The club-seeking odyssey of an equipment-obsessed golfer

posted 07:39 AM 11/03
Permanent Link.

He's working on his third driver this year and his second or third 3-wood, with an eye on a new one. He's hot after the perfect wedge. He's apparently OK with his putter - he never talks about it.

His golf club history is not the most tortured of people I know, or know of. Truth be told, he’s only extremely obsessive – therefore nearly normal, by standards of Golf Nation.

This is a story about a 9-iron, which is where the worst of it started. And a driver that’s just too loud.

Really, even before that, it started with a simple question: “You play much golf, Steve?”

He said, “Nah, I’m (terrible).” Or something like it. Steve Valandra is nothing if not profane.

“Wanna play sometime?”

“Yeah, OK.”

So he played, and then he played again, and then he was playing a lot. And he was (terrible).

He knew, even then, it wasn’t just his equipment. He knew he had to get help with his golf swing. But in fact, his equipment was (terrible).

So Valandra, 53, by day the communications director for the Department of General Administration, set about building a set.

Realize, he was full-on buggy about the game of golf by now. Truly unhinged. He was then on the first of the three instructors he would work with in a year’s time.

With the focus of a newborn zealot, he got acquisitive. The first club he bought was a driver, from Don Mykorski up at The Golf Club Co. on Harrison Avenue, where a lot of people around here get their first made-to-order club or set.

Next, he looked at his irons. They were the (worst) of all – old, off-brand, not very good even when they were new.

The set didn’t include a 9-iron, so he picked one up on eBay – a MacGregor NVG, a couple models old, which in the breathless world of golf marketing means it was hopelessly obsolete.

He hit it for the first time on the par-3 15th over the water at Gold Mountain Olympic. Stuck it on the green and made par. He kept on hitting it and kept on liking it.

By this time, he’d made the acquaintance of Craig Foster of Craig’s Custom Clubs. Valandra asked him why he was hitting the 9-iron so well.

Foster, who’s seen equipment madness in many forms and many degrees in his business repairing, adjusting and customizing golf clubs, told him it was because it was a lot better club than any other iron in his bag.

So Valandra went looking for the matching full set of NVGs and found it, on the Golfsmith Web site.

Among the equipment-obsessed, details of clubs’ comings and goings in and out of your life can be fuzzy, so it might have been in here somewhere that he also acquired a MacGregor MacTec driver. Got it new on eBay for around $40.

He wasn’t driving the ball well last summer, so he wasn’t hitting any of his various drivers. Eventually he gave the Golf Club Co. driver to a friend – he had no confidence in the MacGregor – and he was going to Portugal and taking his sticks, so he needed a driver.

He picked up the Adams RPM online from Dick’s Sporting Goods – 460cc head, 10.5 degrees of loft, and loud.

When he got back from Portugal, he played the Adams on the front nine of his first home-soil round. At this point, it wouldn’t have mattered if he was hitting it well (which he wasn’t) because he was hating the way it sounded at impact, that grating peeng noise.

On the back nine, he switched to the MacGregor, which he hadn’t even swung in a long time.

“It’s got that oval shape (head),” he said. “I liked the way it looked.”

He liked the way it sounded, too, and suddenly he was hitting it fine.

He used the MacGregor in a mid-October round at Tumwater Valley, drove it well all day, and shot the best score of his life.

“I’m sticking with it after that one,” he said. “I don’t think it’s so much the club, it’s the instruction. But it doesn’t make that stupid sound.”

Again, it’s fuzzy with the sequence, but he paid next to nothing to a private party for a couple Adams fairway woods, 6, maybe 7 years old, but still worlds better than what he had. He never fell in love with them. They rest now in a garbage can in his home, where all his once and former weapons live.

He’s got a Cobra 3-wood in his bag, which he likes, but it’s 10 years old. So his current club-lust is fixated on a TaylorMade Burner 3-wood. Maybe with some store credit from GolfUSA (for trading in a used club) ... and the cash from selling the Adams noise-bomb ... and maybe he can find room in his budget for the TaylorMade.

Then it will be on to finding the right wedge, he says. He recently picked up a Maxfli TM (for “Tad Moore”) 53-degree wedge – “face is fine, grooves are good, 10 bucks” – in a used bin at GolfUSA. He likes it a lot. But he’s not done.

Craig Foster has seen worse cases of the golf disease than Valandra’s – much, much worse. And he’s seen plenty of golfers who never come to realize, as Valandra has, that it’s really more about the shooter than the gun.

“A lot of it comes from a lack of understanding of golf clubs, the alignment of them and how they work,” Foster said. “They think there’s a magic club. They think that’s the first suspect, the club. It’s really the golfer.”

Valandra, in all fairness, is probably not the guy who lies awake at night over the one club he really, really needs, you know, just one club, to get him to the next level ... He’s not even such a (terrible) player these days.

Oddly, he never talks about changing his putter. You know, Steve, you’re not that great a putter ... it could be the club.

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