Licorice sticks: How I shot a great round with women’s clubs and will never speak of it again

I didn’t have my golf clubs on this trip. I’d concluded my business and golf was calling, but the weather report was doing its best to make sure I stayed in the hotel restaurant eating questionable “Loaded Potatoes.” Loaded with what? Rain was in the forecast, on and off, a meteorological shrug that could mean anything from a mist to a monsoon.

But here’s the thing about golfers: we are not reasonable people.

My friend used to say it best, back in our days at Rancho Park, watching thunderheads pile up over the San Gabriel Mountains while everybody else was heading to the clubhouse: “I play in the rain.” It wasn’t bravado. It was a medical condition. I felt the old familiar itch in my palms. I got in the car.

The course near the hotel was a nine-hole “short course” — the quotation marks doing considerable heavy lifting on the signage. Mostly par-3s with two par-4s thrown in as a courtesy to the ego. The kind of place that has a soda machine instead of a pro shop and a parking lot that doubles as a drainage ditch. Charming, in the way that a leaky rowboat is charming. You’re not going anywhere fast, but you’re going somewhere.

“Do you rent clubs?” I asked the young man behind the counter. He had the thousand-yard stare of someone who had been asked this question many times and found it, on balance, not that interesting. He disappeared into a back room. There were sounds. Not encouraging sounds. More like the sounds of archaeology, of unearthing things long buried for good reasons.

He emerged with a bag that appeared to have been assembled from golf’s witness protection program. Clubs of varying origin, heritage, and allegiance, united only by their availability and their willingness to be rented for ten dollars.

“Look OK?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said, because what else do you say? “These are fine. I just want to get out there.”

And I did. The rain clouds were doing their slow, menacing waltz across the sky. I moved with purpose. On the first tee I hit a reasonable shot. A little thin, but nobody’s watching. Fine.

It was on the second tee that I saw it.

There, embossed in the shaft of what I had believed to be a perfectly normal 7-iron: Ladies Flex.

I stared at it for a moment. I picked up the club and looked at it again, in case I had misread it, in case it said something more dignified, like Lasers Flex, or Lads Flex, or literally anything involving the letter combination that didn’t end where this one ended.

Ladies Flex.

The kid had given me women’s clubs.

Now, I want to be careful here, because I’m a modern man with enlightened sensibilities, and I understand that women’s golf clubs are precision instruments designed for specific swing characteristics and there is nothing inherently lesser about…oh, who am I kidding. I’m standing on a public nine-hole in the rain holding a set of licorice sticks that flutter in a light breeze and I have four more holes before I can retreat to the car with what remains of my dignity.

I’m a guy known to hit a long ball. Well, now and then. The years have admittedly crept up on me. Crept is maybe generous; they’ve sort of arrived. But I am not a rocking-chair man. I do not sit on porches. I still attack the ball. What was he thinking? Is he questioning my rep?

Too late to turn back. Rain was on the menu and I had paid my ten dollars and a golfer doesn’t turn back. I gripped the first ladies’ flex iron, took my stance, and tried to figure out what to do with a club so light it felt like a suggestion.

Here’s the thing about clubs with shaft flex designed for someone who generates significantly less clubhead speed than you: if you swing hard, they become a weapon against you. The shaft loads and unloads like a spring, and if your timing is off by a fraction, the face is pointed at the county line. I swung hard on my first attempt and the ball went approximately sideways.

So I slowed down.

Think smooth. Think tempo. Think Ernieeee Ellssssss, the great South African’s swing playing like a film loop in the back of my mind. That unhurried, buttery motion, the kind of swing that looks like it’s falling asleep on the way through the ball.

The ball soared up and landed on the green.

I looked around. Nobody saw that. I almost felt cheated that nobody saw that.

By the fourth hole, a par-4, I’d fully converted. I pulled out the driver — an ancient thing that looked like a modern 5-wood, boxy and small-headed and absolutely not intimidating. I took my Ernie swing. Whack. The ball flew down the fairway, took a little skip right, and sat down in the short grass like it had made a decision.

I stood there in the light drizzle. I thought about the clubs back home — the stiff-shafted, premium-shafted, expensive-shafted clubs I’d bought because the guy at the store said they’d suit my game.

Are these really Ladies Flex? Because I am hitting some of the best shots of my life.

I didn’t say this out loud. A man has limits. But I thought it, there on the soggy fourth fairway, in the rain, alone, playing better golf than I had any right to with someone else’s equipment on a course that charged me ten dollars and sent me out there anyway.

The kid at the counter might have known exactly what he was doing.

Or — more likely — he just grabbed whatever was in the back.

Either way, I’m saying nothing. And if you happen to see me out there next time, swinging slow and easy, watching the ball drop softly onto a green like I’ve been doing this all my life, don’t look too closely at the shafts.

Some things are between a man and his golf clubs.