Want to see a drive made of wood? Ask your grandfather to climb in the attic.
Talk about relics and antiquities. If you want to see a golf club with a wood head, the kind that Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player played, try the Greensboro Historical Museum.
You won't find one at Forest Oaks Country Club, scene of this week's Chrylser Classic of Greensboro.
Back in the early 1990, when metal woods - yes, it's an oxymoron - started becoming popular, many pros quickly switched to Big Bertha metal drivers.
But many still carried a genuine wood fairway club or two in their golf bags.
Golf manufactuers who had trailers set up on the Forest Oaks practice range earlier this week and caddies questioned said they know of no player who now uses a wood club. They said they're not sure if wood clubs are even manufacturered anymore.
Rich Adcox, a caddy for Japanese player Hidemichi Tanaha, says he gets to peek into the bags of other players, and the last time he saw a wood club was in the late 1990s.
He says those clubs belonged to Dillard Pruitt, a former touring pro (now a PGA Tour official), and Omar Uresti, who is still playing. Adcox said Uresti clung to his three-wood made of wood after everyone else had gone metal. Oresti is now an all-metal man himself.
"Technology," Adcox says, explaining why metal woods are now the standard. The pros can hit the ball farther with them. Anyone who used wood clubs would be at competitive disadvantage. They'd lose money.
It's kind of scary when you think about it, Adcox said.
There are now young pros on the tour, such as Charles Howell, "who have never hit a persimmon wood club," he said.
Adcox and the likes of Jack Nicklaus believe there ought to be a tournament set aside when the pros play with wood clubs, steel shafted irons from yesteryear and a golf ball that isn't as juiced up as those of today.
Footnote: For the sake of historical accuracy, metal woods aren't a modern-day invention. Irwin Smallwood, retired from many jobs at the News & Record, including sports editor and golf writer, said he remembers that baseball great Wes Ferrell, an excellent golfer, carried an aluminum driver back in the 1950s.
Real old-timers will remember that driving ranges of long ago stocked metal drivers for those who arrived without their own clubs. The metal wouldn't wear out as fast as wood.
