Make Him an Offer for These

We are in a period of headlong runaway memorabilia collecting in sports in this country. Bruce McNall pays almost a half-million dollars for a baseball card of a turn-of-the-century player. Millionaires plunk down kings’ ransoms for sweaty, torn uniforms worn by half-forgotten sports heroes of the past. Memorabilia shows draw such crowds, they have to rent convention centers to house them. Sub-Hall of Fame ballplayers sell their autographs to thousands for $15 a copy.

It used to be you got a Van Gogh or a Tintoretto for the kind of money these new collectors are putting out--at least, you hoped to get a one-issue stamp of a plane flying upside-down or a coin once handled by Julius Caesar. Hitler’s diaries wouldn’t command more than a sweat sock once worn by a New York Yankee or maybe a lock of Red Grange’s hair today.

So, I was uniquely interested the other day to read where the auctioneers at Sotheby’s in England raffled off a set of golf clubs for an eye-opening $1,031,101, a record price for golf collectibles.

Bear in mind, these are not golf clubs you can use. They are museum pieces originally collected by Willie Auchterlonie, British clubmaker and himself winner of the 1893 British Open.

Included in the collection, in addition to Auchterlonie’s, are clubs used by other winners of the British Open between the years 1860 and 1930. The oldest club in the set belonged to the 1860 winner, Willie Park Sr., and the newest belonged to the great Bobby Jones when he won in 1930.

Now, this is all right, so far as it goes, but it occurs to me Sotheby’s might be missing a point. Maybe it should be interested in a set of clubs that are every bit as historic in their own way as Auchterlonie’s. I refer to mine.

Consider this: I have in my bag a driver that is 40 or so years old, which has never struck a golf ball on the clubface. I mean, it’s hit a ball off the toe, off the heel. It has topped, oh, 40,000 balls, but it may be the only No. 1 wood in the game with the center of the clubface as new today as it was in 1948 or ’49.

It has never hit a ball more than 110 yards in its life and has never hit a ball that got higher than 10 feet off the ground.

I think it should be hanging in the Louvre.

I have a three-wood that has never hit a ball anywhere but in the water or in a sand trap. It doesn’t matter how you line up or which way you point the “vees” at address, it will find trouble. It’s like one of those forked branches that can find water you didn’t even know was there. It has launched more flying objects out over the Pacific Ocean than the Vandenberg Space Center.

I have a sand wedge that has never gotten a ball out of a sand trap on the first swing in its history. The second swing gets the ball out of the sand trap, all right--also over the green, across the fence and out into traffic. It is a historic implement because it has never put a ball on a green in its existence. Its primary function is to plaster sand against your glasses and in your mouth, to say nothing of in your hair, while it moves the ball only one or two inches, if at all.

I have a four-wood that propels the ball straight up in the air. You could use it in an elevator shaft and not hit a wall. It has this built-in pop fly. It is the only club I’ve ever seen where you yell, “Fore!” to the group coming up behind you.

My putter, you know about, if you’ve been paying attention. It only looks like steel. It’s a four-foot coral snake. It hibernates between rounds. Some putters you get out of a pro shop barrel. This one they got out of a zoo. It is programmed to run the first putt 20 feet by the hole, then leave the comebacker 15 feet short. It’s the only club in the bag that won’t make the ball disappear.

My five-iron, on the other hand, specializes in lost balls. It is ambidextrous. It can go either way in search of impenetrable foliage or gopher holes. It is like a heat-seeking missile. If the trouble is on the right, it will turn into the dreaded left-to-right slice. If it is on the left, it will smother-hook the ball into that lion country. It is programmed to find knee-high, dense grass or 20-foot-deep barrancas. It has made more balls disappear than Blackstone has rabbits.

I have clubs that specialize in cut-shots. Oh, not those little finesse, open-the-face shots favored by Hogan or Snead to miss a tree. My clubs actually cut the ball. Sometimes in half. At least, they put this little smile in the dimples.

I submit, as artifacts, my clubs make Auchterlonie’s look prosaic. Look at it this way: His clubs probably do what woods and irons are supposed to do. Mine are a band of desperadoes. Sociopaths. They’re more interesting, the fairway equivalent of the James Gang or a pirate ship.

If anyone wants them to put under glass in his castle, I will throw in the two- and three-irons. They are still in the cellophane in which they came from the factory. They have never been on a fairway (neither, come to think of it, have a lot of my other clubs). I would only use a two- or three-iron to poke a fire with or kill a tarantula.

You can opt for the wedge that Tom Watson used to chip in out of the rough to win the Open at Pebble in ‘82, if you like, or the four-wood Sarazen used for his double-eagle at Augusta in 1935, but these, I put to you, are not what golf is all about.

My clubs are far more representative of the great game. You want the clubs Snead made eight with at Spring Mill in ’39 or the driver Hogan snap-hooked off the tee at the 18th at Olympic in ’55. You want golf clubs that do what golf clubs are supposed to do--betray you. Golf clubs that win British Opens fail miserably at their jobs.