When I play hickories, I use an original MacGregor heel shafted putter and an all wrist stroke I picked up watching those Bobby Jones "How I play golf" videos on the Golf Channel. About two years ago, I was introducing a teaching pro friend of mine to hickory golf when he joked that I was rolling the ball better that day with the wristy stroke and blade putter than with a modern stroke and Anser style putter.
Being a persistent tinkerer, I took this as a challenge to make a more durable version of the old hickory stick that I could put in my regular bag this year to see what would happen. Thanks to a abundance of $1 club bins at a nearby sporting goods store, I secured several 2 irons (couldn't find a 1-iron) from the 50-70's with small thin heads and set to work.
I threw on a Gripmaster standard round perforated leather to keep the nostalgia intact and shafted with a TT DG wedge shafts pulled from a prior project. The hosel had to be rebored due to the amount of bending necessary to achieve putter status. At the end of the day, what we have is a 2-iron with 5 degrees of loft, a 70* lie (with no fractures in the hosel after bending!!!) and a swing weight of A7.8 that looks something like this:
It's a novelty now, as I took steps to improve my putting stroke, but still fun to take out during the offseason when the greens aren't perfect and the ability to play the ball through a debris field is more important than break.
