Confessions of a Golf Club Addict

Most people come back from an Irish golf trip with logoed golf balls and clothes. Don came back with three putters.

Photo by Barnabas Piper on Unsplash

I was the last one on the bus at Portmarnock Golf Club just outside of Dublin, the first course we played on the first-ever Random Golf Club Major pilgrimage, because I was dilly-dallying in the pro shop for too long. My purchase? The most modestly priced belt I could find with the Portmarnock logo on it.

Back on the bus, I learned that Don, the one player on the trip with a plus handicap, bought a new putter in that same pro shop.

When I caught up with him on a video chat recently, he called it the beginning of “the stupid buying spree.” It started innocently enough. He’d brought the wrong putter on the trip, one he thought he liked but quickly realized he didn’t. So at Portmarnock, he bought a longer counterbalanced Ping putter, something he had never tried but had always been curious about. Even the guys in the shop said they had their eyes on it for a while.

Then a couple of rounds later, he thought, “I don’t like this one either,” his tone somewhere between confession and justification.

So, naturally, at Castlerock Golf Club, three hours away from Portmarnock in Northern Ireland, he bought another one.

Then, at the end of the trip, at County Louth Golf Club, back outside of Dublin again, he spotted a different model he hadn’t tried yet. “I realized I didn’t like [the one from Castlerock] either. And, oh, I haven’t tried one of those Jailbird ones yet.”

Three putters. Three different Irish pro shops.

The kicker? Don gave one of them to Nick, our bus driver. “You got the bookends,” he laughed, referring to the driver someone else in our group had gifted Nick. “Now you just gotta buy the rest.”

His Rule

Here’s where it gets interesting. Don has a rule about any new club—not just putters: The first shot he hits with it must be during an actual round on the golf course.

“You’re not allowed to use it on the practice putting green, the range, or anywhere,” he explained. “It’s bad juju for any golf club.”

This means the first time Don picks up that new putter, driver, or iron, he’s standing over an actual shot that gets written on a scorecard. He bought an LA Golf driver a few months back, and the first time he swung it was on the first tee of a tournament. “Where’s it going to go? I don’t know. Maybe I snap hook it out of bounds, because there’s OB left on that hole.”

He bought a set of Miura blades three months ago that still has an un-hit five-iron in it. “There just isn’t a five-iron hole out there” at his home course, he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

His Collection

In Don’s garage, there are five, six, maybe seven full sets of golf clubs. Fifteen putters, give or take. Half a dozen drivers. Multiple sets of blades spanning decades.

“Say I buy a driver for $600, $750, $900, right? A year later, you can sell it for maybe $250,” he said. “I’ll just keep it instead.”

But this isn’t a story about hoarding. Don gives clubs away constantly—to friends, to family, to anyone who might get good use out of them. He showed up at his buddy Mike’s place with a Callaway driver and handed it to him mid-conversation. Mike protested that it was too long. Don told him just to try it. And he hit it 15 yards past his old driver. “So I said, okay, it’s yours.”

When I asked about his wife’s opinion on all this gear, he chuckled. “She would definitely tell you that there’s too much in the garage. She’s probably not wrong.” But he’s never had to do what he calls an “integration purchase”—hiding a putter inside a Walmart run for Christmas presents. “It’s never been like that.”

His Gift

Don is 55 now. He’s been playing golf since he was nine years old. He estimates that he’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 13,000-14,000 rounds played in his life. In his 20s, living in Orlando, he’d regularly play 72 holes a day. “It was just normal,” he said. “Everybody had their own cart.”

One afternoon in 1996, after he had moved to Phoenix and was working at Foothills Golf Club, he grabbed his clubs for a quick nine before a dinner date. He hadn’t warmed up. The starter paired him with the three guys he had just checked into the pro shop.

On that front nine, Don birdied every single hole.

Nine birdies. No warm-up. He nearly eagled the 9th hole, hitting his approach from 160 yards to inches.

Unbeknownst to Don, one of the guys in that group worked for IMG, handling sponsorships for professional athletes. They met for lunch the following Monday. The guy wanted to sponsor him, get him on the Nike Tour, and arrange for PGA Tour exemptions. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anybody play a better nine holes of golf in my life,” he told Don.

Then he asked where Don went to college.

“I didn’t go to college,” Don said. “I barely went to high school.”

The guy told him that his team wouldn’t be able to sponsor him without some sort of track record to go off of. Don had no playing pedigree and no competitive background—nothing to prove he was worth the investment. All the extra cash he made in money games didn’t matter to them.

“Is there anything I can do?” Don asked him. “Do you want me to shoot nine under for them, too?”

The guy started laughing. “You probably could.”

The door closed. Don never got that chance. He was 26.

His Mindset

These days, Don plays maybe 30 rounds a year, compared to the 200 he used to log. He’s “so much worse” than he was 20 years ago. “There was a time when shooting 69 felt terrible,” he said. Now he’s working on reclaiming fragments of that old game.

But he doesn’t struggle with the mental game demons that often plague golfers as they get older and build up more and more scar tissue.

“People struggle with the mental side so much,” he said. “I don’t have that problem. I can draw on so many good shots from the past.”

That mindset translates to his equipment, as well, because Don knows that he can pick up any club and make it work. The 15 putters aren’t about searching for the magic wand that’s going to fix everything. They’re moods, nostalgia, and feelings, which can change on any given day.

“I’ll just feel like playing the Rossi today,” he said. “So I’ll grab it and swap it out. No extra thought required.”

He tried switching from blades to cavity-back irons about a decade ago, thinking that at 45, it might be time to make things easier. For six months, his elite distance control vanished. Shots went seven yards long, then three yards short. Finally, he grabbed his blades out of the garage and put them back in his bag.

“My distance control was instantly better,” he said. Now he’s sticking to the blades “until I just can’t hit them anymore.”

His Philosophy

Don doesn’t believe in new and improved technology as salvation. When someone in one of his golf group chats mentioned L.A.B. putters and their zero torque technology, he shot back: “That’s why God gave you hands. They handle the torque.”

He brought up Bobby Locke, one of the greatest putters of all time, who used a blade putter and sliced every putt on purpose. He talked about golfers from the 1930s and 40s shooting incredible scores on bumpy, more sloping greens than tour players play on these days. And about Old and Young Tom Morris shooting low numbers with wooden clubs and balls made of feathers and leather.

“The skill level of the people who were here long before us is incredible,” he said.

Don has a reverence for golf’s long history of players who just figured out how to get the ball in the hole, regardless of the equipment they were using. He treats his golf equipment the way a musician treats instruments. They’re tools, yes, but they’re also expressions of feel, memory, and possibility.

He bought those three putters in Ireland because maybe one of them would feel right on that one day, and he also didn’t have access to the 14 other putters in his garage across the Atlantic.

At 55, with tens of thousands of rounds behind him and the knowledge that he once shot nine-under seemingly without trying, he knows the magic isn’t in the metal—it’s in his hands, his mind, and his decades of touch.

The putters are just the soundtrack to a lifelong conversation with the game. And if one of them happens to work on any given day? Well, that’s just a bonus.

“I think I could do pretty well with anything in the garage,” Don told me, “except for that one Scotty.”

Apparently, some things even 13,000 rounds can’t fix.

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