Can't See Woods For the Tees

By Tom Callahan

Spring is in the air (fore), and old men's fancies are returning to thoughts of golf, an ancient reverie that may seem to have lost a little romance since Jack Nicklaus began driving recently with a metal wood. But maybe not.

On the tongue and on the ball, metal wood is the dumbest-sounding oxymoron since jumbo shrimp. But, like television journalist, its usage has proliferated beyond the inventors' dreams. Once lovingly crafted of tempered wood, the heads of drivers are going steel. If even Nicklaus is bonging these days instead of bashing, the game has certainly changed. "I still hit the ((old)) persimmon club one or two yards longer," he estimates with charming precision, "but I hit the metal wood straighter. That's what convinced me. I feel very confident now that I'm going to drive the ball in the fairway."

It does no good to remind him that in the course of winning 20 major championships, he hit a few fairways previously. Nicklaus thinks he has found magic again. The last time was two years ago this week at the Masters in Augusta, Ga., where anyone with a wet eye could see that his mother in the gallery and his son at his side had more to do with a sixth victory surging out of him at 46 than did the oversize putter he waved jubilantly. "I wanted something with the largest possible moment of inertia and the smallest dispersion factor," he said at the time.

Sixty years ago, Bobby Jones never mentioned dispersion factors. He kissed his putter and called her Calamity Jane. "Sixty years ago," says Gene Sarazen, still slickered down and knickered up and still playing golf at 86, "I had a rotten grip. If you ask me, that's why there are so many excellent players today. A good grip is like a solid hinge on an oak door." Sarazen goes back to hickory sticks that required shellacking in the rain, and is amused by the '80s fashion, which encompasses titanium shafts, tungsten fibers, beryllium-copper, manganese-bronze and high-modulus graphite. "Of course," he says, "the modern player thinks it's the equipment. You know that's baloney."

Of late, the modern player has been wringing his overlapped hands over something called square grooves. Though the U.S. Golf Association has demonstrated scientifically that the benefit of these ruggedly faced irons is negligible, even those traditionalists on tour who are offended by the idea of backspin out of the rough have been changing cudgels in self-defense. "Golf clubs aren't only tools, they're totems," says Frank Hannigan of the U.S.G.A. "The game turns on illusions."

The Typhoid Mary of square grooves is a round Nebraskan named Mark Calcavecchia, 27, whose improvement over the past couple of summers suggests sorcery. Calcavecchia caddied at the Honda Classic one year (1986) and won the tournament the next. On the crucial shot, he used a grooved 8-iron instead of a machete to gouge his way out of a particularly savage patch of vegetation. By reaching the green and, what's more, checking up to within ten feet of the hole, that simple golf ball became something of a superbullet. It nicked everybody else in the business.

On the subject of modern golf balls, Tom Watson worries that they travel too far. Lee Trevino thinks that they go too straight. Grown men swear they saw Bernhard Langer hit a ball last year that was headed toward the Great Dismal Swamp when, suddenly, it corrected itself in midair before flying onward to the target. In addition to the perfect swing, the best golfers in the world are out searching for the self-correcting ball.

So, the worst players in the world are too. They're the ones being serviced by all the manufacturers (including Nicklaus) at a preposterous cost for space-age metals -- but a reasonable one for magic. Illusions are priceless, and while spring may be in the air, it takes a little beryllium to really get it airborne.