Play Hickory: The Cure to Golfing Boredom?

Chris McIntyre kick-started his golf life and new businesses with wooden shafts

Features • Darin Bunch • 02/15/11

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As FG has begun to explore the world of hickory golf, we’ve found an entire culture of people who play with wooden-shafted clubs across the country. Back in November 2010, Chris McIntyre of the tournament company Play Hickory, which specializes in events with more than a touch of history mixed in, spoke with Fairways + Greens Magazine about his club rental business and his passion to create true replica golf balls from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The conversation came just a few weeks after McIntyre had seen his hickories used in celebrity pro-am event north of Scottsdale put on by PGA Tour player Michael Allen. Among other participating in the fun-filled tournament were Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee, former Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Luis Gonzalez and former Ryder Cup captain Tom Lehman.

ON HIS “PLAY HICKORY” EVENT BUSINESS …

“I’m just finishing up my sixth year of being in the hickory rental business. I started in the fall of 2004, and I think I’ve done more than 110 or 120 events by now over those years, small and large. Small being maybe a half dozen sets for to put on a couple of par-3 holes for a fun event to all the way up to about 80 sets for individual-play tournaments. And pretty much everything in between. And most of my customers are from all around the country, not local — I would say 95 percent of my business is out of state.”

“What happens is this: My typical customer would be like the client I have in Chicago where a country club is turning 100 years old and they want to do a special event for their members to celebrate the anniversary. So they call ahead and reserve the date and an estimated number of clubs, pay a deposit, and then basically as the date gets closer we work together and I make it real easy on them — I do all the coordination of the shipping both ways, I use UPS for distribution logistics, and I have some real nice hard cases that hold groups of club sets and so we finalize the numbers of sets and how many golf balls they want and I ship it out to them, try to get it out to them a few days ahead so they can relax and get ready. And then they have their event, and we have pre-printed labels so they can ship everything back to me or to the next destination. And that’s a real typical, most common transaction with the country clubs.”

**VISIT PLAYHICKORY.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION**

“I charge by the bag because it’s kind of pre-set. A few of the higher-end events will actually give each player a set to use, so that’s $75 per player, which gives them a bag of clubs and a sleeve of balls to play with, and that includes all the logistics built in. But a lot of times, even though that’s pretty reasonable for what it is, people try to get the most for their money and share a bag, so that gets the cost down to about $45 per player for sharing a bag but getting their own three balls to play with.”

ON FINDING HICKORY CLUBS THAT WILL LAST …

“The one thing that I’ve done, probably moreso than anybody, is that I’ve taken real care over the years to pick and choose what clubs I purchase, and about 98 percent of them are all British-made clubs — all from Scotland and England — and you could consider many of them pro-line clubs from the day. And the typical scenario back then was that the professionals at the clubs used to actually fit the players for their shaft length, strength and everything like that. So what I do is I make sure that I’m picking out clubs that have very solid shafts with some stiffness to them and clubheads with some weight to them, and then I restore them by making sure that the clubheads are soundly matched to the shafts — sometimes I take them apart and epoxy them, sometimes I slip some glue in there, whatever it takes to make the heads real solid. And I put all new leather grips on them.”

“I’ve sent 80 sets out for a big tournament and gotten all back and had only two clubs broken before. But I’ve also had instances where the entire tournament played with them and didn’t break anything but one guy broke four. Othertimes, I might send 30-40 sets out, and I get three or four or five back, so that’s considered a bad day from my end. I consider anything more than a couple clubs broken unfortunate.”

WHO ARE THE BEST CLUBMAKERS TO COLLECT?

“There are a couple of names that are really sound. Stewart has the cleek mark of the pipe, and Gibson has a cleek mark of a star, and Gibson had a lot of great clubs and shafts. There are, to be honest with you — by name, those are the top two brand names — but there are a lot of other clubs that you come upon, that once you hold them, feel them, swing them and hit them, they are just as good as anything.”

“An example is that I have 800 clubs to choose from in all these sets, and for four years in row I did an event with a professional golfers career college down here in Temecula, California, and three times a year we’d go play hickories with the graduating class. So we did a lot of play with these clubs, and I got to play with them every time, and I would just play out of whatever bag. It’s not like they’re all matched sets, you know, so if I send 20 sets over for 40 guys to share a bag and play, every pair of guys hitting out of the bag is hitting out of something completely different, but I’ve always told everybody that I’ve done a pretty good job to ensure that are all within what I call an 80 percent quality range. So there’s a little bit of a crapshoot to what you get, but for the most part the quality is within about 80 percent of each other, and we’ve had some tremendous scores turned in from people who have never seen these things before and played with them.”

“But playing with that group three times a year, always playing with just whatever random set, one day I was out there playing and there was just a mashie in that set that we were using that I hit a few times and it felt great and by the end of the round the guys I was playing with were just jaw-dropping with how well I hit that club all day long. And it was just some kind of no-name — it has a little lion cleek mark on it, and an A McDonald signature, honestly I’ve never even looked it up to see what clubmaker it was from — but the combination of weight and shaft strength and flex just matched my needs perfectly, and that club went right into my personal bag, and I’ve played it ever since. And that’s been a number of years. So anybody who looks in my bag and sees that mashie, nobody would really know it because only I know how well I play with it and why it’s in the bag. That’s what the true hickory enthusiast is going to experience over time. They’re going to get excited, they’re going to buy more clubs than they need, and they’re going to try things out, buy clubs just for the shafts or parts and find out, ‘Hey, look at this.’”

“So besides Gibson, there’s a lot of names — Ayres, Army & Navy, just an abundance of lesser names, if you will — but you have to search them out. George Nicoll actually is a big name, but in my opinion, there aren’t very many great George Nicoll clubs. The difference between George Nicoll and Tom Stewart all has to do with the sole balance — a lot of Nicoll clubs have very sharp leading edges that tend to dig into the ground and bite, but with the Stewart clubs, what we found out was that he kind of knew that the sole of the club needed a little raised front edge for bounce so the clubhead would hit and glide through the turf, so that’s kind of the history behind it. And when [hickory golf historian Ralph] Livingston did his investigation, he discovered that about most Stewart clubs, and that’s why they’ve become so popular. But there are Stewart clubs that are too light-headed or funny-looking or are matched on shafts that don’t work for you. So if you say you’re hunting down a Stewart set, it’s more than just finding the first set of Stewarts that you come across, it might take you years to find just the right ones.”

HOW DID YOU GET YOUR START PLAYING HICKORIES?

“I was playing golf at a country club, and I was playing three or four full rounds a week, and another couple nine holes here and there — I was basically at the golf course six days a week — and playing a lot of golf, and was just, I’m gonna say it, bored. You play the same course, you play with the same guys, you play the same set, you go out there and it’s fun, it’s exercise, it’s golf, you love it, but one day I just said, ‘You know what, I’m just so bored, I’m going to goof around today because I’m a goofy guy.’ So I put together a little set of my son’s junior 3-wood, a Medicus 5-iron, a left-handed Alien wedge, a backasswards putter and my good ol’ 7-iron because I wanted to have one club I knew I could trust. And I went out with my buddies, and I smiled more and had more fun, and I played quite well with these six stupid clubs. And when I was done, I joked to my friends, ‘Hey, didn’t they used to make clubs with wood shafts? I should put one of those in this bag.’ And one of my friends said he had a couple in his garage, so he gave them to me, and I brought them home and shined them all up and fixed them up and I took them to the executive course and hit ’em, and I said, ‘Hey, this is kinda cool.’ So the next thing I know, I’m on the Internet, I’m searching all around, I find out there’s hickorygolf.com, I find out there’s people who play these things, and the rest is history.”

“And now it’s 10 years later and I’m known all around the world, I’ve developed a golf ball for hickory play and I have a business that provides the enjoyment to people on a rental basis.”

ON DEVELOPING GOLF BALLS FOR HICKORY PLAY …

“In 2004, a big group from the Golf Collectors Society here went over to Scotland to spend some time with the British Golf Collectors society and play in the Scottish Hickory Championship and then play at a few other courses — and of course the Old Course. I took Randy Jensen [who some call the Hickory Tiger for his many victories in wooden-shafted club events] as my roomie with me. I just has such a fantastic visit over there, and it just brought all of this together for me, what I’d been leading up to for a few years of playing with hickory and meeting everybody and now to be playing the Old Course at St. Andrews, teeing off at 6:30 in the morning, playing with a caddie from the highlands and coming down the stretch, wearing our knickers and having some of the tourists watch us play the last hole — it just brought the whole thing together. So we were flying home, and I was talking to Randy and I said, ‘This is so cool, we’re playing with old clubs, we’re playing these historic courses, but we’re playing with a Pro-V1.’ And I was thinking there’s got to be something better. The ball is great, but playing such a high-tech ball just seemed wrong. So I told him, ‘I’m going to find a way to make a ball for hickory.’ So that’s what got it into my mind.”

“It just seemed so appropriately needed. So that’s when I kind of took to my skills and talked to my friends and did a bunch of reading on golf balls and studied all the materials and then, long story short, the first golf ball I made was sort of an experiment on a work bench with just a press and a single mold and a heat gun. Not hardly knowing what I was doing, it took about 15 minutes to heat and press a ball out, and then I didn’t know how to get it out of the mold. So it was a long process but successful in that, when it all came out, it had this square mesh design from a mold I had bought off eBay. And I’ve gone from that to building custom compression mold machines with heating and cooling, and have purchased an abundance of molds, and now I have a whole process where I’ve built machines to mold, trim, print and finish off the balls.”

“The square mesh ball is the mainstay for 1920s-era play. Then I have a number of fancy molds I’ve made a little bit here and there. I make the bramble ball in gutta percha and modern material. And playable gutta percha balls — called the grooved or line-cut gutta percha. That’s what we want to exemplify the 1800s-1890s-era play — Harry Vardon played that type of ball two win his first two Opens in late 1890s. By 1902 or 1903, the rubber ball had taken over and gutta percha was dead.”

ON HOW GOLFERS ARE EXPOSED TO HICKORY GOLF …

“One thing I’ve learned over these years is that there is an element of discovery that’s really important — in other words, it’s sometimes a very hard sell. If you happen to drive up to a golf course, park and walk up to the first group of guys you see and say, ‘Hey, check this out — you wanna play hickory today?’ they’re gonna look at you like you’re an idiot. So selling it is kind of difficult, but for the people who are exposed to it and it hits ’em in the heart and they have some inquisitiveness about it, those are the ones who are going to follow the path to want to find out more about what it is. But it needs to be exposed to them, and it can’t be a hard sell — that’s the thing I’ve learned about it. You have to let people decide for themselves whether it means something to them or not.”