom made for me, until I flashed them before my assistant pro. “Those are just like our rentals,” she said. I never did like those clubs.
These days I tend to find golf clubs I like and stick with them. My husband, on the other hand, bought no less than three drivers one summer. He currently plays with none of them. Nearly every one of the skeletons you’ll find in the golf club graveyard in our garage has been buried there by him. I have a hard time letting go of my old clubs, as if tossing them aside means the end of a long standing relationship. Come to think of it, I’ve had exactly as many drivers as I’ve had husbands. It’s ironic that husband number two insisted on taking back my Burner Bubble in the divorce settlement forcing me to buy a new driver. I think it was considered assault with a dangerous weapon at the time; I was poking it way past him off the tee.
